Authors: Jill Bialosky
“You’re good, William.”
“Eleanor.” He stopped and looked at his half-eaten steak. “I wish there was an alternative universe, where none of the rules apply.”
“I know what you mean.”
“The world creeps in little by little and sometimes I don’t weather it well.”
“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” she said, when they hugged good-bye in his driveway. “Don’t try to do so much.”
“Look, a falling star.” She looked up and saw another fall. “That’s one thing you can’t see in that city. Think of me when you go to Central Park, Eleanor.”
“When do I not think about you?” she said, holding on to the sleeve of his coat.
William said he had met a man on the streets of downtown Chicago who was trying to save his soul—a born-again Christian—when he came to visit her in New York a month later. The born-again convinced William that the end of the world was coming, that if he did not redeem himself he would go to hell. “It’s strange,” William said. “I mean to me hell is right here on earth.” He said the man told him that if he embraced Jesus he would understand the puzzle of darkness and light. William had a curiosity for things and explanations not of the earth, and he knew how to listen.
They were lying on her twin captain’s bed that also served as a couch in her one-room studio. “It made me think,” he said. “I don’t understand why we’re here. I don’t mean in this room. I mean cosmically. I mean why are we
here
? I don’t like to think about it, but it’s there, that question. Are we supposed to wake up every day and do the same thing? Eat, go to work, sleep? What’s the point when there’s cruelty? What’s the point when people next door don’t have enough to eat? It’s always haunting me, that there’s evil in the world. I don’t understand the way the world operates. I don’t want to spend my whole life making money doing something I don’t like so that I have a bigger house, a bigger television.”
“We’re here to be good people, William. You have to find your passion.”
“You’re my passion, Eleanor.” He took her hand and held it like you would a valuable present and then kissed it. “I have my dogs and the woods where no one bothers me and I have you, what else is there? I wish we could go far away. Live in the woods, sleep underneath the trees. Eleanor, do you think there are trees in heaven?”
It was dark in the room. Outside, in the hall, she heard a congregation around the pay phone, talking about keg parties and cramming for exams. She squeezed his hand. “Let me finish school. We’ll figure it out then,” she said, thinking maybe that William could never leave the woods. She suddenly felt ashamed of all the hours she spent in Adam’s studio when it was William who needed her. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and in the dark she could see the shape of W illiam’s arm as he lifted it toward the ceiling and stared at his hand.
“Do you ever look at your hands and feel that they don’t belong to you? Like they are not your own?”
“Yes.” She lied to reassure him. “Of course.”
“Hold me, Eleanor.”
“What’s wrong? Tell me.”
“Sometimes I can’t figure a way out of my own head. I can’t stop thinking about how I’m going to get it all done. The electrical. The hot water when winter comes.” Her eye wandered to the crack underneath the door and the stretch of light. She heard a sound of an animal in agony. She thought it was a dog or cat out her window. She had never heard William cry before.
“You’re stressed. You have to calm down.” She tried to breathe strength into William’s neck. She held him and they fell asleep like brother and sister without making love. The eagerness to touch, to kiss, to be close to each other’s bodies had distilled into something more urgent.
In the morning she took William to the synagogue on 88th Street to consult the rabbi. “Something’s wrong. You’re not supposed to believe in Jesus. You’re Jewish, for God’s sake.” Even though she wasn’t really religious, and barely went to synagogue, she woke up with the idea that William was in some kind of philosophical crisis and it was the only idea that made sense. “You can seek God, but he’s a loving God.”
But when they arrived at the door to the rabbi’s chambers, William changed his mind. “I’m not going through with this. I’m okay, Eleanor,” he said, when she was about to knock. “I don’t feel so bad today.”
There was a spark of light back in his eyes. He didn’t seem so anxious. “I don’t want to do this. Come on, I’m leaving tomorrow to go back home. You and I need to be together.”
Before they left they took a peek into the synagogue. Eleanor’s eye caught the everlasting light on the bema. “Look. God is watching us. He’s taking care of you.”
All the leaves had fallen off the tree on Broadway. It looked stark and naked. They walked back to her studio apartment. She looked at him in his wool sweater, and the bulk of him reassured her. William picked up a burnt-red leaf from the ground and pressed it into her palm. “It’s the color of my heart.”
She took it in her hand and put it in her pocket.
“You’re okay now, aren’t you?” Eleanor asked in the morning as William stuffed his work clothes into his duffel bag. “I wish you didn’t have to leave.”
They sat on the edge of her bed. William coaxed her down on the mattress and looked into her eyes. “It’s okay,” he said. “Do you hear the trees outside the window making love to the wind? Remember the sound. I’ll be inside it.”
They went to Broadway to hail a cab. Going to a fancy Ivy League University, studying literature—she spent days in her room smoking cigarettes, drinking instant coffee, and analyzing lines of poetry—and modeling for Adam seemed meaningless when she looked into William’s searching, down-to-earth eyes the color of the forest. She had begun to believe that what mattered most was living through literature and art. She didn’t live comfortably in the world the way that other people did. But what if she was wrong? Watching William, she told herself that she might give up her ambition. That she’d drop out of graduate school and go back to the woods and simplify her life. As they said good-bye on Broadway, the wind biting their faces and sending up swirls of garbage and papers from the street, she held on to the lapels of his coat. She looked in his eyes. “I’ll be home soon. Hang in there. It won’t be long now.”
William stopped and pulled her closer to him. “You have to know it isn’t your fault. You have to promise me you know that.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Promise.” A cab stopped and pulled over. The white light on top of the roof of the cab went off. She said nothing. “Promise me, Eleanor. This isn’t a joke.”
“I promise,” she whispered into his coat. She thought he was referring to the fact that she had left him to go to college. She stood by the side of the street, watching as he climbed in the cab, until it was long out of sight.
She collapsed on the bed in her room. She looked at the red leaf he had given her that she had placed on her dresser. It was curling up at the edges.
Eleanor looked at the clock. It was 2:30. She thought about William’s words again.
My hands, Eleanor. They don’t feel like my own
. She looked at her own hands. Sunday she had slipped out to get a manicure to revive herself when the boys were at the apartment next door for a playdate, and though she admired the soft sheen the polish left on her fingernails, when she looked at her hands again, for the first time she thought she understood what William had meant. She put away her copy of
The Inferno
and closed her notepad, filled with the sense that something was coming unhinged. She packed up her belongings into her book bag and went to fetch Nicholas and Noah from school. She took in the scents of spring, noticed the daffodils still in bloom in the median running down the middle of Park Avenue, saw the buds on the trees, their narrow dark arrows about to blossom. It had been a long winter in New York and the flowers and trees were late beginning to bloom.
Nicholas was on the steps anxiously waiting for her. He hugged her hips. How quickly her children could snap her out of a mood. He wanted to have a playdate, and she let him run off, though she suddenly didn’t want him to go.
Noah’s class was coming out of the school building. Eleanor saw Noah’s shiny black hair. He was carrying his square Batman lunch box. She walked in on a conversation between two of the other mothers about the spring fair and plans for the summer. You could be a banker, an academic, a stay-at-home mom, an actress, and none of it mattered when it came to talking about children. She liked the selfless bond she shared with other women as they arranged playdates, gossiped about their children, smiled at each other as their children came running out the school doors.
Eleanor let her son direct her to the playground. She watched Noah climb the jungle gym with his typical ease and spring. She marveled (still) that he was her child. She measured the miracles of the world by her children’s small but meaningful accomplishments. When Nicholas learned to read she had to remind herself not to take his intelligence, his health, his beauty, his empathy, any of it for granted. She reminded herself how once she had wanted a child so badly she could taste it, because she did not want for one minute to think that her children wouldn’t be enough to sustain her. She sat on the mound of lawn overlooking the playground and contemplated the children. She remembered that Stephen had called her earlier that day and she smiled.
She let Noah play in the playground until the other mothers and babysitters began to gather their charges to head home. As they walked toward the subway she talked him through the minutiae of her day. The routine of knowing exactly where she was and what she did when they were apart calmed him. She began with conferences with students, the fracas with a faculty member, what she was reading or teaching, and as she spoke she reflected that the trip to Paris was finally behind her. For many nights since returning she had found her mind wandering back to the fixed look in Stephen’s face as he stood on the bridge over the Seine. She thought if she continued to remember Stephen that day on the bridge she would never be able to sleep or rest peacefully again. She reminded herself that that night after she had seen him she felt as if a chasm opened and how eventually the feeling passed.
Noah loved to take the subway. Eleanor thought his enthusiasm for it would eventually wane and that it would turn commonplace, but it hadn’t yet. Sometimes he was the conductor. Other times he was Spiderman and the bad guys were in one of the cars and he’d have to figure out which car before they arrived at their stop.
When they stood on the platform waiting for the train, even though he was seven, she still feared he’d jump out and fall in front of the tracks. She insisted that he stand behind the yellow line, holding her hand. Fie sometimes traveled so far into his imaginary play that he could block out the world around him. “All it takes is one misstep, one minute of not paying attention,” she had warned him. He looked up at her with annoyance in his eye. “I’m not a baby, Mommy.”
They waited for the train. Eleanor noticed a woman at the end of the platform in her early thirties with long blond hair, wearing a skirt and a colorful scarf tied around her neck. She was walking back and forth, pacing between two columns. She was used to seeing agitated homeless people pacing back and forth, but this woman did not appear homeless. She stopped close to the edge of the platform and then walked back against the wall. She looked up. It looked as if she’d been crying. A blotch of mascara was underneath one eye. Eleanor tried to catch her gaze in sympathy, smile, but the woman stared through her, seemingly absorbed in her own thoughts. Eleanor turned away to give her privacy.
Noah tugged on her hand. The train was approaching. She heard a cry and instinctively pulled Noah against her body to hide his eyes. The train hit something. The wheels screeched on the track, and the train came to an abrupt halt. Eleanor continued to hide Noah’s face, making her body a shield. Commotion filled the subway station. She looked toward the end of the platform for the woman. She was gone. Had she imagined her? People began screaming. Police officers flew down the stairwell. Everyone shoved to get through the turnstiles. Eleanor gripped Noah’s hand and pushed through the crowd converging near the exit. She was anxious to get her son above ground. She turned to walk him toward the stairway, holding on to his hand so tightly she thought she felt his knuckles crack. Again, the blare of ambulances reverberated inside her eardrums. As she mounted the stairs she looked back again, hoping to catch sight of the woman with the blond hair in the ascending crowd.
She ran the bath for the boys. She scoured the refrigerator for what she might prepare for dinner. She intended to pick up some fresh vegetables to make with pasta, remembering that Michael was not coming home. Nicholas arrived from his playdate and threw his backpack on the floor in the hallway, then kicked off his shoes in the middle of the kitchen. She yelled at him to pick up his shoes. It had been too much and her son’s smelly gym shoes were in the middle of her kitchen and he had run off to play with his action figures. The laundry she had forgotten to fold that morning was all over the kitchen counter in piles. It was recycling day and she hadn’t wrapped up the newspapers. There was no milk in the refrigerator. There was no pasta. “Nicholas, get in here and pick up your shoes,” she shouted. He didn’t hear her. “Get in here and pick up your shoes,” she said again. There were smudges on the glass in the kitchen cabinets, handprints on the cupboards, piles of mail overflowed from its basket. “NICHOLAS!” she screamed. Her hands were shaking. “It’s okay, Mom,” Nicholas said, gathering up his shoes. “No, it’s not okay,” she said.
“I won’t do it anymore,” Nicholas said, standing in the kitchen with his tennis shoes in his hands. “I promise.”
She looked at his face and softened. “It hasn’t been a good day,” she said. “Sorry I yelled at you.”
Her son stared at her strangely, clutching his tennis shoes against his chest before he went to his bedroom.
Her objective was to get the boys to sleep so that she could retreat to her study. She was filled with the sensation that she was being punished for the transgressions in her mind. Perhaps she had willed the accident on the subway platform—if it was an accident. Had she been missing the clues and signs about her own life all along, the way she had missed the clues about William? She heard his voice in her head.
Why are we here in the first place?
The vacant eyes of the woman on the platform stayed with her. How she saw past Eleanor, how we always see past each other if we don’t pay attention. How we can see even past ourselves.