A Window Across the River

by Brian Morton

  A couple of days earlier, Nora had read an article in the Nation by someone who had been a longtime member of the American Communist Party. He said he understood why he’d joined the party (idealism), and why he’d left (it had corrupted every ideal it claimed to stand for). What he couldn’t understand was why he’d stayed with the party for so long.

  Sitting on the subway train, awkwardly massaging her arm, Nora asked herself the same thing about her relationship with Benjamin. Why have I stayed with this party for so long?

  She’d met Benjamin a year and a half ago. For the first few months, he intrigued her. She thought he was the most serious person, the most touchingly serious person, she’d ever met. He taught in the comparative literature department at the City University of New York; he was a specialist in German literature and philosophy. He was always reading people like Windelband and Dilthey, whoever they were. Dilthey! When she first knew him, she thought of his reading habits as heroic. He was rescuing people from oblivion—because if he didn’t read Dilthey, who would? He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time.

  When she was getting to know him, she’d sometimes drop in on him at his haunt at the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia—he’d spend hours there, reading and drinking coffee—and when she’d sit down across from him he’d look up, smiling kindly but vaguely, as if unable to place her; and she was charmed by this. It was as if he belonged in another century. She always had the feeling that if she’d arrived ten minutes earlier, she would have seen him chatting with Freud or Wittgenstein or Karl Kraus.

  Her unhappiness arrived quietly, almost without announcing itself. One afternoon a few months after they got together, she was in his apartment when he got a call from someone from Rutgers University Press. Benjamin was publishing a book, a beefed-up version of his dissertation—a study of the later work of the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch—and he needed to do some last-minute revisions. She picked up something to read and went to the kitchen, and after he got off the phone she went back to the living room and asked him if the revisions were done.

  “No. I still have to have one more conversation with Alex”—his editor. “I was talking to some lowly assistant just now.”

  After he said this, she realized she’d already known it. Even from another room, even without hearing his words, she’d been able to tell that he was talking to some lowly assistant. If he’d been talking to someone he considered important, he would have had a different tone of voice.

  She began to be bothered by the way he spoke to people: waiters, receptionists, his students when they called on the phone. Unless they could help him or impede him in some way—unless they were important to his career—just about everyone was a lowly assistant to him.

  She could pinpoint the moment when she realized she needed to leave him. It was on the day the new phone books arrived. She picked one up in her lobby and took it upstairs and looked herself up—not to make sure her listing was accurate, but because finding your name in the new phone book is a small and slightly startling confirmation that you exist. Then she looked Benjamin up. She’d never looked him up in the phone book before.

  He existed too: Benjamin Mandelbaum, Ph.D.

  Ph.D.?

  The funny thing was, it didn’t really surprise her. It didn’t surprise her that he felt the need to inform the readership of the Verizon Manhattan SuperPages of the fact that he had a Ph.D.

  When you’re bothered by your boyfriend’s listing in the phone book, it’s probably a sign that you’re not really meant for each other.

  It wasn’t that he was a bad person. He did have a passion for learning, like few people she had ever known. There was something moving about his devotion to old dead thinkers. He wasn’t a bad person, but he wasn’t the person for her. There was nothing left to do but leave him.

  But before you leave someone, you have to have The Talk. How she dreaded The Talk! She’d once heard that the essayist Lionel Abel had left his first wife by going out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never coming back, and she kept wondering if this was an option for her. In order to do it, of course, she’d have to start smoking, but it might be worth it, if The Talk was the only alternative.

  When you tell someone that you’re leaving him, he will ask why, and then you’ll have to give your reasons, and then he’ll dispute them—when our lovers try to leave us, we suddenly become lawyers—and the two of you will debate about whether your reasons for leaving are good enough, when all along what you really want to say is simply, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not happy.”

  Maybe there were people who could just come out and say this, but Nora wasn’t one of them. Many of her friends, down through the years, had referred to her as impulsive, and she didn’t think they were wrong. But this wasn’t true in every sphere of life. When she was unhappily involved with a man, she got stuck.

  She kept reviewing the possibilities. There was The Talk. There was the Lionel Abel option. And best of all was the Superman II option. After Lois (Margot Kidder) discovers that Clark (Christopher Reeve) is really Superman, they have a love affair, which ends when Superman, fearing that her knowledge of his true identity would put her in danger, gives her a hypnotic kiss, erasing both her memory of his identity and her memory of their affair. What wouldn’t she give to be able to kiss Benjamin with a kiss of forgetfulness!

  Benjamin had once said that if a woman he was seeing ever cheated on him, he’d leave her instantly. “Infidelity,” he had told her, “is the only unforgivable.” But she didn’t want to cheat on him.

  The difficulty of breaking up with him had nothing to do with a fear of being alone. She was sure about that. She never thought of herself as an orphan—the term seemed too self-pitying—but she was used to being alone, schooled in it. She’d once read an essay by Michael Ventura called “The Talent of the Room,” in which he said that if you want to be a writer, the most important piece of equipment you need is the ability to be alone—to spend your best hours by yourself at the keyboard. If that’s the most important thing, Nora had thought, I’ve got it made.

  Finally she decided there was no way around it. As much as she dreaded The Talk, she knew she had to go through with it.

  There couldn’t have been a better time to leave him. Benjamin’s book was being published; he was on a tenure track; everything was falling into place for him. No one could accuse her of kicking him when he was down.

  She decided to have The Talk the next time she saw him. Benjamin had no idea what was coming. She thought it was best that way. She would dispose of the matter quickly and efficiently. She felt like a hit man.

  On the appointed night, a Friday, she paced around her apartment, tidying, waiting for him, thinking about all the movies about hit men she’d seen in the last few years, wondering why the hit man had become a cultural hero. Then she ate two Mars bars to give herself a jolt of sugar for her task.

  Benjamin showed up precisely at nine, and as soon as she opened the door she could tell that something was wrong. People carry their own climates with them, their own ecosystems; Benjamin’s, lately, had been perpetually sunny. With his book out and his tenure imminent, he’d seemed, during the last few months, to be walking around inside a golden bubble; at times she felt she could have reached out and given it a squeeze. But tonight something was different. His golden bubble was gone.

  He even smelled different. He smelled meaty. Unpleasantly so, like liverwurst.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He dropped a copy of the New York Review of Books on the kitchen table.

  She turned to the table of contents. His book had been reviewed.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Read it. You read it, and I’ll weep.”

  The review had been written by somebody from Harvard, evidently a big shot in the field. It was a long review, and it wasn’t nice. The reviewer made a distinction between intellectuals (people who put ideas to use in interesting wa
ys) and scholars (people who merely amass facts, with no idea of what to do with them). “Sadly,” the reviewer concluded, “this is the work of a scholar.”

  While she read the review, Benjamin sat beside her at the kitchen table, reading it over her shoulder. He’d probably already read it more than once, but he couldn’t stop himself from reading it again. He was thrusting his chin in the air, working the muscles of his throat, as if he’d forgotten how to swallow. He looked like a frightened little boy.

  After she finished, he began to explain why the review was unfair. “It’s a joke. It’s worse than a joke: it’s a scandal. This is going to destroy his reputation. Look at this. He writes that Broch sold his family business to devote himself to literature—as if I didn’t spend an entire chapter on the fact that he sold it to devote himself to philosophy. He only turned to literature after he studied philosophy. If you can mix up something that basic, how can you think you have the credentials to review a book on Hermann Broch?” He talked for five or ten minutes, citing the reviewer’s many errors. Every once in a while he leaned over and made notes for a letter to the editor—a letter she hoped he wouldn’t send, because it would convict him more thoroughly than the review had. Accused of being an arid scholar, Benjamin wanted to refute the charge with the tools of arid scholarship.

  She didn’t have the heart to have The Talk that night. It would be too cruel.

  Benjamin was still working his throat muscles oddly, still thrusting his face forward.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I feel weird. I think I must have eaten something bad. I feel like I have a stomachache all the way up to my jaw.”

  “Benjamin?”

  “I’m all right. Just let me lie down for a second.”

  He lay down, but it didn’t help. After a few minutes he said he couldn’t breathe. “I feel like I have something stuck in my throat.”

  “Do you think we should call your doctor?”

  “It’s Friday night. My doctor’s home bleaching his teeth.”

  Benjamin’s doctor was famous for his wondrous teeth.

  “Maybe we should go to the hospital,” Nora said.

  “That’s ridiculous. I’m just upset that that charlatan got his hands all over my book.”

  But after half an hour on the couch he didn’t feel better, and he let her take him to the hospital. In the emergency room—overweight male with chest pain—he moved quickly to the front of the line. He sat on the examining table in a paper gown, his plump white hairless legs dangling. “I have an anomalous sensation in my chest,” he said to one of the doctors, and Nora was touched by this. Who talked this way? Nobody but Benjamin.

  After twelve hours of testing, the doctors concluded that he’d had a mild “coronary event,” and they kept him in for observation.

  He sat in his hospital bed, stiff with fright; when his brothers came by the next day, they made jokes to cheer him up, but Benjamin just sat there, nodding tightly. Later, after his brothers had left, Benjamin’s doctor stopped in, and Benjamin asked him, in a small voice, whether it was all right to laugh.

  “Of course,” the doctor said. “Laughter’s the best medicine,” he added predictably.

  “It won’t put a strain on my heart?”

  Sitting in the corner, Nora felt ashamed of her own mind. Because at the same time that she was genuinely concerned about Benjamin, she was also wishing that she’d broken up with him a month ago. She didn’t know when she’d be able to break up with him now.

  ALL THIS HAD HAPPENED more than a year earlier. Benjamin was as good as new: he’d lost weight; he’d gotten tenure; his book had been well reviewed in the scholarly journals. His golden bubble had long since reappeared. But still she hadn’t left him. She hadn’t been able to.

  Her inability to leave him was stunning—and yet it wasn’t stunning at all. Anytime she thought about it, she remembered him as he was that night in her kitchen: the frightened boy who’d forgotten how to swallow; or as he was the next day in the hospital: the timid boy asking his doctor if it was okay to laugh.

  She didn’t love him, but she stayed. And two days after he was discharged from the hospital, she’d put away the notes she’d been making for a story about him, and she’d written barely a word of fiction from that day until this morning.

  During the past year, she’d become an amateur authority on coronary health. She’d subscribed to Nutrition Action and the Harvard Heart Letter, she’d read half a shelf of books about “heart-healthy lifestyles.” She was trying to keep him on something approximating the Dean Ornish diet. She’d nudged him into an exercise program (he finally acquiesced when she explained that he could read while he exercised, and now he was dutifully spending half an hour a day on the treadmill, a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea propped up on the instrument panel). And without his really being aware of it, she’d begun to oversee his schedule, trying to make sure that his afternoons were free for reading and writing so that he was no longer staying up till two in the morning and getting by on five hours’ sleep.

  Sometimes she told herself that it made perfect sense that she hadn’t been writing any fiction: the creative energy that she normally poured into her stories had been diverted into the effort to take care of him. But she knew that wasn’t the real reason. She wasn’t writing fiction because she was afraid of where it would lead her.

  THE RESTAURANT WAS ON Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street. It was one of those places that make you feel like you’re back in the 1940s—it had a neon sign outside that said “Steaks and Chops.” It was a comfortable place, where you could sit as long as you liked.

  She knew this was a big night for Benjamin. During the last six months, he’d grown restless with the confines of being an academic scholar, writing only for other academics. He wanted to write for Harper’s and the Atlantic, he dreamed of writing for the New Yorker someday. He wanted, he once told her solemnly, to become a “public intellectual.” He valued these monthly get-togethers, because many of the people who attended them wrote for the magazines he dreamed about writing for.

  At the back of the restaurant, ten or fifteen people were sitting around a long table. Nora knew about half of them—not well, but well enough to consider sneaking away. But then Benjamin spotted her. Too late.

  The people at the table, in Nora’s view, could have posed for a collective portrait illustrating the varieties of self-glorification in literary life.

  Sitting next to Benjamin was Marty Rubin, whose zeal for self-promotion took innovative forms. Two years ago, after he’d published his first book, a political novel about the drug war, he’d hired a team of college-age “assistants” to read the book for a few hours a day while riding the subway. Last year, after the death of a mutual friend of theirs, he’d sent Benjamin a packet in the mail. It contained a note that read, “I was so sorry to hear about Paul’s death. I want you to know that only an unbreakable obligation like the one described in the enclosed flyers could prevent me from attending the memorial service. If you get a chance, perhaps you could distribute them after the service, so that if any of our friends happen to be traveling to the West Coast they can attend the second or third lecture.” The note was accompanied by twenty copies of a flyer advertising a lecture series he was giving at UCLA; it featured a color photograph of him, standing shirt-sleeved in a blighted barrio in East L.A., looking both compassionate and streetwise.

  There was Peter Anderson, who in his early thirties had written two books in quick succession: an authorized biography of Giorgio Armani and a slim study of foot fetishes. After the foot-fetish book flopped commercially, Peter had spent a few months engaged in anguished introspection, a period that culminated in a trip to the Middle East, where, during a tour of the West Bank, he had discovered that the Palestinians were possessed by irrational furies and an inability to let go of their grievances. He had expanded on this insight in a series of articles, which had led to a contract for a book about world trouble spots; the
thesis of the book, The Limits of the Liberal Mind, was that the conflicts in places like Ireland, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East were beyond the reach and even beyond the comprehension of idealists, humanitarians, and peacemakers. He now appeared regularly on Charlie Rose, offering deeply pessimistic reflections about global politics in a voice that was stricken, burdened, weary, weighed down by all he had witnessed.

  And then there was Frank Millstein, an investigative reporter who in recent years had taken to referring to himself in the third person: “When people see Frank Millstein’s name at the top of the page, they know they’d better sit down. They know they’re about to read something that’s gonna pack a punch.” And why, Nora thought, shouldn’t he? If you consider yourself a figure of major importance, you should refer to yourself in the third person. Anything else would be false modesty.

  All these forms of self-aggrandizement seemed peculiarly male. But why were men like this? And was it only men who were like this? Of course not. But it was much easier for men to be like this. She found a chair at an empty table and slid it next to Benjamin, who kissed her hello, but who was so absorbed in the discussion that he barely looked at her.

  They were talking about an article that had recently appeared in Harper’s. Nora hadn’t read it, so it was hard for her to follow the conversation.

  Just before she’d entered the restaurant, Nora had noticed a judo school next door. Now, after ordering a drink, she glanced up and saw a man who must have been one of the teachers. A small, compact Asian man in his late fifties or early sixties, he was standing near the door, waiting to be seated. He was dressed simply, in a white shirt and khaki pants; he was carrying a gym bag that bore the school’s emblem. His hair was wet and neatly combed, as if he’d just showered after his class. A busboy went hurrying by, holding up a tray of plates and glasses, and the man turned aside to let him pass; it was a tiny movement, a half step, but it was a study in economy of motion.