by Brian Morton
They sat on the bench. Billie still couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The harder I try to breathe the more I feel like I’m not breathing.” She lowered her head between her knees, apparently thinking this would help; her straw hat fell to the ground.
“Maybe I should go by myself,” Nora said.
“Are you sure?” Billie said. She had bitten herself so hard that there was blood on her lips.
“I’ll be fine,” Nora said. “I think I might prefer to do it alone, really.”
She squeezed Billie’s hand, stood up, and walked toward the Scary House. When she reached the door she looked back, hoping that Billie might have changed her mind—might be hurrying forward, half limping half trotting, to catch up with her.
Billie was still on the bench. Her arms were wrapped around her body; she was shivering, in the baking sun.
Nora met the funeral director, a dark-jowled man named Mr. Tenzi—he looked as if he needed to shave five times a day—and made the arrangements. His office was filled with flowers. Nora asked if she could take a violet.
She emerged into the bright day. Billie was still on the bench. She looked renewed; she’d put her straw hat back on, and she was smiling.
As Nora walked toward her, she realized that she wouldn’t be going to New York with her. As much as she loved her aunt, she couldn’t rely on her.
Nora stood over Billie and held out the flower. Billie reached for it hesitantly, squinting in the sun, smiling up at Nora shyly from under the brim of her hat.
For the next few years, Nora barely spoke to her. Billie had failed to take care of her. In Nora’s sophomore year of college she came across a line from T. S. Eliot: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” This passage not only justified her anger; it gave it a glow of stern nobility.
But as time went on, Nora missed her aunt’s tenderness, her playfulness, her generosity—she just missed her. During her senior year of college, after she transferred to NYU, she finally called her, and soon they were getting together for dinner almost every week.
Forgiveness brings knowledge of its own. Nora came to see the past differently. She came to understand that Billie had wanted to take care of her; she just wasn’t strong enough. And in time her memory of Billie on the bench—distraught, shivering, biting her lips—became transformed. It was no longer a memory of someone who had failed her, but of someone who’d wanted to help her, wanted it with all her heart.
18
NORA HAD BREAKFAST WITH HER friends Robert and Judy, who lived in Toronto and were making their annual trip to New York. Robert had been one of Nora’s pot-smoking buddies in college; he’d turned respectable in his old age but he hadn’t lost his anarchist spirit. When Nora tried to talk about her problem—that she couldn’t write without writing about people she knew, and she couldn’t write about people she knew without hurting them—he let out a huge laugh. “Put me into your stories! You wouldn’t hurt me! Write about my sexual fantasies! Better yet, try them out!”
Judy patted him on the hand. “Back down, Rob. She’s not interested in writing porno.”
“That’s the problem. She’s been writing that literary shit long enough. If she spilled some of my secrets, she’d be on the bestseller list.”
Nora was sorry to say good-bye. It was good to be around friends who didn’t take her problems very seriously.
After breakfast, she picked up a rental car and drove to Connecticut. It was July second, the day before her birthday. Nora had been planning to spend the day working on the Gabriel story, but a company that made dental products had offered her a deranged amount of money to go up to Connecticut and help them with a last-minute rewrite of their brochure.
She spent the afternoon and early evening doing the job. They put her to work at a computer with a fancy new ergonomic keyboard, which was the most awkward thing she’d ever laid her hands on, and as she drove back to New York her arm was keening in distress. She couldn’t wait to get home and strap on an ice pack. She’d bought a new model a few days before, a Freeze Wrap, and she had high hopes for it. It was filled with space-age goo.
What she wanted to do after that was spend the evening playing around with the Gabriel story. Which, in truth, although the main character was still named Gabriel, was becoming a story about Isaac.
It still wouldn’t have been accurate to refer to it as a story. At this point it was still just notes toward a story. This was how it always went for Nora: she had to write for months, getting to know her characters, before she could begin to find her way into the story. Sometimes she felt like a private eye, spending months following up false leads until she stumbled upon the one that provided the key. She wasn’t always sure the effort was worth it—she found it embarrassing that it took her six months to write a story—but this was the way the process always went for her, and she had come to trust it.
It seemed to be turning into a story about Isaac and his sister, though she didn’t know much more about it than that. She wasn’t thinking about Isaac’s feelings or his sister’s feelings; she felt responsible to no one, responsible only to the story itself. So although Isaac called her faithfully every week, she was still keeping him at arm’s length. If she started seeing him again, she wouldn’t be able to write freely anymore.
She was driving down the highway, listening to a Tanya Donelly tape, when the car started to shudder. It felt like it was having a seizure. She managed to guide it onto the shoulder just before it died.
What are you supposed to do when your car dies on the highway? Do you get out and flag somebody down? Do you walk to a service station? Do you just sit there?
She thought of the writer Andre Dubus, and concluded that she should just sit there. Dubus once stopped on the highway to give a hand to somebody whose car had broken down, and another car slammed into him, and he was rendered paralyzed and lived out the rest of his life in physical anguish.
A literary anecdote for every occasion, Nora thought.
For the first time in her life, she wished she had a cell phone. She realized she was at a bridge moment in history—or maybe just in the history of the telephone. Two years ago, it had seemed pretentious to have a cell phone; in two years, it would seem pretentious not to.
Trucks were blasting by her, trucks so huge that her two-door Chevy trembled as they passed. She put on her emergency blinkers, but no one stopped to help. An SUV slowed down, and the woman in the passenger seat, who seemed to be wearing a cowl—maybe she was a nun—leaned out the window and held up her middle finger and shouted, “Fuck you!”
Nora rested her head on the steering wheel. All she had wanted from the evening was to sit at her keyboard working on the Gabriel story, and here she was, stuck on the highway, being given the finger by nuns.
Clinging to your desk, as Kafka recommended, is not enough. It’s not solitary enough. I should live in a shack in Montana, she thought, with just a typewriter and some paper. No phone, no fax, no e-mail. Off the grid. Maybe the Unabomber’s place is still available.
After half an hour a police car pulled up behind her. The police officer was a woman. She walked slowly to Nora’s window.
After Nora explained what had happened, the officer looked under the hood and told her that her alternator was shot. Her name tag said “Officer Lundquist.”
“I suppose you don’t know anything about alternators,” Officer Lundquist said.
“Not really.”
“Figures. You think you don’t have to know anything about your car—you just drive it.”
Nora didn’t know what to say to this.
“I can give you a lift back to town,” Officer Lundquist said. “Then you can call Avis or whatever and demand your rights.”
Nora didn’t know why this woman was being so hostile. Maybe it was the eternal conflict between the pretty team and the not-so-pretty team. Nora didn’t overestimate her own appeal—whenever she looked in the mirror the first thing she saw was her nose, which meandered sli
ghtly off course—but she knew that men usually found her easy on the eyes. Officer Lundquist, on the other hand, had not been smiled upon by nature. She looked a little like the guy who played Carole Lombard’s father in My Man Godfrey. Or maybe it had nothing to do with prettiness. Maybe she was just having a bad day.
When they got into the police car, Officer Lundquist offered Nora a toothpick. Nora didn’t want it, but she took it, because she was scared of the police.
Her arm felt twenty degrees hotter than the rest of her. Her arm wanted to get this over with and get the hell home. It was like having a bad-natured cousin who accompanies you and poisons your own mood.
“You wouldn’t be from around here, of course,” Officer Lundquist said. “Where you from?”
“Montana,” Nora said. She said this just to take her attention off her arm. And also because Officer Lundquist was being so rude.
“Montana. Never been there.”
“It’s a beautiful state,” said Nora, who hadn’t either. “It might be the most beautiful state in the union.”
“What do you do there?” Officer Lundquist said.
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
Officer Lundquist nodded reflectively. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be many psychiatrists in Montana.”
Nora forced a “you’ve got my number” chuckle out of herself. “It’s true. I have a lot of free time.”
Officer Lundquist was examining her out of the corner of her eye. Nora was staring straight ahead, but she could feel it.
“Got any kids?” Officer Lundquist finally said.
“Sure do. A girl named Billie and a boy named . . . Steve.”
Officer Lundquist eyed Nora slyly, as if she had proof that she was lying. “I thought psychiatrists aren’t supposed to talk about their personal lives. I thought you get in trouble if you do.”
“We don’t tell our patients. But we can tell other people. Just like anybody else.”
They drove along in silence for a while. Nora was hoping that Officer Lundquist wouldn’t ask her any more questions.
“Can I talk to you about something?” Officer Lundquist said. Her voice sounded odd. It sounded wet.
“Sure,” Nora said. How can I get out of this?
“I have a new baby. My first. He’s eight months old.”
Nora was about to say “Congratulations,” but then she realized that, as a psychiatrist, she should say nothing of the kind. It was the psychiatric equivalent of leading the witness. Maybe Officer Lundquist wanted to confide that she didn’t really like her baby, and if Nora congratulated her, it would make it hard for her to own up to this distressing truth. Nora hadn’t been a psychiatrist for long, but she had her professional ethics.
“He’s a charmer. Really a charmer. Gregory. He takes center stage, I’ll tell you that much. He owns the whole show. I can tell he’s going to be a preacher someday, just like his grandpa.”
Nora smiled understandingly. You can always tell when your boy’s going to grow up to be a preacher. It’s one of the true joys of motherhood.
“He’s got the cutest little feet. You’d love ’em. But here’s the thing. Here’s my question. Sometimes, when I’m with him, I feel so crazy about him that I just want to give him a kiss on the lips. You ever feel like that with—what was your boy’s name?”
What was his name? Nora couldn’t remember. She smiled and said, “Well, I’ve got my professional hat on now, so no more talk about me.”
Officer Lundquist grinned, one canny old pro to another. “I knew you’d say that.” She grew more serious. “But really. When I’m with him, you know, I just want to cover him with kisses. I do cover him with kisses. Just like a mother should. Kisses on his belly, on the top of his head, on his knees. I never want to kiss him, you know—I never want to kiss him down there.” She looked at Nora meaningfully, and Nora understood that she wasn’t referring to his feet, the feet that Nora would love. “When I give him kisses on the cheeks I’m always careful not to put my lips on his mouth. But I want to. I really want to. I want to kiss that little baby on the mouth. And I don’t want to do it just once. Do you think that’s sick?”
How did I get into this?
You can’t avoid it. You can’t stop it from coming. If you so much as walk outside your home, you find yourself with someone’s life in your hands.
Officer Lundquist was looking at Nora zestfully, as if it exhilarated her to talk about this. This was alarming.
Nora spoke slowly, trying to think the question through. “We all have urges that disturb us. The difference between being a responsible human being and not being one isn’t whether you think about doing disturbing things. It’s whether you actually do them. Listen. I don’t think you’re sick at all. But I do think you should get some therapy. Real therapy. Not just a chat on the Connecticut Turnpike.”
Officer Lundquist nodded thoughtfully, but then, as they got off the highway, she took on a different expression, shaking her head slowly as if Nora had said something stupid. “Well, that’s quite an opinion,” she said. “Straight from the honcho’s mouth.”
They drove on in silence. Nora was thinking about poor little Gregory. She heard a voice in her mind—she couldn’t identify it—saying, It turns out you can’t save anyone.
Someone had said this to her, but she couldn’t remember who, or when, or why.
Officer Lundquist dropped Nora off at a pay phone, and Nora called the rental car company and demanded her rights. They arranged for a cab to take her back to New York. When she got home she strapped on her Freeze Wrap, and, although it didn’t quite live up to the hype, her arm felt better after a while.
Later she tried to work on the Gabriel story, but she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t stop thinking of Officer Lundquist and her son. Poor Gregory! She hoped that Officer Lundquist would find a way to beat back the craziness inside her.
She decided to stop writing for the night; she saved her work onto a floppy disk and lay down on the couch.
It turns out you can’t save anyone.
She still couldn’t remember who’d said that.
It bugged her. Not because the remark itself meant much to her. She didn’t think it was profound; she didn’t even think it was true. You may not be able to save anyone’s soul, but a heart surgeon can save someone whose arteries are blocked, and a lifeguard can save someone who’s drowning. People save each other all the time. But it still bugged her that she couldn’t remember, because of the feeling she had when she thought of the words.
Nora knew of one infallible way to find out what she really thought of someone, but it wasn’t an operation she could perform at will. Occasionally she’d remember some remark without being able to remember who’d said it, and when she tried to figure out who it was, before she could conjure up a face or a name, she would get a feeling about the person, and this feeling represented the truth of her emotions. Shorn of any of the tags of circumstance—of the context in which she knew the person, of their mutual history or lack of mutual history, of her superego’s decrees about what she should think of the person—it was the bare, pure essence of what the person meant to her.
Now, turning the simple sentence over in her mind, she had a strong warm feeling, a feeling of connection: whoever had said it was someone she cared for and respected and trusted. It was, she realized after a moment, Isaac. Of course.
She remembered now. He hadn’t presented the idea as a general rule; he’d been talking about something specific. He’d been telling her, years ago, about the week he’d spent taking pictures in Haiti during the last days of the Duvalier regime. He’d been sent there by Rolling Stone. He told Nora that the experience had cured him of his romantic ideas about the power of photojournalism. He’d seen men and women who’d had their arms hacked off; he’d seen children hunting for food in garbage dumps. “Some people go into photography because they think it can save lives,” he told her. “But it turns out you can’t save anyone. You can only bear witne
ss to their suffering.”
She remembered what she’d been feeling as he’d said this. She had felt an intense respect for him; she had had a deep sense of his seriousness, his compassion, his sadness at being unable to do more. Remembering this, she felt a bond with him that was so strong that it seemed to be something she ignored or disregarded at her peril. She decided to change her plans for the next day. She’d give herself a birthday present, by seeing him.
19
HER BIRTHDAY FELL ON A SATURDAY. On the phone a few weeks earlier, Isaac had mentioned that he was playing in a summer softball league in Central Park. He could have found a league in New Jersey, but this was a way of keeping in touch with old friends from his Village Voice days. She remembered him saying that he played on Saturday afternoons.
She wrote during the morning, performed her birthday devotions in the early afternoon, and then walked to the park. It was a warm, welcoming day. There were five or six baseball fields on the Great Lawn, all of them with games in progress. On the fringes of the lawn, at a safe distance from batted balls, families were picnicking, couples were lying in the grass, a small group of elderly men and women was doing t’ai chi. New York felt almost like a family.
She walked from one softball game to another until she saw him. He was playing first base. She watched him for a while without trying to catch his eye. The second batter hit a pop-up to the right side of the field; she watched Isaac ranging over to the foul line to catch it. Relaxed and confident, he caught the ball in a basket catch, a little show-offy, and tossed it back to the pitcher, a tall woman with thick dark slightly graying hair. Isaac moved nicely.
Nora hadn’t been looking forward to her birthday—thirty-five seemed old. But now, on a beautiful summer day, having sought out and found the man she cared for, she felt young.
The inning was over. Isaac was the second person to bat for his team. Nora felt very old-fashioned: Teresa Wright in Pride of the Yankees, watching with love and awe as Lou Gehrig hits a home run. Isaac didn’t hit a home run, though, but a grounder to the third baseman. He was thrown out by fifteen feet.