by Brian Morton
The most horrible thing was not the account of the visit, but what Nora seemed to be saying about it. She seemed to see his failure with Jenny as an emblem of his entire life. She had taken his life and shown it in the worst possible light.
If she was so eerily accurate about what had happened that night—about the feel of it, if not the facts—could she be wrong about his life, wrong about who he was?
Over the past few months, although she’d never mentioned it, Nora must have noticed that he wasn’t taking pictures anymore. She’d stopped asking him about his plans for future work; it had certainly been a long time since she’d called him anything like a “touchstone.” But since she’d never said anything, he had allowed himself to believe that maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t realized that he wasn’t a practicing artist anymore, that maybe she still respected him.
The story made it clear that she didn’t. The person in the story, “Gabriel,” was a man who, in the end, lacked strength and conviction. He’d had both when he was young, but he’d let them leak away.
This was what she’d been working on for the last few months, while he thought they’d been falling unbreakably in love. This was why she hadn’t joined him at the reception. While Nadine was ignoring him and McCall was insulting him, Nora had been injuring him in a much more intimate way.
He’d never believed that she could write a hurtful story about him. And he’d underestimated her power to wound him. He hadn’t read 1984 since high school, but he’d never forgotten the part about Room 101: how the torturers had a way of fitting their torture to each victim, finding precisely the assault that would make each person crack. Nora, he now thought, or the demon that resided inside her—the goblin, as she called it—had the power to ferret out that one thing you feared might be true about yourself, the thing you hoped nobody else had noticed.
He heard the key in the lock. Very softly, Nora pushed open the door. She had an expression of nervousness and concern, and maybe a tiny sliver of hope.
“Did you read it?”
“Oh yes.”
“Are you upset?”
“Oh yes.”
“Isaac—you need to know that this isn’t what I think of you. This is just what happens when I write. I see things one way, and the stories see them all another way. It’s something I can’t control. The difference between you and Gabriel is that Gabriel ends there. I know your life didn’t end there.”
The more she apologized, the worse he felt. He didn’t believe her. The voice you could hear in her story was her truest voice.
If he had read it at another time, it might not have hurt so much. But tonight it was unendurable. For more than a month now, the world had been letting him know that he just wasn’t good enough. Up until now he’d been learning that he wasn’t good enough as an artist, but Nora’s story was telling him that he wasn’t good enough as a man.
In her story, Gabriel, too timid to say what he wanted to say to his sister, had thought that his shortcomings as a man and an artist grew from the same root. You need to have a little wildness in you, which is the one thing I don’t have: those were the words that Nora had put in Gabriel’s head.
Her computer was sitting placidly on her card table, waiting for her to turn her unique form of attention to someone else.
Whenever you visited her, Nora’s computer was on. She never turned the fucking thing off. You’d be having what you thought was an intimate conversation, but all the while it would be sitting there humming away, so you could never forget that it was her work Nora was committed to, not you.
He felt like smashing it.
He walked over to the window. He could see the river, sleek and dark, and, beyond it, the lights of New Jersey, blinking with a provincial ardor.
She smiled at him sadly. “Would you jump off this roof for me?” she said. As she’d said to him years ago. It was as if she was asking him to sacrifice himself for her in a new way: asking him to forgive her for writing about him without charity.
What was she alive for? What was the point of her? She moved through the world doing her little acts of saintly care—giving blood on her birthday, moving in with her aunt—but then at night she’d go home to her computer and shit on the people she claimed to love.
He was getting angrier and angrier.
Isaac was a careful man, even on the rare occasions when he lost control: he prepared to lose control before he lost it. He knew that Nora’s window didn’t overlook the sidewalk or the street but the roof of a smaller building. Now he glanced outside to make sure the roof was empty.
“Probably not,” he said. “But I’d throw things off the roof for you.”
He picked up her story from the couch where he’d laid it, stepped quickly to the window, and tossed it, underhand, like a bride tossing a bouquet. Before he let go, he imagined that the pages would flutter gracefully, one by one, through the night sky, but instead they went straight down in a clump.
“Okay,” Nora said. “I deserve that.”
“You know, Nora, I might have a little more wildness in me than you think.” He picked up the computer and pulled the plug out of the wall.
“Come on. Put that down.” She moved toward him.
“You’ve been complaining about this thing for months. Why don’t I help you out?” He headed back toward the window. He was feeling a jolt of macho joy, as if he were about to make a monster slam dunk. Pseudo-macho joy, since the path to the basket was blocked only by Nora. She moved in front of the window, putting out her hands to try to stop him from raising the laptop over his head, and for a moment he thought they were going to knock each other out the window, that they would die that way, and in the next moment he thought he’d drop the computer and embrace her and they’d make love, and then he just leaned over her and lobbed it, in a soft, heavy arc, into the night.
There was a silence, and then they heard it, faintly, breaking. The sound wasn’t as satisfying as he would have liked.
“Jesus Christ. You could have killed somebody.”
He didn’t tell her that she was wrong, that he knew there was nobody down there. He wanted her to think that he’d been, for once, reckless.
She was standing there with an expression of childlike disbelief. She looked terribly tired; she looked like a frail, unhappy creature, and it struck him that although she was younger than he was, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he outlasted her. He wouldn’t be surprised if he someday had to endure a world in which there was no Nora.
He wondered why she was so tired, and then remembered that she’d been spending all her days and nights at Billie’s, and thought guiltily that he hadn’t even asked after Billie.
Looking at her, so tired, so small, he wanted to take everything back, he wanted to tell her he loved her. He opened his arms and took a step toward her. She backed away. She looked like an animal who’d been placed in a cage with a dangerous larger animal.
It was amazing that this could happen. That after everything, the two of them could reach a point where if he took a step toward her she responded with instinctive animal fear.
“Oh God,” he said.
He didn’t know what else to say, so without saying anything else, he left.
36
IN THE CROWDED SUBWAY CAR, he wondered how he could have been so stupid. Not because of what he’d just done, but because he’d let her back into his life in the first place. And because he’d been longing for her for all these years. After that miserable afternoon five years ago, he should have known they had no future.
Five years ago, on the day of the abortion, a freezing day with a splattery intermittent rain, he had heaved himself, heavily bundled, into the cab, feeling pale and ill. Beside him, she was oddly bright and chipper, gossiping away about people they knew, and he couldn’t understand how she could be taking it so lightly. He understood that she might not be taking it lightly—that this might be her way of masking how gravely she was taking it. But he wasn’t sure.
The cabbie was insane; he hunched himself over the steering wheel and jerked wildly through the traffic.
Isaac tapped the partition. “Can you go a little slower?”
“Don’t be afraid,” the cabbie had said. “There is no fear. In Lebanon we fought the tanks with only droomsticks.”
Isaac assumed he meant broomsticks, but he wasn’t interested enough to inquire. Nostalgia mixed with racism: he had a spasm of longing for the mythical New York cabbie of the 1950s—a guy with a Brooklyn accent, who knew every street in all five boroughs, who drove like a mensch, and who dispensed wise homilies along the way. If only they’d had that kind of cabbie, Isaac thought, they’d never end up at the abortion clinic: they’d be on the way back to Nora’s apartment by now, cheerfully swapping ideas about what to name the baby.
Nora, on the cab ride, which he felt as a ride to their doom, or the doom of someone they were meant to bring into the world together, was chirping away brightly about nothing. He would never forget the stupidity of the things she was talking about. A block away from the clinic, she was talking about how she wished that screwdrivers weren’t her favorite drink, because they were really only a summer drink rather than something you could drink year-round—he couldn’t believe that she was talking about such shit at a moment like this. He remembered thinking that maybe he didn’t really get her: maybe her magnificence was just his delusion, something he only thought he saw. He wanted to believe that she was concealing herself, hiding out from him in the thickets of the trivial; he couldn’t believe that this side of her was genuine.
He got out of the cab with her, though she’d told him that she didn’t want him to accompany her into the clinic. He couldn’t stop himself from making one more attempt to change her mind.
“Think about it,” he’d said. “We could bring a new person into existence.”
The remark didn’t have the intended effect. “I just want to bring myself into existence,” she’d said. “That seems like enough work for this lifetime.”
He didn’t want to think about this anymore. He took the subway to Port Authority and waited there for a bus to New Jersey. Nora was probably at her card table, writing by hand, beginning a new story, about a forty-year-old man who throws temper tantrums.
37
AFTER HE LEFT SHE SAT THERE for a long time. She couldn’t blame him for being mad.
She wondered if there was any way she could make it up to him. She didn’t know if there was.
Maybe I’m a wicked person, she thought.
She still couldn’t believe he’d done that with the computer. At least she had everything backed up. Ever since the time Helen’s son had zapped one of her stories out of existence, she’d saved everything compulsively onto floppy disks.
She found a copy of the version that she’d submitted to the contest a few weeks earlier. It was different from the version Isaac had read, but close enough. She went through it slowly, lingering over the lines that must have hurt him. She was appalled by her own cluelessness: how had she expected him to react?
After a few more minutes, without quite realizing what was happening, she stopped thinking about Isaac and became absorbed in the problems of the story. There were still those passages that she needed to add. She got out a pen and a yellow legal pad and started working on a description of Gabriel’s badly bitten nails and his doomed, deluded hope that he’d someday find the strength of character to stop biting them.
38
IT WAS TEN O’CLOCK WHEN he got back to New Jersey. He stopped off at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Irish whiskey—because, he thought as he took it down from the shelf, I am a fucking phony, and in the days when I used to drink I always used to drink Irish whiskey, pretending that I liked it more than Scotch whiskey, which tastes the same.
When he got home he poured himself a tall glass and drank it quickly, and poured himself another tall glass and drank it quickly, and then turned on the TV.
The phone rang. Nora. It had to be Nora. She was calling to say that she’d also been writing another story during these last few months, a story that showed his strength of character . . .
The machine answered it before he could. It was Renee. She was saying something about how she was leaving for her fact-finding tour on Sunday and she was hoping they could meet somewhere for one last cup of herbal tea and also she wanted to give him back his Kertesz book and she thought he might have been home tonight but how silly of her because it was a Friday, and come to think of it he must still be at the reception and she hoped he was having a great time—and so on and so on. He didn’t pick up.
Renee. Renee was the hope for the world.
Renee was at least as dedicated as Nora was, and she would almost certainly be more successful. She was more successful already. And she was also more humane. Nora’s art was an art of caricature; Renee’s was an art of conscience.
Renee was the future. The future! He lifted his glass in a toast to the future.
He would do better than that. He would toast the future in person. Renee was home. He tried to call her, but he kept getting a busy signal. She was a no-frills kind of girl: no call waiting, no voice mail. The last busy signal in America.
Well, he could drop by. He could do the pop in. Renee lived only two towns away; several times he’d dropped her off after work. Maneuvering himself drunkenly up from the couch, he found his keys and put on a jacket. Then he remembered that he didn’t have his car—but this was actually a good thing, because he was too drunk to drive. He decided to take his bicycle. He thought of putting on his helmet, but he decided not to, in order to spite Nora. Because she obviously thought of him as the kind of man who would never ride a bike without a helmet.
He hated the fact that he was thinking about Nora even now. Forget her. Think about Renee.
He thought about how nice it would be to get close to her—her youth, her hopefulness, her newly blossoming beauty.
He reached her apartment and stood outside. She lived on the first floor in a garden apartment complex. Her lights were on.
He saw her. She was moving around in her kitchen. He couldn’t see what she was doing.
You could walk in and change everyone’s life. You could walk in and tell her you love her.
She was the future. Let her live. Let her live.
He stood on the lawn, his hands in his pockets against the cold. The night was alive; columns of crackly leaves were spiraling and swirling all around him.
There was a voice in his head saying: Come on, man, your relationship with her is the only purely good thing in your life. Don’t fuck it up.
He wished he were a reckless man who would go in there and fuck up everyone’s life or else a saint who wouldn’t even consider it, but here he was, standing outside Renee’s window, Mr. In-Between, thinking that he wanted to hold her, thinking that she was the future, thinking that this was insane, she was someone else’s future, not his.
He rang her doorbell. She came to the door.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” He could see ten different emotions and questions passing across her face. Her wonderfully expressive face. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“How was the reception?”
“The reception was fabu.” He tried to remember if that was a word that young people used. He’d had an assistant who’d used it a lot, but that was five years ago. “I saw your friend Earl. He says howdy.”
She asked him to come in. He kept a distance from her, hoping she wouldn’t realize how drunk he was.
“Sit down. Sit down. Can I help you? I mean, can I get you anything? Can I get you a beer?”
“You shouldn’t have beer on the premises, young lady. You’re not old enough. I’ll have to report you to the authorities.” A lame jest, but maybe it was his subconscious trying to restore order, trying to place an obstacle between them, trying to prevent him from doing anything stupid.
“I actually am,” she said. �
�I turned twenty-one this summer, you know.” He was surprised she was that young. He’d thought she was twenty-three.
She peered into her refrigerator. “Bass Ale or Rheingold?”
“Rheingold?” he said. “I didn’t think they still made Rheingold.”
“It’s a very manly beer,” she said. “I must have known you were coming.”
He didn’t know what that meant. Was she insulting him? He tended to feel insecure about his manliness. One woman he’d gone out with had told him he was womanly. She’d meant it as a compliment, supposedly, but it hadn’t made him happy at all.
But he tried to tell himself that Renee had just been making a harmless, meaningless joke.
“What’s going on?” she said. “You look a little down.”
She was concerned about him. Bless her darling heart.
She brought out two beers and sat next to him on the couch. She was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned, over a leotard. She sat facing him, in some sort of modified lotus thing, so that both of her knees were almost touching his thigh. It was impossible to tell whether she knew she was being provocative. She might have been too innocent to know, too trusting even to imagine that he was thinking of her with desire.
He was moved by this, he was touched by this, leave leave leave leave leave! Get out of here! Don’t curse her with your life! She trusts you! Don’t fuck it up!
These thoughts were going through his mind, but with such sloshing slipshod sloppiness that he couldn’t focus on them. And at the same time another current of thought was guiding him in a different direction. She’s here, man! You’re in her house! Look at the way she’s leaning toward you! She wants you! She’s of age! What are these inane scruples? What are you, a Victorian? Even the Victorians didn’t really act like Victorians! You just read a book review about that! Kiss her, man! She’s kissable! She wants to be kissed!