A Window Across the River (22 page)

Renee had just attained a kind of success that he had never come close to, not in twenty years of striving, and never would. He was a known quantity now, and no one was willing to look at his work with a fresh eye. With some of life’s rewards, if you don’t get them when you’re young, you don’t get them.

He wanted to kill her. Because
she
was killing
him.
She didn’t realize it, but she was killing him. She was diminishing him.

“How was your show?” she called from the other room. She couldn’t have said anything more insulting if she’d tried.

“It was nice,” he said. Yes, it was nice—he’d been praised by a roomful of old friends, none of whom knew anything about photography. And a woman from Latvia had told him about her grandfather.

He felt his mind working to diminish Renee’s achievement. The
New Yorker
was using her pictures because they fit in with a particular article, not because she was a good photographer; they wouldn’t be using her again. It was a lucky coincidence. It would look good on her résumé, but it was a one-shot deal.

He ran quickly through his mental file of photographers who’d enjoyed early success and then fizzled out. He was wishing that future on Renee.

But it wasn’t working. Renee wasn’t going to fizzle out. She was the real thing.

He’d once read an article about how birds lose their plumage when other birds defeat them in the struggle for dominance. He felt himself losing his plumage. If he could take a blood test right this second, he was sure it would show a stark drop in serotonin, dopamine, testosterone, and whatever other chemicals contribute to feelings of confidence, mastery, well-being, vitality, youth.

But you can’t be so upset by this! She once called you her mentor! You’re her
teacher,
in a way! Your role is to help her! The whole point of working with young people is that you
hope
they’ll surpass you! This is what you wanted! At least it’s what you claimed to want.

He was making the tea. He’d cramped himself into a corner of the kitchen, hiding from her while all this played out in his mind.

He came back out, bearing two steaming mugs.

“This is just so fantastic, Renee.”

What a fucking hypocrite I am. If I was being honest I’d scream at her. I’d throw her out.

But honesty isn’t the important thing here, he thought. The important thing isn’t what you feel. The important thing, sometimes, is what you appear to feel.

He believed in the authority of the visible. If all Renee saw was his generosity, then his generosity would be real.

When he was in his late twenties, two of his photographs were acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and when
he told one of his former teachers the good news, the old man had said, “Yes, they’ve been after me to send them some things, but I’ve been too busy.” At the time Isaac hadn’t understood that the old man had no class, that his response had emerged from a stew of peevish envy. He understood it now. And he understood that if he gave Renee anything less than a generous response, it would condemn him, condemn him as a small-souled man, and that a generous response, even if it wasn’t sincere, would be enough.

“This is just so wonderful, Renee,” he said. “It’s fantastic.”

“I know!” she said. “It’s just so great! I can’t believe it!”

The next generation was making its claim, and he hadn’t tried to obstruct it. He felt obscurely that this was one of the defining moments of his life.

“Where shall we eat?” he said, wondering if he could possibly eat anything.

He felt as if he’d been enlarged as a man. But that didn’t mean he had to enjoy it.

N
ORA TOOK
B
ILLIE HOME
in a taxi. Dr. Kanter hadn’t told Billie about the seriousness of her condition.

“Maybe we can go for a walk later and get a snack,” Billie said on the way home. “I have a yen for some red licorice. There’s a candy store on Ninth Avenue that has that kind I like—Peel and Pull.”

Nora had cleaned Billie’s apartment the day before when she’d stopped by to feed her cats.

“You made it perfect for me,” Billie said. “You made it like a palace.”

She had a funny cheerfulness. Nora wanted to think that Billie knew how ill she was—that she knew even without being told—and that she was being brave. But it probably wasn’t true. Probably when the news was explained to her, she’d fall apart.

Billie looked in her refrigerator. “I have some Boca Burgers, and tomatoes, and buns. Maybe we can have a Boca-fest tonight. And then maybe we can rent a movie.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“I feel so lucky,” Billie said. “I can’t believe they just fixed me up in a jiffy. I think I might find out if I can volunteer in the hospital. I like that Dr. Candy.”

Billie sat on the couch, and Edwin and Louie hustled up—Dolly lay on her pillow, too weak to move—and in an instant were all over her, licking her and pawing at her. Purring, pushing their paws against her, and pulling them back, each time having to make the effort of disentangling their claws from her shirt. Louie continued flattering her in this manner; Edwin went over to the door and meowed.

Nora let him out into the hall and he went to scratch his back on the banister.

“Maybe we can take a ferry to Hoboken tomorrow, if you’re free,” Billie said. “I heard on the radio that they set up a temporary amusement park near the river. We could ride the Ferris wheel. We could ride the Wild Mouse.”

Nora went to the kitchen, made the veggie burgers, and put together a salad. She brought everything out on a tray and placed it on the coffee table, and they sat side by side on the couch eating dinner and watching the Summer Olympics. “What an adventure,” Billie said. “Who would have thought a week ago that I’d be in the hospital yesterday. And who would have thought, yesterday, that today I’d be back home.”

During the track-and-field competitions, Nora started to nod off. She woke up to the sight of Billie moving to the bathroom, as quickly as she could move. Nora followed her. Billie was on her knees in front of the toilet bowl. There was vomit in the bowl and on the floor and on her blouse.

“I guess it was a little too soon for a Boca-fest,” Billie said.

“Let me help,” Nora said. She wetted down a washcloth and cleaned Billie’s face.

“Thank you,” Billie said.

She helped Billie back to the couch, got her a clean shirt, put the soiled one in the sink and ran water over it and rubbed
it down with a bar of soap, and then found a sponge and some paper towels and a container of Ajax and cleaned up the floor.

Billie looked pale and spent. “Maybe I could have some of that sleepy thing,” she said.

Dr. Kanter had given her a supply of Tylenol with codeine. Nora brought her a glass of water and she swallowed a pill. She helped Billie into bed, got in beside her, and turned her bedside television on.

They watched a little more of the Olympics. They watched Ping-Pong, and then they watched synchronized swimming.

“I guess it’s pretty,” Nora said, “but I’m not sure it’s a sport.”

Nora couldn’t tell if Billie was awake. Her nose was barely peeping out from under the blanket.

“You know what sport they’re having at the next Olympics?” Billie said sleepily. “Slinky.”

Nora put a glass of water on Billie’s night table, kissed her on the forehead, and went out to the living room. It was eleven. The home-care worker was supposed to have arrived an hour ago.

When Billie was in the hospital, Nora had called the “extended-care” office and arranged to have someone to stay with her after she got home. Medicare would cover this for fourteen days; after that, they’d have to reapply.

Nora had put in a request for a woman she knew, a soft-voiced grandmother named Joyce who’d worked for her friend Helen’s mother when she was ill, Joyce was one of the gentlest people she’d ever met; if Joyce were taking care of Billie, Nora would feel at ease. But she’d found out that afternoon that Joyce was unavailable, taking full-time care of someone else.

The home-care worker finally showed up at 11:30. She was an attractive young woman from Russia; her name was Sofia. She was wearing a short tight skirt with a slit up the side.
She’s dressed to kill,
Nora thought, and immediately felt worried.

Nora talked with her for a few minutes and then took the subway uptown.

The phone was ringing when she walked in the door. Something bad had happened to Billie. She moved quickly to the phone.

“Hi,” Billie said. “Did I wake you?”

“No. Not at all. I just got back.”

“I woke up to go to the bathroom. I just wanted to thank you.”

Nora didn’t feel as if she deserved to be thanked. She should have still been down there, sleeping on Billie’s couch. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know. I’m feeling a little misty, like parts of me are floating away. But I’m okay. I’ve got the TV on, and Edwin and Louie are snuggling right next to me.”

They spoke for another minute; Nora told Billie that she’d see her the next day, and they said good-bye.

Nora wanted to stay up and write for an hour or two, but she needed to rest for a minute first. She closed her eyes. Her apartment was very quiet; she could hear an occasional car horn, but nothing else. She lay on the couch listening to her own breathing.

She felt so attuned to her aunt, so at one with her, that it seemed, in this quiet, as if she could feel her presence, from blocks and blocks away. Billie was sleeping, breathing wheezily, with difficulty. The medicine and the illness, the painkillers and the pain—her body was a battleground. She was being peeled
open and pulled apart. Peel and pull. Nora’s own breathing grew more shallow and more rapid, as if it were taking on the rhythms of her aunt’s. She tried to calm herself, to make each breath longer and slower and deeper, so she could send healing breaths into her aunt’s body, from all these blocks away. She knew it wasn’t possible to have the connection she thought the two of them were having—she knew she was connecting only with her own idea of her aunt. And yet
she felt
connected.

It had rained that evening, and after a hot day the night air had turned mild. The windows of her apartment were open, and a breeze was moving softly through the room.

Billie was sleeping, unmoving in her bed, but Nora could feel that within her, in her spirit, something was shifting. She could sense that her aunt was edging closer, hesitantly, toward the hugeness of death. She was like a shy young bride, gathering up the courage to give herself away.

Let it take you peacefully, Billie, let it take you sweetly. I swear it can take you sweetly if you let it.

How did Nora know that it could take you sweetly? She didn’t. She merely hoped that it was true.

N
ORA WOKE AT ONE IN THE
morning and heated up some water. Even though she didn’t always have the strength to do it, she believed in the idea of writing through everything, refusing to let any event or emotion interrupt her work. If she felt too sad or too spacy to write, she tried to write nevertheless; she tried to bring her sadness or her spaciness to the keyboard. She wanted to keep faith with that idea tonight. She was feeling sorrowful and tired, and her arm, from the effort of helping Billie up four flights of stairs, was speaking in tongues, but she made two cups of coffee and set them side by side on her card table and started to scroll through the Gabriel story.

Even during this last week, while spending most of her time in the hospital, she’d managed to work a little every night. And her devotion was starting to bear fruit. The story was making sense to her again. Gabriel was on a train, on the way to visit his sister. Nora didn’t know why he was visiting her or what would happen when he got there, but she was feeling as if the story was ready to unfurl itself.

She’d barely gotten started when the phone rang. It was Isaac. He never called her this late. Their middle-of-the-night phone calls were strictly one-way.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Oh, I just—I don’t know. How’s Billie?”

“She’s okay. She doesn’t know anything yet. She thinks she’s fine. At least she says she thinks she’s fine. Maybe she’s trying to spare my feelings.”

“Poor Billie,” he said.

Something was going on with him. She knew he was concerned about Billie, but she could tell that wasn’t why he’d called.

“What’s new with you?” she said.

“Something funny happened to me tonight. Renee—you remember Renee?”

“Sure. ‘Too bad you have such a small family.’”

“That’s right. Renee from the human family. She dropped by tonight. She told me that some of her pictures were accepted by the
New Yorker.
”

“That’s fantastic,” Nora said. “You must be proud.”

“Yeah. She’s got it made. Made in the shade.”

She didn’t know why, but when he said this, she realized that he was miserable.

“She might be a genius,” he said. “A genius with the camera, I mean. The funny thing is that she’s not even that devoted. I’ve met a thousand photographers who know more about the craft of photography, who
care
more about the craft of photography than she does. She just happens to be great at it. It’s a gift. You either have it or you don’t.”

He sighed: a heavy, defeated sigh.

“You either have it or you don’t,” he said again. “She has it. I don’t.”

She thought she should say something to comfort him, but she decided not to. She’d always liked his photographs, but she
didn’t consider herself qualified to judge whether he was truly gifted.

“Life is funny,” he said. “It’s like, in my twenties, in my early thirties, when I didn’t think about anything except taking pictures—during all those years, it was like I was searching for genius. I was doing it as well as I could possibly do it, but I used to think that the one thing I didn’t have was that tiny little glint of genius that would have brought everything together. It’s like, I don’t know anything about cooking, but I’m sure there are complicated sauces, with a lot of ingredients, that don’t really taste like much until you add some tiny pinch of one last ingredient. Some spice or something. Maybe just salt. And when you add that last thing, everything else comes together and the whole thing tastes incredible. Am I making any sense?”