A Window Across the River (27 page)

He didn’t tell her that she was wrong, that he knew there was nobody down there. He wanted her to think that he’d been, for once, reckless.

She was standing there with an expression of childlike disbelief. She looked terribly tired; she looked like a frail, unhappy creature, and it struck him that although she was younger than he was, he wouldn’t be at all surprised if he outlasted her. He wouldn’t be surprised if he someday had to endure a world in which there was no Nora.

He wondered why she was so tired, and then remembered that she’d been spending all her days and nights at Billie’s, and thought guiltily that he hadn’t even asked after Billie.

Looking at her, so tired, so small, he wanted to take everything back, he wanted to tell her he loved her. He opened his arms and took a step toward her. She backed away. She looked like an animal who’d been placed in a cage with a dangerous larger animal.

It was amazing that this could happen. That after everything, the two of them could reach a point where if he took a step toward her she responded with instinctive animal fear.

“Oh God,” he said.

He didn’t know what else to say, so without saying anything else, he left.

I
N THE CROWDED SUBWAY CAR
, he wondered how he could have been so stupid. Not because of what he’d just done, but because he’d let her back into his life in the first place. And because he’d been longing for her for all these years. After that miserable afternoon five years ago, he should have known they had no future.

Five years ago, on the day of the abortion, a freezing day with a splattery intermittent rain, he had heaved himself, heavily bundled, into the cab, feeling pale and ill. Beside him, she was oddly bright and chipper, gossiping away about people they knew, and he couldn’t understand how she could be taking it so lightly. He understood that she might
not
be taking it lightly—that this might be her way of masking how gravely she was taking it. But he wasn’t sure.

The cabbie was insane; he hunched himself over the steering wheel and jerked wildly through the traffic.

Isaac tapped the partition. “Can you go a little slower?”

“Don’t be afraid,” the cabbie had said. “There is no fear. In Lebanon we fought the tanks with only droomsticks.”

Isaac assumed he meant broomsticks, but he wasn’t interested enough to inquire. Nostalgia mixed with racism: he had a spasm of longing for the mythical New York cabbie of the
1950s—a guy with a Brooklyn accent, who knew every street in all five boroughs, who drove like a mensch, and who dispensed wise homilies along the way. If only they’d had that kind of cabbie, Isaac thought, they’d never end up at the abortion clinic: they’d be on the way back to Nora’s apartment by now, cheerfully swapping ideas about what to name the baby.

Nora, on the cab ride, which he felt as a ride to their doom, or the doom of someone they were meant to bring into the world together, was chirping away brightly about nothing. He would never forget the stupidity of the things she was talking about. A block away from the clinic, she was talking about how she wished that screwdrivers weren’t her favorite drink, because they were really only a summer drink rather than something you could drink year-round—he couldn’t believe that she was talking about such shit at a moment like this. He remembered thinking that maybe he didn’t really
get
her: maybe her magnificence was just his delusion, something he only thought he saw. He wanted to believe that she was concealing herself, hiding out from him in the thickets of the trivial; he couldn’t believe that this side of her was genuine.

He got out of the cab with her, though she’d told him that she didn’t want him to accompany her into the clinic. He couldn’t stop himself from making one more attempt to change her mind.

“Think about it,” he’d said. “We could bring a new person into existence.”

The remark didn’t have the intended effect. “I just want to bring myself into existence,” she’d said. “That seems like enough work for this lifetime.”

He didn’t want to think about this anymore. He took the subway to Port Authority and waited there for a bus to New Jersey. Nora was probably at her card table, writing by hand, beginning a new story, about a forty-year-old man who throws temper tantrums.

A
FTER HE LEFT SHE SAT THERE
for a long time. She couldn’t blame him for being mad.

She wondered if there was any way she could make it up to him. She didn’t know if there was.

Maybe I’m a wicked person, she thought.

She still couldn’t believe he’d done that with the computer. At least she had everything backed up. Ever since the time Helen’s son had zapped one of her stories out of existence, she’d saved everything compulsively onto floppy disks.

She found a copy of the version that she’d submitted to the contest a few weeks earlier. It was different from the version Isaac had read, but close enough. She went through it slowly, lingering over the lines that must have hurt him. She was appalled by her own cluelessness: how had she
expected
him to react?

After a few more minutes, without quite realizing what was happening, she stopped thinking about Isaac and became absorbed in the problems of the story. There were still those passages that she needed to add. She got out a pen and a yellow legal pad and started working on a description of Gabriel’s badly bitten nails and his doomed, deluded hope that he’d someday find the strength of character to stop biting them.

I
T WAS TEN O’CLOCK WHEN
he got back to New Jersey. He stopped off at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Irish whiskey—because, he thought as he took it down from the shelf, I am a fucking phony, and in the days when I used to drink I always used to drink Irish whiskey, pretending that I liked it more than Scotch whiskey, which tastes the same.

When he got home he poured himself a tall glass and drank it quickly, and poured himself another tall glass and drank it quickly, and then turned on the TV.

The phone rang. Nora. It had to be Nora. She was calling to say that she’d also been writing another story during these last few months, a story that showed his strength of character . . .

The machine answered it before he could. It was Renee. She was saying something about how she was leaving for her fact-finding tour on Sunday and she was hoping they could meet somewhere for one last cup of herbal tea and also she wanted to give him back his Kertesz book and she thought he might have been home tonight but how silly of her because it was a Friday, and come to think of it he must still be at the reception and she hoped he was having a great time—and so on and so on. He didn’t pick up.

Renee. Renee was the hope for the world.

Renee was at least as dedicated as Nora was, and she would almost certainly be more successful. She was more successful already. And she was also more humane. Nora’s art was an art of caricature; Renee’s was an art of conscience.

Renee was the future. The future! He lifted his glass in a toast to the future.

He would do better than that. He would toast the future in person. Renee was home. He tried to call her, but he kept getting a busy signal. She was a no-frills kind of girl: no call waiting, no voice mail. The last busy signal in America.

Well, he could drop by. He could do the pop in. Renee lived only two towns away; several times he’d dropped her off after work. Maneuvering himself drunkenly up from the couch, he found his keys and put on a jacket. Then he remembered that he didn’t have his car—but this was actually a good thing, because he was too drunk to drive. He decided to take his bicycle. He thought of putting on his helmet, but he decided not to, in order to spite Nora. Because she obviously thought of him as the kind of man who would never ride a bike without a helmet.

He hated the fact that he was thinking about Nora even now. Forget her. Think about Renee.

He thought about how nice it would be to get close to her—her youth, her hopefulness, her newly blossoming beauty.

He reached her apartment and stood outside. She lived on the first floor in a garden apartment complex. Her lights were on.

He saw her. She was moving around in her kitchen. He couldn’t see what she was doing.

You could walk in and change everyone’s life. You could walk in and tell her you love her.

She was the future. Let her live. Let her live.

He stood on the lawn, his hands in his pockets against the cold. The night was alive; columns of crackly leaves were spiraling and swirling all around him.

There was a voice in his head saying: Come on, man, your relationship with her is the only purely good thing in your life. Don’t fuck it up.

He wished he were a reckless man who would go in there and fuck up everyone’s life or else a saint who wouldn’t even consider it, but here he was, standing outside Renee’s window, Mr. In-Between, thinking that he wanted to hold her, thinking that she was the future, thinking that this was insane, she was someone else’s future, not his.

He rang her doorbell. She came to the door.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” He could see ten different emotions and questions passing across her face. Her wonderfully expressive face. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How was the reception?”

“The reception was fabu.” He tried to remember if that was a word that young people used. He’d had an assistant who’d used it a lot, but that was five years ago. “I saw your friend Earl. He says howdy.”

She asked him to come in. He kept a distance from her, hoping she wouldn’t realize how drunk he was.

“Sit down. Sit down. Can I help you? I mean, can I get you anything? Can I get you a beer?”

“You shouldn’t have beer on the premises, young lady. You’re not old enough. I’ll have to report you to the authorities.” A lame jest, but maybe it was his subconscious trying to
restore order, trying to place an obstacle between them, trying to prevent him from doing anything stupid.

“I actually am,” she said. “I turned twenty-one this summer, you know.” He was surprised she was that young. He’d thought she was twenty-three.

She peered into her refrigerator. “Bass Ale or Rheingold?”

“Rheingold?” he said. “I didn’t think they still made Rheingold.”

“It’s a very manly beer,” she said. “I must have known you were coming.”

He didn’t know what that meant. Was she insulting him? He tended to feel insecure about his manliness. One woman he’d gone out with had told him he was womanly. She’d meant it as a compliment, supposedly, but it hadn’t made him happy at all.

But he tried to tell himself that Renee had just been making a harmless, meaningless joke.

“What’s going on?” she said. “You look a little down.”

She was concerned about him. Bless her darling heart.

She brought out two beers and sat next to him on the couch. She was wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, unbuttoned, over a leotard. She sat facing him, in some sort of modified lotus thing, so that both of her knees were almost touching his thigh. It was impossible to tell whether she knew she was being provocative. She might have been too innocent to know, too trusting even to imagine that he was thinking of her with desire.

He was moved by this, he was touched by this, leave leave leave leave leave! Get out of here! Don’t curse her with your life! She trusts you! Don’t fuck it up!

These thoughts were going through his mind, but with such sloshing slipshod sloppiness that he couldn’t focus on
them. And at the same time another current of thought was guiding him in a different direction. She’s
here,
man! You’re in her
house!
Look at the way she’s leaning toward you! She wants you! She’s of age! What are these inane scruples? What are you, a Victorian? Even the Victorians didn’t really act like Victorians! You just read a book review about that! Kiss her, man! She’s kissable! She
wants
to be kissed!

He felt like a cartoon character, with a little angel perched on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.

Talk to her first. Talk, then kiss. Tell her about your disappointment that your show didn’t lead to anything. Tell her that you’re a tiny bit envious of her success. Tell her that you hope she has the success you never had.

“Have you ever felt that life is just . . . what am I talking about? I can’t ask you if you’ve ever felt the way a forty-something-year-old man feels.”

“Of course you can,” she said. “Don’t be silly. We all feel the same things.”

We all feel the same things. She said it herself. She wants me to kiss her.

No she doesn’t. She’s too innocent to be thinking that at all.

“Did you ever think you took a wrong turn somewhere, and you can’t go back?” He wasn’t sure what he was talking about, except that he was mad at himself for having given so many of his years to the worship of Nora.

“That’s a terrible way to think,” Renee said. “I don’t believe it. No matter how many wrong turns you make, you can always go in a new direction. As long as you’re alive.”

“Maybe it finally gets too late.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said. “If I believed that, I wouldn’t want to keep living. And I do want to keep living. Passionately.”

Passionately. You can enter another universe, just by leaning forward. You move from one moral universe into another, just like that.

I can’t kiss her. I can’t do it. I shouldn’t do it.

You need to have a little wildness in you, which is the one thing I don’t have.

To hell with Nora. She was wrong about him. He’d prove she was wrong.

Renee was sitting next to him, and there was an invitation in her eyes, he was sure of it, and he leaned forward and kissed her.

As soon as he kissed her, as drunk as he was, he could tell that this wasn’t what she’d wanted. She was returning his kiss, but he could tell that she didn’t want to.

She was kissing him to be polite.

They brought their lips apart and he opened his eyes and she was looking at him with . . . he didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t happiness, so to blot out the sight of it he kissed her again. He pulled her toward him; he had never realized how delicate she was. Birdlike bones. Her mouth was communicating nothing now. Deadness.