A Window Across the River (4 page)

Nora took her aunt’s hand. At the moment when they touched, Nora knew that she wouldn’t be going to MacDowell. Not now, at least. She could reapply later.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Nora said. She had to force these words out of her mouth—they sounded completely false to her. But they seemed to comfort her aunt.

I’m too young,
Nora thought.
I’m too young for this kind of responsibility.
But as soon as she thought it, she realized that it wasn’t true: she wasn’t too young at all.

A
FTER SHE LEFT
B
ILLIE’S
, Nora daydreamed about going out to New Jersey, ringing Isaac’s doorbell, and, then, without a word, giving him a long kiss.

What she actually did was more prosaic: she went back to her apartment and soaked her arm. When she was seventeen, two weeks after her mother died, Nora got drunk with a boy whom she knew to be an idiot and persuaded him to drive her to New York and join her in forming an artists’ collective, a journey that began in the parking lot of the Lamplighter’s Bar in Chicago and ended ten blocks east of there when he ran a red light and hit a stretch limo that was carrying the mother of the former Harlem Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon. Nora was the only person hurt; she broke her nose, not very badly, and her left arm, badly. She was alone in the world—her father had died two years earlier—and although her parents’ friends had arranged to take care of her during her last year of high school, their arrangement, in which she was shuttled from one home to another, meant that no one person was responsible for her, and therefore that no one was responsible for her at all. Her arm, which had been broken in five places, was treated by a not-very-competent doctor, and never healed properly; it hurt more keenly year by year. It looked normal now except
for the thin scar that curled around her bicep, but it never felt quite right, and whenever she spent a lot of time at the keyboard it ached the next day—it ached, in other words, almost every day of her life. The pain had its own mysterious rhythms: it usually showed up only for about half an hour a day, but she could never anticipate when that half hour would come. The only things that seemed to help were Advil and ice. Almost every day she soaked her arm in ice water or strapped on a Polar Pack, an ice pack that you could wear like a sleeve.

After she finished soaking, she made herself a cup of tea and checked her answering machine. There were two messages from old friends; a message from someone at a medical journal, reminding her of a copy-editing deadline; and a message from Benjamin. His conference was wrapping up; he’d be home in two days. In her unhappiness she gulped the tea and burned the tip of her tongue.

It was as if she was punishing her tongue for its desire to play around with Isaac’s.

She sat down to do some writing. Recently she’d interviewed the songwriter Richard Buckner for a weekly paper in Detroit, and she had to write it up by the end of the week.

Nora kept her laptop computer on a card table near her living-room window. From where she sat, she could see a thin slice of the Hudson River and the cliffs of northern New Jersey. Soon after she moved here, she’d heard that Isaac was living in New Jersey, and she would often look out across the water and think about him. Sometimes at night she’d stand at her window watching the tiny lights of the cars on the other side of the river, imagining that one of the cars was Isaac’s. She imagined him coming home, very late at night, to
a clean and well-ordered apartment, and watching the news, and getting ready for bed. Thinking of him this way, as she watched the lights, had always given her a mixed feeling of comfort and loneliness.

She thought of what he’d said that afternoon: she’d written wonderful things already, and if she just kept going, she’d write a lot more.

If only it were true. She
had
kept going: she wrote every day; but it had been a long time since she’d written anything she could be proud of. She’d been writing articles and reviews, things she didn’t care about much. Though she began her writing session every day by opening a new document on her computer and trying to get a story started, within half an hour she would delete what she had written, if she had managed to write anything, and then she’d turn to some piece of nonfiction—something that interested her less, something that challenged her less.

A year earlier, Benjamin had spent two days in the hospital with symptoms of heart disease. She’d been planning to break up with him, but after he got sick she couldn’t do it, and she’d stuck with him, unhappily, from then till now. And during the course of the year, her imagination had closed up shop.

A
FRIEND OF
N
ORA’S HAD ONCE
summed her up by saying that she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be Virginia Woolf or Florence Nightingale. It was as if she had two needs in life: the need to write and the need to take care of people. The problem was that she couldn’t seem to do both at the same time.

In daily life, she was a kind person—at least she hoped she was. But in her stories, she wasn’t kind at all. When she sat
down at the keyboard, it was as if someone else took over: someone who’d had the same experiences she’d had, but who saw the world with a cold eye.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if she wrote about invented people in invented situations. But when she wrote, she became a cannibal, feeding off the lives of acquaintances, friends, and loved ones. The only time she felt excited as a writer was when she was writing about people she knew, and, almost always, she gravitated to their secrets and their frailties. The things they feared about themselves, the things they hoped no one would ever notice—Nora had a gift for divining them. It was a gift she didn’t possess at all in her day-to-day life; it was something that emerged only in her fiction. Her fiction was more perceptive than she was, and more ruthless.

In college she’d had a friend named Gina, a brilliant funny charming tender messed-up girl. “Every day is a mountain,” she once said to Nora, and if she’d had a coat of arms, that could have been inscribed on it; there was something about her that simply wasn’t fit for daily life. When she was in one of what she called her “blue periods,” she could go for days without leaving her room, and Nora would visit her every evening, bearing sandwiches and juice and magazines. Nora genuinely cared about her. But at the beginning of their junior year, when Nora found herself writing a story about Gina, a spirit of heartlessness took over her pen, and Gina became a virtuoso of victimhood, a woman whose weakness was her only tool, a tool she loved too much to let go of.

Gina had once told her that she’d been sexually molested by her grandfather. Except for her therapist, she’d never told anyone but Nora. She asked Nora never to talk to anyone about it, and Nora never had . . . but it made its way into the story.

When Nora was writing fiction, she became so impersonal, such a servant of the story, that although she was writing something based on Gina’s life, she barely thought of Gina at all as she worked on it. She gave no thought to the ethics of telling someone else’s secrets. The only thing she worried about was that sexual abuse had become such a cliché in fiction that she wasn’t sure she could say anything fresh about it. It was only after she finished the story that she remembered it was based on her friend’s life.

Nora was taking a writing class that semester. She didn’t show the story to the class, because some of the people in it knew Gina and would have recognized her. She did show it to her teacher, however, who told her it was the best piece of student writing he’d read in years and urged her to submit it to
Small Craft Warnings,
the college literary magazine. Nora said she couldn’t, but didn’t tell him why.

One day at the end of the fall semester, when Nora was in the library, she saw a stack of freshly printed copies of
Small Craft Warnings.
She picked one up and looked idly at the table of contents. She noticed that one of the stories was called “The Mountain”—the same title she’d given hers. Then, next to the title, she saw her name.

She got the number of the editor-in-chief, and after she’d screamed at him for a while, he told her that the story had been submitted by her teacher. She called
him
—a little too cowed by authority to scream at him, but she let him know she was mad—and he told her that he’d thought she was merely “afraid of success.”

After this she went straight to Gina’s room, to warn her and to apologize.

Gina was in bed, sitting up, with her arms wrapped around her legs. The magazine was on the bed beside her.

“Why did you do this?” she said.

“I’m so sorry. I never meant for it to be published.”

She explained what had happened, but Gina didn’t look mollified.

“When I told you about my family,” she said, “I thought you understood it as an act of trust. I feel like I’ve been . . .”

Nora knew her well enough to know what she’d intended to say: that she felt as if she’d been violated all over again. But Gina didn’t finish the sentence. She was an honest person, and she didn’t want to confuse the issue by exaggerating.

Somehow, knowing this, knowing what Gina had the self-control not to say, made Nora feel worse than she would have felt if Gina had said it.

“My mother’s going to read this, you know.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. They send this thing to everybody’s family, because Swarthmore is so proud of all its little student writers. My mother likes you. When she sees your name, she’ll read the story. I wanted her to learn about what happened when I was ready to tell her. Now she’s going to learn about it because of you.” Gina picked up the magazine and tossed it to the floor. “I don’t even
care
that you didn’t want it to be published. That’s not the point. I can’t understand why you thought you had the right to put it down on paper in the first place.”

“That’s what a writer does,” Nora said.

“It isn’t what a friend does.”

Nora couldn’t think of a reply, and didn’t want to. Gina had the right to the last word.

Gina didn’t come back to school for the spring semester. There were rumors that she was in a psychiatric hospital, rumors that she’d tried to harm herself. Nora kept leaving
messages for her at her mother’s house, but Gina never called her back.

Nora tried not to blame herself for whatever had happened to Gina. She’d always been close to the edge, and Nora couldn’t be sure it was her story that had pushed her over. But she could never think of her again without feeling guilty and ashamed.

She tried to change her way of writing: she tried to write about people who didn’t exist. She tried the unfamiliar strategy of using her imagination—that was the way she put it to herself in a moment of self-loathing. But she couldn’t do it. Rather, she could do it, but the stories that came out were flavorless and flat. The only time the act of writing lit her up was when she was writing about someone she knew.

After her junior year she transferred to NYU, and in the spring she got an internship as a teaching assistant at an elementary school. She became friendly with the head teacher, a woman named Sally. Sally, in her thirties, was unmistakably an adult—she was a capable, confident teacher—but she had a way of letting you know that she still felt baffled by life. Nora couldn’t afford to be baffled by life—she’d had to meet life one-on-one, with no guidance, no protection, ever since she was seventeen—but being with Sally softened her up in a way she needed, helped her let her guard down. Nora had dinner with Sally and her family every few weeks; she baby-sat for Sally’s boys; she had long conversations about literature with Sally, who was an ardent reader. Nora felt lucky to know her.

Then Nora wrote a story in which Sally was the main character—not as she was, but as she would be. It was about Sally Burke at sixty. It was a story about a woman who felt she’d never really lived. Nora titled it “What She Wasn’t.”

Part of the story was about Sally’s marriage. Sally’s husband was a union organizer: a Good Samaritan, an idealist, a believer in the dignity of labor. He was the Nicest Guy in the World. All of which made him, in twenty-one-year-old Nora’s eyes, a bore. The blandness of goodness. He would corner you and tell you that the world should be a place in which no one goes hungry, and that everyone should have health insurance, and that everybody should have the right to a job at a decent wage. All of this was, of course, true, but the calm, thorough manner in which he would elaborate on these insights made Nora feel as if she was visiting one of those dentists who use laser technology. The experience wasn’t exactly painful, but she still wanted to get away as quickly as she could.

In the story, the character based on Sally remembers a more passionate relationship she had when she was young (with a character Nora made up; Sally had never talked about anything like this) and wonders what her life would have been like if she’d stayed with him.

Sally had expressed an interest in reading Nora’s fiction, and this was the story Nora decided to let her read. She thought Sally would find it amusing to trace the influence of writers they’d talked about—to find herself a character in a story that contained a hint of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” a hint of Joyce’s “The Dead.” Nora had known that her story about Gina would hurt her, but she was incapable of imagining that she had the power to hurt Sally, a woman in her thirties, an adult.

Nora gave Sally the story on the last day of the school year. Sally said she was eager to read it, but Nora heard nothing from her for two weeks. Finally, Nora called her, and they arranged to meet at a coffee shop. After they ordered, Nora asked her if she’d had a chance to read it yet.

“Yes, I read it. I read it the day you gave it to me.”

“What did you think?”

“I can’t say it filled me with a fond elation,” Sally said. Sometimes she talked like a book. “First of all, it’s not exactly flattering to be the main character in a story about someone who hasn’t really lived. But the more important thing is, I
trusted
you. Which means that when you were baby-sitting my kids, I didn’t expect that you’d be going through my diaries. I don’t care that you went snooping. Everybody snoops. But to find my keys and go into the closet and unlock the trunk and read my diaries . . . and then to write a little fable in which everything is true but everything is taken out of context. How did you expect me to react?”