A Window Across the River (9 page)

Isaac’s apartment was on the twenty-eighth floor of a building near the Hudson River, in Edgewater. There was a long panel of windows in his living room. When he opened the door, the first thing she saw was the city: the entire city, the long, elegant reach of it, alive with light.

It could have been a holy moment. Unfortunately, someone in the next apartment was watching TV.
COPS.
She recognized the theme song. “
Bad boys bad boys . . .
”

She tried to block it out. She sat on Isaac’s couch and looked up at him. “Don’t turn on the light.” She wanted him to sit next to her and put his arms around her.

He did sit next to her, but didn’t touch her, and she was disappointed.

So why not put your arms around
him
? Why not just kiss him?

Because she couldn’t. Because she understood her role. Despite Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ellen Willis—despite two hundred years of the feminist intellectual tradition—and despite the fact that she was a woman who seized the moment, a woman who could save the life of an ungrateful dog, she couldn’t initiate the kiss. That was Isaac’s
job. Her job was to let Isaac know that she wanted him to kiss her.

He was sitting next to her; they were both looking out at the city, which was burning with a million lights. She looked up at him—she looked at him somethingly. She didn’t know
how
she was letting him know, but she was letting him know.

He kissed her, tentatively, and then he pulled back—to check on her, to make sure he’d been invited.

The person next door changed the channel.
NYPD Blue.
She heard the voice of Andy Sipowicz: “I don’t care if he gets himself lawyered up with Clarence
Darrow.
He’s a low-life skell, and I’m gonna nail his ass to the wall.”

Cop shows on every channel. Why? Why do we want to believe what we believed as children: that the police are friendly and wise and good . . . ?

The marijuana had definitely not worn off.

She was upset with herself for letting their first kiss, the first kiss of their new life, if that was what it was, be ruined. She’d barely noticed it as it was happening.

Isaac was still looking at her questioningly.

She leaned forward, determined to put more into it this time, so that she’d stop ruminating and give herself fully to the experience.

At the moment when her lips touched his, however, she was thinking of Wilhelm Reich’s theory of fascism. The theory that the mass of humanity craves protection and will do almost anything, submit to any authority, in order to feel protected. That was why cop shows were ever-popular.

Was this why she was kissing Isaac: because she couldn’t summon up the strength to leave Benjamin unless she felt she was being protected by another man?

When she thought of Benjamin, the dreadful river of con
science rushed in. She was still
with
Benjamin. She didn’t want to be, but she was, and therefore she shouldn’t be doing this now.

And then the river of reason. Her task right now was to get back to the life she wanted to live: the life in which she was creating herself through her work. She had sought Isaac out because he, more than anyone else, had encouraged her to go deeper into that life. But if she did finally choose to be with him again, it should be because she
wanted
him, not because she was trying to free herself from Benjamin.

How could she still
be
with Benjamin? How could she be stuck with him a year after she’d realized she had to leave him? She felt like a character in a Chekhov story: not someone who was squeezing the slave out of himself—he actually never wrote stories like that—but someone who knows she’s living the wrong life but is powerless to change it. But that wasn’t her! Chekhov was her favorite writer, but she didn’t
want
to be a character in a Chekhov story! I’m the heroine, damn it, of my own life!

At least I want to be.

While she was thinking about all this, Isaac was somewhere in the room. In fact, his lips were on her lips. How can this be happening? How can I be so deep inside my head? In an episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Mr. Data, the
Enterprise
’s android science officer, in his never-ending quest to become more like a human being, investigates the experience of love, and becomes involved with a fellow crew member, who, after their first make-out session, sensing that his simulated heart isn’t fully into it, asks him what he’d been thinking about while they kissed. He tells her that he was reconfiguring the warp-field parameters, analyzing the collected works of Charles Dickens, calculating the maximum pressure he could
safely apply to her lips, and considering a new food supplement for one of the pets aboard the ship. This was supposed to illustrate something about his android nature—his emotional detachment and the capaciousness of his brain. So this is the terrible truth, Nora thought. I too am an android.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go! She needed to get out of this. She needed to stop.

But how? How could she get out of this without hurting him?

She was at a loss. She was stumped by the difficulty of ending the kissing session.

Where the kissing never stops,
she thought. The title of an essay by Joan Didion.

Stop it!
she said to her mind.
Stop thinking!

It would be good, she thought, if an announcer broke in in the middle of
NYPD Blue
with a tragic news flash. If there’d been an earthquake somewhere, whole neighborhoods leveled, that would be good, because they would be shocked into a recognition of how irresponsible it was to be kissing in a world in which people were dying.

That didn’t make sense.

But this wasn’t right. They had to stop.

She was miserable. Two hours ago she had vowed not to hurt him again, and now she was about to hurt him already.

It would definitely be best if Isaac himself were to end it. Surely he must have sensed that she wasn’t giving herself fully to this experience. Although that would probably be more clear to him if she took her hand off his fly.

She had to figure out a way to make
him
end it, so he wouldn’t be hurt. Or—what was that plan she’d had a minute ago? Oh, yes: an earthquake. Her shirt was about to come off.

You have to be honest. You have to try to move through this life with integrity, even when you don’t want to.

She pulled her head back and put her hands on his face. She hoped it felt loving, but she was restraining him. She hoped it was clear that she was restraining him lovingly.

“Is everything all right?” he said.

“I’m having a lovely time with you, Isaac. But”—she sighed—“I’m still with someone else.” She put a hand consolingly on his arm.

He didn’t look surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.

“One life at a time,” she said, with a slight inward wince. It was the height of cornball-hood, but she and Isaac talked that way to each other sometimes.

“One life at a time,” he said, and she was thankful that she had found a phrase that had the right effect on him. He leaned back on the couch with a half smile.

N
ORA WAS SLEEPING IN HIS BED
. She’d asked if they could just lie together all night with their clothes on; he’d said yes, but after she fell asleep he realized he couldn’t stand it. He got up and went into the kitchen.

It was amazing how his desire for her had only grown.

One night after he’d been with her for about a year, they were having dinner at midnight in a dark little bar in the East Village and she mentioned that she’d seen
Body Heat
—William Hurt and Kathleen Turner—on TV the day before. “Their sex was hot,” she said. She took a sip of her drink, smiling, looking him straight in the eye. “But ours is hotter.”

He hadn’t even gotten to see her legs tonight. She hadn’t taken her damn pants off.

He hadn’t even gotten to see her
scar.
She hadn’t even rolled up her sleeves.

He was maddened by the fact that she didn’t want to sleep with him.

He wondered whether she’d ever make a life with someone—with him or with anyone else. Even though she’d almost always been in relationships, there was something essentially solitary about her. Growing up an only child and being orphaned in her teens; her early life might have left an indelible mark.

He paced around his kitchen, not knowing what to do. He felt all jangly and insulted. “Blue balls,” a term from his youth, came into his mind. Sexual insult: they’d gotten started, and then she wanted to stop.

He felt inept. He wondered if the real reason she’d wanted to stop was that he hadn’t been touching her right. Their sex used to be hot, yes, but he’d always secretly worried that eventually he’d start to bore her. He thought of himself as the kind of person who, when he cooked a meal, always followed the recipe. He worried that he lacked the improvisational spirit without which one can never hope to achieve greatness in any field that matters, be it sex, jazz, or basketball.

And he was worried for another reason. He felt as if he was wooing Nora under false pretenses. A few of the things she’d said that evening—how he was her moral touchstone, how excited she was about his show—had unnerved him.

Nora, without knowing it, was talking about the person he used to be. He didn’t know how she’d feel about the person he’d become.

Sometimes he thought he had made his way in life through a series of nervous breakdowns. The problem was that Nora didn’t know about the most recent of them, the one she’d helped bring about.

When he was a boy, when his friends were thinking about nothing except sports or cars, he was thinking about nothing except God. Just after Isaac’s tenth birthday, his grandfather died, and he started thinking about the mysteries of life and death, casting his mind out over these mysteries with a small boy’s great capacity for wonder. He decided that he wanted to become a student of the Talmud, and he spent seven years in solemn preparation for a lifetime of worshiping God.

When he was in high school, he began to find his history
classes fascinating, and the study of history undid him. The steady record of human barbarity, reaching its awful blossoming in the twentieth century—progress, it seemed, meant little more than the development of ever more efficient ways to slaughter people—swept away his belief that we were fashioned by a divine intelligence. He was too honest to try to pull the covers of faith back over his head, no matter how much he might have wanted to. He was still little more than a boy, but his rejection of religion—a body of thought that had given a shape to every day of his life and freed him from anxiety about the future—left him feeling like a spent old man.

In his senior year of high school he took a photography class and immediately became obsessed. Photography took the place of prayer. He’d lost his belief in God; he’d come to believe that nothing existed except this world: the fleeting world, the disappearing world. But he hadn’t lost his sense of reverence, his sense of wonder before the mysteries of life. And now he believed that the best way to express his reverence was to try to capture the object of it with his camera: this world of appearances, this world that is all we have.

He majored in photography at Cooper Union. When he graduated, he barely noticed the event, because nothing essential changed in his life. He was obsessed with taking pictures the day before he graduated and obsessed with taking pictures the day after.

Until his early thirties he lived in the heroic mode, putting photography before everything else. He picked up freelance work to pay the bills, but as little as possible; he lived like someone who’d taken a vow of poverty. He was sustained not by external rewards—there
were
no external rewards—but by the pure love of taking pictures.

Gradually, as the years went on, it got harder. Standing on a corner for hours waiting for the light to fall in the right way—it was one thing when he was young. When he was young it was worth it: there was grandeur to the activity of waiting—waiting for the moment when the texture of the light altered subtly and everything was transformed. But as he grew older, it became harder to sustain that level of devotion. His legs began to give out. His will began to give out.

By his middle thirties, he’d had a few moments of recognition—the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had bought one of his pictures for its permanent collection; he was showing his work in galleries about once a year; he’d put out a book of photographs, which had come into the world unheralded and then gone demurely out of print—but they hadn’t cohered into anything approaching a reputation. When he was younger he wouldn’t have thought this would matter. He’d thought that you do the thing solely because you love it, and the idea of needing to be rewarded for it seemed absurd. But it had come to matter somehow.

Just after Isaac’s thirty-fifth birthday, he suffered a series of misfortunes, large and small. A gallery owner who liked his work died suddenly, and the hipsters who took over the place never even returned his calls; his sister, his beloved little sister, followed her guru to Oregon and cut off all contact with the family; an editor at Aperture, the best publisher of photography books in the country, turned down his proposal for a new volume of photographs by telling him that his work was “unoriginal.” And Nora left him. All this within a few months.

The confluence of bummers sent him reeling. His way of working through his unhappiness was to take pictures. Without meaning to change his approach, he found that his approach
had changed. He stopped focusing; he stopped worrying about how much light to let in. He stopped trying to play matchmaker between the camera and the world; he let them work out their relationship on their own. All he did was press the button. These new photographs were blurry, unfocused, uncomposed, yet he thought there was more feeling in them than in anything he’d ever done before.

He had no idea whether these photographs would mean anything to anyone else. It turned out that they didn’t—not, at any rate, to anyone who mattered in the wider world. Some of his friends liked them, or said they did. But he couldn’t get them into any of the galleries or magazines that occasionally welcomed his work.