A Window Across the River (2 page)

Isaac wasn’t a lover of literature; he was a photographer who knew little about the other arts. But he understood the beauty and the nobility of giving yourself fully to a pure and disinterested pursuit. Even after years of being out of touch with him, she’d felt sure that he was the one person who could understand what she was going through, the one person to whom she could speak freely about the frustration of not being able to give herself to her vocation with the full-heartedness it deserved.

“I’m sorry it’s been hard for you,” Isaac said. “But look. You’re gifted. That’s a matter of record. All artists go through difficult patches, and you’re going through one now. But you’ve written some wonderful things already, and if you just keep going, you’re going to write a lot more. There’s no doubt about that.”

It was nice, what he was saying, but it didn’t comfort her. He didn’t know the whole story.

When she’d left her apartment, on her way to meet him, she thought she’d tell him everything, but now she realized
that she wasn’t going to be able to. She didn’t want to tell him about the other dimension of her unhappiness. She didn’t want to talk about Benjamin.

“Excuse me.” She got up, went to the women’s room (trying to walk gracefully, because she knew that he was watching her), went into a stall, sat down, put her head in her hands, and cried.

She wasn’t even sure why she was crying. It wasn’t just one thing. It was that she’d started out so strongly but had let her chance slip away, and now she was afraid she was too old. It was that she wasn’t happy with Benjamin, but hadn’t been able to leave him. It was that she was a weaker creature than she’d ever imagined she was.

She made a fist to punch the side of the stall, but then she decided that that would be melodramatic, and anyway she didn’t want to hurt herself. She thought of maybe writing some graffiti on the wall, something as simple as
fuck you.
She searched in her bag for a pen, but she couldn’t find one.

There was a spider making his way along the floor. She thought about stepping on him.

She didn’t step on him. It isn’t the spider’s fault—she told herself reasonably—that you don’t know if you have the strength to change your life.

She sat there watching the spider proceeding on his solitary mission.

“Hello, Spide,” she said sadly.

In one of Chekhov’s letters to his brother, who wanted to be a writer, Chekhov suggested that he write a story about a man who “squeezed the slave out of himself drop by drop.” The phrase had stayed in Nora’s mind; she sometimes used it against herself, when she felt she was living a kind of slave life.
Now, she thought, she had her chance. She had the chance to squeeze the slave out of herself. But she didn’t know if she had the strength.

She got out of the stall and washed her face and put on some lipstick.

When she rejoined Isaac, the food was already on the table, but he hadn’t started eating. He’d been waiting for her.

Maybe he would have waited for anyone: he was a gentlemanly man. But as he sat there in front of his untouched food, he looked so bony and spectral that she felt that it was a metaphor of his life: she felt as if he hadn’t taken any nourishment of any kind since she’d left him. As if he’d been doing little but waiting for her.

Poor Isaac. She saw how selfish she was. She had come here to talk about herself; she’d barely asked about him.

“What’s it like working as a photo editor?” she said. “What’s it like having a real job?”

He used to make a living as a freelance photographer. He’d taught a little here and there, he’d been on some sort of contract with the
Village Voice,
but mostly he’d kept his time free in order to take the pictures he wanted to take. She’d always thought of him as a model of how to put your art ahead of everything else, and she’d been surprised, a few years back, when she heard that he’d taken on a full-time job.

“It’s nice to get a steady paycheck. If I want to buy a pair of shoes now, I don’t have to ponder the decision for a month and a half.”

“Do you still have time for your own work?”

“Not as much. But it sort of concentrates the mind. If you know you only
have
an hour, you can get as much done in an hour as you used to get done in a day.”

“And what’s it like living in the suburbs?”

“It’s not bad. It’s clean. It’s quiet. The supermarkets are amazing, if you care for that sort of thing. Everything’s just easier out there. It’s a semi-perfect life.”

Semi-perfect. That seemed like a cue for her to ask a question: What do you mean by that?

But she didn’t ask, because she thought she already knew what he meant. He meant that the only thing that was missing in his life was her.

She moved things around on the tabletop, which was composed of large black and white squares. The hot sauce captured the pepper, and then the ketchup put the mustard in check. “Are you still in touch with Meredith?” she said.

“Yeah. She moved to Texas.”

“Really? Why?”

Isaac started to explain why she’d moved, and Nora didn’t listen. Instead, she wondered why she’d asked. Meredith was a mutual acquaintance of no great importance to either of them.

“And then she decided Austin was more like New York than New York was, or something like that,” Isaac was saying. “Austin is what New York was in 1962. I think that’s what she said.”

Nora reached across the table and put her hand over his. “I’m sorry. I don’t really want to know about Meredith. And you probably don’t want to talk about her. I’m sorry for asking.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“It was like our conversation was getting too real. I was trying to hide out in small talk. But I don’t want to do that with you. If I can’t be real with
you,
then I’m finished.”

“I’m glad you’re not finished,” he said.

N
ORA LIVED ON
108
TH AND
B
ROADWAY
. Isaac had parked near there, so they walked together.

“Do you like it up here?”

“I do,” she said. “It’s exciting.”

She used to live in the provinces—in darkest Brooklyn. She’d moved into Manhattan a year ago.

She loved living up here. She was telling Isaac a story about how she’d lucked into her apartment; as she talked, she was reveling in the day. It was a summerlike afternoon in the middle of May; Broadway was crowded with Columbia students, and Nora wondered about each one they passed: two fierce young men who looked as if they’d just been arguing about Trotsky; a woman browsing at the table in front of the art supply store, with a meditative expression and independent-minded hair; a Paul Bunyan type in a flannel shirt and overalls, who looked as if he’d been shipped in a box from New Hampshire. Isaac, though he was a photographer, trained to
see,
had his attention fastened to Nora so closely that he didn’t seem to notice any of it. A beautiful young woman on Rollerblades swept by—tall, long-legged, in a halter top and shorts—and Isaac didn’t even take a glance.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he said. “I only need to work for an hour. Then I can introduce you to the mysteries of New Jersey.”

“That sounds like every girl’s dream. I wish I could. But I have to see Billie tonight.”

Billie was Nora’s aunt. Isaac smiled when he heard her name. He’d always liked her; everyone did. Billie was the most lovable person Nora knew. If you didn’t love Billie, Nora sometimes thought, you didn’t love life.

“How’s she doing?”

“Not that great. They found a lump in her breast, and she has to go in for some tests this week.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Please give her my love.” He opened the door of his car. “How about tomorrow?”

She felt weird about the idea of spending an evening with him. She
could
do it; Benjamin was at a conference in Berlin. But still.

She sometimes thought that she and Benjamin abided by an unwritten law that held that both could retain the opposite-sex friends they’d had before they met but couldn’t make any new ones. Maybe most couples abide by that law.

She hadn’t seen Isaac in years. Did he count as an old friend or a new one?

And how about sleeping with him? Did the unwritten law permit her to sleep with guys she’d slept with before she met Benjamin?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll call you.”

She didn’t want to kiss him good-bye. In the old days, they’d never had a kiss that meant nothing. A Saturday-morning kiss on the street corner when he was heading off to
do his laundry and she was buying the paper, and they’d be seeing each other again in half an hour—even when it was that kind of kiss, it never felt like a small thing.

But she didn’t know if she was prepared for something like that now.

So no kiss.

She took off her watch, dropped it into the heart pocket of his shirt, and patted him there.

I
SAAC DROVE BACK TO
New Jersey, thinking about Muhammad Ali.

He was excited. And upset. And excited.

When Nora had called him last week, out of the blue—but not out of the blue at all, because he was always thinking about her—he’d had a mystical feeling that life was coming full circle. He’d always believed that someday she’d see the mistake she’d made when she left him, and that she’d come back to him.

But she evidently hadn’t come back into his life to repair her mistake. It was impossible to tell
why
she’d come back. Or if she’d really come back at all.

He drove to his office, got some coffee, and forced himself to concentrate. He had to choose among sixteen photos of a town council meeting in Leonia; he had to choose all the photos for the sports section; and he had to put together a montage to illustrate an article on Disneyland. All in the next half hour.

He was mad at himself for asking her to get together. He should have let well enough alone.

It was
disturbing
to have Nora back in his life. It had taken him so long to wean himself, so long to let go of the longing. If he ever had. Which he hadn’t.

Not too long after Nora left him, Isaac had spent a few months with a woman named Clarissa. She was bright, interested in him, accomplished—she was a cellist—and she was lovely; some people would have considered her far more attractive than Nora. One Saturday night they were in a bookstore on Broadway—he was still living in the city then—and he ran into Nora. Clarissa was upstairs in the poetry section, Isaac was browsing through photography magazines, and Nora floated over to say hello. They didn’t say much—just exchanged a few superficialities—and they didn’t touch, but he felt as if she’d placed her hand on his skin. When Nora left and he found Clarissa again, leafing through the love poems of Pablo Neruda, he knew he couldn’t be with her. He didn’t know if he’d ever see Nora again, but he knew he couldn’t be with Clarissa.

In 1978, when he was in his teens, he had seen Leon Spinks, a negligible fighter, take the heavyweight title away from Muhammad Ali, who had grown listless and slow-footed with age. After the fight, talking with reporters, Spinks had graciously and accurately said, “He’s still the greatest. I’m just the latest.”

Nora, Isaac was thinking, was the Muhammad Ali of his romantic life. The women who’d come after her had had their virtues, but each of them had merely been the latest. And because of the memory of Nora, he’d been unable to give himself fully to anyone else. There wasn’t room in his heart, it seemed, for more than one person.

And now she was in some sort of crisis of the spirit.

It was hard to listen to her talk about her crisis of the spirit. It was hard to listen to anything that didn’t lead to
him.

He sat at his computer, scrolling through photographs of Daisy Duck. From some angles Daisy was pretty sexy.

While Nora had talked about needing to change her life, needing to rededicate herself to her work, he’d been thinking, Do you really think that’s enough? Isn’t it fucking
obvious
what you need? Isn’t it fucking clear to you that the big thing missing in your life is
me
?

When had men become women and women become men?

It had happened at some point during his lifetime. When he watched movies from the forties and fifties, the men and women struck him as so different from the men and women of today that he sometimes felt as if he was watching science fiction. The wimpiest man of the forties was manlier than the manliest man of today.

Pining after a woman for years, resenting her because she’s more interested in her career than in being with you—how had this happened?

He didn’t even know
why
he loved her.

Yes he did. He did know.

She excited him. She thrilled him. He’d never felt bored with her. He was always eager to hear what she had to say. In the old days, when they sometimes went to dinner parties where they had to sit apart from each other, the experience itself counted for nothing; what counted for everything was talking about it with her later. In the midst of the party, he’d sometimes watch her from across the room, watch the play of intelligence and humor in her eyes, and feel lucky to know that later that night he’d find out what she’d been thinking.

At the diner, listening to her story, he’d found it hard to believe that she was feeling so defeated. It wasn’t the Nora he knew.

Years ago, shortly after he and Nora had started seeing each other, she lent her laptop to her friend Helen, whose four-year-old son got hold of it and zapped out of existence a story
Nora had been working on for six months. Nora hadn’t saved it to disk, hadn’t printed it out. After a night during which she looked seasick, and in which she watched the entire six-and-a-half-hour
Godfather Saga
on TV because it cheered her to see people blowing one another away, she calmly started afresh on the story the next morning. “This version’ll probably be better,” she’d said.

That was the Nora he knew.

The Nora he knew had a quietly ferocious tenacity that wouldn’t let anything stand in her way.

She was more beautiful than ever, in his eyes. This was maddening; it would have been easier, in a way, if she weren’t.