A Window Across the River (11 page)

A large and brilliant blue butterfly approached her—dancing toward her and backing away at the same time—and
she was filled, not only with joy, but with gratitude. The sheer trustfulness of the people who’d put this exhibit together nearly brought tears to her eyes—their faith that the young people who visited this tent wouldn’t be inclined to maul the butterflies, to tear their wings off; their faith that the experience itself would be civilizing.

Some of the butterflies seemed to float through the air without moving their wings. It was like being in a summer shower, a shower of pure beauty. It was like being in some Utopian jungle, the tenderest and calmest jungle that could possibly be.

They left the exhibit and walked through the park. They walked around the reservoir, a part of the park that Billie loved. It was a sparkling day; braids of sunlight rippled across the water.

At Mount Sinai, they waited for two hours until Billie was given a room. The other bed was empty, which was nice. The first thing she did was take out her photo album and put it on the night table. It unfolded accordion-style, so you could look at all the pictures at once. There was a picture of Billie’s parents—Nora’s grandparents; one of Nora with her mother—Nora, at the age of three, standing on Margaret’s lectern at the University of Chicago; one of the cats—all three of them sandwiched together on the couch, sleeping; and one of Billie with Nelson, more than twenty years ago, in a paddle boat, laughing.

“Home sweet home,” Billie said.

Nora looked around the bare room. “There’s just one more thing this room needs,” Nora said. She took a bottle of bubbles from her bag—she’d bought it in a party store on Broadway that morning. She opened the bottle, dipped the wand in the liquid, held the wand in front of her lips, and blew.
Ten or fifteen bubbles shot up toward the ceiling and settled slowly in the air: glistening, iridescent, slippery, circling, trembling, wavery, gone.

Nora gave her the bottle and Billie, with a soft breath, sent four small bubbles into the air.

“You’re good to me,” she said.

“You’re easy to be good to.”

W
HILE
N
ORA WAS IN THE
waiting room, a nurse came in to tell her she had a phone call. She took the call at the nurses’ station. It was Isaac.

“I was just calling to find out how Billie’s doing.”

Nora told him that she was still in surgery.

“How did you find me? How’d you get the number here?”

“You don’t spend the night with a hotel detective without picking up a thing or two,” he said.

She stayed at the hospital until Dr. Buffalo came out to tell her that the operation was over, that everything had gone smoothly, and that they wouldn’t know the results for a few days. Billie was in the recovery room; she was under sedation, and would probably just sleep all night.

After leaving the hospital, Nora took the subway downtown to meet Benjamin.

She was meeting him at a restaurant where a group of writers he knew got together for dinner once a month. After that the two of them were going to a book party near Battery Park City.

While she rode the subway, her arm began to throb. It was hard to understand why no one else was aware of it. It seemed to be calling out.

Three different doctors had told her that she needed an
operation: her bones had knitted together in the wrong way, and they needed to be broken again and reset. She didn’t
want
to go through an operation, and anyway she had no faith that just one operation would do the trick. She had tried physical therapy, acupuncture, acupressure, yoga, Swedish massage, Chinese herbal medicine, magnets, and prescription painkillers (some of them made the pain go away, but they made her stupid), and nothing helped. So she’d finally decided just to live with the pain. The only problem was that it sometimes affected her mood. Pain can make you less generous, less patient.

A couple of days earlier, Nora had read an article in the
Nation
by someone who had been a longtime member of the American Communist Party. He said he understood why he’d joined the party (idealism), and why he’d left (it had corrupted every ideal it claimed to stand for). What he couldn’t understand was why he’d stayed with the party for so long.

Sitting on the subway train, awkwardly massaging her arm, Nora asked herself the same thing about her relationship with Benjamin. Why have I stayed with
this
party for so long?

She’d met Benjamin a year and a half ago. For the first few months, he intrigued her. She thought he was the most serious person, the most touchingly serious person, she’d ever met. He taught in the comparative literature department at the City University of New York; he was a specialist in German literature and philosophy. He was always reading people like Windelband and Dilthey, whoever they were. Dilthey! When she first knew him, she thought of his reading habits as heroic. He was rescuing people from oblivion—because if he didn’t read Dilthey, who would? He was like a fireman of intellectual life, rescuing frail forgotten thinkers from the burning building of time.

When she was getting to know him, she’d sometimes drop
in on him at his haunt at the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia—he’d spend hours there, reading and drinking coffee—and when she’d sit down across from him he’d look up, smiling kindly but vaguely, as if unable to place her; and she was charmed by this. It was as if he belonged in another century. She always had the feeling that if she’d arrived ten minutes earlier, she would have seen him chatting with Freud or Wittgenstein or Karl Kraus.

Her unhappiness arrived quietly, almost without announcing itself. One afternoon a few months after they got together, she was in his apartment when he got a call from someone from Rutgers University Press. Benjamin was publishing a book, a beefed-up version of his dissertation—a study of the later work of the Austrian novelist Hermann Broch—and he needed to do some last-minute revisions. She picked up something to read and went to the kitchen, and after he got off the phone she went back to the living room and asked him if the revisions were done.

“No. I still have to have one more conversation with Alex”—his editor. “I was talking to some lowly assistant just now.”

After he said this, she realized she’d already known it. Even from another room, even without hearing his words, she’d been able to tell that he was talking to some lowly assistant. If he’d been talking to someone he considered important, he would have had a different tone of voice.

She began to be bothered by the way he spoke to people: waiters, receptionists, his students when they called on the phone. Unless they could help him or impede him in some way—unless they were important to his career—just about everyone was a lowly assistant to him.

She could pinpoint the moment when she realized she needed to leave him. It was on the day the new phone books arrived. She picked one up in her lobby and took it upstairs and looked herself up—not to make sure her listing was accurate, but because finding your name in the new phone book is a small and slightly startling confirmation that you exist. Then she looked Benjamin up. She’d never looked him up in the phone book before.

He existed too: Benjamin Mandelbaum, Ph.D.

Ph.D.?

The funny thing was, it didn’t really surprise her. It didn’t surprise her that he felt the need to inform the readership of the Verizon Manhattan SuperPages of the fact that he had a Ph.D.

When you’re bothered by your boyfriend’s listing in the phone book, it’s probably a sign that you’re not really meant for each other.

It wasn’t that he was a bad person. He
did
have a passion for learning, like few people she had ever known. There
was
something moving about his devotion to old dead thinkers. He wasn’t a bad person, but he wasn’t the person for her. There was nothing left to do but leave him.

But before you leave someone, you have to have The Talk. How she dreaded The Talk! She’d once heard that the essayist Lionel Abel had left his first wife by going out to buy a pack of cigarettes and never coming back, and she kept wondering if this was an option for her. In order to do it, of course, she’d have to start smoking, but it might be worth it, if The Talk was the only alternative.

When you tell someone that you’re leaving him, he will ask why, and then you’ll have to give your reasons, and then
he’ll dispute them—when our lovers try to leave us, we suddenly become lawyers—and the two of you will debate about whether your reasons for leaving are good enough, when all along what you really want to say is simply, “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not happy.”

Maybe there were people who could just come out and say this, but Nora wasn’t one of them. Many of her friends, down through the years, had referred to her as impulsive, and she didn’t think they were wrong. But this wasn’t true in every sphere of life. When she was unhappily involved with a man, she got stuck.

She kept reviewing the possibilities. There was The Talk. There was the Lionel Abel option. And best of all was the
Superman II
option. After Lois (Margot Kidder) discovers that Clark (Christopher Reeve) is really Superman, they have a love affair, which ends when Superman, fearing that her knowledge of his true identity would put her in danger, gives her a hypnotic kiss, erasing both her memory of his identity and her memory of their affair. What wouldn’t she give to be able to kiss Benjamin with a kiss of forgetfulness!

Benjamin had once said that if a woman he was seeing ever cheated on him, he’d leave her instantly. “Infidelity,” he had told her, “is the only unforgivable.” But she didn’t want to cheat on him.

The difficulty of breaking up with him had nothing to do with a fear of being alone. She was sure about that. She never thought of herself as an orphan—the term seemed too self-pitying—but she was used to being alone, schooled in it. She’d once read an essay by Michael Ventura called “The Talent of the Room,” in which he said that if you want to be a writer, the most important piece of equipment you need is the ability to
be alone—to spend your best hours by yourself at the keyboard. If that’s the most important thing, Nora had thought, I’ve got it made.

Finally she decided there was no way around it. As much as she dreaded The Talk, she knew she had to go through with it.

There couldn’t have been a better time to leave him. Benjamin’s book was being published; he was on a tenure track; everything was falling into place for him. No one could accuse her of kicking him when he was down.

She decided to have The Talk the next time she saw him. Benjamin had no idea what was coming. She thought it was best that way. She would dispose of the matter quickly and efficiently. She felt like a hit man.

On the appointed night, a Friday, she paced around her apartment, tidying, waiting for him, thinking about all the movies about hit men she’d seen in the last few years, wondering why the hit man had become a cultural hero. Then she ate two Mars bars to give herself a jolt of sugar for her task.

Benjamin showed up precisely at nine, and as soon as she opened the door she could tell that something was wrong. People carry their own climates with them, their own ecosystems; Benjamin’s, lately, had been perpetually sunny. With his book out and his tenure imminent, he’d seemed, during the last few months, to be walking around inside a golden bubble; at times she felt she could have reached out and given it a squeeze. But tonight something was different. His golden bubble was gone.

He even smelled different. He smelled meaty. Unpleasantly so, like liverwurst.

“What’s wrong?”

He dropped a copy of the
New York Review of Books
on the kitchen table.

She turned to the table of contents. His book had been reviewed.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Read it. You read it, and I’ll weep.”

The review had been written by somebody from Harvard, evidently a big shot in the field. It was a long review, and it wasn’t nice. The reviewer made a distinction between intellectuals (people who put ideas to use in interesting ways) and scholars (people who merely amass facts, with no idea of what to do with them). “Sadly,” the reviewer concluded, “this is the work of a scholar.”

While she read the review, Benjamin sat beside her at the kitchen table, reading it over her shoulder. He’d probably already read it more than once, but he couldn’t stop himself from reading it again. He was thrusting his chin in the air, working the muscles of his throat, as if he’d forgotten how to swallow. He looked like a frightened little boy.

After she finished, he began to explain why the review was unfair. “It’s a joke. It’s worse than a joke: it’s a scandal. This is going to destroy his reputation. Look at this. He writes that Broch sold his family business to devote himself to literature—as if I didn’t spend an entire chapter on the fact that he sold it to devote himself to
philosophy.
He only turned to literature
after
he studied philosophy. If you can mix up something that basic, how can you think you have the credentials to review a book on Hermann Broch?” He talked for five or ten minutes, citing the reviewer’s many errors. Every once in a while he leaned over and made notes for a letter to the editor—a letter she hoped he wouldn’t send, because it would convict him more thoroughly than the review had. Accused of
being an arid scholar, Benjamin wanted to refute the charge with the tools of arid scholarship.

She didn’t have the heart to have The Talk that night. It would be too cruel.

Benjamin was still working his throat muscles oddly, still thrusting his face forward.

“Are you okay?”

“I feel weird. I think I must have eaten something bad. I feel like I have a stomachache all the way up to my jaw.”

“Benjamin?”

“I’m all right. Just let me lie down for a second.”

He lay down, but it didn’t help. After a few minutes he said he couldn’t breathe. “I feel like I have something stuck in my throat.”

“Do you think we should call your doctor?”

“It’s Friday night. My doctor’s home bleaching his teeth.”