by Brian Morton
“The little green notebook,” Isaac said. “I’d almost forgotten.”
“So tell me about these youngsters.” She took out a pen. “What merry youngsters doth these be?” she said, and wondered if she’d lost her mind.
“They’re both pretty special. Earl has Tourette’s syndrome—he once told me that when he was in high school he used to bark like a dog. He’s got it under control though, with medication. He’s a good young photographer. And Renee—Renee is a wonder.”
He pronounced her name in a velvety and tender way, and Nora immediately disliked her.
“What’s so wonderful about her?”
“She’s on fire. I don’t think she ever puts her camera down. I don’t think she ever sleeps. She wants to be a crusading photojournalist. She wants to put an end to the world’s injustices.”
“That’s ambitious,” Nora said.
“She is ambitious,” Isaac said. He was so enthralled by the thought of his prize assistant that he hadn’t heard the irony in Nora’s voice.
A shaggy brown poodle was nosing around leashless, going from table to table.
“Who’s that?” Nora said.
“It’s Muffin. Muffin himself. He’s a celebrity here.”
Like a benevolent host, Muffin was making the rounds. The people at the next table were talking to him in baby talk, which he seemed to enjoy.
Isaac was waving to someone, and then the someone was sitting down. A boy. A redheaded boy—too much hair—with a farm-boy face. Earl.
She looked at her memo pad. Earl: Tourette’s. Renee: on fire. She discreetly put it back in her bag.
Isaac made the introductions.
“I can’t believe I’m late,” Earl said.
“Not a problem,” Isaac said.
“Lateness is the bane of my existence,” Earl said to Nora. “My goal in life is to start showing up on time.”
Isaac nodded sagely. “The only way to make sure you’ll be on time is to be early,” he said.
“Wow,” Nora said. This seemed profound.
A waitress showed up, name-tagged Priscilla. She had a nose ring, and when she said hello Nora saw the glint of a tongue stud.
Why were so many people stapling holes in their faces these days?
Marijuana, Nora reflected soberly, makes you wise. She had suddenly realized that the young people who wear eyebrow rings and nose rings and lip rings weren’t the wild ones, the rebels; they were wallflowers who were trying to escape their wallflowerness but who felt some obscure need to punish themselves for doing so. The self-mutilation was at once the escape and the punishment. Nora understood that poor pierced Priscilla was suffering deeply; the question of what to order seemed trivial by comparison. But Priscilla, who evidently wasn’t ready to acknowledge her suffering, was impatient for Nora to order, so Nora asked for a banana split.
“So are you two old friends? How do you know each other?” Earl said after the waitress had left.
“It’s a funny story,” Nora said. “About ten years ago, I had a job as a hotel detective. One of the guests reported that her necklace was stolen, and when I first looked into it I was pretty sure the culprit was Isaac. It turned out to be the woman he was hooked up with at the time. I had her arrested, she ended up doing twelve months in Leavenworth, and the rest is history.”
She liked to make things up once in a while. She’d gotten into the habit after her mother died; lying to strangers was a way of punching a hole in the wall and getting a glimpse of a different life. It no longer served that purpose, but the habit remained. Her inventions were generally harmless, since they were almost always too ridiculous to be believed. The only problem was that they sometimes popped out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Wow,” Earl said. “That’s awesome.”
And then there was Renee. Nora knew her as soon as she saw her. She was gliding toward the table with a look on her face that seemed to be inviting you to stop what you were doing and admire her.
Renee sat down. She didn’t just sit: she seemed to be doing a dance with the chair, which ended with her turning the chair backward, so that when she sat, the back of it was against her stomach. How strange: to be so young that she didn’t even sit like a normal person.
She was a sylphlike girl with hennaed hair and alarmingly green eyes. She was insanely skinny—almost painful to behold. Her bones seemed to be pushing against her skin, protesting against their encasement; it was hard to look at her wrists without wincing.
Isaac was obviously enraptured. Renee was sitting next to Earl, across from Isaac, and Isaac pushed his chair back slightly, as if Renee, this thread-thin thing, was such a large presence in his mind that he felt compelled to give her more room.
She’d barely sat down before she started to talk. “I just had some amazing news. At the protests in D.C. last summer I met some people from one of the unions, and to make a long story short, I might be going along on one of their fact-finding trips this fall. Taking pictures of the sweatshops in Indonesia.”
“Fantastic,” Earl said.
“I’m so excited. Some of these multinational corporations put children to work for five cents a day. They say it’s okay because if they weren’t giving these people work they’d have no work at all. You could justify slavery on the same grounds. It’s horrible.”
Nora had an ornery impulse to argue with her. Except that she didn’t feel like arguing with her at all, because she agreed with her. It was horrible.
Renee was talking about the working conditions of children in China, Indonesia, Thailand. It sounded like she knew what she was talking about, and she genuinely seemed to care, but there was something about her that Nora didn’t like: a touch of grandiosity, a touch of mania. She probably did think she had a shot at ending the world’s injustices.
But Nora understood why Isaac was a little bit in love with her, if he was. Exuberance is beauty, and Renee was beautiful.
“We had a teach-in last month and Renee debated a guy from Nike,” Earl said to Nora. “She got him to admit that he wouldn’t want his family to be working for fifty cents a day, and then she said, ‘I’m sorry you have such a small family.’”
“My finest hour,” Renee said, shyly peeking up at Isaac and Nora for their approval.
This won Nora over. She liked this young woman.
The food arrived, and while Nora investigated her banana split, the others drifted off into gossip about people at the newspaper.
Isaac glowed when he listened to Renee. He was looking handsomer moment by moment.
He had a way of making people feel important. This was what he was doing for Earl and Renee—Nora could feel it— and this was what he’d always done for her. He interpreted her in the largest, the most generous way. He made her feel like a creature with a fascinating destiny. He held her up to the light.
She didn’t like to see him appreciating someone else.
She remembered how he’d made her feel during their first year together. She’d been amazed by how fully he accepted her. She’d felt utterly free. Sometimes it seemed that he provided a kind of stage on which she could perform, on which she could put all the different parts of herself in play.
After their first year, she had begun—even with Isaac—to feel the old ache of constraint. When they’d met, Isaac’s career seemed to be blossoming; a year later, he was coming off a year of professional defeats. It was around that time that Nora had a story included in Best American Short Stories. It took her a week to tell him about it; she felt uncomfortable, almost guilty, about the fact that good things were happening for her when nothing was happening for him. And not too long after that, she stopped writing stories again.
“All things can tempt me from this craft of verse,” wrote Yeats. The only thing that could tempt Nora from the craft of fiction was a man in need. If her man was ailing, she dropped everything to take care of him; if her man was insecure, she stooped, morally and emotionally, in order to seem smaller than he w
as.
During their first year together, she was finishing a group of stories about her mother. During their second year, a new story started to take shape. It was about Isaac, and it wasn’t kind. She didn’t get very far with it—she had no idea what the story was going to say about Isaac, but she knew that it wouldn’t be tender.
She never told him about it. She’d told him about her experiences with other people—with Gina, with Sally, with Daryl—but she didn’t tell him that she had begun to write something equally heartless about him.
When she’d talked with him, in a general way, about the fact that her writing always slipped free of her intentions, he’d had a sympathetic response. “You have an artistic demon. You have to respect it.” That was kind, but she thought he was glorifying her. It wasn’t a demon; it was nothing as noble as that. It was more like a goblin. A fat little goblin that squatted on her keyboard and took delight in sliming her loved ones.
Although he’d counseled her to accept herself, she knew he wouldn’t be happy if the goblin put its paws on him. He’d given himself away when he’d once said he thought that if she ever did write about him, she’d write about him lovingly. He was trying to show her that he felt secure in her love, but what he actually showed her was that he didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand the inevitability of what happened when she sat down to write.
He’d given himself the part of Prince Charming: his kiss would wake her from her spell. But it wouldn’t. She knew this.
After she got a hint of where the story was going, she tried to force it in a different direction. First she tried replacing the main character with a man who was nothing like Isaac. But the story wouldn’t comply: it wanted to be about Isaac. Then, resigning herself to the fact that she was fated to write about him, she tried to make it a story that would show him in a good light—the light in which she actually saw him. But the story refused to emerge.
There was no reason one couldn’t write stories about people’s virtues—good stories, unsyrupy, unsappy. Grace Paley—her beloved Grace Paley—was always writing about people’s generosity, their loyalty, their resilience. It could be done. But as much as Nora valued these qualities in life, they didn’t happen to be the themes that unlocked her imagination.
It was as if she was a medium, with no control over the voices that spoke through her. She didn’t have a choice between writing about invented characters and writing about people she knew; she didn’t have a choice between writing charitably and writing coldly. The only choice she had was between writing the stories she wrote and not writing stories at all.
Unwilling to write about Isaac and unable to write anything else, she finally did the same thing she’d done when she was seeing Daryl. She decided not to write stories at all. Once again, she turned her attention to essays, reviews, and other things that didn’t matter to her.
When she got pregnant, she realized that she had to change her life. Isaac was the best man she’d ever known, but their relationship couldn’t survive her pregnancy.
Maybe it could have if he hadn’t been so insistent. She was clear about not wanting a child, but Isaac wouldn’t let it rest; he hectored her about it for two solid weeks while she was waiting to have the abortion.
During those two weeks, she began to shrink away from him. He began to seem terribly old to her: his skin, his hair, his breath, his teeth, his preoccupations. He compared her once to Emma Peel, the heroine from some old TV show she’d never heard of, someone he’d had a crush on since the age of five. He looked as if he’d just given her the greatest compliment in his vocabulary, and she felt as if she was going steady with Methuselah.
Renee was telling Isaac how great it had been to work with him. Nora reached out for Isaac’s teacup and took a sip to establish her territorial rights. She did this automatically, while continuing to think about the way things had fallen apart five years ago. She remembered taking his arm when the two of them were standing on the roof of a building—they were in someone’s penthouse during a party, and they had ended up on the roof, thirty floors up, looking out at the city—and mischievously asking, “Would you throw yourself off this roof for me?” He had looked at her glumly and said, “Well, I don’t think I would. But I’d probably consider it.” She remembered the look of resignation on his face, as if his love for her was something that he didn’t even want, just something that he’d gotten stuck with, and she remembered that she was at one and the same time full of sympathy, because she didn’t really want to make him suffer, and delighted, because she loved being able to think of herself as a woman a man might throw himself off a roof for.
Why had she been so cruel to him that night? Because she knew she was going to leave him, and she was so angry at herself, so sick at heart, that she was seized by a wild desire to treat him monstrously.
He had insisted on accompanying her to the clinic—not taking her seriously when she said she wanted to go alone—and as he sat beside her in the cab, oppressively glum, she wished she had an ejector seat so she could send him popping up into the air and be done with him. While the madman cabbie bolted down Ninth Avenue as if they were in a war zone, she had chattered on about the most foolish things she could think of, knowing that she was hurting him by doing this, and taking pleasure in it.
Even then, on the street outside the clinic, he’d made one last effort to change her mind. He just wouldn’t give up. She remembered that she said something that finally silenced him—something he didn’t have an answer for. But she couldn’t remember what it was.
She didn’t make her decision lightly. She knew it was a grave decision; by the time she had the abortion she was eight weeks pregnant, and the being inside her had a heartbeat and the beginnings of a central nervous system. (Nora couldn’t stop herself from looking at books that charted the development of the embryo.) It wasn’t like lancing a boil. She was prepared to suffer over her choice, and she did suffer—not so much during the day, but at night, while she slept. She kept having dreams in which she was pregnant, though the embryo or fetus was never in her womb: it was growing in her hand, or in her arm—her left arm, her injured arm—or in her brain. The being inside her, in these dreams, was always sleeping—except once, when it was reading a book by Agatha Christie—and always gave off a faint blue glow. She had the dreams once or twice a week, and in the morning she would wake up feeling lost. The dreams had never completely stopped coming, although she didn’t have them very often anymore. But as sad as the decision made her, it was one that she never came to regret.
After the abortion, she and Isaac had tried, incredibly, to “be friends,” and for three or four months it seemed to be working. She remembered seeing him on his birthday and telling him he was her best friend. Then, the day before she left for a vacation in Canada, she and Isaac took his nephew to the zoo, and, witnessing how joyful it made Isaac to be with him, Nora thought that it would be best to get out of his life—that, mere “friends” though they might be, she was probably holding him back. She didn’t exactly decide anything that afternoon, but after she got back from Canada she didn’t call him, and he didn’t call her either. And that was that.
Isaac and Renee and Earl were talking, but she wasn’t even pretending to be listening anymore. She was hoping there was a way for her to atone for hurting Isaac. She was hoping she wouldn’t hurt him again.
She felt something cold and wet in her palm: Muffin’s nose. He was licking her hand. Then he put his front paws on her thigh and strained toward the table. Apparently he wanted her to feed him.
Nora wanted him to go away. She moved her leg away and Muffin got down and, still hopeful, walked over to Isaac. He nuzzled his head against Isaac’s shin, but Isaac, entranced by his young friends, didn’t even look down. Nora was the only one paying attention to the dog, so she was the only one who noticed when he got hold of a piece of biscotti that Earl had accidentally dropped on the floor.
“You have to stay open,” Renee was saying. “Even wh
en it hurts.”
Nora was trying to catch up on the conversation—what had inspired Renee to impart this wisdom?—when she noticed that Muffin was doing some kind of dance near Isaac’s feet, taking little leaps backwards. The lambada, Nora thought. The forbidden dance.
Isaac glanced down at him. “Cute dog,” Isaac said.
Muffin began to emit a curious sound, as if he was trying to speak.
“I think he’s choking,” Nora said.
Muffin’s front legs were still scuffling, but he wasn’t getting any traction anymore; he’d stopped moving backwards. He was still making odd noises, and he was starting to list, like an injured ship.
“Oh my God,” Renee said. “Give him some water.” Even stoned, Nora could see that that didn’t make sense. Muffin’s eyes were going up in his head; you could hardly see his pupils anymore.
A man at the next table stood up abruptly. He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties. He looked like a take-charge guy. He looked like someone you’d want to have living next door to you, just in case there was ever any trouble. Nora was relieved—he was going to deal with this.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and didn’t move.
His wife, a suburban bohemian in a baggy dress, was waving her napkin. “Give the poor thing some room. He needs air.”
We’re watching this dog die, Nora thought. We’re all of us going to sit here and watch.
She was paralyzed by the thought that she didn’t know what to do, until she realized that no one around her knew what to do either.
The Heimlich maneuver, she thought. She bent down and picked up the dog, and then she hesitated, because she remembered having read that when an infant is choking you shouldn’t give him the Heimlich; you should lay him face down across your knees and tap him sharply on the back, as if you’re burping him.
Grown-up or infant—which did Muffin resemble most? She decided that Muffin’s air of friendly optimism reminded her of her grandmother, many years gone, so she put her fingers into his abdomen and pressed. A hard chunk of biscotti shot out of his mouth.