by Brian Morton
“You remind me of that Yeats poem, ‘Long-Legged Fly.’ You know that poem?”
“Yah,” he said, without looking up. “Like I know any Yeats poems.”
She closed her eyes and recited as much as she could:
“There on the scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
Something something something
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.”
Isaac didn’t say anything.
“I guess you had to be there,” she said.
“Long-legged fly,” he said. “Guess so.”
She remembered the moment when she realized she was in love with him. It was on a winter Saturday after they’d been together about two months. An old high school in his neighborhood was about to be demolished, and he’d mentioned that he was planning to take pictures of it just before the sun went down. She thought it would be fun to surprise him there.
She saw him from across the street. He had a bulky old camera with a tripod; he was bent over the contraption, his hands in his pockets in the brittle day, peering into the lens. He looked like a creature of pure attention.
She thought it might be better not to disturb him; she was considering walking away. But then he looked up and saw her, and a look of pure calm happiness transformed his face.
As she walked toward him, she herself felt transformed. People speak of feeling dizzy when they’re in love; Nora had never felt more balanced, more clear. She’d finished her devotions for the day—this was how she thought of her writing when it was going well—and now she was joining him while he was still in the midst of his. He was engrossed in what he was doing, fascinated, but she was sure he was equally fascinated by her. And she thought: This is it. This is everything.
Now, tonight, in his darkroom, he took a print out of the sink, turned off the red light and switched on a desk lamp, and bent over the print, examining it.
“Through all these years,” she said, “I’ve thought of you as a kind of moral touchstone.”
“Oh God,” he said. “What does that mean?” He sidled away from her, as if he didn’t really want to know.
“The thought of you has been like a lifeline. In all those years we weren’t talking, I always felt that if there were maybe ten things I could rely on in the universe, and one of them was that the sun rose in the east, and another was the law of gravity, another of those ten things was that you were out there taking pictures.”
“I’m glad to represent something for you,” he said. “I’m glad to have a place in your moral constellation.”
“It’s not only that you were taking pictures. You figured out how to keep going.”
“Wow, man,” he said. “I’m like your guru.”
He didn’t look up at her, and he was trying to appear blasé, but she was pretty sure he was interested.
“You’re not my guru. But I do admire you. I know plenty of people who dedicated themselves to their art for a few years, but when they didn’t become world famous by the age of thirty, they just gave up. I admire it that you found a way to keep going.”
Isaac looked up at her with a puzzled expression. “You mean I’m not world famous?” This was a joke.
Like most people, Isaac had trouble accepting compliments; he found it easier to fend them off. But she was telling him the truth.
The truth. The truth was good.
She needed to be honest with him. Everything that followed would be tainted if she wasn’t honest from the start. She needed to let him know that she was still involved with another man.
10
SO HE LISTENED AS SHE told him a long story about this Benjamin—this academic peacock, this stuffed shirt. It was hard for Isaac to take it in, because at every turn in the narrative he kept hoping she’d say something like, “And that’s when I realized that it’s you that I love.”
“And then I had to go to a medical writers’ convention in Missoula, and I was by myself every night, and I had a lot of time to think. And one night I came back to my room and couldn’t sleep, and that’s when I called you. And that’s my life so far.”
She’d skipped the part about realizing he was the one she loved.
“Fine,” he said, just to say something. “Very fine.”
“So I’ve told you my story,” she said. “What’s yours? What have you been doing from then till now?”
“It’s a very long story,” he said. Which it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to speak. He was still trying to absorb the fact that she was with another man.
He wasn’t angry, though he wondered if he should be. Mostly, another man or not, he was glad she was here. It was just that it was hard to take it in.
“If you’re not going to tell me anything about your life,” she said, “I’ll just have to investigate.”
His wallet, his keys, and his datebook were on the table not too far from her. She stretched out, swept up the wallet in her hand, and sat up again. Her shirt had come loose from her pants when she’d stretched out.
“Do that again,” he said.
“Hush. I’m doing research.” She removed his driver’s license from his wallet. “You look mean. Were you mad at the picture-taking lady?”
“Not that I can remember.”
He wished he had something exotic in his wallet, something that hinted at a Rich Inner Life. In his twenties, after a love affair with a French girl who was working in New York for the Agence France-Presse, he’d kept her farewell note in his wallet for a long time. Je pars déchirée . . . He wished it was still there.
“Credit cards. Library card. Video store card. You’re kind of generic. Let’s take a look at your datebook.”
“That’s private,” he said. But the truth was that he wanted her to look.
Nora had always been a snoop. Years ago, when he was first getting involved with her, he’d just split up with a woman named Nancy, who began to find him desirable at the moment when he rejected her. One day he left Nora alone in his bedroom and came back to find her sitting at his desk, reading a love letter from Nancy that he’d received the day before. He expected Nora to be flustered and apologetic, but all she said was, “I can’t find the second page of this. It was just getting good.”
She was nodding at his datebook as if she understood him better now. “New School,” she said, and flipped the page. “New School.” She looked up at him. “New School?”
“I took a course there last spring.”
“A course in what?”
“It was a course about tracing your family roots.”
“What did you find out?”
“I was able to trace my mother’s side of the family back about a hundred years, in Poland. My father’s side is tougher to trace.”
“Roots,” she said. “The search for roots. You remember that John Berryman line? ‘People ask me about my roots . . . as if I were a plant.’ You remember that?”
“Who’s John Berryman?”
She turned the page. “Boston,” she read. “Very nice. Travel broadens the mind. What’s in Boston?”
“I had a job offer from the Globe.”
“What happened?”
“Turned ’em down.”
“Why?”
“Too cold.”
“That is the correct answer,” she said. “Concert. Concert. Concert. You’re a very concert-going man.”
“I had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.”
“Ye gods. All that warbling. Was it any good?”
He thought about this. “No,” he said.
He knew that Nora hated the opera: he’d once tried to take her to La Bohème and she’d made her feelings clear. He’d always gotten a kick out of this side of her—her unrefined side. She was the only woman he’d ever met who liked Henry Miller. She thought the sex in his books was funny. She liked Steven Seagal movies (on one of their first dates, she’d dragged Isaac to see Under Siege 2). She liked W. C
. Fields—she even liked the scene where, after checking to make sure no one is watching, he gives Baby LeRoy a kick in the pants.
Most of the women Isaac had dated had been very refined. They were women who didn’t watch TV. Women who didn’t own a TV. Women who never had coffee or tea in the house, except for herbal tea; women who never had sugar in the house, only honey. Women with postcards of Frida Kahlo over their desks. Somehow her little mustache inspired them.
The thing about Nora was that she was a human being. She liked to stay up late and watch Letterman. She drank root beer. Once in a while she’d been known to have a slice of pizza for breakfast.
She was sitting on the long table, her legs crossed at the knee. It would have been nice if she’d been wearing a skirt.
A little-known fact about Nora: she had legs that, if she’d been around during World War II, would have made our boys overseas forget Betty Grable. The only problem was that nobody ever got to see them. She had about twenty pairs of corduroy jeans, which she considered suitable for every occasion. He remembered what it was like during the first few months he knew her, before they got together. When you saw her in a dress you felt lucky, and every other time you saw her, you wondered when was the next time you were going to see her in a dress.
She was still studying his datebook. “Who’s Olive?”
He could feel himself blushing. “She was just a mistake I made.”
He was hoping she would ask for details, so he could give her mysterious, elusive answers, but she turned the page.
“Cupcake?” she said. “Is she another mistake you made?”
“Cupcakes. It was the last day of work for two college students who were at the paper on a work-study program. What am I talking about?—they’re the people we’re seeing tonight. Anyway, I was reminding myself to bring in a treat for them.”
“You’re a good boss.”
Isaac was taking intense pleasure in this. Why was it such a pleasure to have someone you love snoop through your stuff?
Now she looked unhappy.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
“Jenny’s birthday. You still haven’t talked to her, have you?”
He didn’t say anything. Jenny was Isaac’s sister. Years ago she’d followed a cult leader into a commune in Oregon. Just before she left, he’d had a stupid fight with her, and they hadn’t spoken since then.
There was a cordless phone on the table. Nora picked up the receiver and tossed it at him.
“Give her a call. Right now.”
“I haven’t talked to her in years.”
“She’d love it if you called her. You know she would. When’s the last time you tried to call her?”
“Four years ago. I couldn’t reach her. So I gave up.”
“That’s the old fighting spirit, eh? That’s the old bulldog.” She shook her head in disappointment, and then she tried again: “Seize the day, man. Call her.”
“Maybe I’ll call her tomorrow,” he said.
There were a million reasons he wasn’t going to call his sister. But he loved it that Nora had thrown the phone at him. He loved her generous impulsiveness.
After Isaac’s mother died, his father spent three years in anguish. Nora had a dream one night in which Matthew—Isaac’s father—was playing with a dog, and in the morning she told Isaac that she wanted to get Matthew a puppy. Isaac thought it was a bad idea. He thought his father was too demoralized to care for an animal. But Nora was insistent; she spent the weekend going to animal shelters until she found a dog that reminded her of the one in the dream. Isaac had to leave town on a freelance assignment, and instead of waiting for him to come back, she took the dog to Matthew’s by herself—a three-hour bus ride. She didn’t force it on him—she was prepared to keep it herself if he didn’t want it—but it turned out that he did want it, and it turned out that her dream was prophetic. Having this tiny feisty needy thing in his care woke him up—delighted him—and helped make the last two years of his life better and lighter than Isaac could have imagined.
He knew that he wasn’t going to call his sister—not today; but he was glad that Nora was urging him to, urging him to seize the moment, urging him to do the generous thing. It was the kind of thing he’d always loved about her.
11
NORA NOTICED A HAND-ROLLED cigarette near the phone.
“Isaac Mitchell,” she said. “What in the world is this?”
“It’s called marijuana.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve become a pot smoker.”
Isaac had had a drinking problem in his youth and had dealt with it long before they met, and she’d never seen him ingest anything stronger than coffee and tea.
“No. One of those kids I mentioned, Earl, left it here. I think he thought he could shock me. You’re welcome to it, if you want it.”
She hadn’t smoked pot in years. She’d smoked enthusiastically in college, but rarely since then. But now she thought, Why not?
“It might be fun,” she said. “Care to have a little?”
“No thanks. High on life.”
“Will I blow up anything in the darkroom?”
“Probably better to smoke it outside.” He was carefully putting things away. He took meticulous care of his darkroom. “Just give me a minute to shoot up.”
He picked up a canvas satchel and got out his insulin kit. Isaac had diabetes. He’d always been very careful: he exercised faithfully, adhered to his diet, monitored his insulin level, and gave himself injections three times a day. Years ago, before he met her, when Isaac was late giving himself his insulin shot one day, he’d passed out. It had never happened again, but sometimes he experienced bouts of the same kind of spaciness that had preceded his fainting fit. Nora used to call those episodes his vastations.
Nora had never known him to complain about his condition, and if he worried about how it might affect him in the future, he’d never spoken of it. She’d always thought there was something heroic about this.
She used to give him his injection every once in a while. It was sad and intimate at the same time.
THEY WERE MEETING ISAAC’S young people in an ice-cream shop about a mile away. They decided to walk there, and Nora lit up the joint on the way.
Their walk took them through an enormous park. Nature in the darkness seemed mysterious, filled with grave intent.
She’d smoked less than half the joint, but that was more than enough. At first she was thinking that pot didn’t really do anything, but a minute or two later she found herself reflecting on the idea of how exciting it is to be a person, to be a self, to have a self. To be a person in the middle of a life.
She remembered an afternoon in nursery school when she and a few other kids were building a fort out of cardboard bricks. When she’d handed a brick to a boy named Eugene, he had said, “Okey dokey.” It was the first time she’d ever heard the phrase, and she wasn’t sure what it meant.
At this moment, it was hard to understand why that memory was even hers. What is identity? What knits me together with the little girl who had that experience? What binds the two of us together into a single “I”?
“Isaac?” she said. “Did you ever think about the fact that it’s strange that the particular moment you’re living is the only moment that exists in the universe? That all the other moments that people have ever lived are gone?”
“You’re my guru,” he said.
The night was awe-inspiring, with an immensity of stars; they looked as if they were sending out messages to one another. She felt as if she were inside the mind of God. She thought of all the trials of her life—the trials that she’d endured already, and the trials ahead—and they all seemed small.
She thought about how strange it was to have a life, to be pursuing your goals—your goal of independence, your goal of self-realization, your goal of helping others, your goal of anything—when the populous night sky provides evidence that none of it matters very much, that the universe has preceded
you by billions of years and will outlast you for billions of years. And yet we keep struggling. Apparently we have to.
She saw storefronts in the distance, glowing. She didn’t want to arrive. She wanted to keep walking forever, beside her friend Isaac, in the dark.
Isaac. What a name.
“How did you get the name Isaac?” she said. She couldn’t believe she’d never asked him that before. “It’s really a ridiculous name.”
“Nora’s not much better.”
“I know,” she said. “We’re both of us absurd.”
“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose.”
And then suddenly they were in the ice-cream shop—it was called “Muffin’s”—and the bright loud lights were attacking her. Isaac was talking to the hostess—it was all too much for Nora to deal with—and, thank God, the hostess was leading them through the glaring room into a garden, quieter and darker, and then Isaac was telling her something about the place, and it was hard to keep track of what he was saying, not because he was saying anything complicated, but because every sentence he spoke would open the door to a thought of her own, and then she’d be gone, wandering down long corridors of solitary reflection, and then, when she found her way back to the present, she wouldn’t be able to remember what he’d been talking about in the first place.
This was because of the marijuana, but at this moment it seemed to her that normal life wasn’t so different. You’re always trying to make out other people’s words through the static of your own thoughts.
I need to start meditating, she thought, so I’ll be able to live in the present.
In the meantime, she could take notes.
Ever since Nora was in high school, she’d carried little memo pads around with her. Generally she used them for the normal purposes—shopping lists, Things to Do—but sometimes she liked to bring them out in the middle of a conversation and take notes. Her friends found the habit half flattering and half annoying. At the moment it felt like a necessity—the only way she might have a shot at keeping track of the conversation. She put her memo pad on the table.