A Window Across the River (7 page)

“Isaac Mitchell,” she said. “What in the world is this?”

“It’s called marijuana.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a pot smoker.”

Isaac had had a drinking problem in his youth and had dealt with it long before they met, and she’d never seen him ingest anything stronger than coffee and tea.

“No. One of those kids I mentioned, Earl, left it here. I think he thought he could shock me. You’re welcome to it, if you want it.”

She hadn’t smoked pot in years. She’d smoked enthusiastically in college, but rarely since then. But now she thought, Why not?

“It might be fun,” she said. “Care to have a little?”

“No thanks. High on life.”

“Will I blow up anything in the darkroom?”

“Probably better to smoke it outside.” He was carefully putting things away. He took meticulous care of his darkroom. “Just give me a minute to shoot up.”

He picked up a canvas satchel and got out his insulin kit. Isaac had diabetes. He’d always been very careful: he exercised
faithfully, adhered to his diet, monitored his insulin level, and gave himself injections three times a day. Years ago, before he met her, when Isaac was late giving himself his insulin shot one day, he’d passed out. It had never happened again, but sometimes he experienced bouts of the same kind of spaciness that had preceded his fainting fit. Nora used to call those episodes his vastations.

Nora had never known him to complain about his condition, and if he worried about how it might affect him in the future, he’d never spoken of it. She’d always thought there was something heroic about this.

She used to give him his injection every once in a while. It was sad and intimate at the same time.

T
HEY WERE MEETING
I
SAAC’S
young people in an ice-cream shop about a mile away. They decided to walk there, and Nora lit up the joint on the way.

Their walk took them through an enormous park. Nature in the darkness seemed mysterious, filled with grave intent.

She’d smoked less than half the joint, but that was more than enough. At first she was thinking that pot didn’t really do anything, but a minute or two later she found herself reflecting on the idea of how exciting it is to be a person, to be a self, to have a self. To be a person in the middle of a life.

She remembered an afternoon in nursery school when she and a few other kids were building a fort out of cardboard bricks. When she’d handed a brick to a boy named Eugene, he had said, “Okey dokey.” It was the first time she’d ever heard the phrase, and she wasn’t sure what it meant.

At this moment, it was hard to understand why that memory was even
hers.
What is identity? What knits me together
with the little girl who had that experience? What binds the two of us together into a single “I”?

“Isaac?” she said. “Did you ever think about the fact that it’s strange that the particular moment you’re living is the only moment that exists in the universe? That all the other moments that people have ever lived are gone?”

“You’re
my
guru,” he said.

The night was awe-inspiring, with an immensity of stars; they looked as if they were sending out messages to one another. She felt as if she were inside the mind of God. She thought of all the trials of her life—the trials that she’d endured already, and the trials ahead—and they all seemed small.

She thought about how strange it was to have a life, to be pursuing your goals—your goal of independence, your goal of self-realization, your goal of helping others, your goal of anything—when the populous night sky provides evidence that none of it matters very much, that the universe has preceded you by billions of years and will outlast you for billions of years. And yet we keep struggling. Apparently we have to.

She saw storefronts in the distance, glowing. She didn’t want to arrive. She wanted to keep walking forever, beside her friend Isaac, in the dark.

Isaac. What a name.

“How did you get the name Isaac?” she said. She couldn’t believe she’d never asked him that before. “It’s really a ridiculous name.”

“Nora’s not much better.”

“I know,” she said. “We’re both of us absurd.”

“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose.”

And then suddenly they were in the ice-cream shop—it was called “Muffin’s”—and the bright loud lights were attacking
her. Isaac was talking to the hostess—it was all too much for Nora to deal with—and, thank God, the hostess was leading them through the glaring room into a garden, quieter and darker, and then Isaac was telling her something about the place, and it was hard to keep track of what he was saying, not because he was saying anything complicated, but because every sentence he spoke would open the door to a thought of her own, and then she’d be gone, wandering down long corridors of solitary reflection, and then, when she found her way back to the present, she wouldn’t be able to remember what he’d been talking about in the first place.

This was because of the marijuana, but at this moment it seemed to her that normal life wasn’t so different. You’re always trying to make out other people’s words through the static of your own thoughts.

I need to start meditating, she thought, so I’ll be able to live in the present.

In the meantime, she could take notes.

Ever since Nora was in high school, she’d carried little memo pads around with her. Generally she used them for the normal purposes—shopping lists, Things to Do—but sometimes she liked to bring them out in the middle of a conversation and take notes. Her friends found the habit half flattering and half annoying. At the moment it felt like a necessity—the only way she might have a shot at keeping track of the conversation. She put her memo pad on the table.

“The little green notebook,” Isaac said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

“So tell me about these youngsters.” She took out a pen. “What merry youngsters doth these be?” she said, and wondered if she’d lost her mind.

“They’re both pretty special. Earl has Tourette’s syndrome—he once told me that when he was in high school he used to bark like a dog. He’s got it under control though, with medication. He’s a good young photographer. And Renee—Renee is a wonder.”

He pronounced her name in a velvety and tender way, and Nora immediately disliked her.

“What’s so wonderful about her?”

“She’s on fire. I don’t think she ever puts her camera down. I don’t think she ever sleeps. She wants to be a crusading photojournalist. She wants to put an end to the world’s injustices.”

“That’s ambitious,” Nora said.

“She
is
ambitious,” Isaac said. He was so enthralled by the thought of his prize assistant that he hadn’t heard the irony in Nora’s voice.

A shaggy brown poodle was nosing around leashless, going from table to table.

“Who’s that?” Nora said.

“It’s Muffin. Muffin himself. He’s a celebrity here.”

Like a benevolent host, Muffin was making the rounds. The people at the next table were talking to him in baby talk, which he seemed to enjoy.

Isaac was waving to someone, and then the someone was sitting down. A boy. A redheaded boy—too much hair—with a farm-boy face. Earl.

She looked at her memo pad.
Earl: Tourette’s. Renee: on fire.
She discreetly put it back in her bag.

Isaac made the introductions.

“I can’t believe I’m late,” Earl said.

“Not a problem,” Isaac said.

“Lateness is the bane of my existence,” Earl said to Nora. “My goal in life is to start showing up on time.”

Isaac nodded sagely. “The only way to make sure you’ll be on time is to be early,” he said.

“Wow,” Nora said. This seemed profound.

A waitress showed up, name-tagged Priscilla. She had a nose ring, and when she said hello Nora saw the glint of a tongue stud.

Why were so many people stapling holes in their faces these days?

Marijuana, Nora reflected soberly, makes you wise. She had suddenly realized that the young people who wear eyebrow rings and nose rings and lip rings weren’t the wild ones, the rebels; they were wallflowers who were trying to escape their wallflowerness but who felt some obscure need to punish themselves for doing so. The self-mutilation was at once the escape and the punishment. Nora understood that poor pierced Priscilla was suffering deeply; the question of what to order seemed trivial by comparison. But Priscilla, who evidently wasn’t ready to acknowledge her suffering, was impatient for Nora to order, so Nora asked for a banana split.

“So are you two old friends? How do you know each other?” Earl said after the waitress had left.

“It’s a funny story,” Nora said. “About ten years ago, I had a job as a hotel detective. One of the guests reported that her necklace was stolen, and when I first looked into it I was pretty sure the culprit was Isaac. It turned out to be the woman he was hooked up with at the time. I had her arrested, she ended up doing twelve months in Leavenworth, and the rest is history.”

She liked to make things up once in a while. She’d gotten into the habit after her mother died; lying to strangers was a
way of punching a hole in the wall and getting a glimpse of a different life. It no longer served that purpose, but the habit remained. Her inventions were generally harmless, since they were almost always too ridiculous to be believed. The only problem was that they sometimes popped out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“Wow,” Earl said. “That’s awesome.”

And then there was Renee. Nora knew her as soon as she saw her. She was gliding toward the table with a look on her face that seemed to be inviting you to stop what you were doing and admire her.

Renee sat down. She didn’t just sit: she seemed to be doing a dance with the chair, which ended with her turning the chair backward, so that when she sat, the back of it was against her stomach. How strange: to be so young that she didn’t even sit like a normal person.

She was a sylphlike girl with hennaed hair and alarmingly green eyes. She was insanely skinny—almost painful to behold. Her bones seemed to be pushing against her skin, protesting against their encasement; it was hard to look at her wrists without wincing.

Isaac was obviously enraptured. Renee was sitting next to Earl, across from Isaac, and Isaac pushed his chair back slightly, as if Renee, this thread-thin thing, was such a large presence in his mind that he felt compelled to give her more room.

She’d barely sat down before she started to talk. “I just had some amazing news. At the protests in D.C. last summer I met some people from one of the unions, and to make a long story short, I might be going along on one of their fact-finding trips this fall. Taking pictures of the sweatshops in Indonesia.”

“Fantastic,” Earl said.

“I’m so excited. Some of these multinational corporations put children to work for five cents a day. They say it’s okay because if they weren’t giving these people work they’d have no work at all. You could justify slavery on the same grounds. It’s horrible.”

Nora had an ornery impulse to argue with her. Except that she didn’t feel like arguing with her at all, because she agreed with her. It
was
horrible.

Renee was talking about the working conditions of children in China, Indonesia, Thailand. It sounded like she knew what she was talking about, and she genuinely seemed to care, but there was something about her that Nora didn’t like: a touch of grandiosity, a touch of mania. She probably
did
think she had a shot at ending the world’s injustices.

But Nora understood why Isaac was a little bit in love with her, if he was. Exuberance is beauty, and Renee was beautiful.

“We had a teach-in last month and Renee debated a guy from Nike,” Earl said to Nora. “She got him to admit that he wouldn’t want his family to be working for fifty cents a day, and then she said, ‘I’m sorry you have such a small family.’”

“My finest hour,” Renee said, shyly peeking up at Isaac and Nora for their approval.

This won Nora over. She liked this young woman.

The food arrived, and while Nora investigated her banana split, the others drifted off into gossip about people at the newspaper.

Isaac glowed when he listened to Renee. He was looking handsomer moment by moment.

He had a way of making people feel important. This was what he was doing for Earl and Renee—Nora could feel it—
and this was what he’d always done for her. He interpreted her in the largest, the most generous way. He made her feel like a creature with a fascinating destiny. He held her up to the light.

She didn’t like to see him appreciating someone else.

She remembered how he’d made her feel during their first year together. She’d been amazed by how fully he accepted her. She’d felt utterly free. Sometimes it seemed that he provided a kind of stage on which she could perform, on which she could put all the different parts of herself in play.

After their first year, she had begun—even with Isaac—to feel the old ache of constraint. When they’d met, Isaac’s career seemed to be blossoming; a year later, he was coming off a year of professional defeats. It was around that time that Nora had a story included in
Best American Short Stories.
It took her a week to tell him about it; she felt uncomfortable, almost guilty, about the fact that good things were happening for her when nothing was happening for him. And not too long after that, she stopped writing stories again.

“All things can tempt me from this craft of verse,” wrote Yeats. The only thing that could tempt Nora from the craft of fiction was a man in need. If her man was ailing, she dropped everything to take care of him; if her man was insecure, she stooped, morally and emotionally, in order to seem smaller than he was.

During their first year together, she was finishing a group of stories about her mother. During their second year, a new story started to take shape. It was about Isaac, and it wasn’t kind. She didn’t get very far with it—she had no idea what the story was going to
say
about Isaac, but she knew that it wouldn’t be tender.

She never told him about it. She’d told him about her
experiences with other people—with Gina, with Sally, with Daryl—but she didn’t tell him that she had begun to write something equally heartless about him.