by Brian Morton
When he was walking back off the field, he saw her.
“You must have put the jinx on me,” he said. “I never hit ground balls.”
He stopped about two feet away from her. He looked happy to see her, but wary.
The sun was behind him; she had to put up her hand to shield her eyes as she looked up at him.
“You’ve got a little halo thing going there, Tall Man.”
“It’s good to see you,” he said quietly. “Did you give blood this morning?”
He’d remembered it was her birthday. Her birthday devotions: she gave blood once a year.
She held out her arm for him to see the bruise.
“You’re remarkable.”
“I do it for the cookies.”
The inning was over; he had to get back on the field. She sat on the grass and watched the rest of the game, and then the two of them walked through the park.
“Did you get the invitation to my exhibit?”
“Yes. Thank you. It’s exciting. Are you excited?”
“I am. Were you planning to come?”
“I think so.”
“I’m glad.” He looked, though, as if he wasn’t sure he believed her.
She knew he was happy to see her, but his energy was different. He was wary. He even moved differently: he was walking more rigidly, as if he wanted to be sure to stay two feet away from her.
This was good. He wasn’t going to allow himself to wait for her forever. If she kept opening the door and closing it again, the time would finally come when she’d open it and he wouldn’t be there. She felt glad about this, not for herself, but for him. He had better things to do than wait for her.
“How were you planning to celebrate your birthday?” he said.
“Like this.”
Isaac walked her back to her building, and without their discussing it, he accompanied her to her apartment. She realized he’d never been there before.
After she closed the door she pointed toward her window. Her view wasn’t as magnificent as his, but it was a view. “Someday when you’re in your place and I’m here, we should blink our lights on and off and find out if we can see each other. We could have a conversation in Morse code.”
He walked over to the card table on which she kept her laptop computer. The computer was on, humming quietly.
“The holy of holies,” he said. “Here’s where the stories get written.”
“Or don’t.”
“Do you always leave it on? So when a bolt of genius strikes, you can be sure to get it all down?”
“Well, that’s just a nice by-product. I never do miss those bolts of genius. But the reason I keep it on is that it’s dying. When I turn it off I can never be sure it’ll come on again. It’s like my grandparents’ TV. When I was eight years old I was over their house and I wanted to watch the Brady Bunch reunion and the TV wouldn’t come on. I could get the sound but not the picture.”
“What a sad, sad story,” Isaac said.
“What would you like to do for dinner? Would you like to just eat here?”
“It’s your day. Would you?”
“I think so. It’s cozier.”
“Coziness is important.”
“The purpose of life is to be cozy.” This was something that had once been said by her old friend Sally Burke—another person who’d ended up feeling violated by her writing. “What do you feel like?” She opened up her filing cabinet and pulled out a folder stuffed with take-out menus. Then she noticed another folder and handed it to Isaac.
“This is for you. You probably know it all, but maybe there’s something you haven’t seen.”
The folder was filled with articles about diabetes, from newspapers, from magazines, and from some of the medical publications she’d worked for. He looked through them quickly.
“These are, like, from the last five years.”
“I know,” she said. “Sorry. Most of them must be out of date. The newer ones are toward the back.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant: you’ve been clipping these things for me over the last five years?”
“Yes. So?”
“I didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again.”
“I didn’t either. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about you.”
They sat at her kitchen table and talked for a while—he was telling her about a philosophy class he was taking in the general studies program at a college in New Jersey—and then the teakettle was whistling. In the old days, she used to put the kettle on whenever they came back to her apartment, so Isaac could have a cup of tea. This evening she’d done it without even realizing.
After Isaac finished his tea he went to the sink to wash the cup, and then, while they continued to talk, he started washing the rest of her dishes. She felt moved by this. He always used to wash her dishes; he claimed to enjoy it. They were falling effortlessly into old habits, and this struck her as beautiful. Her making the tea; his washing her dishes: what was beautiful was that the habits they’d slipped back into were the small habits of daily caring.
He had rolled up his shirt-sleeves before starting on the dishes, and the sight of his arms—bony, soapy—and the flexing of his muscles, or tendons, or whatever they were, as he rotated a bowl under the hot stream, sent a slithery scrill of desire down her spine.
“Come sit with me on the couch,” she said, and he did, but once they were there she didn’t know what to do with him.
She knew she wanted to let him into her life, but she didn’t know how far. A voice in her mind was saying: Stay back. Don’t jump into anything. You know what happens to you when you get enmeshed. Treasure your freedom.
If you get back together with him, you won’t be able to write about him. The same old thing is going to happen. Them lady poets must not marry, pal.
But on the other hand, she wanted to kiss him.
She leaned forward, all the way, and kissed him—a long, slow kiss—on the mouth. She thought about kissing him again, but she didn’t have to, because this first kiss didn’t stop.
She wasn’t thinking about Wilhelm Reich this time, or Joan Didion, or Mr. Data.
There was no one in her thoughts but Isaac, she was nowhere but in this room, but, being Nora, she was still thinking. She was thinking that what she had always loved about their physical life was that there was no break in continuity when they went from the world to the bed. Isaac pulled back his head and smiled at her, and his eyes were beautifully warm, but they’d been just as warm fifteen minutes ago, when she’d been asking him questions about his philosophy class. Their sex wasn’t sealed off from the rest of their lives. Everything in the world was in this kiss.
She loved the strange way they fit: she loved the fact that he was half a world taller than she was, yet somehow made her feel like the most formidable woman on earth. He was lying back on the couch, and she was climbing him, and there was a tangle of hair below his throat that she’d been thinking about for years—there—and the buttons of his shirt were clicking on the hardwood floor because she seemed to have ripped his shirt off.
His shirt was off, and she was touching him in a way she knew he liked.
Isaac unbuttoned her shirt, and took it off, and kissed her palm, and her wrist, and the scar that ran around her bicep.
Isaac had once told her she was a genius in bed. She wasn’t a genius in bed; it was just that he was so open about what he liked, so refreshingly easy to read. He was like the little red diary she used to write in when she was ten. It had a tiny lock on the cover, but if you lost your key you could open it up with a bobby pin.
Lying on top of him on her couch, she took his head in her hands and brought her mouth to his ear and whispered, “Dear diary,” and this, she could tell, excited him, even though he couldn’t have known what she meant by it.
20
AFTER HE LEFT THE NEXT MORNING, she wrote all day, and in the evening she went out to New Jersey and they walked to the Hudson River to
watch the fireworks over Manhattan. It was nicer than it would have been in the city: a crowd was gathered by the river, but no one was pushing, no one was bellowing, no one seemed to be drunk. She could see why he liked it out here. She wouldn’t want to live here herself—it was too tame—but she enjoyed partaking of its calm.
They lay on a blanket, watching the fireworks bloom in the night sky. The sight reminded her of videos from junior high school science class: the life cycle of a flower, from bloom to graceful dying.
After the display was over, as they stood up, she reached over to retrieve a book that had slipped out of her bag. The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford.
“I read that,” Isaac said. “What do you think of it?”
She started to answer, and then, instead, she grabbed his arm and pulled him toward her and hugged him.
“What’s that for?”
“Nothing,” she said.
But it wasn’t for nothing. She’d hugged him because the previous boyfriend wouldn’t have asked. The previous boyfriend, if he was familiar with the book she was reading, would have launched into a lecture about it.
The pleasure of being asked questions: a pleasure she hadn’t even known she’d missed.
SHE STARTED TO LIKE NEW JERSEY. Astonishing. On the one hand, it made her nervous to spend the night in a place where you couldn’t walk to the corner at two in the morning and get some fried dumplings or the New York Review of Books. She wasn’t used to frontier life. But on the other hand, if you did go out at two in the morning, you could see stars in the sky, the moon walking in brightness, and at moments like this she thought that Isaac hadn’t made such a bad trade.
One night when she was telling Isaac a story about her college years, the phone rang and he had to take the call. He talked for about ten minutes, and when he hung up he said, “So what were you saying? You thought Shakespeare was important because he led to Bob Dylan?”
She hadn’t even remembered she was telling this story. And she thought of how rare it was that when you get cut off in the middle of a story, the person you’re talking to will remember that you were talking, much less what you were talking about.
One weekend they spent Friday night lounging around his apartment, he in jeans and she in sweatpants, watching two movies they’d rented (Cocteau’s Orpheus, which was one of his favorites, and The Terminator, one of hers), and then they spent Saturday night at a party in the city for a friend of his who’d just put out a book of photographs, a party for which Isaac wore a suit and Nora wore a tight black dress.
She’d had boyfriends she loved to be cozy with, lounging around in sweatpants, and boyfriends she loved to be out in the world with, wearing a tight black dress. Isaac was the only man with whom she loved both.
One day she was having lunch with Helen and Laura, two old friends from high school, and Helen turned to Laura and said, “Doesn’t Nora look great since she and Benjamin broke up?”
She did look great; she could feel it. Men were looking at her in a way they hadn’t in years. A guy would look at her as he passed her, then look again; and then, she sometimes noticed, he’d steal another look from across the street, as if he wanted to keep a picture of her in his mind. She was a three-look woman again.
An idiot saying vulgar things to you on the street was one thing, but walking past a sweet-looking, unintrusive guy who looks like he’s about to get hit by a truck because you’re so beautiful—this is one of the great pleasures of life. As long as he doesn’t get hit by the truck, of course.
As nice as it felt to be noticed, she didn’t feel the least hint of interest in any of these sweet-looking, unintrusive guys on the street. The reason she looked beautiful was that she was in love.
Isaac’s nephew, Sam, was learning to play the bass; Isaac saw a beautiful upright bass at an auction and bought it for him. He told Nora that if she weren’t in his life, it never would have occurred to him to buy it. “You make me more generous.”
Isaac was planning to give Sam the bass as a birthday present, but his birthday was months away. Since Isaac’s brother and his family lived in the city, Nora suggested that they keep it in her apartment so Isaac wouldn’t have to drag it out to New Jersey and drag it back in again. They propped it in a corner of her living room, where, darkly shining, it was like a piece of sculpture. She liked having it there, both because it was beautiful and because of what Isaac had told her after he bought it. Being with him made her feel like a better person, and she was happy to learn that he felt the same way about being with her.
One night she took the subway downtown to meet him in the Village. The subway at rush hour is a kingdom of bad smells: an awful intimacy of sweat and breath. Everyone was cramped, everyone was pushing; everyone was somehow damaged. A legless beggar jerked angrily through the car, propelling himself with his elbows. A man peering at the subway map looked as if half his face had been frozen by a stroke. A woman with no nose sat reading the Weekly World News. (“Bin Laden Clones Plot Worldwide Terror.” There were photos of a French bin Laden in a beret, a Bronx bin Laden in a baseball cap, and a British bin Laden in a bowler.) A young mother held the hand of her blind son. It was the casualty show. But Nora was on the way to see her lover, and neither of them were casualties yet, and everything inside her felt light and lit and lifted. She got off the train and waited for him at an outdoor café on Cornelia Street, and when she caught sight of him coming down the block, her soul was lifted.
There was more liftedness to come. Isaac had a friend at the newspaper, a woman named Velma, who’d just gotten her pilot’s license, and on a cloudless scary Saturday—scary because Nora had been half hoping it would rain and the outing would be called off—Nora and Isaac met her at Teterboro Airport and she helped them into the back of a four-seater plane for what she ominously called a test drive. After she squeezed into the cockpit and closed the door, Nora and Isaac were alone. They held hands as the plane lurched slowly up the runway with a horrendous accompaniment of knocking and grinding and banging. Nora was sure she was going to die, and then they were tearing down the runway, terrifyingly picking up speed, so that she felt as if her heart had been hurled against her spine, there was no way a machine this rickety could fly, and then the plane took a nervous jump, as if it wasn’t sure it could manage this, and they were in the air, and man wasn’t meant to fly, but they were flying, and then they were rising, and they took a sharp sickening turn and headed for the city, and after a few minutes they met the Hudson River near the Empire State Building, and they proceeded north, skimming the air a mile or so above the river, and passed over the glorious George Washington Bridge—glittering in the sunlight, it looked like the Eiffel Tower at rest. As they shot beyond the bridge it was like being ripped backward through the time barrier: the buildings fell away, and out her window, on the west side of the river, she saw nothing but lush green cliffs, everything looking as it must have looked a thousand years ago. She was thankful for her life. She had the thought that she didn’t regret anything she’d ever done, because the course of her life had taken her to this moment. She was grateful for everything, even grateful for her mistakes.
That night they went back to her place and ate Chinese food and rented a movie and turned it off in the middle because they needed to touch each other, and this, all of this, was happiness.
The only problem was that she was starting to feel her story slipping away. She was still sitting down at her keyboard every day, but Gabriel was eluding her. A few weeks ago she thought she’d been on the verge of understanding him; now he was more of a mystery than ever. She was trying to blame it on the fact that she had so little time these days: she was seeing Isaac every night, she was spending time with Billie, and she’d had an unusually large amount of medical writing to do. But the truth was that none of these reasons sufficed. She was backing away from her story because she didn’t want to know where it would take her.
21
ON THE NIGHT OF ISAAC’S OPENING, Nora put on a black d
ress and, splurging wildly, took a taxi out to New Jersey. There was a lot of traffic on the highway, and she realized she was going to be late. She was mad at herself: Isaac was going to be disappointed.
When she got there, she saw that she needn’t have hurried. The gallery was crowded, and he was surrounded by people. Some of them she recognized from the old days—his brother, a few of his college friends. Most were people she’d never met.
When she’d thought about this event, she’d imagined herself examining Isaac’s photographs while he hovered at her shoulder, anxiously awaiting her verdict. But he was surrounded by well-wishers; he was looking the picture of contentment and success; so she was free to look at the pictures by herself, and to have her own unmonitored reactions.
She walked from room to room, looking at his photographs.
Although she’d known him for years, and although he liked to talk about his work, she still had no vocabulary to understand what he was doing. She could tell, however, that these pictures had been lovingly crafted. She could tell, even without knowing anything about photography, that each of these pictures had behind it a wealth of care.
He had a distinctive style in these new pictures, a distinctive way of seeing people. In all of these photographs, his subjects, his people, seemed strong.
It was a curious thing: even the children he photographed seemed heroic. He had photographed his nephew, eight years old, struggling to open up a present on Christmas Day. There was a look of utter intentness on the boy’s face. He seemed ready to meet any challenge life might offer.
People, she was thinking, have handles, and different artists grasp people by different handles. Dostoevsky grasped people by their feverishness, their intensity. Yeats grasped people by their nobility of character. Whitman grasped people by their sexuality, or by whatever it is in us—something that includes but is larger than sexuality—that makes us want to merge with others.