A Window Across the River (15 page)

“No thanks.”

“It’s my vegan anniversary,” she said. “As of today I haven’t had any dairy in a year.”

“Quite an accomplishment,” he said, although what he was feeling was concern. Was she getting enough protein?

“I decided to give up dairy because I realized it was already ten years since I became a vegetarian. I thought it was time for a burst of self-improvement.”

“What do you think you’ll be doing for self-improvement ten years from now? What do you want to
be
in ten years?”

He liked asking her questions like this, big what-do-you-want-from-life questions. He didn’t quite know if she liked this habit of his or thought it was corny.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I feel like I’m open to anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want to get trapped in the meantime.”

“That sounds very deep, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“So many people think they want to be writers or musicians or painters, or they want to work for the Peace Corps or something. But they’re worried about security, and they think they need something to fall back on, and they decide to do something else in the meantime. So they go to law school or business school or they become copy editors instead of writers. And then five years go by, and then ten years, and they never end up doing what they wanted to do. They just end up stuck in the meantime.”

Isaac nodded at this, and didn’t say anything, and felt hurt. Suddenly he wanted her to be gone.

It’s impossible to know what young people think of you. When Isaac was a photography student, he went through wild opinion swings about his teachers. In his freshman year, he had a teacher he worshiped: the teacher was a man of small gifts, but his encouragement meant so much to Isaac that Isaac thought he was the most important photographer since Mathew Brady. When Isaac was a senior, he was one of only five students admitted to a “master class” with Robert Frank. Deep into a season of arrogance, Isaac regarded Frank with a sort of benevolent amusement; he was so sure of the hugeness
of his future accomplishments that he couldn’t help but look down on what Frank had actually accomplished.

So it was impossible to tell whether Renee respected him, because he’d had a respectable career as a photographer, or pitied him, because he didn’t really do it anymore. It was impossible to tell whether she thought he’d gotten stuck in the meantime.

“I hope I’ll still be taking pictures,” she said, “but not for the sake of just taking pictures. If the pictures I take aren’t about exposing something that’s wrong or celebrating something that’s right, then they really don’t mean much to me. I couldn’t do what you do. I’m, like, an agitator. You’re an artist.”

He liked her again.

“What do you hope to get from your exhibit?” Renee said. “In your heart of hearts.”

“Fame. Fortune. Immortality.”

“Okay, now give me the real answer, instead of the joking-around answer.”

He didn’t want to give her the real answer. He didn’t want to tell her how much was riding on this show.

He wasn’t dreaming about impossibilities. When he was just starting out, in his twenties, whenever he had an exhibit he used to imagine that it would change everything, that it would lead to a life in which he would be paid just for taking the pictures he wanted to take—some no-show professorship, say, with a college that would be honored just to be able to use his name in their ads. That was back in the days when his ambitions were endless, when he thought he had a shot at taking his place among the greats: Atget, Weston, Cartier-Bresson. It was embarrassing even to remember those days.

Now he dreamed modest dreams. Now he was simply thinking that if he could get some grain of genuine recognition from this exhibit, some affirmation that his work meant anything—if he could get one or two good reviews from people who knew what they were talking about, or if someone from one of the first-rank galleries showed some interest—it would reawaken his confidence, reawaken his desire to take pictures.

Though he hadn’t actually started taking pictures again, he’d been spending a lot of time in the darkroom, making new prints of his old work. The show was going to consist of pictures he’d taken during his first two years at the paper, when he sometimes filled in for staff photographers who were ill or on vacation, plus a few other things he’d taken around that time. He was sending out invitations to dozens of people, including the reviewers and curators who’d been kind to his work in the past.

The exhibit was more than two months away, but he was beginning to think that things were changing in his life already. Last week he’d received a note from a woman who was curating a photojournalism exhibit at the New York Public Library. She wanted to include one of his old photographs, something he’d taken for the
Village Voice
fifteen years ago.

“You never tell me anything, you know,” Renee said. “Do you
try
to be mysterious? Is that your thing?”

“No,” he said.

But maybe it
was
his thing. He was dying to let her know about the library exhibit, but he’d restrained himself. He hadn’t said a word. Sometimes Isaac thought that all he really wanted to do was talk about himself, and that the reason he talked about
himself so rarely was that the urge was so powerful that he had to keep it violently repressed.

Don’t boast, he was telling himself. Think Clark Kent. If you have to boast, it’s a sign that you don’t have anything to boast about.

Renee finished her tangerine, they chatted for a few more minutes, and then she had to go. She was heading off to get a left-wing tattoo: a fist holding a rose. “See ya later, Pops,” she said.

Isaac puttered around in the darkroom for another hour.

Renee, my daughter.

Renee, my not-quite-daughter.

It was hard to get comfortable with the mix of feelings he had for her.

He wouldn’t be feeling any of this confusion if Nora were around.

To hell with Nora.

He shouldn’t have been surprised by Nora’s vanishing act. It was as though he’d forgotten what she was like, forgotten the essence of Nora. The essence of Nora was that she bowled you over, and then she disappeared. It was the Nora Howard Two-Step.

Isaac’s uncle had met Nora once and had later summed her up as “a slippery little thing.” Isaac normally thought of him as a moron, but this time his uncle was right.

Isaac always loved to remember the way she’d insisted on getting that dog for his father. What he thought about less often was that six months later, his father came down to New York for a visit, and Nora was supposed to meet the two of them for lunch but didn’t show: she was writing, and she lost track of the time. On the phone that night she talked about
meeting them for breakfast before his father took the train back upstate, but she called the next morning to say that she’d been writing all night and was too zonked out to make it. His father tried to act as if it didn’t matter, but it was clear that he was hurt. He was in poor health and never made it back to the city, so that turned out to have been his last chance to see her.

To hell with Nora, Isaac thought, and then called home to pick up his messages, but she hadn’t called.

Y
OU WAKE BEFORE DAWN
. You shower, dress, and make coffee, and then, without letting anything else intervene, you sit down at the keyboard.

If every morning begins in this fashion, Nora thought, then the rest of the day will be blessed.

“God,” Tolstoy once said, “is the name of my desire.” Writing was the name of Nora’s. Isaac had once told her that photography had taken the place of prayer in his life, and she knew what he meant. It wasn’t writing she worshiped; writing, rather, was a way of worshiping. It was the best way she had ever found to express her fascination with life, her quarrels with life, her questions. She sometimes thought that even if what she wrote every day was doomed to disappear during the night, she would keep writing stories, just to make a daily pilgrimage to the realm of mystery and reverence and play. She didn’t always reach that realm when she was writing stories, but merely to turn toward it was a kind of nourishment unlike any other.

It had been a month since she’d left Benjamin, and she still hadn’t seen Isaac. They talked on the phone, conversations in which there was tenderness and longing in every word, but she didn’t want to get together with him yet. She didn’t want to
leap from one man to the next, like someone who crosses a river by stepping from stone to stone. She didn’t want to use him. Her first task in life was to find her way back into her writing, and this was a river she wanted to cross without help.

She’d kept writing about Gabriel, whom she’d been finding more and more intriguing. He wasn’t such a fantasy figure now; he had flaws.

The story was still murky—she still barely knew what it was about—but she was writing with an excitement that she hadn’t felt in years. For the first time in years, she wasn’t afraid to follow her imagination; she was eager to see where it would lead her.

She’d put a Post-it note next to her computer, with the deadline of the contest that Ilya Kaplan had told her about. She was trying to use it as an incentive to keep working quickly.

There were times when she found Gabriel in situations in which she didn’t know what he’d do. When Gabriel made his decisions—she experienced it as him making his own decisions—she kept realizing that he’d done what Isaac would have done. Gabriel was starting, not to merge with Isaac, but to borrow a few of his qualities.

And this was another reason why she hadn’t seen him. She wanted to let her story breathe; she wanted to give it room and air and light. She was afraid that if she got involved with Isaac now, the old walls of constraint would rise up around her again.

She was as unhappy as ever that her imagination worked this way—that she had to feed off the lives of her loved ones—but she wasn’t trying to fight it.

Years ago she had spent six months in therapy, primarily in an effort to change the way she wrote. She wanted to uncouple
her imagination from her real life, and she wanted to stop writing stories that were so pitiless. The therapist was an intelligent man who respected artists—his wife was a painter—and he didn’t disagree when Nora finally concluded that she had to accept the unhappy terms and conditions that guided her creative life. She came to think that you can no more change the terms of your creative life than you can change your sexual preferences. Her goblin couldn’t be dislodged.

During their last session, the therapist said, “Let me tell you a story about Rilke. You know Rilke?
Letters to a Young Poet
? Like most artists—like most people, I suppose—he was a tortured soul, and he thought psychoanalysis might help him. He was in treatment for a while, but he finally broke it off: he said that he feared that if the treatment took away his devils, it would take away his angels too.”

She was surprised she hadn’t heard this before. She’d already been compiling a little library of quotations and anecdotes, designed to reassure her that her own case wasn’t unique. D. H. Lawrence had said that “one sheds one’s sicknesses in books,” which she took to mean that if you let your dark side into your fiction, you won’t have to live it. Norman Mailer had said that writers who are sunny in their work are crabbed and curdled in real life, whereas writers who let the most wicked, vicious impulses into their work are usually sweet and generous people. Philip Roth had compared his misanthropic fiction to the comedy of Jack Benny, who always presented himself as a miser, not because he actually was one, but because it happened to be the role that set his comic energies free. And Joan Didion had simply said that a writer is always selling somebody out.

All of this helped, within limits. It helped her come to
terms with herself in theory, but not in practice. It didn’t, for example, make it easier for her to contemplate the thought that the story she was writing, which hadn’t even begun to take shape yet, was going to turn into something that would cause Isaac pain.

There had been times when she wished she didn’t need to write at all. But she did. She’d needed it ever since she was a girl.

Nora could date the birth of that need. She’d been writing stories all through junior high school, but it became a need only after her mother died. Margaret died suddenly of a stroke when Nora was seventeen. Arthur, Nora’s father, had died two years earlier, of cancer, so Nora was alone. During the next few months, while she was being shuttled among the homes of her parents’ friends, her diary was the only thing that kept her sane. Every night she would write for an hour in the black-and-white marbled composition book she used for a diary. Everything else about her life was in doubt: she didn’t know if she’d be going to college in a year; she didn’t even know where she’d be staying from week to week. The diary gave her a way to link each day to the days that had come before, to link her life with the life she’d had when her mother was alive. Writing was the only way to join the days.

When Nora met Isaac, she saw how he carefully monitored his blood-sugar levels and injected himself with insulin three times a day. When Nora thought back to the months after her mother died, when she’d found sanctuary every night in her diary, she thought that she’d been driven by a physical need, not too different from Isaac’s need for insulin. And ever since then, ever since those diary days, her need to write had felt just as ungovernable, just as urgent.

Kafka once said that a writer should cling to his desk as if
it were a life raft. Nora felt like she knew what he meant. And maybe, she thought, a woman writer has to cling to it with a special ferocity. Swarthmore had had a busy creative writing program, and every semester three or four visiting writers came in to give readings, lead daylong seminars, and be picturesquely literary in the coffee bar and the cafeteria. Nora tried to observe them closely. All of the successful male writers, she’d noticed, were carried through their lives by a sort of rapture of egotism. Most of them were married, or had been—most had burned quickly through several wives—and many of them had children, but she got the feeling that none of them had ever let anything come between them and their work. The women were different. Most of them seemed nicer than the men—more modest, more approachable—but less obsessed; Nora found it easy to believe that their devotion to writing had always had to compete with the many varieties of caretaking with which women fill their lives. Some of the older women had long gaps in their writing lives, ten-year periods in which they’d published nothing. The single women were the only ones who seemed as fantastically devoted to writing as the men. “Them lady poets must not marry, pal,” wrote John Berryman in one of his
Dream Songs;
more than forty years later, it still seemed to be true.