by Liz Moore
But he can do such things—he can fall into idleness for days. Mike has no job to worry about now. When the Burn got signed, he quit the temping job that he had acquired halfheartedly after college. He is twenty-four now and he feels pretty successful: he’s a member of a Titan band, a band that opened for Tommy Mays’s band, a band that gets recognized sometimes on the street.
The phone rings and Mike jumps, and then across the room Nora jumps and giggles nervously. It has been ringing off the hook, but he’s been ignoring it. It’s probably Siobhan. It’s probably Mike’s mother.
“Why don’t you answer it, Nora?” asks Mike, but it’s a joke. Nora falls into laughter once again. She has been laughing and laughing these days. When Mike knew her she only laughed in class.
Mike smiles; he considers and then rejects the idea of dragging himself out of bed to answer the phone, which has been ringing for nearly a minute. Mike has never had an answering machine. He doesn’t believe in them. He is almost absurdly old fashioned about some things: no computer, no answering machine, no cell phone. He corresponds by mail. His manners are good. When the band got signed, Siobhan insisted that he needed to be easier to get in touch with. His one concession: a beeper, which still affords him the choice of whether or not to call back. It gives no one the opportunity to insist vocally on a returned call.
But the beeper has been uncharged on the counter for the past two days, and Mike has been turning over and over in bed and having dreams that are dark and dreary and eating almost nothing and drinking Orange Crush from a large plastic container and ignoring every phone call that has come his way.
Nora Cross wanders about the apartment; she comes and goes. She likes to disappear and reappear: first in the northeast corner, then at the foot of his bed, then by the stereo, nodding along with Natalie Merchant, mouthing the words that Mike has learned well in the last twenty-four hours. Her flickering existence is okay with Mike. It reminds him of being younger, the way children flicker in and out of each other’s lives, the way they falter under pressure—like he did. He did that.
“Coward,” says Mike. Though he is saying it to himself, Nora’s face falls. He has always been able to make her cry.
VI.
Nora Cross lived on the water, in a small house with poles that suspended it over the ocean. The house supported the weight of her family. She had a mother and a father and a brother named Isaac.
Every autumn since they moved into the little house, the Cross family has watched the sky at sunset from their eastward-facing windows (it is nicer to watch the sky change without the glare of the sun in the west); they have watched the sunset over water reddened by refracted light. This autumn has been no different; it’s just that first they had a daughter and then they did not. First there were four and now there are three.
Mr. and Mrs. Cross have not moved much this week. They still feel their daughter’s presence in every corner of that house: in the basement, where she painted apples and jugs for art class in high school and, later, sketched stuffed animals with fruit or dice or holes for eyes and stuffing that strained and spewed from seams; in the kitchen, where once a week she baked a batch of cookies and then ate them more quickly than she should have; by the window in the living room, where she sat or reclined, catlike, for hours, arranging pillows on the floor when the sun came in and lit up the room brilliantly so it shone like copper, like mica.
Watching the sunset from their window, the three surviving members of the Cross family recall aloud the parts of Nora that hurt most to recall. It is a test for them; it is a game for them. Mrs. Cross says that Nora loved bright things. She loved weak things. She loved small things like ring boxes and seashells. Her bedroom was a very bad mess of green things and magazines. The number of trinkets that Nora owned was almost staggering. Here is the part where Mrs. Cross cries. Thinking of Nora’s trinkets, she cries.
Isaac Cross, eighteen, puts a hand on his mother’s back and tells his parents that he is going to write a song for Nora on his guitar. The Crosses tell him it is a lovely idea and remind one another that Nora always loved to hear her brother play.
VII.
“Nora, do you remember going to the prom with me?”
She nods. She is sitting on the floor in the only patch of sunlight that ever shows itself in the one-windowed apartment—around two in the afternoon on autumn days like this.
“Do you remember driving to Boston with me when we were seniors in high school?
“Do you remember watching a baseball game with me in the springtime, one April, one spring break? In a little park? A team we didn’t know?”
Nora nods again. She seems upset today, thinks Mike. Her cheeks have lost their pinkness. She points to the CD player in the corner and suddenly Mike realizes it has been skipping for hours, maybe for days. Nora looks as though she might cry.
“Oh, Nora,” says Mike. “Let me fix that for you.” But he has not eaten anything in so long that he is almost too weak to get out of bed, and he tells himself he will rest for only a moment, just a moment more, and then he will fix the CD for Nora Cross. He puts his head back on the pillow. His bed is a mattress on the floor.
He drifts toward sleep while over the speaker comes the broken song: “I may know the word but not say it. I may know the word but not say it. I may know the I may know the I may know the I may I may I may I may I may know the word but not say it. I may know the I may know the truth I may I may know the truth but not face it I may know the truth but not face it face it I may know I may know I may know.”
VIII.
When Mike went away to school, he thought of Nora as something static. They were apart for the first time and they spoke on the telephone all autumn. He knew he was not in love with Nora Cross anymore the night she called him crying because she missed him.
“I think about you with other girls,” said Nora on that bewildering night. It was raining and cold. “I think about you wanting them. And touching them.”
Mike heard her sniffling and it made him feel nothing. He said nothing.
“Mike?” said Nora. “Are you still there?”
All fall, that first year at school, Mike had a recurring dream. In his dream he saw, one after another, all of the towns between his college in New York and hers in Rhode Island. All the little port towns that stood between them. He saw those towns lit up for Christmas, lit black against a red sky. He dreamed of their residents, lit up like the houses that kept them, residents who, like Nora, lived in houses on poles above water. The trust of those people! thought Mike. To live so. The innocence.
The dreams were unpleasantly long and complex. Sometimes he saw Nora in the midst of these towns, walking toward him, through them, over them, over poled houses and dim roads. Sometimes he saw her through windows: a Nora Cross in every house, a Nora Cross behind every tree, on every road. Always she was crying. Always, upon waking, he would shudder with guilt—and he had done nothing, really; he had no reason to feel guilty. He began to blame Nora for the dreams, and it ended them.
He came home that first rainy Christmas of college, and he went to Nora Cross, and he said, “It’s over.” Like someone in the movies. He could not think of his own line. Then he watched her cry on his childhood street for a while. Then he went home, and he did not see Nora Cross again.
IX.
On Tuesday, Mike wakes up and looks at himself. He has been lying in his bed for nearly a week. He can barely stand.
He goes to the refrigerator, half crawling. He opens a cup of yogurt and licks it in its container.
Then he remembers that the funeral is tomorrow. “I almost missed it, Nora,” says Mike.
He calls his mother and leaves a message saying he will take a bus home tomorrow morning.
Later, he is haunted by the small details about Nora’s death that seem most morbid to him. Why, he wonders, did she shoot herself on her bed? There is something sleepy about a death like that, something warm. He has pictured it many times over, each time a diff
erent way, each time a tragic ending to a tragic play. He is picturing it now, like this:
Nora’s mouth would be open, but there is no mouth there. Just blood that has hardened over a cave of a face. She has slumped forward. She has almost fallen off the bed. There is blood on the wall behind her. Blood and brains. The door opens. Her brother cries out.
Nora’s eyes are open. Her face is drenched in sunlight. She has blown it to the side: the force of the bullet entering the bed, the bedsprings that pushed back. She was lying back on the bed when she did it, her knees bent so her feet touched the floor.
The door is open. From the hall her brother sees her and thinks she is daydreaming, so casually are her legs slung from the bed, so calmly is her arm draped across her waist. Then he sees the pistol, and then the blood, and then the blood, and then the eye that stares unblinkingly toward daylight. He cries out.
Or before.
Nora walks into the bedroom.
That’s all Mike can see. A step. Five steps. From the doorway to the bed: steps that might have been retraced on a different afternoon, maybe.
Nora walks into the bedroom. That’s all.
Or before everything.
X.
Nora at fourteen or fifteen. She and Mike are fumbling for each other on the couch in her parents’ living room. Mike has an erection. With her small hand she reaches toward Mike’s face. She stands and unbuttons her shirt. It’s the first time Mike has seen breasts outside a magazine or a movie. She’s young. Her breasts are small cones. Her stomach, an arc of flesh that she sucks in awkwardly, like a rescinded offer.
“You can touch me,” she says.
But this all seems unholy now. Mike is ashamed. He looks at Nora across the room and she is frowning, sucking the candy cane, disapproving. She might be blushing, even. But it is difficult for him to think of anyone that he once knew naked as anything but naked. Nora crosses her legs and shakes her head at him.
“I’m sorry, Nora,” says Mike, and he wishes he could think of a way to make it up to her. He wishes he could find a way to make all sorts of things up to her: the time he was going to take her to see a movie in tenth grade, a movie they had talked about seeing for months before it came out, and then went with Trevor King instead; the glass pony that used to sit on her dresser, which he broke while trying to throw it in the air and catch it in his hat, and then hid behind her bureau; the terrible thing he said to her once about her figure, the thing that had made her cry and cry. He had only been joking, and he wants to tell her that now, across his room, but she has turned away from him and she is looking out the window, half smiling, gazing dreamily toward daylight.
XI.
When Mike wakes up Wednesday, Nora is gone.
Mike looks everywhere in the apartment for her, but he cannot find her.
“Nora Cross,” he says. “Nora Cross.”
He turns on Natalie Merchant but Natalie Merchant does not make Nora appear. He closes his eyes and opens them and still she is gone.
“Nora Cross.”
She is not sitting at the foot of his bed; she is not sitting on the kitchen counter; she is not lying on the floor in sunlight; she is not there at all.
When it’s time to leave, Mike wanders into the hallway and down the stairs of his fifth-floor walk-up. He is wearing a suit. It hangs on him like a tent—he is very thin today. He is not bringing a suitcase to Rhode Island. In his right hand is his wallet. In his left, an apple.
There is no one in the small lobby of his building. It echoes when he walks through it, sending back to him the sound of the rustling fabric of his suit, the sound of his own footsteps. Mike opens the door and it is lovely outside, warm for autumn, bright and warm. Then he turns around. He walks back inside. He opens his mailbox.
Inside it, propped informally against the left wall, is a letter in a pink envelope.
8.
ABRAHAM AND PACIFICA
Nessun dorma, nessun dorma…
Tu pure, o Principessa,
Nella tua fredda stanza,
Guardi le stelle
Che tremano d’amore
E di speranza.
—PUCCINI, “Nessun Dorma,” from Turandot
I.
Abraham Kline, on the occasion of the eightieth birthday of his wife, Pacifica, decides to invite a small group of old friends and well-wishers to their home in Brooklyn Heights. For many years, the Powers-Kline brownstone has served as headquarters for Brooklyn’s intellectual and financial aristocracy. It has been in Abraham’s family for three generations; his grandfather bought it when Brooklyn Heights was first becoming a suburb of busy Manhattan. It is old and graceful: dark wood frames the three-paneled window at the front of the sitting room; the ceilings and the doors are high and detailed, customary in Victorian architecture; charmingly, a laughing jade Buddha sits on the mantelpiece (Pacifica Powers, since visiting China as a young girl with her widower father, has always considered herself a bit of an expert on Asia, so, when she and Abraham moved into this home forty-five years ago, she decorated it in bright shades of red and green and gold; she often sighs over the fading of these colors, and over Abraham’s insistence, when they were young enough to travel, upon traveling exclusively in North America and Europe). But despite its grandeur, the Powers-Kline brownstone is always warm, and the Powers-Klines themselves, it is almost universally agreed, are unparalleled conversationalists, well schooled in art and the history of Brooklyn.
On Thursday, Pacifica leads a tour of old brownstones in her neighborhood. Biannually, the Powers-Klines visit the Green-Wood Cemetery to pay their respects to friends, family, and unrelated soldiers—Abraham is himself a veteran of the Second World War—and to indulge Pacifica’s rather eccentric passion for tombstone rubbings. Over the years she has acquired a large collection, the best of which she frames and places on the already-cluttered wall of the front hallway; she is especially fond of finding stones marked “Powers” or “Roth,” her mother’s maiden name, and inventing or imagining some family tie. Often, she closes her eyes as she stands by a grave and thinks of the bones beneath her feet and secretly clacks her teeth together so that she feels close to a skeleton herself—but she only ever acts on this impulse when she is certain that Abraham has wandered off someplace, perhaps to meditate on some other gravesite, on some particular tree or monument, as he often does.
II.
“Monkey,” says Pacifica, on the morning of her eightieth birthday. It is her special name for Abraham—one that has become effortless to her over its many years of use, so that although Abraham, with his cane and his faded velvet bow ties, is in fact very far from possessing any kind of apelike vigor, the name suits him as well as his own. “Today I am eighty.”
Abraham has been reading his paper in an old armchair that faces the three-paneled window. It overlooks the street, and for a moment Abraham looks down at the young nanny who is pushing a carriage while holding her young charge by his hand. She is lovely and her hair is being blown about her face in an enchanting way—the way Pacifica’s used to, when her hair was long and dark. She wears it short now, and it has been silver for two decades. “Oh, you’re very old, Pacifica,” says Abraham. “I think it might be time to take a mistress.”
He has already begun to plan the day’s dinner. Maris, their housekeeper, will arrive in time to put in three racks of lamb. The guests will arrive at seven for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres: among them, the candied pralines that Pacifica’s cousin sends each year for her birthday; miniature quiche lorraines, made by Maris yesterday evening; an assortment of table crackers that the Powers-Klines seem to accumulate in great quantities, no matter how many dinners they host; and—Abraham’s face lights up at the thought—a magnificent Gouda brought back from their most recent excursion to Murray’s Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street. It is here that the Powers-Klines signed up for a course in cheese making and tasting, two of Abraham’s many ardent passions.
Hors d’oeuvres hour at the Powers-Kline browns
tone is always accompanied by the bottles of excellent wine their guests bring. And tonight, thinks Abraham, will be no different, for among the invited there are several connoisseurs. Abraham knows that the Blandes will bring a bottle from their favorite vineyard in the South of France, for they have just returned after a winter abroad at their home in Nice. Arthur and Naomi Plassey have a son in California, and they will bring a fruity red wine from the West Coast. Others will bring what they have selected from stores in Manhattan or a borough, and Abraham’s mouth waters at the idea of a glass of his favorite merlot with the Gouda that sits provocatively on the kitchen counter.
He straightens his bow tie with pleasure. Tonight, he thinks, will make Pacifica happy; and making his wife happy has been his chiefest goal for as long as he can recall.
III.
Upon reaching her office building, Jax Powers-Kline takes the elevator to the top floor and glares at the new secretary as she walks to her door. This girl is the fourth since Cynthia left: a little incompetent mouse of a girl who wears braces—braces, thinks Jax, at her age—and a perpetually shocked expression. For these reasons, Jax would love to fire her, but it would just mean hiring someone else, having to train someone all over again. She’s sick of it.
“Good morning,” says the new girl, and Jax stares.
“I have a message for you,” says the new girl. “From your father.”