A Window Across the River (31 page)

And would she ever want children? And if she did, what kind of a mother would she be? How would a child enjoy being the beneficiary of the Nora treatment?

He didn’t blame her for the way she was. She had a kind of integrity that he still, after everything, found exhilarating. He respected it, but that didn’t mean he had to endure it.

O
N THE NEXT MORNING
, a Saturday, he left his apartment at noon and took a bus into the city. Two of his colleagues from the paper were getting married in a synagogue in the West Village. They were both in their late twenties; standing before the rabbi, they looked radiant and nervous, and very young.

After the ceremony, he went uptown. Nora’s apartment was more than ninety blocks away, but he decided to walk. He needed time to figure out what he wanted to say to her.

It was the seventh of December. At five in the evening, it was already dark. And it was chilly. He hadn’t dressed warmly enough. He had counted on global warming, but for one night, at least, global warming hadn’t come through.

At a street corner in midtown he bought a bag of chestnuts from an old woman with a heated cart. She had long, stiff, stark-white hair; she was twisted low to the ground with age. As he was paying her, he was oddly aware that the same transaction—a man buying roasted chestnuts from a woman on a frigid late-autumn evening—might have taken place, on this
same corner, a hundred years ago, and might take place here a hundred years in the future.

When he reached Central Park, he stopped at Wollman Rink to watch the skaters. There were young couples, lithe and confident; there were fathers and mothers teaching children who looked as if they’d never been on the ice before. The wedding must have put Isaac in a sentimental mood, because all of them, all of them, struck him as beautiful.

Finally he stood outside Nora’s building. He couldn’t tell which of the windows was hers: her apartment was too high up. It didn’t matter. He knew what she was doing. She was sitting at her card table, in front of her computer—a new computer—working on a new story, a story that would turn out to be a sort of letter bomb addressed to someone she loved.

Arthur, the doorman, let him in, and Isaac took the elevator to the fifteenth floor. Nora opened her door. She looked as if she hadn’t slept. She looked wary, guarded: he might have come just to pick up the bass.

But he knew her so well that he could see what she was thinking. She was trying not to show it, because she didn’t know what he was going to say to her, but he could tell that she was hoping for the best.

1

Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: she was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual?

Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as “strident” and “shrill.”

If you’re an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill.

She closed her laptop.

Not much point, she thought.

But then she opened it up again.

2

She didn’t
feel
strident or shrill. She didn’t even feel old.

And anyway, old age isn’t what it used to be—or at least that’s what she kept telling herself.

This was her reasoning. Florence was seventy-five years old. In an earlier era, that
would
have made her an old lady. But not today. She’d been a young woman during the 1960s, and if you were young in the sixties—“bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”—there’s a sense in which you can never grow old. You were there when the Beatles came to America; you were there when sex was discovered; you were there when the idea of liberation was born; and even if you end up a cranky old lady who’s proud of her activist past but who now just wants to be left alone to read, write, and think—even if you end up like that, there’s something in your soul that stays green.

She wasn’t—this seems important to say—a woman who tried to look younger than she was. She didn’t dye her hair; she had no interest in Botox; she didn’t whiten her teeth. Her craggy old-fashioned teeth, rude and honest and unretouched, were good enough for her.

She wasn’t a woman who wanted to recapture her youth. In part this was because she found the life she was living now so interesting.

So she was a strong proud independent-minded woman who accepted being old but nevertheless felt essentially young.

She was also, in the opinion of many who knew her, even in the opinion of many who loved her, a complete pain in the neck.

3

She was writing a memoir that began with the early days of the women’s movement—the modern women’s movement, her own women’s movement, the one that had been born in the 1970s. If she could finish it, it would be her seventh book.

Each book had posed its own difficulties. The difficulty with this one was that she was finding it impossible to bring the past to life. Her memory was efficient; she could recall the dates and the acts and the actors. But she was finding it hard to remember the texture of the past.

Tonight she had finally begun, she thought, to crack the code. She’d remembered a moment that she hadn’t thought about in years. It was just a moment, not important in itself. But precisely because she hadn’t thought about it in so long, she was able to remember it now with a sense of freshness, and she was hoping she might have finally found the door that would lead her back into the past.

She was free for the rest of the night. She’d had dinner plans with friends, but with a secret glee she’d canceled so she could stay home and work. It was seven o’clock on a Friday in early May; she was through with her academic obligations and her mind was clear. And this evening, in which she’d finally, finally, finally begun to make some progress—this evening was the happiest one she’d had in a long time.

Except that Vanessa kept calling.

Her friend Vanessa kept calling, and Florence kept not picking up. After the fifth call, she thought Vanessa might be in some sort of trouble, and on the sixth, she finally answered.

“Thank God you’re home,” Vanessa said. “I’ve got a problem.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing big. Nothing terrible. It’s just that I got pickpocketed, evidently, and I don’t have anything except my phone. I need some money to get back home.”

“Where are you?”

“That’s why I called you. I’m three blocks away.”

She named a restaurant.

“Well I’m right here,” Florence said. “Just come up.”

“That’s nice of you. But it’s a little bit complicated.”

“Why?”

“Ruby and Cassie had to run, and I stayed to pay the check, and that’s when I found out my purse was gone. So the owner doesn’t want me to leave. He wants to be sure I’m not going to skip out on him.”

“Vanessa, you’re a very respectable-looking woman. You’re a very
old
woman. You’re obviously not skipping out on him. Tell him you’re not Bonnie Parker.”

“That’s just what I told him. That’s exactly what I told him, in fact. I told him I’m not Bonnie Parker. But he’s not being very understanding. I think he thinks I
am
Bonnie Parker. I’m really sorry. But it’ll just take a minute.”

People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again?

He’s afraid she’ll skip out on him. As Florence waited for the elevator, she was muttering to herself. She reminded herself of Popeye the Sailor Man.

She crossed the street, still muttering. Muttering, and clenching and unclenching her fists.

She was doing this with her fists because she’d been having some trouble with her left hand. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Her fingers sometimes jumped around as if they had five little minds of their own. A neurologist had told her to get an ergonomic keyboard and an ergonomic mouse and an ergonomic splint for her wrist; she’d gotten all of it, and she’d faithfully done the exercises he prescribed, but none of it was working so far.

Muttering, clenching, unclenching: I must look, she thought, like a madwoman.

4

The restaurant was on Sixty-seventh Street, between Columbus and Central Park West. She went inside, couldn’t see Vanessa.

It was a fancy, expensive, somewhat full-of-itself restaurant. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where the owner would hold you hostage.

The greeter, a somber-looking man, asked her if she needed help.

“I’m looking for a friend. Woman my age? Couldn’t pay her bill?”

“Oh, yes. I know who you mean. She’s in the back room.”

They’ve got her in the back room, Florence thought. They’re working her over.

He led Florence down a hall and gestured toward an entryway, behind which the room was unaccountably dark. She stepped in, and the lights went on, and the room was filled with people shouting “Surprise!”

Surprise.

Friends from NYU, friends from the movement, friends from the writing world. Even her family was there: her daughter-in-law, her granddaughter.

Vanessa was embracing her.

“This was the only way we thought we’d be able to celebrate you.”

“It’s not my birthday.”

“I thought if we did it too close to your birthday, we’d lose the element of surprise. You’d know what was coming and you’d never show up. It was a delicate operation. Like trapping the mythical yeti. We wanted to celebrate you. And we wanted to get you out of your apartment so you could have some fun.”

It was astonishing how little people know each other, even old friends. I
was
having fun, Florence thought. I was having fun sitting in my apartment and trying to understand our life, our collective life. I was having fun trying to make the sentences come right. I was having fun trying to keep a little moment in time alive.