A Window Across the River (3 page)

It was funny to think that when he first met her, he wasn’t even that attracted to her. He liked her immediately, but she looked too pure to have lustful thoughts about. She looked very
healthy
—that was his first impression. She had the glowing skin of an athlete: a runner or a swimmer or a rock climber. Her nose was slightly, interestingly, crooked—probably, Isaac assumed, from some challenging activity too zealously pursued. A kayaking accident, maybe, or a pole-vaulting mishap. She didn’t instantly stir up feelings of desire; she stirred up thoughts of hearty outdoor activities.

When he got to know her, he learned that she wasn’t athletic in the least. The freshness of her skin, the subtle muscles of her arms and legs, her swimmer’s shoulders—all this was part of her genetic inheritance, entirely unearned. She’d never been on a hike in her life, and she didn’t even know
how
to swim. She hardly ever left the city. Once he’d managed to drag her off to a weekend in Maine, and when they got back to Manhattan, after they emerged from Grand Central, as they stood in the twilight with the Empire State Building and the
Chrysler Building blazing above them, she’d spread out her arms and said, “
This
is God’s country, my friend!”

She liked to portray herself as a neurotic writer, housebound, averse to natural light, but that wasn’t the way he saw her. He still saw her as a mountain climber, or as the moral equivalent. Confident and strong. She was a small slim slight woman, but he thought of her as the person who, if you were pinned beneath a car, would be the most likely to be able to free you.

After she broke up with him, one or two of his friends had suggested that his estimate of her—her brilliance, her beauty, her force—was exaggerated, and that he’d soon be able to see this, soon be able to downsize her in his imagination. But, for better or for worse, he never had.

He wondered whether she was really going to call him again. She’d always been impulsive. She was always getting in touch with people she hadn’t spoken to in ages. She’d call up to apologize for something she’d done years earlier, usually something the other person didn’t even remember. And then, after that, she might not call again, and if the other person called
her,
she might forget to call back.

He wondered whether he was going to have to wait another five years.

Didn’t some guy have to wait seven years for a woman in the Bible—and then have to wait another seven years? The guy who wanted to marry Rachel, but ended up marrying Leah by mistake? He tried to call it up, but he couldn’t quite remember the story.

N
ORA STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK
, waiting to catch the keys. Her aunt Billie lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Fifty-first Street, in the neighborhood that used to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Nora couldn’t remember what it was called now. Billie couldn’t buzz her visitors into the building, so she’d stand at the window and toss them a set of keys.

When Nora was a girl, she and her mother would come to New York to visit Billie two or three times a year, and she was always thrilled by the sight of Billie throwing down her keys. It seemed like something from a fairy tale—Rapunzel letting down her hair. It made her aunt seem magical.

Billie’s head appeared in the window.

“Hello, my dovecote,” she said. “Could you pick up my mail in the lobby? It’s the tiny key.”

She lobbed the keys down to the sidewalk. They were on a chain with a lucky rabbit’s foot.

Nora let herself into the lobby, got Billie’s mail, and made her way up the stairs, thinking she needed to exercise more. The stairwell smelled like boiled potatoes.

As she climbed the stairs, she was thinking about how to cheer Billie up. Two weeks ago, Billie had found a lump in her breast. A biopsy had revealed a cluster of irregularly shaped cells, and she was going in for a lumpectomy in two days.

She’d had breast cancer four years earlier; during the last six months she’d been starting to believe that she might have “beaten” it. But now there was this.

Nora tried to be cheery on the first two flights; on the next two she tried to be resolute. She was telling herself not to cave.

In three days, Nora was leaving for a month-long stay at MacDowell, the artists’ colony in New Hampshire. She’d never been to an artists’ colony before, but it sounded like paradise. She would get her own private cabin; a silent ghostly butler would leave breakfast and lunch at her door; and she’d have no responsibilities other than to write all day. Nora had applied on a whim—she didn’t think she’d have a chance of getting in. But she did get in, and now she couldn’t wait. With a month alone, with nothing to do but work, she might finally find her way back to writing short stories.

She’d heard a rumor that Grace Paley was going to be there. Grace Paley, whose stories, when Nora read them in her teens, had made her want to be a writer. A month of writing all day and then having dinner with Grace Paley!

Ever since Billie found out she’d need to have an operation, though, Nora had been thinking of giving up MacDowell. She was thinking she’d rather stay in the city and take care of her aunt. Now, on the stairs, she was telling herself not to do that. She’d be in New York for a couple of days after Billie’s operation, and after that she’d be in touch by phone. That was enough. You can take care of your loved ones and still take care of yourself.

Billie was waiting at her door, in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. When Nora came forward to kiss her, she closed her eyes and offered Nora her cheek—receiving the kiss with a childlike intensity, as if she wanted to store it on her skin so she could recollect the sensation later. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said.

She put her hands on Nora’s shoulders, beaming.

“I always forget how tiny you are,” Billie said. “You’re like a pocket pal.”

She hurried ahead of Nora into the living room, picked up a lint catcher—a plastic rolling pin with a sticky surface—and ran it over the easy chair. She performed the task with great enthusiasm but little craft; when she was done there were still wide patches of cat hair left untouched. Nora sat down anyway.

“Would you like some soda pop?”

“Sure. Thank you.”

Billie seemed very excited. It was as if she was so happy to see Nora that she’d forgotten what was in store for her that week. She was humming to herself as she poured Sprite into a glass. She came out of the kitchen with the glass in one hand and a box of prunes in the other.

“Prunes?”

Nora declined the prunes.

“They’re all I have to snack on. I tried to order cheese and crackers from the deli but they don’t give me credit anymore.”

“Do you need some money?”

“No—thank you. I got my Social Security check yesterday. I can cash it this afternoon.”

Billie received monthly checks from her pension and from Social Security, and she lived in a rent-controlled apartment, but she was always broke by the end of the month. “I’m not a balance-the-checkbook kind of girl,” she’d once explained.

When Nora was little, her aunt seemed to glide above the normal rules of existence. Life treated her generously. If she arrived at the bank at three, just as the guard was locking the door, she’d smile at him with a sort of hopeful helplessness, and he’d let her in. If she didn’t have the fare for a cab ride, she
could charm the cabbie into taking her for free. When Nora was a girl, Billie’s life seemed to offer a glimpse of the magical possibilities of womanhood.

“Do you know they’re not called prunes anymore?” Billie said. “They’re called dried plums now. The fruit companies think prunes have a bad reputation.”

She removed one from the box and drew it toward her. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll still call you a prune.” Then she kissed it, and then she put it in her mouth.

Billie was the only family Nora had. Nora had no brothers or sisters, and her parents had died when she was still in her teens.

“Are you sure you want to come to the hospital with me?” Billie said.

“Of course I am. Of course.”

“You’re a state-of-the-art niece,” Billie said. She picked up her lint catcher again and ran it affectionately over Nora’s knee.

Nora didn’t feel state-of-the-art. She was feeling guilty: she hadn’t seen Billie in weeks.

“How have you been?” Nora said.

Stupid question, she thought, but Billie didn’t treat it as such.

“Fine, except for this dumb lump. Keeping busy. It’s about all I can do to keep track of these babies. It’s like a full-time job.”

The babies were her cats, who were far from babies now. Dolly must have been twenty, and Louie and Edwin weren’t much younger.

“What else have you been up to?” Nora said.

“I don’t know. Just waiting for the Romance Channel to arrive.” She laughed—a self-conscious, embarrassed laugh.

“The Romance Channel?”

“It’s a new TV station. They don’t have it in Manhattan yet, but they keep running these ads. If enough people vote for it, they might bring it here.”

“How do you vote?”

“You call this 800 number. I call it a lot. I put it on speed dial.”

The Romance Channel. Billie had gotten married at twenty. When she and Nelson were in each other’s presence, they’d always seemed a little giddy, as if they’d each had a glass and a half of champagne. They had a crush on each other for twenty years. To Nora, they had seemed like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, presiding over their own private Jazz Age.

Nelson died a week before their twenty-first anniversary. Waiting for the downtown E train at Forty-second Street, he’d had a heart attack and died on the platform.

Something stopped working inside Billie after Nelson died. She stopped going to movies and museums; she stopped seeing friends—she just came home from work every evening, double-locked her door, and watched TV. Sometimes, when Nora saw a certain expression on her face, a sort of patient sadness, she got the feeling that Billie was still waiting for Nelson to come home.

When she ventured into the outside world, Billie still relied on the old tools: she was still trying to charm her way through life. But now that she was in her sixties, her charm couldn’t take her very far. It didn’t keep banks open; it didn’t win her free rides. And Nora always found herself wondering—as she never had when she was young—
why
Billie could never get it together to get to the bank on time or pay the cab fare or remember to buy toilet paper or pay her bills.

It was odd. Before her retirement, Billie had been working all her life—first as a dancer, then as a physical therapist at a children’s hospital—yet after Nelson died she seemed to be waiting for someone to come along and take care of her. And no one ever had.

For Nora, Billie’s life remained a picture of the possibilities of womanhood—but it was a different kind of picture now. As much as she loved her aunt, it was a picture of what to avoid.

Louie, a heavy Persian cat, made his way up to Nora’s lap. In his youth he had been a spry thing, but scaling the easy chair was now an undertaking that called upon all his years of hard-won craft.

“Louie still loves you,” Billie said. “It’s like you haven’t missed a day.”

Nora ran her hand over his back.

“My community isn’t in very good shape,” Billie said. “Dolly had a stroke last month.” She knelt next to Dolly, who was lying in the corner. “She only eats if you feed her with a spoon. She only eats if you help her.” She dipped a spoon into a bowl of water that was sitting on a plastic mat on the floor, and held the spoon near Dolly’s mouth. Dolly shifted her head slightly. She hesitantly put out her tongue and touched the water, barely disturbing its surface.

“She’s a good girl,” Billie murmured. “Good lady.”

Maybe, Nora thought, I can call MacDowell and ask if I can get there a few days late.

Except she’d already done this, and they’d told her that if she couldn’t come for the full month, she’d have to forfeit her place. They had a long waiting list of people who could put the month to good use.

When Billie sat back down, she looked at the letters Nora had brought up.

She opened one of the envelopes. “Shoot.”

“What’s the matter?”

“This is from the cable company. They’re going to turn off my cable tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? They should give you more notice than that.”

“They gave me notice. They called. I just forgot.”

“Do you need some money? I can write them a check if you want.”

“Thank you. But that’s not the problem. I can pay them after I cash my Social Security, but it means I’m not going to be able to tape the Daytime Emmys Thursday night.” Again she laughed her embarrassed laugh. “I love the Daytime Emmys. I was planning to tape it and watch when I get back from the hospital. There’s this twelve-year-old boy down the hall who comes over and sets the VCR for me.”

“I can call them up and pay for it with my credit card.”

“Thank you, but they only let me pay them with a certified check. They know me down there by now.”

“I can tape it for you.”

“Really?” Billie said. She looked astonished, as if Nora had mentioned that she was going to be assisting the surgeon during Billie’s operation. “You know how to work those things?”

“Sure,” she said. She actually didn’t, but Benjamin did. Nora made a mental note to leave him a message.

Billie looked like she couldn’t believe her good fortune. It was sad to think that a kindness this small made her aunt this happy.

The Daytime Emmys. The Romance Channel. Nora felt
an obscure shifting, as if every particle of tenderness within her was rising up and streaming toward her aunt.

Don’t do it, Nora thought. You can take care of her before you go and after you get back. You don’t have to give up MacDowell.

“I hope they don’t have to take my breast off,” Billie said. “I’m already a fat old bag. That’s all I need—to be a fat old Amazon.”

“Oh, come on. You’re beautiful, Billie.” This wasn’t true, but she
had
been so beautiful when she was younger, and Nora remembered it so vividly, that it seemed true.

“I don’t understand how everything happened,” Billie said. “I still feel like the girl who won the jump-rope contest in fifth grade.”