A Window Across the River (26 page)

Susan Becker, an editor from the
Boston Globe,
came up to say hello, and she and Isaac small-talked for a few minutes. Isaac had always liked her; she reminded him of his sister.

Susan was unhappy because three people who worked for her were leaving: two to have babies, one to travel the world. “If you hear of anybody good who needs a job, let me know.”

“Do they have to have experience?”

“Young, old. Doesn’t matter. They have to be competent, and they have to be reliable. No flakes. But that’s about it.”

The job would be perfect for Earl. The
Globe
would be a great place to start off. And he could handle it. He was a talented, hardworking, responsible young man.

When Isaac was in his twenties, he’d once said to his sister that every time he’d gotten a break in life, it was because one old Jewish guy or another had helped him out. “What’ll I do when they’re all gone?” “By that time,” his sister had said, “you’ll
be
the old Jewish guy.”

Glancing over Susan’s shoulder, Isaac could see that Earl was still having a fine time, and he realized that he didn’t feel like doing him a favor.

“If I think of anybody, I’ll let you know,” he said.

There are times when you know what you should do, but you don’t do it. During the two years it took him to quit smoking, almost every time he picked up a cigarette he would think, “This is wrong,” and then he would light it.

The opening, the public part of the event, was coming to an end; the dinner, which was invitation-only, was beginning.

People were beginning to drift off toward the dining room. Isaac didn’t want to go in. He thought he’d just give the ticket to Earl.

“Well, buddy,” he said, “I’ve got to get going a little early. Why don’t you take this.” He gave him the ticket.

“Really?” Earl said.

“Really.”

“I can’t believe this. You’re awesome!”

The poor kid had no way of knowing that Isaac had screwed him. Would never know.

“You’re a true mentor,” Earl said.

Isaac shook his hand, leaning backward to ward off a possible hug.

After he left the building, walking past one of the great stone lions, he thought that he’d not only let Earl down, he’d let himself down. He had obeyed his baser instincts.

If Earl had been a young woman, would Isaac have done the same thing? If he’d been an attractive young woman . . . ?

He remembered how, a few weeks ago, he’d forced himself to behave generously toward Renee—forced himself to appear delighted by her success—and how, at the end of that evening, he’d felt a little more human.

He turned around and went up to the dining room, found Earl, found Susan Becker, and introduced them. “Here’s your man,” Isaac said, clapping Earl on the back with a false heartiness.

Leaving the building for the second time, he didn’t feel better. He felt worse. He would have felt better if he’d hurt someone. Nadine, Freddy, McCall, Earl, Susan. Almost anyone.

H
E FOUND A PAY PHONE
on the corner, called his answering machine, and got Nora’s message. She’d remembered the exhibit after all; she’d just been too tired to attend it. He didn’t know if that made him feel better or worse.

She’d invited him over. He took the subway to the Upper West Side—his car was in the shop. Nora’s doorman, Arthur, greeted him by name, and Isaac had to be personable.

When he got out of the elevator, Nora had her door open. She was leaning against the doorjamb, looking welcoming but tired.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m really sorry about the library thing. I’m glad you came.”

He nodded. Somehow her calling it “the library thing” made him angrier.

“How was it? What did I miss?”

“You missed some superb mushrooms.”

“How was Nadine? Did she spend the whole night flirting with you?”

“Nadine. Yes. Nadine and I are thick as thieves.”

The upright bass he’d picked up for his nephew was still in the corner—he kept forgetting to take it to his brother’s, though he lived only about fifteen blocks away. Against the wall, sitting on its little card table, Nora’s computer was on. She had a
Star Trek
screensaver: silver stars slipping slowly through space. To the right of the computer was a stack of printed pages. He thought of Nora at her computer, thoughtfully replacing a semicolon with a comma while he waited for her at the diner, his mouth full of mushy wet grape leaves.

“You been writing?”

“Yeah.” She swept her hand in the air in a gesture that seemed to indicate the poetic difficulty of writing.

She’d been too tired to join him at what they both thought would be a special occasion for him, but she hadn’t been too tired to write.

“You know, I haven’t read anything of yours in a long time,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“Why don’t you let me read what you’re writing?”
Let me see what was so much more important than coming to the reception with me.

“It’s funny you should ask. I was just thinking I’d like you to read it.” She didn’t look as though she’d been thinking this; in fact she looked as if the idea made her ill.

He was oddly disappointed. It was as if he’d wanted her to say no, so he could have another reason to be angry with her.

“Great,” he said. He walked toward the card table.

“I didn’t mean
now.
”

“Why not? If not now, when?”

“If not now, later. It’ll be weird being in the same room while you’re reading it. I’ll wonder what you’re thinking about every sentence.”

“I’m sure I’ll be loving every sentence.”

He didn’t know what he was after. He wanted the story to be great or terrible. If it was great, he could punish himself with the reflection that Nora, like Renee, was artistically out of
his league—the thought of how untalented he was. If it was terrible, he could be angry with her for staying home to write instead of keeping her date with him.

He picked up the story and sat on the couch.

“I can’t sit here while you’re reading,” she said. “I’m too nervous. I have to take a walk.”

“Okay.” He looked down at the story and then looked up at her again. She seemed to have more to say. “Yes?”

“I need you to keep in mind that it’s a story. And I need you to keep an open mind. I know you’re going to have your reactions, but I hope you won’t make up your mind what you think about it until we talk.”

“Fine. Of course.” He was beginning to wonder what he’d gotten into.

She picked up her wallet. “I’ll be at the bookstore. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

She left, and he read the first paragraph of her story. It was about him.

He read the story slowly. When he read the first page, he was flattered. She was describing his appearance, and she evidently thought he didn’t look bad. She’d always
told
him she thought he was handsome, but you can never be sure.

When he got to the third and fourth and fifth pages, he was touched. She was writing about him and his sister. She’d never met Jenny, but she’d captured her on the page. He was touched that Nora had listened so well; he was touched that she cared enough about him to put him at the center of a story.

When he came to the middle of the story, he started to feel uneasy.

When he had finished the story, he felt stunned. Stunned and unloved and alone.

The story was about the trip he took to New Haven to
reason with Jenny about her decision to join the cult. Nothing in the story took place the way things had actually happened. The train had never broken down; the friends of Jenny’s who’d cowed Isaac into silence didn’t exist. But at the same time, Nora’s intuitions were uncanny. His failure of nerve hadn’t taken the form it took in the story, but he
had
had a failure of nerve. And he
had
let Jenny down.

He closed his eyes and thought about the way it had really happened—the argument about the cheeseburger, the lost keys. The way things had really happened was so undramatic that a year from now he’d probably remember Nora’s version more vividly than his own.

The most horrible thing was not the account of the visit, but what Nora seemed to be saying about it. She seemed to see his failure with Jenny as an emblem of his entire life. She had taken his life and shown it in the worst possible light.

If she was so eerily accurate about what had happened that night—about the feel of it, if not the facts—could she be wrong about his life, wrong about who he was?

Over the past few months, although she’d never mentioned it, Nora must have noticed that he wasn’t taking pictures anymore. She’d stopped asking him about his plans for future work; it had certainly been a long time since she’d called him anything like a “touchstone.” But since she’d never said anything, he had allowed himself to believe that maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t realized that he wasn’t a practicing artist anymore, that maybe she still respected him.

The story made it clear that she didn’t. The person in the story, “Gabriel,” was a man who, in the end, lacked strength and conviction. He’d had both when he was young, but he’d let them leak away.

This was what she’d been working on for the last few months, while he thought they’d been falling unbreakably in love. This was why she hadn’t joined him at the reception. While Nadine was ignoring him and McCall was insulting him, Nora had been injuring him in a much more intimate way.

He’d never believed that she could write a hurtful story about him. And he’d underestimated her power to wound him. He hadn’t read
1984
since high school, but he’d never forgotten the part about Room 101: how the torturers had a way of fitting their torture to each victim, finding precisely the assault that would make each person crack. Nora, he now thought, or the demon that resided inside her—the goblin, as she called it—had the power to ferret out that one thing you feared might be true about yourself, the thing you hoped nobody else had noticed.

He heard the key in the lock. Very softly, Nora pushed open the door. She had an expression of nervousness and concern, and maybe a tiny sliver of hope.

“Did you read it?”

“Oh yes.”

“Are you upset?”

“Oh yes.”

“Isaac—you need to know that this isn’t what I think of you. This is just what happens when I write. I see things one way, and the stories see them all another way. It’s something I can’t control. The difference between you and Gabriel is that Gabriel
ends
there. I know your life didn’t end there.”

The more she apologized, the worse he felt. He didn’t believe her. The voice you could hear in her story was her truest voice.

If he had read it at another time, it might not have hurt so
much. But tonight it was unendurable. For more than a month now, the world had been letting him know that he just wasn’t good enough. Up until now he’d been learning that he wasn’t good enough as an artist, but Nora’s story was telling him that he wasn’t good enough as a man.

In her story, Gabriel, too timid to say what he wanted to say to his sister, had thought that his shortcomings as a man and an artist grew from the same root.
You need to have a little wildness in you, which is the one thing I don’t have:
those were the words that Nora had put in Gabriel’s head.

Her computer was sitting placidly on her card table, waiting for her to turn her unique form of attention to someone else.

Whenever you visited her, Nora’s computer was on. She never turned the fucking thing off. You’d be having what you thought was an intimate conversation, but all the while it would be sitting there humming away, so you could never forget that it was her work Nora was committed to, not you.

He felt like smashing it.

He walked over to the window. He could see the river, sleek and dark, and, beyond it, the lights of New Jersey, blinking with a provincial ardor.

She smiled at him sadly. “Would you jump off this roof for me?” she said. As she’d said to him years ago. It was as if she was asking him to sacrifice himself for her in a new way: asking him to forgive her for writing about him without charity.

What was she alive for? What was the point of her? She moved through the world doing her little acts of saintly care—giving blood on her birthday, moving in with her aunt—but then at night she’d go home to her computer and shit on the people she claimed to love.

He was getting angrier and angrier.

Isaac was a careful man, even on the rare occasions when he lost control: he prepared to lose control before he lost it. He knew that Nora’s window didn’t overlook the sidewalk or the street but the roof of a smaller building. Now he glanced outside to make sure the roof was empty.

“Probably not,” he said. “But I’d
throw
things off the roof for you.”

He picked up her story from the couch where he’d laid it, stepped quickly to the window, and tossed it, underhand, like a bride tossing a bouquet. Before he let go, he imagined that the pages would flutter gracefully, one by one, through the night sky, but instead they went straight down in a clump.

“Okay,” Nora said. “I deserve that.”

“You know, Nora, I might have a little more wildness in me than you think.” He picked up the computer and pulled the plug out of the wall.

“Come on. Put that down.” She moved toward him.

“You’ve been complaining about this thing for months. Why don’t I help you out?” He headed back toward the window. He was feeling a jolt of macho joy, as if he were about to make a monster slam dunk. Pseudo-macho joy, since the path to the basket was blocked only by Nora. She moved in front of the window, putting out her hands to try to stop him from raising the laptop over his head, and for a moment he thought they were going to knock each other out the window, that they would die that way, and in the next moment he thought he’d drop the computer and embrace her and they’d make love, and then he just leaned over her and lobbed it, in a soft, heavy arc, into the night.

There was a silence, and then they heard it, faintly, breaking. The sound wasn’t as satisfying as he would have liked.

“Jesus Christ. You could have killed somebody.”