A Window Across the River

by Brian Morton

  That would have been a movie with Ralph Bellamy. Apparently she’d gotten the genre wrong. This wasn’t a screwball comedy; this was a horror movie, where, at the end, after you think the heroine has killed the mutant, it jumps back out and she has to kill it again.

  The mutant wasn’t Benjamin; it was her life with him.

  She put her ice pack in the freezer and went to the door. She expected Benjamin to look downcast, stricken, but instead he looked purely enraged.

  He walked in quickly. “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe. I don’t think so.”

  “Then what were you doing back there? Did you have any goal, other than to make us both look like idiots?”

  He had a right to be angry, and, on reflection, she was glad that he was angry. If he’d seemed devastated by the thought of losing her, it might have made things harder. It might have awakened her protective instincts. But because he was angry, she felt free. She wasn’t afraid of having The Talk anymore. If he’d come for a fight, she could fight him.

  “I’m sorry, Benjamin. But I needed to get out. I needed to leave.”

  “Why? Was it because of the VCR thing? Was that it?”

  “That wasn’t it. It was, but it wasn’t. I just . . . this isn’t working. I need a different life.”

  “That’s a cliché,” he said.

  This hurt her. She wouldn’t have thought that he had the power to hurt her.

  “Well, whatever,” she said, which didn’t exactly refute him, but she didn’t care.

  “I don’t understand you. Five days ago, when I called you from Berlin, you said you loved me. Has something changed in the last five days? Or is this the way you think you should treat someone you love?”

  She’d often told him she loved him. But did she? Had she ever? She’d first used the words a few days after his Coronary Event, when she was overcome by pity and tenderness. You tell someone you love him, because you think you do—or because you want to, and you hope that saying it will make it become true—and then, when you begin to see that you never have, never will, you can’t quite take it back.

  She’d once read a book by C. S. Lewis called The Four Loves, which distinguished among erotic love, charitable love, something love, and something else love—she couldn’t remember. Spiritual and amicable love, maybe, the last referring to the love we feel for our friends? Maybe she could tell Benjamin, “I love you in the amicable sense, but no longer in the erotic or spiritual senses, and the category of the charitable doesn’t apply.”

  “If you want to be with me,” Benjamin said, “this is a crazy way to show it.”

  “I’m sorry, Benjamin. I don’t want to be with you.”

  He looked as if he hadn’t considered this possibility before. Which was surprising. It would seem to be axiomatic that when your lover leaps off a boat to get away from you, she’s probably unhappy with the relationship.

  He sat down on the couch. “So you really don’t love me. You probably never did.”

  She was about to answer this, but then she realized that she had no answer. No answer that wouldn’t hurt him more than she was hurting him already.

  He put his head in his hands, and instantly she wanted to walk over and comfort him, and she had to force herself to stay put. Then he lifted his head, and he was smiling. His smile was a little scary. He looked like a madman in a James Bond movie, who’d just hatched a plan for world domination.

  “I’m not going to let you do it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you know what you want right now. It’s pretty obvious that you’re not thinking clearly. Some people down there thought you were trying to commit suicide. I know you weren’t, but I do think you’re not well. We’re not breaking up. I’m sticking with you until you come to your senses.”

  This was something she hadn’t anticipated: that he might not allow her to break up with him. She didn’t know what to do. And then she did.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” she said. “I’ve been seeing someone.”

  Cheating on him, as he’d once told her, was the one unforgivable.

  The mad confidence of a moment ago shrank away. He seemed to get swallowed up by the couch.

  “Who is he?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Who is he? I want to know his name.”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know his name. He has a name, doesn’t he?”

  “His name,” she said slowly, “is Gabriel.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Not very long.”

  “What’s so great about Gabriel?” He said this as if the bearer of such a name must self-evidently be a stupid man.

  Well, Nora thought, he fits onto a floppy disk. That’s pretty great.

  “He listens to people,” she said. “He listens to me.”

  He had no response to this. He sat on her couch, nodding, looking down. It was as if he knew that listening to people was not one of his strong points.

  Finally she said, “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

  “So it is,” he said, and stood up. She put her hand on his back and steered him toward the door. Tamely, he allowed himself to be steered.

  At the door he turned around, and they looked at each other: the first full, frank look they’d exchanged in months. She felt as if she was seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time. He was a baffled creature, just as she was, groping his way through life.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said, and touched his arm, and then she closed the door.

  She put her ice pack back on, sat down at her keyboard, and starting banging away. The Gabriel story.

  There was a knock on her door. It was Benjamin.

  “I forgot my glasses.” She stepped aside and he retrieved his glasses from the coffee table. He stopped for a moment, looking at her computer. She wished she hadn’t started writing so quickly after he left. She wished that he’d found her sitting in a contemplative silence.

  After he left again, she waited until she heard the elevator going down, and then she went back to the keyboard.

  16

  IT’S NICE TO BELIEVE THAT each of us has one true love. This is a story we all enjoy. When Ingrid Bergman asks Dooley Wilson—Sam—to play “As Time Goes By,” and Humphrey Bogart, hearing the song, turns pale, we know it’s because the only woman he’s ever loved has just come back into his life. We don’t want to think that there might have been three or four other women who could have laid him even lower by strolling in after her and asking Sam to play something else—“Begin the Beguine,” say, or “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue.”

  Isaac believed in the idea of true love more than anyone else he knew—anyone his age, at least. He believed that Nora was his mate.

  But at the same time, he sometimes felt that if he’d been much, much younger, he might have believed it of Renee.

  He tried not to think about her this way. He wasn’t her boss anymore, but that made no difference; he had only one role to play in her life, the role of a fatherly friend.

  “You’re such a throwback,” Renee said. “You’re like a doctor who’s still treating people with leeches.”

  She was visiting him in his darkroom. She’d never been there before. She was teasing him because he still used a darkroom.

  “Or, you know what you’re like? Really? You’re like one of those people who don’t buy CDs because they say vinyl sounds warmer.”

  “I’m a phony, in other words?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  He was glad she’d stayed in touch after she’d stopped working at the paper.

  She was dressed absurdly, in a Hawaiian shirt, extra-large, that went all the way down to her knees, and blocky, cloddish shoes, shoes that might have been designed for Frankenstein.

  “How are you?” he said. “How’s your noggin?”

  Two weeks ago, while she was taking pictures of police
breaking up a demonstration of squatters in the East Village, one of the cops had clipped her on the side of the head with his billy club. He’d tried to grab her camera, but Renee had refused to relinquish her grip.

  “He cleaned my clock,” Renee said proudly. “It still hurts. But I’m getting the last laugh. One of the pictures is going to be published in the Tenants’ Rights Newsletter.”

  Had Nora ever put her body on the line for a cause? Never. Renee, he thought, was a better person. She gets slammed with a billy club, but if she gets a good picture out of the experience, she has no regrets.

  He was angry at Nora for neglecting him, so he ran Renee against her in his mind. He wanted to place Renee and Nora on the scales of human merit, and to conclude that Renee was a superior person.

  Nora had disappeared. It had been a month since she’d broken up with Whatshisface, and although they’d been speaking on the phone since then, and she always sounded as if she missed him, she was keeping her distance. The one time she’d been willing to make a date to get together, she’d cancelled it at the last minute. Isaac wouldn’t have predicted that she would leave the other guy yet not come hurtling into his arms.

  Oh well.

  Before Nora had come back into his life, he’d sometimes had romantic daydreams about Renee. He never would have tried to make them a reality, but he didn’t think there was any harm in dreaming. He didn’t dream about the two of them as they were now; rather, he imagined some Star Trek time warp that made them the same age.

  When he’d thought Nora was coming back into his life, he’d instantly stopped daydreaming about Renee. But now Nora was out of reach again.

  “What have you been up to?” he said.

  “I’m mostly just waiting around for the fact-finding trip. Gotta go find them facts.” She hoisted herself up onto a table and, sitting there, kicked her legs idly in the air. She looked like she was about nine. “And I’ve been sending my pictures out to magazines and stuff.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. The Village Voice, Double Take, the Democratic Socialist, the New Yorker.”

  There was something incredibly pure-minded about her, or about her stage of life—that stage of life in which you can believe that getting a picture into the Democratic Socialist, circulation 408, is as much of a triumph as getting one into the New Yorker. More of a triumph.

  “You should use me as a reference. I still know some people at the Voice. I can call them for you if you want.”

  “Thanks. That’s really nice of you.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “When I get back from Asia, maybe you can teach me the mysteries of the darkroom,” Renee said. “You can teach me how to spend three hours developing a picture that doesn’t end up looking quite as good as if you’d done it on a Mac.”

  Renee didn’t have the same pure passion for taking pictures that he’d had when he was her age. For Renee, photography wasn’t an end in itself; it was a tool in the struggle for social justice. If she’d been a writer, she would have been a crusading journalist; if she’d been good with a guitar, she would have been a protest singer, if there was such a thing anymore. She had no special attachment to photography.

  And yet she was gifted. Isaac didn’t think she’d realized it yet, but she was a far more gifted photographer than he was. He was sure of this.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” Renee said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The woman I met last month. Norma. Isn’t that your girlfriend?”

  “Nora. No, she’s just a friend.”

  “It sure looked like she was your girlfriend. As my five-year-old niece would say, it looked like you two were crushed on each other.”

  Talking in the darkroom was good, because if you were blushing, no one could see. “We used to be.”

  “What’s her story? She looks like she has an interesting story.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She has a certain look. She looks like she has a tragic past.”

  Isaac found this surprising. She’d never looked that way to him.

  “She does have a tragic past,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Both her parents died when she was still in high school. She was an orphan when she was still in her teens.”

  “God. That’s rough.”

  Renee was trying to seem respectful, but she sounded unimpressed.

  She was probably thinking that the death of your parents was small potatoes. She had spent the previous summer, after all, in Peru, where the government was dynamiting the homes of peasants who were suspected of sympathizing with the rebels. Compared to the political horrors that Renee had heard about or even witnessed, Nora’s life probably seemed peachy.

  Losing your parents early might not be such a terrible thing. A month ago Isaac had had dinner with an old friend, Eric, who spent a good part of the evening talking about his conflicts with his father, a high-octane businessman who disapproved of the career choices Eric had made. Listening to Eric, who seemed to have been rendered stoop-shouldered by the weight of his father’s disapproval, Isaac realized that he himself felt like an adult, like a man, in a way that Eric did not. Isaac had loved his father, but, listening to his friend, he found himself thinking that he was glad his father was gone.

  Thinking about this now, he decided that Nora hadn’t had such a bad fate after all. She’d had parents who loved her, who steered her through her formative years, who left her with enough resources to get through college, and who were considerate enough to die young.

  “How’d they die?” Renee said.

  Isaac didn’t actually know. Nora had told him about her parents’ deaths soon after they met, but he’d forgotten the details, and it was the kind of story you can’t ask to hear a second time. “Tell me how your parents died again . . . ?”

  “Car accident,” he said. He didn’t want to admit he had no idea.

  “Is she afraid of cars now?”

  “No. She’s a good driver.”

  “Earl told me she’s a hotel detective?” Renee said.

  It took him a second to figure that one out. Nora had said that to Earl.

  “She used to be.” For some reason he felt he had to be loyal to Nora’s lie.

  Nora, then, was a former hotel detective whose parents had died in a car crash.

  “I have to pee,” Renee said, and walked off toward the bathroom. This casual bit of crudeness struck him as unpleasant—he was a throwback—and he wondered how he ever could have been infatuated with her. The two of them were from different centuries.

  He was finished working; he turned the red light off and the white light on. And then she came back into the room, and for some reason she’d taken her Hawaiian shirt off and was wearing only a leotard and shorts, and her shoulders and her legs were golden, and he felt confused again.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  Sometimes he suspected that he wasn’t daydreaming at all—that whatever he was feeling, she was feeling as well. Earlier that spring she’d been reading a book called Half a Life, by Jill Ciment, which she said she liked a lot. He leafed through it one day and found that it was a memoir, which ended with a chapter describing how the author, when she was in her early twenties, fell in love with a painter, a man more than twice her age. From the “About the Author” paragraph he saw that she was still with him, more than twenty years later. Maybe Renee had a thing for older men . . . ?

  One night about a month ago, Renee had accompanied him to a reception the paper was sponsoring in New York. They were in a cab on Broadway; when they stopped at a light, she’d taken a tube of lipstick from her bag.

  “This is my new toy,” she’d said. “It’s not very feminist, but it’s fun.” She’d carefully applied the lipstick and then turned toward him. “What do you think?”

  He’d wanted to kiss her—he’d wanted it badly. And he couldn’t believe that she didn’t know it.

  �
�Looks nice,” he’d said. “Looks great.” And then he’d forced himself to look away, and the moment had passed.

  He still wondered about that moment, still replayed it in his mind. Had she been disappointed? Or relieved? Was it possible that without even knowing it, she’d been testing him—making sure she could trust him? And that by not responding, he’d passed the test? He’d probably never know.

  Now, in his darkroom, Renee was searching around in her backpack. “Tangerine?”

  “No thanks.”

  “It’s my vegan anniversary,” she said. “As of today I haven’t had any dairy in a year.”

  “Quite an accomplishment,” he said, although what he was feeling was concern. Was she getting enough protein?

  “I decided to give up dairy because I realized it was already ten years since I became a vegetarian. I thought it was time for a burst of self-improvement.”

  “What do you think you’ll be doing for self-improvement ten years from now? What do you want to be in ten years?”

  He liked asking her questions like this, big what-do-you-want-from-life questions. He didn’t quite know if she liked this habit of his or thought it was corny.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “I feel like I’m open to anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want to get trapped in the meantime.”

  “That sounds very deep, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “So many people think they want to be writers or musicians or painters, or they want to work for the Peace Corps or something. But they’re worried about security, and they think they need something to fall back on, and they decide to do something else in the meantime. So they go to law school or business school or they become copy editors instead of writers. And then five years go by, and then ten years, and they never end up doing what they wanted to do. They just end up stuck in the meantime.”

  Isaac nodded at this, and didn’t say anything, and felt hurt. Suddenly he wanted her to be gone.

  It’s impossible to know what young people think of you. When Isaac was a photography student, he went through wild opinion swings about his teachers. In his freshman year, he had a teacher he worshiped: the teacher was a man of small gifts, but his encouragement meant so much to Isaac that Isaac thought he was the most important photographer since Mathew Brady. When Isaac was a senior, he was one of only five students admitted to a “master class” with Robert Frank. Deep into a season of arrogance, Isaac regarded Frank with a sort of benevolent amusement; he was so sure of the hugeness of his future accomplishments that he couldn’t help but look down on what Frank had actually accomplished.