A Window Across the River (17 page)

“What do you do there?” Officer Lundquist said.

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

Officer Lundquist nodded reflectively. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be many psychiatrists in Montana.”

Nora forced a “you’ve got my number” chuckle out of herself. “It’s true. I have a lot of free time.”

Officer Lundquist was examining her out of the corner of her eye. Nora was staring straight ahead, but she could feel it.

“Got any kids?” Officer Lundquist finally said.

“Sure do. A girl named Billie and a boy named . . . Steve.”

Officer Lundquist eyed Nora slyly, as if she had proof that she was lying. “I thought psychiatrists aren’t supposed to talk about their personal lives. I thought you get in trouble if you do.”

“We don’t tell our patients. But we can tell other people. Just like anybody else.”

They drove along in silence for a while. Nora was hoping that Officer Lundquist wouldn’t ask her any more questions.

“Can I talk to you about something?” Officer Lundquist said. Her voice sounded odd. It sounded wet.

“Sure,” Nora said.
How can I get out of this?

“I have a new baby. My first. He’s eight months old.”

Nora was about to say “Congratulations,” but then she
realized that, as a psychiatrist, she should say nothing of the kind. It was the psychiatric equivalent of leading the witness. Maybe Officer Lundquist wanted to confide that she didn’t really
like
her baby, and if Nora congratulated her, it would make it hard for her to own up to this distressing truth. Nora hadn’t been a psychiatrist for long, but she had her professional ethics.

“He’s a charmer. Really a charmer. Gregory. He takes center stage, I’ll tell you that much. He owns the whole show. I can tell he’s going to be a preacher someday, just like his grandpa.”

Nora smiled understandingly. You can always tell when your boy’s going to grow up to be a preacher. It’s one of the true joys of motherhood.

“He’s got the cutest little feet. You’d love ’em. But here’s the thing. Here’s my question. Sometimes, when I’m with him, I feel so crazy about him that I just want to give him a kiss on the lips. You ever feel like that with—what was your boy’s name?”

What
was
his name? Nora couldn’t remember. She smiled and said, “Well, I’ve got my professional hat on now, so no more talk about me.”

Officer Lundquist grinned, one canny old pro to another. “I knew you’d say that.” She grew more serious. “But really. When I’m with him, you know, I just want to cover him with kisses. I
do
cover him with kisses. Just like a mother should. Kisses on his belly, on the top of his head, on his knees. I never want to kiss him, you know—I never want to kiss him down
there.
” She looked at Nora meaningfully, and Nora understood that she wasn’t referring to his feet, the feet that Nora would love. “When I give him kisses on the cheeks I’m always careful
not to put my lips on his mouth. But I
want
to. I really want to. I want to kiss that little baby on the mouth. And I don’t want to do it just once. Do you think that’s sick?”

How did I get into this?

You can’t avoid it. You can’t stop it from coming. If you so much as walk outside your home, you find yourself with someone’s life in your hands.

Officer Lundquist was looking at Nora zestfully, as if it exhilarated her to talk about this. This was alarming.

Nora spoke slowly, trying to think the question through. “We all have urges that disturb us. The difference between being a responsible human being and not being one isn’t whether you
think
about doing disturbing things. It’s whether you actually
do
them. Listen. I don’t think you’re sick at all. But I do think you should get some therapy. Real therapy. Not just a chat on the Connecticut Turnpike.”

Officer Lundquist nodded thoughtfully, but then, as they got off the highway, she took on a different expression, shaking her head slowly as if Nora had said something stupid. “Well, that’s quite an opinion,” she said. “Straight from the honcho’s mouth.”

They drove on in silence. Nora was thinking about poor little Gregory. She heard a voice in her mind—she couldn’t identify it—saying,
It turns out you can’t save anyone.

Someone had said this to her, but she couldn’t remember who, or when, or why.

Officer Lundquist dropped Nora off at a pay phone, and Nora called the rental car company and demanded her rights. They arranged for a cab to take her back to New York. When she got home she strapped on her Freeze Wrap, and, although it didn’t quite live up to the hype, her arm felt better after a while.

Later she tried to work on the Gabriel story, but she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t stop thinking of Officer Lundquist and her son. Poor Gregory! She hoped that Officer Lundquist would find a way to beat back the craziness inside her.

She decided to stop writing for the night; she saved her work onto a floppy disk and lay down on the couch.

It turns out you can’t save anyone.

She still couldn’t remember who’d said that.

It bugged her. Not because the remark itself meant much to her. She didn’t think it was profound; she didn’t even think it was true. You may not be able to save anyone’s soul, but a heart surgeon can save someone whose arteries are blocked, and a lifeguard can save someone who’s drowning. People save each other all the time. But it still bugged her that she couldn’t remember, because of the feeling she had when she thought of the words.

Nora knew of one infallible way to find out what she really thought of someone, but it wasn’t an operation she could perform at will. Occasionally she’d remember some remark without being able to remember who’d said it, and when she tried to figure out who it was, before she could conjure up a face or a name, she would get a
feeling
about the person, and this feeling represented the truth of her emotions. Shorn of any of the tags of circumstance—of the context in which she knew the person, of their mutual history or lack of mutual history, of her superego’s decrees about what she
should
think of the person—it was the bare, pure essence of what the person meant to her.

Now, turning the simple sentence over in her mind, she had a strong warm feeling, a feeling of connection: whoever
had said it was someone she cared for and respected and trusted. It was, she realized after a moment, Isaac. Of course.

She remembered now. He hadn’t presented the idea as a general rule; he’d been talking about something specific. He’d been telling her, years ago, about the week he’d spent taking pictures in Haiti during the last days of the Duvalier regime. He’d been sent there by
Rolling Stone.
He told Nora that the experience had cured him of his romantic ideas about the power of photojournalism. He’d seen men and women who’d had their arms hacked off; he’d seen children hunting for food in garbage dumps. “Some people go into photography because they think it can save lives,” he told her. “But it turns out you can’t save anyone. You can only bear witness to their suffering.”

She remembered what she’d been feeling as he’d said this. She had felt an intense respect for him; she had had a deep sense of his seriousness, his compassion, his sadness at being unable to do more. Remembering this, she felt a bond with him that was so strong that it seemed to be something she ignored or disregarded at her peril. She decided to change her plans for the next day. She’d give herself a birthday present, by seeing him.

H
ER BIRTHDAY FELL ON A
S
ATURDAY.
On the phone a few weeks earlier, Isaac had mentioned that he was playing in a summer softball league in Central Park. He could have found a league in New Jersey, but this was a way of keeping in touch with old friends from his
Village Voice
days. She remembered him saying that he played on Saturday afternoons.

She wrote during the morning, performed her birthday devotions in the early afternoon, and then walked to the park. It was a warm, welcoming day. There were five or six baseball fields on the Great Lawn, all of them with games in progress. On the fringes of the lawn, at a safe distance from batted balls, families were picnicking, couples were lying in the grass, a small group of elderly men and women was doing t’ai chi. New York felt almost like a family.

She walked from one softball game to another until she saw him. He was playing first base. She watched him for a while without trying to catch his eye. The second batter hit a pop-up to the right side of the field; she watched Isaac ranging over to the foul line to catch it. Relaxed and confident, he caught the ball in a basket catch, a little show-offy, and tossed it back to the pitcher, a tall woman with thick dark slightly graying hair. Isaac moved nicely.

Nora hadn’t been looking forward to her birthday—thirty-five seemed old. But now, on a beautiful summer day, having sought out and found the man she cared for, she felt young.

The inning was over. Isaac was the second person to bat for his team. Nora felt very old-fashioned: Teresa Wright in
Pride of the Yankees,
watching with love and awe as Lou Gehrig hits a home run. Isaac didn’t hit a home run, though, but a grounder to the third baseman. He was thrown out by fifteen feet.

When he was walking back off the field, he saw her.

“You must have put the jinx on me,” he said. “I never hit ground balls.”

He stopped about two feet away from her. He looked happy to see her, but wary.

The sun was behind him; she had to put up her hand to shield her eyes as she looked up at him.

“You’ve got a little halo thing going there, Tall Man.”

“It’s good to see you,” he said quietly. “Did you give blood this morning?”

He’d remembered it was her birthday. Her birthday devotions: she gave blood once a year.

She held out her arm for him to see the bruise.

“You’re remarkable.”

“I do it for the cookies.”

The inning was over; he had to get back on the field. She sat on the grass and watched the rest of the game, and then the two of them walked through the park.

“Did you get the invitation to my exhibit?”

“Yes. Thank you. It’s exciting. Are you excited?”

“I am. Were you planning to come?”

“I think so.”

“I’m glad.” He looked, though, as if he wasn’t sure he believed her.

She knew he was happy to see her, but his energy was different. He was wary. He even
moved
differently: he was walking more rigidly, as if he wanted to be sure to stay two feet away from her.

This was good. He wasn’t going to allow himself to wait for her forever. If she kept opening the door and closing it again, the time would finally come when she’d open it and he wouldn’t be there. She felt glad about this, not for herself, but for him. He had better things to do than wait for her.

“How were you planning to celebrate your birthday?” he said.

“Like this.”

Isaac walked her back to her building, and without their discussing it, he accompanied her to her apartment. She realized he’d never been there before.

After she closed the door she pointed toward her window. Her view wasn’t as magnificent as his, but it was a view. “Someday when you’re in your place and I’m here, we should blink our lights on and off and find out if we can see each other. We could have a conversation in Morse code.”

He walked over to the card table on which she kept her laptop computer. The computer was on, humming quietly.

“The holy of holies,” he said. “Here’s where the stories get written.”

“Or don’t.”

“Do you always leave it on? So when a bolt of genius strikes, you can be sure to get it all down?”

“Well, that’s just a nice by-product. I never do miss those
bolts of genius. But the reason I keep it on is that it’s dying. When I turn it off I can never be sure it’ll come on again. It’s like my grandparents’ TV. When I was eight years old I was over their house and I wanted to watch the
Brady Bunch
reunion and the TV wouldn’t come on. I could get the sound but not the picture.”

“What a sad, sad story,” Isaac said.

“What would you like to do for dinner? Would you like to just eat here?”

“It’s your day. Would you?”

“I think so. It’s cozier.”

“Coziness is important.”

“The purpose of life is to be cozy.” This was something that had once been said by her old friend Sally Burke—another person who’d ended up feeling violated by her writing. “What do you feel like?” She opened up her filing cabinet and pulled out a folder stuffed with take-out menus. Then she noticed another folder and handed it to Isaac.

“This is for you. You probably know it all, but maybe there’s something you haven’t seen.”

The folder was filled with articles about diabetes, from newspapers, from magazines, and from some of the medical publications she’d worked for. He looked through them quickly.

“These are, like, from the last five years.”

“I know,” she said. “Sorry. Most of them must be out of date. The newer ones are toward the back.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant: you’ve been clipping these things for me over the last five years?”

“Yes. So?”

“I didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again.”

“I didn’t either. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about you.”

They sat at her kitchen table and talked for a while—he was telling her about a philosophy class he was taking in the general studies program at a college in New Jersey—and then the teakettle was whistling. In the old days, she used to put the kettle on whenever they came back to her apartment, so Isaac could have a cup of tea. This evening she’d done it without even realizing.

After Isaac finished his tea he went to the sink to wash the cup, and then, while they continued to talk, he started washing the rest of her dishes. She felt moved by this. He always used to wash her dishes; he claimed to enjoy it. They were falling effortlessly into old habits, and this struck her as beautiful. Her making the tea; his washing her dishes: what was beautiful was that the habits they’d slipped back into were the small habits of daily caring.