by Brian Morton
In the story, the character based on Sally remembers a more passionate relationship she had when she was young (with a character Nora made up; Sally had never talked about anything like this) and wonders what her life would have been like if she’d stayed with him.
Sally had expressed an interest in reading Nora’s fiction, and this was the story Nora decided to let her read. She thought Sally would find it amusing to trace the influence of writers they’d talked about—to find herself a character in a story that contained a hint of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a hint of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Nora had known that her story about Gina would hurt her, but she was incapable of imagining that she had the power to hurt Sally, a woman in her thirties, an adult.
Nora gave Sally the story on the last day of the school year. Sally said she was eager to read it, but Nora heard nothing from her for two weeks. Finally, Nora called her, and they arranged to meet at a coffee shop. After they ordered, Nora asked her if she’d had a chance to read it yet.
“Yes, I read it. I read it the day you gave it to me.”
“What did you think?”
“I can’t say it filled me with a fond elation,” Sally said. Sometimes she talked like a book. “First of all, it’s not exactly flattering to be the main character in a story about someone who hasn’t really lived. But the more important thing is, I trusted you. Which means that when you were baby-sitting my kids, I didn’t expect that you’d be going through my diaries. I don’t care that you went snooping. Everybody snoops. But to find my keys and go into the closet and unlock the trunk and read my diaries . . . and then to write a little fable in which everything is true but everything is taken out of context. How did you expect me to react?”
Nora told her she didn’t know what she was talking about.
“Come on, Nora. Jesse?”
Jesse was the name of the old flame in the story.
“Holy shit,” Nora said. “You mean there was a Jesse?”
“Yes,” Sally said. “There was a Jesse. His name was Jesse.”
“Are you serious?” Nora said.
“Are you saying you came up with the name Jesse out of the blue?”
“Of course I did. God! How weird. Maybe I’m psychic. That’s incredible.” She was talking too fast. In her own ears she sounded guilty, even though she wasn’t. She’d snooped around in Sally’s medicine cabinet and in one or two dresser drawers, maybe, but she’d never gone searching for diaries.
Sally finished her coffee and studied Nora as if she was trying to decide about her once and for all. “I’m not sure if I believe you,” she said.
They sat there awkwardly for a minute, and then Sally gathered up her things. “Well, good luck,” she said. Nora never heard from her again.
The episode left Nora with a confused wash of emotions. She regretted hurting someone she cared about; she was distressed about being suspected of doing something she hadn’t done. But she was also filled with a feeling of power. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that her fiction had the power to hurt people—but it was the first time she saw that it had the power to root out the truth about people’s lives.
She never again had such an uncanny visitation of knowledge; she turned out not to be psychic after all. But time and again, she found that once she started writing about people, she intuited more about them than they wanted anyone to know. It was as if she had a dowsing rod that led her straight to people’s psychic frailties.
After she graduated, she started sending stories out to magazines, but she didn’t do it often. The stories she did try to publish were those in which she turned the magnifying glass on herself, or on her parents, who were safely dead, beyond the reach of her treachery. She had a fear, perhaps an exaggerated fear, of hurting anyone else with her writing, so although she was writing all the time, most of her stories ended up in a cardboard box in her closet.
When she started to have serious relationships with men, it all got worse. When she was betraying friends, or dead people, even if she never tried to publish the stories, she could at least write them. But with her boyfriends, she had trouble doing even that. When she was seeing a man, she would inevitably start to write about him, and inevitably start to explore his weaknesses. And then, in midstory, as soon as she realized what was happening, her imagination would freeze.
The first time it happened was with her first post-college boyfriend, Daryl. Daryl, who worked in a bookstore, struck most people as low-key, unambitious, content. He put in his eight hours at the Strand during the day and then came home and studied the sports page. Nora felt good with him; she’d never been so relaxed with a man before. They had keys to each other’s apartments; they wore each other’s shirts. But at some point she started writing a story about him, and in the story, the things she knew about him came together in new combinations, and what emerged was a portrait of a someone who was still very young but who had already been defeated by life.
In the story, the central fact about Daryl was a disappointment he’d suffered in his teens. At fourteen, Daryl had won a national chess tournament. He was the best high-school chess player in the country, and he expected to compete for the world championship someday. But that didn’t come to pass. He never got any better than he was at fourteen, and, in his freshman year of college, after he tried to enter a national college tournament and didn’t even manage to qualify, he got rid of his chessboards and chess books and never touched them again.
Nora had never thought about this consciously—she wasn’t even sure she believed it—but if what her story was saying about Daryl was true, he was living the rest of his life in the shadow of this defeat. He worked as a bookstore clerk not because he had no ambition, but because he had world-consumingly vast ambitions that would never be fulfilled. In his own mind, he was an exiled prince, from a country that had been wiped off the map: the country in which his brilliance would be clear to all.
Once she saw where it was going, she felt uneasy about the story, but at the same time she was immersed in it. She didn’t want to leave the keyboard. And then one evening she came home from the store to find Daryl sitting in her living room with the light off, the pages of her half-written story scattered on the floor.
She turned on the light.
He didn’t look up at her.
“This is me?”
“It’s a story,” she said.
“Last week, when we were in the park, you said you wanted to be good to me.”
She had said that, and she’d meant it.
“Is this what you think it means to be good to me?”
She spent the rest of the night apologizing. It was as if he’d found out that she had another lover. She knew she wouldn’t touch the story again. When she saw him sitting there in the dark, when she heard his voice—when she heard the note of need in his voice—it was as if all the cells in her body had rearranged themselves. Taking care of Daryl, shielding him from his sense of himself as a failure, became more important than anything else.
During the rest of her time with him—and when she was thrown against the same wall with her next boyfriend—she backed off from fiction completely. She still wrote: she wrote every day, religiously, for four hours. But instead of writing stories, she wrote book reviews and record reviews. She started to write for the Village Voice and the Boston Phoenix and the LA Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Her career flourished when she wasn’t writing fiction, because she got her name in print much more often with this other stuff. But it was written with her left hand. This wasn’t writing that engaged her; this wasn’t a vocation she loved; and when she was doing it she felt as if she was turning away from her one true calling. But it felt as if there was a contradiction between writing and taking care of people, and if there was, then she couldn’t choose writing.
Her mother had also been afflicted with the caretaking disease. Nora’s father, Arthur, after an unsuccessful, throat-clearing career in the classroom and another decade spent s
ulkily hanging around on the margins of the academic world, had finally become an editor for Junior Science, a periodical that was delivered weekly to thousands of middle schools across America and read by no one. Her mother, Margaret, had taught philosophy at the University of Chicago. Margaret was the more accomplished of the two: she was a demanding but popular teacher—her lectures were always boomingly overregistered—who had written three well-regarded books, while Arthur had ended up in a job that meant nothing to him, assigning articles about bacteria. And yet Margaret had a way of putting herself in the background, letting her husband be the star of the show. If the two of them started speaking at once, Margaret would fall silent and let Arthur finish his thought; if anyone asked for their opinion about something, it was always Arthur who answered. It was the oldest story in the world: the woman turns down her light to avoid outshining her man.
So when Nora asked herself why her creative life shut down when she was with a man, she certainly could have put the blame on her parents. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to pass the buck; she didn’t want to march in the Great American Victim Parade. If your parents are alcoholics, you might become an alcoholic yourself, or you might become a teetotaler. Or you might become someone who drinks in moderation.
Nora had never written about Benjamin, but she had a sense of the story she would have written if she’d felt free to write it. A few times she’d sat down and made notes, and even the notes disturbed her. What disturbed her was what a satirical character he seemed bent on becoming. Benjamin was a professor of German literature at the City University of New York. In real life he was a serious person, genuinely interested in ideas, but in her notes he became something else: a pompous little pedant with a puffed-out chest, excitedly telling people that he was off to give an “endowed lecture” at the University of Heidelberg (not just a lecture, but an endowed lecture; she wasn’t sure what an endowed lecture was, but Benjamin always spoke in an awed tone about the people who gave them). In her notes he became even shorter than he was in real life, a tiny tenured tyrant, browbeating students and departmental secretaries in a high-pitched voice.
What am I? she kept thinking, when she looked over what she wrote. Is this what I think of him? Is this who I am—someone who can write such things about someone who cares for me?
After Benjamin got sick, her imagination shut down completely. She couldn’t even make the notes anymore. Everything about her got heaved overboard—her independence, her need for solitude, her need to pursue her work—everything except the need to take care of him. But the cost to herself had grown too great. She didn’t want to take care of him anymore. She needed to change her life.
THE TIP OF HER TONGUE still hurt. She went to the refrigerator, got out an ice-cube tray, held it over the kitchen counter, and cracked it, and four or five ice cubes went hopping over the counter. It was like they were making a break for it.
She put the ice cubes back in the freezer except for one that had skated under the toaster. That one she picked up and pressed against her tongue. No kissing tonight. But maybe tomorrow.
9
SHE WAS WALKING UP a long hill in the soft New Jersey suburb where Isaac lived. It was the height of spring, with wisteria blooming everywhere—maybe; she was a city girl, and she didn’t really know what wisteria was. But plant life of some kind was in bloom: mild, inoffensive, uninteresting.
Trees and flowers get a lot of good press, she thought, but what are they good for? They don’t provoke; they don’t stimulate; they don’t have anything to say. How could he have ended up in a place like this?
He’d told her on the phone that he needed to spend most of the day in his darkroom, so she was meeting him there. Later, they were dropping by at a going-away party for one of his co-workers, and then they were having dinner.
That was all they’d planned. She didn’t know what would happen after dinner. She didn’t know if they were going to kiss.
Her tongue was healed, so she was ready.
Physically ready—but she didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. It would be wrong to cheat on Benjamin, and it would be cowardly to use one man as a lever to pry herself free from another.
AFTER HE OPENED THE DOOR to her, he stepped back, looking at her with such happiness that it was almost hard to bear. It was like too much light.
He took her hand and slipped her watch around her wrist. “I’ve been looking all over for the woman this belonged to,” he said.
As he fastened the watchband, his fingers on her wrist felt good.
She followed him into the darkroom.
“This is it,” he said.
“It’s nice.”
“Does it seem familiar?”
It did. It had the same feel as his old darkrooms—the one in Williamsburg, and then, after the building was condemned, the one in Fort Greene. Everything was neatly arranged; everything was clean—gleaming, even in the dark. There was the same easy chair in the corner, the same antique radio on the shelf. On the wall there was the same solitary photo: a tabletop with two pairs of wire-rimmed glasses, an ashtray, and a pipe. She remembered that the pipe and glasses belonged to Piet Mondrian; she couldn’t remember who the photographer was.
She used to love to spend time with Isaac in his darkroom, talking with him while he worked. It was a magical place. She felt snug, hidden, safe.
“Happy darkrooms are all alike,” she said.
“Can I get you something?” He looked nervous. He picked up a plastic bottle and waved it in the air. “Can I get you some solvent?”
Yes, she thought, I need to be solved, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t want to seem as self-obsessed as she probably was. Also she couldn’t tell if it was witty or not.
Also, she didn’t think she did need to be solved. She just needed to change her life.
Once again, she had a moment of difficulty putting him together with her memory of him. Over the last year, whenever she was dissatisfied with Benjamin, she’d been able to think, “Isaac wouldn’t have done that,” or “Isaac wasn’t like that.” As a figure in the past, he’d seemed infinitely cooperative. But now, as he stood a few feet away from her, she suddenly recalled all the times when he hadn’t wanted to do what she’d wanted to do or when they hadn’t understood each other’s jokes. She’d once written a story called “Things that Don’t Fit,” and now she remembered that there were many ways in which she and Isaac didn’t completely fit, simply because no two people ever do.
She’d never forgotten the big misunderstandings at the end of it all, but she’d forgotten the little ones. He was a real person, someone who could disappoint her, someone she could disappoint.
Christ, she thought. Don’t hurt him again.
“Pardon me?” she said.
“I said, ‘Can I get you anything.’” He wasn’t holding the solvent anymore. “It’s an expression.”
“You can get back to work,” she said. “So we can move on to the social portion of the evening.”
“Back to work. Fine.”
He tried to get back to work—he took a contact sheet out of a tray and peered at it in the dusky red light—but he still looked nervous. She could feel how much she affected him. He reminded her of the dog in the old RCA ad—ear cocked, listening for his master’s voice.
His desire for her made her feel desirable.
She was trembling on the verge of new life, but she didn’t know if this new life was what she wanted. It was possible that she was getting back in touch with him merely because of the way he saw her. He had cast her, in his mind, as one of the great heroines. That, she thought, feels wonderful, but it’s not a reason to get together with him. You have to be the heroine of your own life.
As he worked, they talked about their evening. It turned out that she had it wrong: they weren’t going to a party; they were just having a drink with two people who were leaving the newspaper, photography students from Rutgers who’d been working as Isaac’s assistants. They’d gr
aduated last week, and they were moving on.
Isaac was pouring something into the sink. The smell of it was sharp and harsh, like paint stripper. It smelled like something that could wipe your brainpan clean.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get brain damage from these fumes?” A question she’d probably asked him before. She worried about him, spending hours and hours and hours with these chemicals.
“Most photographers live to a ripe old age, and they don’t get brain damage, usually. I mean, it’s probably bad, but it’s not like being a boxer.”
He pinned a picture to his little clothesline. She was pretty sure he was the only photographer in the world who still had one of those.
He’d told her on the phone that morning that he was making new prints of his work for an exhibit.
“I’m excited about your show,” she said. “I can’t wait to see your new pictures. I won’t ask you to show them to me now. I know how secretive you are. But I can’t wait to see them.”
He gave her a strange look, which she interpreted as modesty. But she really was excited.
A month after she’d met him, she’d gone to one of his shows, on Broome Street. She remembered how thrilled she felt when she got there. Aside from her college writing teachers, Isaac was the first real artist she’d ever met, the first person who was actually doing something rather than just talking about it.
She watched him, for five, ten minutes, working quietly in the Martian dimness, doing whatever it is that photographers do. Witnessing his silent, patient concentration, she felt moved.