A Window Across the River

by Brian Morton

  One evening Billie had much more strength than usual. She was speaking easily, as she hadn’t in a while.

  “Can you make me a promise?” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “My birthday is coming next month. I want you to do something nice for me.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “This is what I’d like. If I’m not here, don’t sit around feeling sad. Go dancing with that nice Isaac. That would make me happy.”

  Nora hadn’t told her about what had happened with Isaac.

  “I’m going to be with you,” Nora said. “You’ll be here.”

  Billie put her hand on Nora’s.

  “I know. But if I’m not.”

  BILLIE FELL ASLEEP SHORTLY after this. Nora sat at her bedside, wanting time to stop. Then, very gently, trying not to wake her, she lay down beside her on the narrow bed.

  Nora put her arm around her. She didn’t actually touch her, because Billie was so sore that every touch was painful; instead, she held her arm just above her in the air, cradling her without contact. Nora was lying on her right side; it was her left arm, her damaged arm, that was holding Billie in this way.

  The lights in the hallway went off and then on again—visiting hours were over—but Nora didn’t want to leave her aunt alone just yet, and she lay beside her, with her arm around her awkwardly, for a few minutes more.

  41

  ISAAC HAD BEEN INVITED to give a talk at Rutgers about photojournalism in the computer age. He came home from work to take a shower before driving down to New Brunswick. There was a message on his answering machine. It was from Nora. They hadn’t spoken since the night he’d read her story.

  She was sobbing. She was calling to tell him that Billie had died.

  “I wasn’t even there. I came in yesterday afternoon and her bed was empty. I should have been there. I should have been holding her hand.”

  He called her, got her machine, and left a message telling her how sorry he was. He was relieved to get her machine.

  He’d never known Billie well, but he’d gathered a strong impression of her from Nora’s stories. Not from her stories, really, but from the feeling in Nora’s voice when she told them.

  Good-bye, Billie.

  The thought flickered across his mind that maybe he and Nora would get back together now. Maybe taking care of Billie had sapped her spirit in some way, which had led her to write that cruel story about him, and now that Billie was gone . . .

  This line of thought made no sense, and he didn’t pursue it.

  He went to the bathroom and shaved. He had to shave very carefully, because his face still hurt. He’d broken his nose and his left cheekbone when he fell from his bike. He still didn’t quite recognize himself in the mirror.

  He took a shower, lay dripping on the bed, turned on the TV, and watched a few minutes of Gladiator.

  The three stages of mourning, he thought: Gee, that’s too bad; what’s in it for me?; what’s on TV?

  Not a good way to live.

  He got out of bed, turned the television off, sat down in a hard wooden chair, and spent a minute commemorating, in silence, the life of this woman whom he had never really known.

  He looked at the bed, the quilt damp and slightly disturbed where he’d been lying. He thought of taking a picture of the empty bed, a picture that would serve as a record of his attempt to make a gesture of decency. Because he’d sat up; because he’d turned off the TV. He was just about to get a camera when he saw the clock and realized he had to get going. It didn’t matter anyway. Even if he took the picture, no one would understand what it meant.

  42

  NORA SPENT MOST OF THE NEXT month alone. She wrote, she did her freelance work, she read.

  Billie’s death was like an ache that traveled from one part of her body to another. Nora would wake up every day and feel it in a new place.

  She missed Isaac, but she didn’t call him.

  She missed many things about him, but more than anything else, she missed thinking with him. She missed the way his mind worked. Her thoughts kept running out to meet his thoughts, but his thoughts weren’t there.

  She kept thinking she saw him on the street, but it always turned out to be somebody else. Once, when Nora was about ten years old and Billie’s husband was still alive, Nora had asked Billie how she knew she loved him, and Billie said that even after fifteen years, she still felt excited when she saw him on the street.

  But Nora had no intention of calling Isaac again. They were through. She was reconciled—happily reconciled—to the thought of being alone. On Thanksgiving Day she wrote in the morning, read in the afternoon, had Chinese food delivered to her apartment, and ate at her coffee table while she watched North by Northwest. It was a good day.

  She’d had friends who, after romantic disappointments, had declared that they were swearing off men for good. Nora had always marveled at their powers of self-delusion, and of course all of them had gotten hooked up again in due time. Her own case, she thought, was different. She’d known from an early age what it meant to be alone. And if being alone was the price she had to pay in order to write freely, she was prepared to pay it.

  She still wasn’t happy that her stories hurt people, but she wasn’t worrying about it anymore. She didn’t need to worry about hurting Benjamin; she didn’t need to worry about hurting Isaac. She didn’t need to stifle her own talents to avoid wounding anyone. She didn’t need to take care of anyone, ever again.

  Them lady poets must not marry, pal.

  But if you don’t have anyone in your life, who will you write stories about? You won’t have anyone’s secrets to spill.

  She concluded that it didn’t matter. She probably had years of stories in her, stories she’d stopped herself from writing because she was afraid of where they’d lead. Or maybe she’d learn to live entirely in her imagination. Balzac had believed so completely in his characters that on his deathbed he’d called out for Bianchon, a doctor who existed only in his novels. That seemed like a noble death for a writer. Maybe she could create a world in her imagination, a world large enough for her to live in. Maybe she’d call out on her deathbed for her own Bianchon.

  But not yet. Since finishing the Gabriel story, she’d been sitting at her card table every day, trying to begin something new. She was writing disconnected scenes about characters who were still unformed; she was still straining to see them in the dark. A story had yet to emerge. But she had the dreadful sense that however long it took to emerge, she already knew what it would be. She could sense the activity of the part of her imagination that guided her fiction; she could feel it stirring. She pictured it as something inhuman: a cunning lump, huddled somewhere in the gray of her brain. It was slowly settling on its next victim, sending out its long tentacles into every corner of her mind, searching, searching, searching, with a horrifying patience, for the person Nora loved more purely than she loved anyone else. The next story was going to be about Billie. Nora had always held Billie in the warmest part of her soul, but now she would be removed for a while, taken to a colder region, and examined there.

  She wished she could shield Billie from what was coming, but she knew it was no use. She also knew that whatever came out, she wouldn’t love her any less.

  ON THE MONDAY AFTER Thanksgiving, Nora got a call from a social worker at Riverside. Juliette had died the day before, and in going through her things a nurse had found a sealed envelope with Nora’s name on it. Juliette had left her something. The social worker offered to send it to her, but Nora decided to pick it up herself. She felt sorry that she’d never returned there after Billie died, never returned to visit Juliette. The trip out there in the subway didn’t seem precisely like an act of penance—it was too small a sacrifice—but at least it was an acknowledgment that she had something to do penance for.

  When she got there they told her that the envelope was across the street, in the hospital’s lost-and-found office. She crossed the street and picked
it up. There was no note inside the envelope. The only thing in it was a necklace. A silver chain, a single pearl.

  Walking back toward the elevator, she glanced down a long corridor and saw colorful drawings on the walls, children’s drawings in crayon. She heard the sound of a child’s laughter. At the end of the corridor she saw a sign that said Tyler Children’s Center. She walked down the hallway, following the line of drawings, and pushed through the double doors and went in. The gift from Juliette had made her melancholy; she needed, just for a moment, to be close to children’s laughter.

  She was in a cramped waiting room. There were four or five families here. Parents were scattered randomly, sagging people on sagging couches, in various stages of exhaustion and denial, with their children, who were in various stages of bone-stuntedness and brain-stuntedness. The girl whose laughter Nora had heard was sitting on the floor, putting brightly colored plastic mice into her mouth. She was probably ten or eleven years old. She was unnaturally puffy, and hairy in the wrong places: little tufts sprouted from her cheeks and chin. Her mother kept leaning over and wearily extracting toy after toy from her mouth.

  Across the room, a meek-looking mother was sitting with her son, a boy of about seven or eight. He was bald, and he had several long scars on his skull. The scars must have come from brain operations, but they were so thick and long and jagged that they didn’t look like the results of a procedure that involved exactness and care. He looked as if some waggish uncle while carving the Christmas turkey had decided to slice up a few sections of his head.

  From down the hall Nora could hear an infant crying out, in pain, or in fear, or both. It sounded like a girl’s voice. She was howling, howling, howling.

  The thickness of the misery in this room made Nora weak. She went to the water fountain, and she was disturbed to discover that she had a clear line of sight into the room where the infant girl was howling. She was probably about a year old. She looked beautiful, but Nora only caught a glimpse of her, because there were so many people surrounding her. A nurse was holding down her arms and a woman who must have been her mother was holding down her legs while a doctor was attempting to fit an intravenous tube into her neck. A man who must have been her father was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, weeping. The girl was crying out, “Dada dada dada!” Nora couldn’t tell if she was calling for her father—she was so young that she probably wasn’t; this was probably a sound that had no meaning except that she was in pain—but, seeing her father crying in the corner, it was easy to imagine that he felt as if she was begging him to make this stop, and that he was crying because he couldn’t.

  Nora thought she’d never witnessed anything more horrible than this: strangers inflicting pain on an infant who was too young to understand that they were trying to help her, and too young to understand why her parents were allowing this to happen.

  The sight of someone this innocent being subjected to such pain was overwhelming. During her visits to the hospice, Nora had felt as if she had seen the depths of human suffering. But now she understood that she hadn’t seen a thing. The hospice was filled with people in their seventies and eighties and nineties; it was sad, but it was comprehensible. There was nothing comprehensible about this.

  She didn’t know anything about this family. She didn’t know what the beautiful child was being treated for; she didn’t know why the mother looked so capable while the father was standing uselessly in the corner, weeping. What she knew was that following the sound of laughter in search of spiritual refreshment, she had once again encountered only suffering—suffering, and the effort to relieve it. And she knew that this was going to be her life: wherever she turned, the suffering world would be upon her.

  She didn’t know if she had stumbled onto a fact about existence or merely a fact about herself. Life isn’t just suffering; she knew this. Life is also joy and creation and procreation. Yes, we’re a community of suffering, but we’re a community of ecstasy as well.

  She knew this, but at the moment she couldn’t feel it. At the moment it seemed to her that at the deepest level, what unites us is that we are creatures who suffer.

  The father came out of the room for a moment. He bent down at the water fountain.

  Nora went up to him and held out the necklace.

  “This is for your little girl,” she said.

  He didn’t seem to want to take it. She took another step forward, and he drew back, almost as if he was afraid of her, but she pressed the necklace into his hand, and his grief made him too sluggish to do anything but accept it. She quickly walked back into the waiting room, and he didn’t follow.

  She still felt weak, and she sat down on a couch. After a little while a nurse approached her—a hip-looking modern girl, with a very weird haircut and a very sweet face. She looked a little like Isaac’s Renee, but a few years older and a few years calmer.

  “I’m not sure we have you listed on our appointment schedule,” she said. She had a singing voice. She looked down at her clipboard. “What’s your child’s name?”

  Nora looked at the nurse’s kind face, and felt the force of her youth—she couldn’t have been out of her twenties, and she was radiant with good health—and she thought that she must be a remarkable woman. She spent her days caring for children, many of whom were so young that they didn’t even realize she was trying to care for them, so young that they responded to any attempts to care for them by screaming.

  Nora remembered Isaac’s uncle Carl, with his theory that we’re all bound in an eternal circle, animals destroying animals who have destroyed animals. But there are other circles.

  She thought of her own desire to stop taking care of anyone, and she saw how hollow it was. It was like a dream of stripping away a part of her own nature.

  The nurse glanced up from her clipboard, with a small soft smile that said she wanted to be of help.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Who’s your child?”

  Nora had never had an experience of déjà vu—not until now. She had the sense that she’d encountered this young woman before, a long time ago, although that couldn’t have been true. She had a confused rush of feeling, and before she could assess the words that were coming to her lips—she would have rejected them if she’d had time to think—she answered.

  “You are,” she said.

  The nurse looked at her with puzzled concern. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said. “I kind of wandered in here.”

  43

  NORA RAN HER HAND ACROSS the window and wiped away the wet. She wanted to see the lights of the city as her bus crossed the George Washington Bridge. She was on her way to see Isaac.

  He didn’t know she was coming. She’d been calling him for over a week without reaching him. She hadn’t left any messages; she wanted to talk to him face to face.

  It was early on a Friday night. She didn’t know if he’d be home, but she thought she’d give it a try. She thought she’d try him at his apartment, and, if he wasn’t there, at his darkroom.

  She walked from the bus stop. It was raining, but very lightly. She waited until someone was leaving his building and slipped into the lobby before the front door closed. She didn’t want to ask him to buzz her up, because she was afraid that he wouldn’t.

  And she didn’t want him to be able to prepare himself. If he wasn’t expecting her, then the look on his face when he saw her would tell her everything she needed to know.

  But when Isaac opened the door, Nora didn’t even notice his expression. She was too shocked. His cheek was all mashed and caved in.

  “You should see the other guy,” he said.

  “You’re not serious. Are you? Were you in a fight?”

  He didn’t say anything. She saw that he wasn’t going to tell her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  He still had his hand on the doorknob.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Of course,” he s
aid, and stepped back.

  She walked into the living room. As she passed him, she tried to feel the air around his body—not merely to breathe it in, but to sample it in some way that was larger and harder to define. It felt unresponsive, unremarkable, flat. He wasn’t happy to see her. Which shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  She felt her courage draining away. The sight of his caved-in cheek had alarmed her. She was reminded of his fragility, and she was afraid that if they did get back together—which was, after all, what she was here for—she would hurt him again.

  She considered just making idiotic small talk for a while and then slinking back home. But no. That wasn’t the way.

  She took off her jacket and sat on his couch. She’d cheated a little by wearing a dress and putting on a perfume that she knew he liked. She wanted to meet him soul to soul, but it never hurt to wear a dress.

  “I’ve been calling you a lot,” she said.

  “Really? I haven’t gotten any messages.”

  “I haven’t left any.”

  She expected him to offer her something to drink; merely out of habit, he’d make an effort to be sociable. He didn’t. He just sat across from her, looking uncomfortable, with his hands on his knees.

  “Nora?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you here?”

  She thought of making operatic declarations, telling him everything that had gone through her mind over the past two weeks. Telling him about her visit to the pediatric ward, where the cries of the beautiful child whose name she would never know had shown her that freeing herself from the needs of others was a naive ambition, that the feeling of connection was rooted just as deeply within her as the need to create. Telling him that if she couldn’t remain lashed to her desk—if she didn’t want to—then she wanted to be with him. Because it was in his presence that she felt most alive. If her fate was to spend her life struggling, doing battle with some man in the effort to preserve her autonomy, then he was the man she wanted to do battle with.