A Window Across the River

by Brian Morton

  But she didn’t say any of this. She didn’t want to make a speech.

  “I’m here for two reasons. I wanted to remind you that you left that bass in my apartment. If you want it, you should pick it up. Or ask your brother to come get it. I would have brought it with me, but it’s bigger than I am.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. I’m sorry it’s taking up space. I have to be in the city tomorrow afternoon. I’ll stop by and get it, if you’re going to be around.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “Billie asked me for something before she died, and I need your help with it. She said that for her birthday, she wanted me to go dancing with the person I’m sweet on. And her birthday’s coming up.”

  “And I’m the person you’re sweet on?”

  She’d expected him to smile, but he wasn’t smiling.

  “Yes. You are.”

  “Even though I don’t have wildness in me?”

  “Isaac. I’ve told you many times what it’s like for me. You always seemed to understand it when I told you what it was like to write about other people. I borrowed from you for the story, but that isn’t you. I borrowed a side of you. I borrowed one of your ribs. But that isn’t you.”

  “Did you ever finish it, by the way?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “What are you planning to do with it?”

  This was a question she’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask. But he’d asked it, and she had to tell him the truth.

  “It’s getting published.”

  “Boulevard?” Three of the five stories she’d published had been published in Boulevard.

  “No. This one’s getting published in the Atlantic.” The version of the story that she’d sent them, as ragged as she’d thought it was, had won the contest.

  He didn’t say anything. He was trying to take this in. “Congratulations,” he finally said, but he didn’t look happy.

  He stood up. “I’m afraid you came at a bad time. I’m meeting some people for dinner, and I was already late when you got here. I’d give you a ride to the bus stop but my car’s in the shop.”

  “Still?”

  “It’s been in and out for the past month.”

  “That’s okay. It’s pretty out here. I like the walk.” She put her jacket back on.

  He was already at the door, holding it open, but she didn’t want to go tamely home. “What about the dancing?” she said.

  A faint smile—as angry as he obviously still was, he couldn’t help but smile at her persistence.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. When’s her birthday?”

  “Next Saturday.”

  “Well, like I say, I’m going to be in the city tomorrow, and I’ll come by and pick up the bass. I guess I’ll let you know.”

  Nora walked to the bus stop in the light faint rain, wondering what he’d decide. She couldn’t guess. She didn’t know if she would want to get back with herself if she were him.

  But she hoped he would. He’d once told her that she had to respect her demon. She hoped he’d remember this, even now that the demon, the goblin, her unforgiving inner eye, had turned its gaze on him.

  Love me, love my goblin, she thought. But she didn’t know if it was possible.

  She got on the bus, wondering if this was the last time she would ever make this trip. She was looking forward to the rest of the night with a mixture of pleasure and sorrow. Pleasure, because she’d be spending the night writing; sorrow, because she’d be continuing to expose Billie to the coldness of her imagination.

  She wished she could tell Isaac that she was going to change for him, but she couldn’t.

  44

  AFTER NORA LEFT, ISAAC GAVE himself an insulin shot, and then went out to join a few friends for dinner. The restaurant was within walking distance; the rain was so light he didn’t bother to open his umbrella. During the meal he didn’t think about Nora. He thought about her as he walked home.

  It was a no-brainer. He wasn’t even going to be around next weekend. He’d be in Washington, moderating the panel discussion at the Folger Library. He’d decided to accept the sop Nadine Lyle had thrown him—the place at the kiddie table. Even though he wouldn’t be on the panel with Avedon and Mann and the other hotshots, the conference was an opportunity he didn’t want to miss. He’d be meeting a lot of influential people: photographers, editors, agents. If he ever wanted to get back into the picture-taking life, he’d be a fool to pass it by.

  He walked slowly through the calm streets. He was glad he’d moved out here. It was a blessed retreat from the city. He knew he could never go back.

  He was trying to understand Nora. How she could write what she wrote about him and still say that she was—what did she say? Sweet on him.

  He supposed he could half understand it. In the weeks since he’d read her story, he’d thought about it a lot, and he’d come to a conclusion that surprised him. Nora was wrong about her writing. She’d always said that her stories had no compassion, but that wasn’t quite accurate. Her portrait of him was a perfect rendering of the person he was afraid he might be. She’d intuited some of his worst fears about himself and written a story based on the premise that they were true. To write about him with such damning finality, as if he would never rise above his limitations—that, it was true, could be called cruel. But to go so deeply into his inner life that she could unearth his most intimate fears about himself—that was a large act of sympathetic imagination. She wasn’t like a Diane Arbus, whose camera turned her subjects into freaks, but like a Bill Brandt, who plunged his subjects into harsh shadow and harsh light, and revealed them as no one had revealed them before.

  What the hell am I defending her for?

  When he got back home, it was only ten o’clock. He turned on the ball game, and then he turned it off. He went to the window and looked out at the city. There was a huge body of fog coming in from the north, making its stately way down the river. The city kept fading out and reappearing.

  The photographs from his show, although it had ended weeks earlier, were still in their frames, stacked against the wall.

  Maybe he had no right to be disappointed that his show had come to nothing. If your devotion to something can be measured by how much you’re willing to give up for it, he wasn’t sure how devoted he was. He used to be devoted, but he hadn’t been in a long time. So what did he expect? It was as if he wanted the rewards without having made the sacrifices.

  He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to go to Washington—why he was still dreaming of reviving his career.

  Sometimes he thought it was because he missed taking pictures, but that couldn’t be it. If he missed taking pictures that much, he’d just start taking them again.

  Sometimes he thought that what he really missed was the belief that there was an overarching meaning in his life. This was something he’d had since he was a boy, first because he was dedicating himself to God, then because he was dedicating himself to taking pictures: a thread that tied one day to the next, a bright thread of meaning that took the loose purposelessness of everyday life and gave it form and value and direction. He didn’t have that anymore.

  But maybe photography could no longer provide that. Maybe it was time to admit that he was happier doing what he did now—going to work and doing a job and coming home—than he’d been when he was taking pictures, and that the thing that was missing from his life now, the bright thread of meaning, wasn’t art, it was love, love and family. Maybe the trip to Washington would be a trip in the wrong direction.

  For years he’d been in the habit of thinking that because he wasn’t taking photographs single-mindedly anymore, he’d let himself down. But maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe the ability to change course—to admit to himself that his old vocation didn’t nourish him enough anymore—was a sign of sanity and strength.

  But even if all that was true, it didn’t mean he should let Nora back into his life. He now had firsthand k
nowledge of what it was like to get the Nora treatment, what it was like to be the subject—the target, really—of one of her stories. It was painful to know that her story would soon be running in the Atlantic, that thousands of readers would soon have the opportunity to read about his flaws.

  Now that she’d broken through, now that she’d learned to write as freely as she needed to, even at the expense of someone she loved, what he’d have to look forward to, if they made a life together, was a succession of decades in which everything he did would be documented with a merciless eye. Was he up for that? Forty years, perhaps, of being loved in daily life and lacerated in her stories?

  And would she ever want children? And if she did, what kind of a mother would she be? How would a child enjoy being the beneficiary of the Nora treatment?

  He didn’t blame her for the way she was. She had a kind of integrity that he still, after everything, found exhilarating. He respected it, but that didn’t mean he had to endure it.

  ON THE NEXT MORNING, a Saturday, he left his apartment at noon and took a bus into the city. Two of his colleagues from the paper were getting married in a synagogue in the West Village. They were both in their late twenties; standing before the rabbi, they looked radiant and nervous, and very young.

  After the ceremony, he went uptown. Nora’s apartment was more than ninety blocks away, but he decided to walk. He needed time to figure out what he wanted to say to her.

  It was the seventh of December. At five in the evening, it was already dark. And it was chilly. He hadn’t dressed warmly enough. He had counted on global warming, but for one night, at least, global warming hadn’t come through.

  At a street corner in midtown he bought a bag of chestnuts from an old woman with a heated cart. She had long, stiff, stark-white hair; she was twisted low to the ground with age. As he was paying her, he was oddly aware that the same transaction—a man buying roasted chestnuts from a woman on a frigid late-autumn evening—might have taken place, on this same corner, a hundred years ago, and might take place here a hundred years in the future.

  When he reached Central Park, he stopped at Wollman Rink to watch the skaters. There were young couples, lithe and confident; there were fathers and mothers teaching children who looked as if they’d never been on the ice before. The wedding must have put Isaac in a sentimental mood, because all of them, all of them, struck him as beautiful.

  Finally he stood outside Nora’s building. He couldn’t tell which of the windows was hers: her apartment was too high up. It didn’t matter. He knew what she was doing. She was sitting at her card table, in front of her computer—a new computer—working on a new story, a story that would turn out to be a sort of letter bomb addressed to someone she loved.

  Arthur, the doorman, let him in, and Isaac took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Nora opened her door. She looked as if she hadn’t slept. She looked wary, guarded: he might have come just to pick up the bass.

  But he knew her so well that he could see what she was thinking. She was trying not to show it, because she didn’t know what he was going to say to her, but he could tell that she was hoping for the best.

  1

  Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: she was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual?

  Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as “strident” and “shrill.”

  If you’re an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill.

  She closed her laptop.

  Not much point, she thought.

  But then she opened it up again.

  2

  She didn’t feel strident or shrill. She didn’t even feel old.

  And anyway, old age isn’t what it used to be—or at least that’s what she kept telling herself.

  This was her reasoning. Florence was seventy-five years old. In an earlier era, that would have made her an old lady. But not today. She’d been a young woman during the 1960s, and if you were young in the sixties—“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—there’s a sense in which you can never grow old. You were there when the Beatles came to America; you were there when sex was discovered; you were there when the idea of liberation was born; and even if you end up a cranky old lady who’s proud of her activist past but who now just wants to be left alone to read, write, and think—even if you end up like that, there’s something in your soul that stays green.

  She wasn’t—this seems important to say—a woman who tried to look younger than she was. She didn’t dye her hair; she had no interest in Botox; she didn’t whiten her teeth. Her craggy old-fashioned teeth, rude and honest and unretouched, were good enough for her.

  She wasn’t a woman who wanted to recapture her youth. In part this was because she found the life she was living now so interesting.

  So she was a strong proud independent-minded woman who accepted being old but nevertheless felt essentially young.

  She was also, in the opinion of many who knew her, even in the opinion of many who loved her, a complete pain in the neck.

  3

  She was writing a memoir that began with the early days of the women’s movement—the modern women’s movement, her own women’s movement, the one that had been born in the 1970s. If she could finish it, it would be her seventh book.

  Each book had posed its own difficulties. The difficulty with this one was that she was finding it impossible to bring the past to life. Her memory was efficient; she could recall the dates and the acts and the actors. But she was finding it hard to remember the texture of the past.

  Tonight she had finally begun, she thought, to crack the code. She’d remembered a moment that she hadn’t thought about in years. It was just a moment, not important in itself. But precisely because she hadn’t thought about it in so long, she was able to remember it now with a sense of freshness, and she was hoping she might have finally found the door that would lead her back into the past.

  She was free for the rest of the night. She’d had dinner plans with friends, but with a secret glee she’d canceled so she could stay home and work. It was seven o’clock on a Friday in early May; she was through with her academic obligations and her mind was clear. And this evening, in which she’d finally, finally, finally begun to make some progress—this evening was the happiest one she’d had in a long time.

  Except that Vanessa kept calling.

  Her friend Vanessa kept calling, and Florence kept not picking up. After the fifth call, she thought Vanessa might be in some sort of trouble, and on the sixth, she finally answered.

  “Thank God you’re home,” Vanessa said. “I’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing big. Nothing terrible. It’s just that I got pickpocketed, evidently, and I don’t have anything except my phone. I need some money to get back home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “That’s why I called you. I’m three blocks away.”

  She named a restaurant.

  “Well I’m right here,” Florence said. “Just come up.”

  “That’s nice of you. But it’s a little bit complicated.”

  “Why?”

  “Ruby and Cassie had to run, and I stayed to pay the check, and that’s when I found out my purse was gone. So the owner doesn’t want me to leave. He wants to be sure I’m not going to skip out on him.”

  “Vanessa, you’re a very respectable-looking woman. You’re a very old woman. You’re obviously not skipping out on him. Tell him you’re not Bonnie Parker.”

  “That’s just what I told him. That’s exactly what I told him, in fact. I told him I’m not Bonnie Parker. But he’s not being very understanding. I think he thinks I am Bonnie Parker. I’m really sorry. But it’ll just take a minute.”

 
; People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?

  He’s afraid she’ll skip out on him. As Florence waited for the elevator, she was muttering to herself. She reminded herself of Popeye the Sailor Man.

  She crossed the street, still muttering. Muttering, and clenching and unclenching her fists.

  She was doing this with her fists because she’d been having some trouble with her left hand. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Her fingers sometimes jumped around as if they had five little minds of their own. A neurologist had told her to get an ergonomic keyboard and an ergonomic mouse and an ergonomic splint for her wrist; she’d gotten all of it, and she’d faithfully done the exercises he prescribed, but none of it was working so far.

  Muttering, clenching, unclenching: I must look, she thought, like a madwoman.

  4

  The restaurant was on Sixty-seventh Street, between Columbus and Central Park West. She went inside, couldn’t see Vanessa.

  It was a fancy, expensive, somewhat full-of-itself restaurant. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where the owner would hold you hostage.

  The greeter, a somber-looking man, asked her if she needed help.

  “I’m looking for a friend. Woman my age? Couldn’t pay her bill?”

  “Oh, yes. I know who you mean. She’s in the back room.”

  They’ve got her in the back room, Florence thought. They’re working her over.

  He led Florence down a hall and gestured toward an entryway, behind which the room was unaccountably dark. She stepped in, and the lights went on, and the room was filled with people shouting “Surprise!”