by Brian Morton
“Fine, except for this dumb lump. Keeping busy. It’s about all I can do to keep track of these babies. It’s like a full-time job.”
The babies were her cats, who were far from babies now. Dolly must have been twenty, and Louie and Edwin weren’t much younger.
“What else have you been up to?” Nora said.
“I don’t know. Just waiting for the Romance Channel to arrive.” She laughed—a self-conscious, embarrassed laugh.
“The Romance Channel?”
“It’s a new TV station. They don’t have it in Manhattan yet, but they keep running these ads. If enough people vote for it, they might bring it here.”
“How do you vote?”
“You call this 800 number. I call it a lot. I put it on speed dial.”
The Romance Channel. Billie had gotten married at twenty. When she and Nelson were in each other’s presence, they’d always seemed a little giddy, as if they’d each had a glass and a half of champagne. They had a crush on each other for twenty years. To Nora, they had seemed like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, presiding over their own private Jazz Age.
Nelson died a week before their twenty-first anniversary. Waiting for the downtown E train at Forty-second Street, he’d had a heart attack and died on the platform.
Something stopped working inside Billie after Nelson died. She stopped going to movies and museums; she stopped seeing friends—she just came home from work every evening, double-locked her door, and watched TV. Sometimes, when Nora saw a certain expression on her face, a sort of patient sadness, she got the feeling that Billie was still waiting for Nelson to come home.
When she ventured into the outside world, Billie still relied on the old tools: she was still trying to charm her way through life. But now that she was in her sixties, her charm couldn’t take her very far. It didn’t keep banks open; it didn’t win her free rides. And Nora always found herself wondering—as she never had when she was young—why Billie could never get it together to get to the bank on time or pay the cab fare or remember to buy toilet paper or pay her bills.
It was odd. Before her retirement, Billie had been working all her life—first as a dancer, then as a physical therapist at a children’s hospital—yet after Nelson died she seemed to be waiting for someone to come along and take care of her. And no one ever had.
For Nora, Billie’s life remained a picture of the possibilities of womanhood—but it was a different kind of picture now. As much as she loved her aunt, it was a picture of what to avoid.
Louie, a heavy Persian cat, made his way up to Nora’s lap. In his youth he had been a spry thing, but scaling the easy chair was now an undertaking that called upon all his years of hard-won craft.
“Louie still loves you,” Billie said. “It’s like you haven’t missed a day.”
Nora ran her hand over his back.
“My community isn’t in very good shape,” Billie said. “Dolly had a stroke last month.” She knelt next to Dolly, who was lying in the corner. “She only eats if you feed her with a spoon. She only eats if you help her.” She dipped a spoon into a bowl of water that was sitting on a plastic mat on the floor, and held the spoon near Dolly’s mouth. Dolly shifted her head slightly. She hesitantly put out her tongue and touched the water, barely disturbing its surface.
“She’s a good girl,” Billie murmured. “Good lady.”
Maybe, Nora thought, I can call MacDowell and ask if I can get there a few days late.
Except she’d already done this, and they’d told her that if she couldn’t come for the full month, she’d have to forfeit her place. They had a long waiting list of people who could put the month to good use.
When Billie sat back down, she looked at the letters Nora had brought up.
She opened one of the envelopes. “Shoot.”
“What’s the matter?”
“This is from the cable company. They’re going to turn off my cable tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? They should give you more notice than that.”
“They gave me notice. They called. I just forgot.”
“Do you need some money? I can write them a check if you want.”
“Thank you. But that’s not the problem. I can pay them after I cash my Social Security, but it means I’m not going to be able to tape the Daytime Emmys Thursday night.” Again she laughed her embarrassed laugh. “I love the Daytime Emmys. I was planning to tape it and watch when I get back from the hospital. There’s this twelve-year-old boy down the hall who comes over and sets the VCR for me.”
“I can call them up and pay for it with my credit card.”
“Thank you, but they only let me pay them with a certified check. They know me down there by now.”
“I can tape it for you.”
“Really?” Billie said. She looked astonished, as if Nora had mentioned that she was going to be assisting the surgeon during Billie’s operation. “You know how to work those things?”
“Sure,” she said. She actually didn’t, but Benjamin did. Nora made a mental note to leave him a message.
Billie looked like she couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was sad to think that a kindness this small made her aunt this happy.
The Daytime Emmys. The Romance Channel. Nora felt an obscure shifting, as if every particle of tenderness within her was rising up and streaming toward her aunt.
Don’t do it, Nora thought. You can take care of her before you go and after you get back. You don’t have to give up MacDowell.
“I hope they don’t have to take my breast off,” Billie said. “I’m already a fat old bag. That’s all I need—to be a fat old Amazon.”
“Oh, come on. You’re beautiful, Billie.” This wasn’t true, but she had been so beautiful when she was younger, and Nora remembered it so vividly, that it seemed true.
“I don’t understand how everything happened,” Billie said. “I still feel like the girl who won the jump-rope contest in fifth grade.”
Nora took her aunt’s hand. At the moment when they touched, Nora knew that she wouldn’t be going to MacDowell. Not now, at least. She could reapply later.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Nora said. She had to force these words out of her mouth—they sounded completely false to her. But they seemed to comfort her aunt.
I’m too young, Nora thought. I’m too young for this kind of responsibility. But as soon as she thought it, she realized that it wasn’t true: she wasn’t too young at all.
8
AFTER SHE LEFT BILLIE’S, Nora daydreamed about going out to New Jersey, ringing Isaac’s doorbell, and, then, without a word, giving him a long kiss.
What she actually did was more prosaic: she went back to her apartment and soaked her arm. When she was seventeen, two weeks after her mother died, Nora got drunk with a boy whom she knew to be an idiot and persuaded him to drive her to New York and join her in forming an artists’ collective, a journey that began in the parking lot of the Lamplighter’s Bar in Chicago and ended ten blocks east of there when he ran a red light and hit a stretch limo that was carrying the mother of the former Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon. Nora was the only person hurt; she broke her nose, not very badly, and her left arm, badly. She was alone in the world—her father had died two years earlier—and although her parents’ friends had arranged to take care of her during her last year of high school, their arrangement, in which she was shuttled from one home to another, meant that no one person was responsible for her, and therefore that no one was responsible for her at all. Her arm, which had been broken in five places, was treated by a not-very-competent doctor, and never healed properly; it hurt more keenly year by year. It looked normal now except for the thin scar that curled around her bicep, but it never felt quite right, and whenever she spent a lot of time at the keyboard it ached the next day—it ached, in other words, almost every day of her life. The pain had its own mysterious rhythms: it usually showed up only for about half an hour a day, but she could never anticipate when that half
hour would come. The only things that seemed to help were Advil and ice. Almost every day she soaked her arm in ice water or strapped on a Polar Pack, an ice pack that you could wear like a sleeve.
After she finished soaking, she made herself a cup of tea and checked her answering machine. There were two messages from old friends; a message from someone at a medical journal, reminding her of a copy-editing deadline; and a message from Benjamin. His conference was wrapping up; he’d be home in two days. In her unhappiness she gulped the tea and burned the tip of her tongue.
It was as if she was punishing her tongue for its desire to play around with Isaac’s.
She sat down to do some writing. Recently she’d interviewed the songwriter Richard Buckner for a weekly paper in Detroit, and she had to write it up by the end of the week.
Nora kept her laptop computer on a card table near her living-room window. From where she sat, she could see a thin slice of the Hudson River and the cliffs of northern New Jersey. Soon after she moved here, she’d heard that Isaac was living in New Jersey, and she would often look out across the water and think about him. Sometimes at night she’d stand at her window watching the tiny lights of the cars on the other side of the river, imagining that one of the cars was Isaac’s. She imagined him coming home, very late at night, to a clean and well-ordered apartment, and watching the news, and getting ready for bed. Thinking of him this way, as she watched the lights, had always given her a mixed feeling of comfort and loneliness.
She thought of what he’d said that afternoon: she’d written wonderful things already, and if she just kept going, she’d write a lot more.
If only it were true. She had kept going: she wrote every day; but it had been a long time since she’d written anything she could be proud of. She’d been writing articles and reviews, things she didn’t care about much. Though she began her writing session every day by opening a new document on her computer and trying to get a story started, within half an hour she would delete what she had written, if she had managed to write anything, and then she’d turn to some piece of nonfiction—something that interested her less, something that challenged her less.
A year earlier, Benjamin had spent two days in the hospital with symptoms of heart disease. She’d been planning to break up with him, but after he got sick she couldn’t do it, and she’d stuck with him, unhappily, from then till now. And during the course of the year, her imagination had closed up shop.
A FRIEND OF NORA’S HAD ONCE summed her up by saying that she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be Virginia Woolf or Florence Nightingale. It was as if she had two needs in life: the need to write and the need to take care of people. The problem was that she couldn’t seem to do both at the same time.
In daily life, she was a kind person—at least she hoped she was. But in her stories, she wasn’t kind at all. When she sat down at the keyboard, it was as if someone else took over: someone who’d had the same experiences she’d had, but who saw the world with a cold eye.
This wouldn’t have been a problem if she wrote about invented people in invented situations. But when she wrote, she became a cannibal, feeding off the lives of acquaintances, friends, and loved ones. The only time she felt excited as a writer was when she was writing about people she knew, and, almost always, she gravitated to their secrets and their frailties. The things they feared about themselves, the things they hoped no one would ever notice—Nora had a gift for divining them. It was a gift she didn’t possess at all in her day-to-day life; it was something that emerged only in her fiction. Her fiction was more perceptive than she was, and more ruthless.
In college she’d had a friend named Gina, a brilliant funny charming tender messed-up girl. “Every day is a mountain,” she once said to Nora, and if she’d had a coat of arms, that could have been inscribed on it; there was something about her that simply wasn’t fit for daily life. When she was in one of what she called her “blue periods,” she could go for days without leaving her room, and Nora would visit her every evening, bearing sandwiches and juice and magazines. Nora genuinely cared about her. But at the beginning of their junior year, when Nora found herself writing a story about Gina, a spirit of heartlessness took over her pen, and Gina became a virtuoso of victimhood, a woman whose weakness was her only tool, a tool she loved too much to let go of.
Gina had once told her that she’d been sexually molested by her grandfather. Except for her therapist, she’d never told anyone but Nora. She asked Nora never to talk to anyone about it, and Nora never had . . . but it made its way into the story.
When Nora was writing fiction, she became so impersonal, such a servant of the story, that although she was writing something based on Gina’s life, she barely thought of Gina at all as she worked on it. She gave no thought to the ethics of telling someone else’s secrets. The only thing she worried about was that sexual abuse had become such a cliché in fiction that she wasn’t sure she could say anything fresh about it. It was only after she finished the story that she remembered it was based on her friend’s life.
Nora was taking a writing class that semester. She didn’t show the story to the class, because some of the people in it knew Gina and would have recognized her. She did show it to her teacher, however, who told her it was the best piece of student writing he’d read in years and urged her to submit it to Small Craft Warnings, the college literary magazine. Nora said she couldn’t, but didn’t tell him why.
One day at the end of the fall semester, when Nora was in the library, she saw a stack of freshly printed copies of Small Craft Warnings. She picked one up and looked idly at the table of contents. She noticed that one of the stories was called “The Mountain”—the same title she’d given hers. Then, next to the title, she saw her name.
She got the number of the editor-in-chief, and after she’d screamed at him for a while, he told her that the story had been submitted by her teacher. She called him—a little too cowed by authority to scream at him, but she let him know she was mad—and he told her that he’d thought she was merely “afraid of success.”
After this she went straight to Gina’s room, to warn her and to apologize.
Gina was in bed, sitting up, with her arms wrapped around her legs. The magazine was on the bed beside her.
“Why did you do this?” she said.
“I’m so sorry. I never meant for it to be published.”
She explained what had happened, but Gina didn’t look mollified.
“When I told you about my family,” she said, “I thought you understood it as an act of trust. I feel like I’ve been . . .”
Nora knew her well enough to know what she’d intended to say: that she felt as if she’d been violated all over again. But Gina didn’t finish the sentence. She was an honest person, and she didn’t want to confuse the issue by exaggerating.
Somehow, knowing this, knowing what Gina had the self-control not to say, made Nora feel worse than she would have felt if Gina had said it.
“My mother’s going to read this, you know.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. They send this thing to everybody’s family, because Swarthmore is so proud of all its little student writers. My mother likes you. When she sees your name, she’ll read the story. I wanted her to learn about what happened when I was ready to tell her. Now she’s going to learn about it because of you.” Gina picked up the magazine and tossed it to the floor. “I don’t even care that you didn’t want it to be published. That’s not the point. I can’t understand why you thought you had the right to put it down on paper in the first place.”
“That’s what a writer does,” Nora said.
“It isn’t what a friend does.”
Nora couldn’t think of a reply, and didn’t want to. Gina had the right to the last word.
Gina didn’t come back to school for the spring semester. There were rumors that she was in a psychiatric hospital, rumors that she’d tried to harm herself. Nora kept leaving mess
ages for her at her mother’s house, but Gina never called her back.
Nora tried not to blame herself for whatever had happened to Gina. She’d always been close to the edge, and Nora couldn’t be sure it was her story that had pushed her over. But she could never think of her again without feeling guilty and ashamed.
She tried to change her way of writing: she tried to write about people who didn’t exist. She tried the unfamiliar strategy of using her imagination—that was the way she put it to herself in a moment of self-loathing. But she couldn’t do it. Rather, she could do it, but the stories that came out were flavorless and flat. The only time the act of writing lit her up was when she was writing about someone she knew.
After her junior year she transferred to NYU, and in the spring she got an internship as a teaching assistant at an elementary school. She became friendly with the head teacher, a woman named Sally. Sally, in her thirties, was unmistakably an adult—she was a capable, confident teacher—but she had a way of letting you know that she still felt baffled by life. Nora couldn’t afford to be baffled by life—she’d had to meet life one-on-one, with no guidance, no protection, ever since she was seventeen—but being with Sally softened her up in a way she needed, helped her let her guard down. Nora had dinner with Sally and her family every few weeks; she baby-sat for Sally’s boys; she had long conversations about literature with Sally, who was an ardent reader. Nora felt lucky to know her.
Then Nora wrote a story in which Sally was the main character—not as she was, but as she would be. It was about Sally Burke at sixty. It was a story about a woman who felt she’d never really lived. Nora titled it “What She Wasn’t.”
Part of the story was about Sally’s marriage. Sally’s husband was a union organizer: a Good Samaritan, an idealist, a believer in the dignity of labor. He was the Nicest Guy in the World. All of which made him, in twenty-one-year-old Nora’s eyes, a bore. The blandness of goodness. He would corner you and tell you that the world should be a place in which no one goes hungry, and that everyone should have health insurance, and that everybody should have the right to a job at a decent wage. All of this was, of course, true, but the calm, thorough manner in which he would elaborate on these insights made Nora feel as if she was visiting one of those dentists who use laser technology. The experience wasn’t exactly painful, but she still wanted to get away as quickly as she could.