A Window Across the River (8 page)

When she’d talked with him, in a general way, about the fact that her writing always slipped free of her intentions, he’d had a sympathetic response. “You have an artistic demon. You have to respect it.” That was kind, but she thought he was glorifying her. It wasn’t a demon; it was nothing as noble as that. It was more like a goblin. A fat little goblin that squatted on her keyboard and took delight in sliming her loved ones.

Although he’d counseled her to accept herself, she knew he wouldn’t be happy if the goblin put its paws on him. He’d given himself away when he’d once said he thought that if she ever did write about him, she’d write about him lovingly. He was trying to show her that he felt secure in her love, but what he actually showed her was that he didn’t understand her. He didn’t understand the inevitability of what happened when she sat down to write.

He’d given himself the part of Prince Charming: his kiss would wake her from her spell. But it wouldn’t. She knew this.

After she got a hint of where the story was going, she tried to force it in a different direction. First she tried replacing the main character with a man who was nothing like Isaac. But the story wouldn’t comply: it
wanted
to be about Isaac. Then, resigning herself to the fact that she was fated to write about him, she tried to make it a story that would show him in a good light—the light in which she actually saw him. But the story refused to emerge.

There was no reason one couldn’t write stories about people’s virtues—good stories, unsyrupy, unsappy. Grace Paley—her beloved Grace Paley—was always writing about
people’s generosity, their loyalty, their resilience. It could be done. But as much as Nora valued these qualities in life, they didn’t happen to be the themes that unlocked her imagination.

It was as if she was a medium, with no control over the voices that spoke through her. She didn’t have a choice between writing about invented characters and writing about people she knew; she didn’t have a choice between writing charitably and writing coldly. The only choice she had was between writing the stories she wrote and not writing stories at all.

Unwilling to write about Isaac and unable to write anything else, she finally did the same thing she’d done when she was seeing Daryl. She decided not to write stories at all. Once again, she turned her attention to essays, reviews, and other things that didn’t matter to her.

When she got pregnant, she realized that she had to change her life. Isaac was the best man she’d ever known, but their relationship couldn’t survive her pregnancy.

Maybe it could have if he hadn’t been so insistent. She was clear about not wanting a child, but Isaac wouldn’t let it rest; he hectored her about it for two solid weeks while she was waiting to have the abortion.

During those two weeks, she began to shrink away from him. He began to seem terribly old to her: his skin, his hair, his breath, his teeth, his preoccupations. He compared her once to Emma Peel, the heroine from some old TV show she’d never heard of, someone he’d had a crush on since the age of five. He looked as if he’d just given her the greatest compliment in his vocabulary, and she felt as if she was going steady with Methuselah.

Renee was telling Isaac how great it had been to work with him. Nora reached out for Isaac’s teacup and took a sip to
establish her territorial rights. She did this automatically, while continuing to think about the way things had fallen apart five years ago. She remembered taking his arm when the two of them were standing on the roof of a building—they were in someone’s penthouse during a party, and they had ended up on the roof, thirty floors up, looking out at the city—and mischievously asking, “Would you throw yourself off this roof for me?” He had looked at her glumly and said, “Well, I don’t think I would. But I’d probably consider it.” She remembered the look of resignation on his face, as if his love for her was something that he didn’t even want, just something that he’d gotten stuck with, and she remembered that she was at one and the same time full of sympathy, because she didn’t really want to make him suffer, and delighted, because she loved being able to think of herself as a woman a man might throw himself off a roof for.

Why had she been so cruel to him that night? Because she knew she was going to leave him, and she was so angry at herself, so sick at heart, that she was seized by a wild desire to treat him monstrously.

He had insisted on accompanying her to the clinic—not taking her seriously when she said she wanted to go alone—and as he sat beside her in the cab, oppressively glum, she wished she had an ejector seat so she could send him popping up into the air and be done with him. While the madman cabbie bolted down Ninth Avenue as if they were in a war zone, she had chattered on about the most foolish things she could think of, knowing that she was hurting him by doing this, and taking pleasure in it.

Even then, on the street outside the clinic, he’d made one last effort to change her mind. He just wouldn’t give up. She remembered that she said something that finally silenced
him—something he didn’t have an answer for. But she couldn’t remember what it was.

She didn’t make her decision lightly. She knew it was a grave decision; by the time she had the abortion she was eight weeks pregnant, and the being inside her had a heartbeat and the beginnings of a central nervous system. (Nora couldn’t stop herself from looking at books that charted the development of the embryo.) It wasn’t like lancing a boil. She was prepared to suffer over her choice, and she did suffer—not so much during the day, but at night, while she slept. She kept having dreams in which she was pregnant, though the embryo or fetus was never in her womb: it was growing in her hand, or in her arm—her left arm, her injured arm—or in her brain. The being inside her, in these dreams, was always sleeping—except once, when it was reading a book by Agatha Christie—and always gave off a faint blue glow. She had the dreams once or twice a week, and in the morning she would wake up feeling lost. The dreams had never completely stopped coming, although she didn’t have them very often anymore. But as sad as the decision made her, it was one that she never came to regret.

After the abortion, she and Isaac had tried, incredibly, to “be friends,” and for three or four months it seemed to be working. She remembered seeing him on his birthday and telling him he was her best friend. Then, the day before she left for a vacation in Canada, she and Isaac took his nephew to the zoo, and, witnessing how joyful it made Isaac to be with him, Nora thought that it would be best to get out of his life—that, mere “friends” though they might be, she was probably holding him back. She didn’t exactly decide anything that afternoon, but after she got back from Canada she didn’t call him, and he didn’t call her either. And that was that.

Isaac and Renee and Earl were talking, but she wasn’t even pretending to be listening anymore. She was hoping there was a way for her to atone for hurting Isaac. She was hoping she wouldn’t hurt him again.

She felt something cold and wet in her palm: Muffin’s nose. He was licking her hand. Then he put his front paws on her thigh and strained toward the table. Apparently he wanted her to feed him.

Nora wanted him to go away. She moved her leg away and Muffin got down and, still hopeful, walked over to Isaac. He nuzzled his head against Isaac’s shin, but Isaac, entranced by his young friends, didn’t even look down. Nora was the only one paying attention to the dog, so she was the only one who noticed when he got hold of a piece of biscotti that Earl had accidentally dropped on the floor.

“You have to stay open,” Renee was saying. “Even when it hurts.”

Nora was trying to catch up on the conversation—what had inspired Renee to impart this wisdom?—when she noticed that Muffin was doing some kind of dance near Isaac’s feet, taking little leaps backwards. The lambada, Nora thought. The forbidden dance.

Isaac glanced down at him. “Cute dog,” Isaac said.

Muffin began to emit a curious sound, as if he was trying to speak.

“I think he’s choking,” Nora said.

Muffin’s front legs were still scuffling, but he wasn’t getting any traction anymore; he’d stopped moving backwards. He was still making odd noises, and he was starting to list, like an injured ship.

“Oh my God,” Renee said. “Give him some water.” Even
stoned, Nora could see that that didn’t make sense. Muffin’s eyes were going up in his head; you could hardly see his pupils anymore.

A man at the next table stood up abruptly. He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties. He looked like a take-charge guy. He looked like someone you’d want to have living next door to you, just in case there was ever any trouble. Nora was relieved—he was going to deal with this.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and didn’t move.

His wife, a suburban bohemian in a baggy dress, was waving her napkin. “Give the poor thing some room. He needs air.”

We’re watching this dog die, Nora thought. We’re all of us going to sit here and watch.

She was paralyzed by the thought that she didn’t know what to do, until she realized that no one around her knew what to do either.

The Heimlich maneuver, she thought. She bent down and picked up the dog, and then she hesitated, because she remembered having read that when an infant is choking you shouldn’t give him the Heimlich; you should lay him face down across your knees and tap him sharply on the back, as if you’re burping him.

Grown-up or infant—which did Muffin resemble most? She decided that Muffin’s air of friendly optimism reminded her of her grandmother, many years gone, so she put her fingers into his abdomen and pressed. A hard chunk of biscotti shot out of his mouth.

I did it, Nora thought.

Before she had time to congratulate herself further, she felt Muffin sinking his teeth into her thigh.

All was well for Nora Howard until that fateful night when she performed the Heimlich maneuver on a dog.

Muffin lifted his head to catch a breath of air and seemed to be ready to bite her again and Nora pushed him and he snorkeled wildly off her lap. Then he went over to the moist piece of biscotti, sniffed it, and wagged off toward the cloakroom.

A stocky woman emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. She looked at Nora grimly.

“What’s going on here? I heard someone was hurting my dog.”

“She saved your dog’s life,” Isaac said.

The woman looked over at the take-charge guy and the bohemian. The take-charge guy was still standing.

“I don’t know
what
was going on,” he said. “That dog wasn’t happy, I’ll tell you that much.”

“He was choking on a cookie,” Nora said. “I got it out of him and then he bit me.”

“Muffin never bites anybody,” the woman said, still drying her hands. She seemed to be drying each finger individually.

Muffin had wandered back to the table, as if he wanted to see what all the commotion was about. He looked up at Nora, crouching. He didn’t look friendly.

“Your dog was choking,” Renee said. “You shouldn’t be hassling her. You should be thanking her.” She had a light in her eyes, a light of political zeal, as if she’d found a new cause.

“My dog doesn’t bite. And nobody should be feeding him cookies.”

Nora was afraid that the clean-finger lady was going to call the police. Then the police would find out that she was high on marijuana, and there’d be a trial, and it would be her word against the dog’s.

She felt like someone in an Ibsen play, some figure of lonely heroism, reviled by the crowd.

She had a flush of shame after she thought this, because she’d never actually read Ibsen. She’d always meant to, because she wanted to find out what his character Nora, from
A Doll’s House,
was all about, but somehow she’d never gotten around to it.

She liked Nora Charles, though, from
The Thin Man.

“I think you people should finish up and leave,” the finger lady said. “Before you do any more damage.” She looked them all over slowly, as if she wanted to be able to pick them out in the lineup.

“You can’t force us to leave,” Renee said.

“Who said anything about forcing you?” the lady said, and then she went back to the kitchen.

Renee seemed disappointed, as if robbed of the chance to have a confrontation.

Nora looked down at her thigh. Muffin’s teeth hadn’t broken through the fabric of her pants.

Muffin was underneath their table, sniffing listlessly. He looked a little odd, and Nora wondered sympathetically whether the cutoff of oxygen during his choking fit had given him brain damage.

R
ENEE AND
E
ARL WERE HEADED
off to a concert in New York. When they said good-bye to Nora, both of them respectfully shook her hand.

“Keep it real,” Earl said.

“I liked what you did for that dog,” Renee said. “You’re a cool lady.” Then she gave Isaac a hug, which, Nora thought, lasted too long.

“Are they a couple?” Nora asked after she and Isaac were alone. She wanted them to be.

“I think they may sleep together sometimes, but they don’t seem to think of themselves as a couple. I’m baffled by the mating habits of the young.”

He took her arm. “Alone at last,” he said. “Me and my hotel detective.”

They decided to have dinner in Isaac’s apartment. They walked there, through quiet suburban streets. They didn’t speak. She couldn’t speak. She felt as if there was something gathering force between them. As if the kisses they hadn’t given each other—yesterday, outside the coffee shop; today, when she met him at his darkroom door—hadn’t been given because each of them, without knowing it, had wanted to do nothing to dilute the intensity of the first kiss of this new phase
of their lives, the kiss that they were going to give each other tonight, in his apartment, in the dark.

She wished she hadn’t smoked the joint. She was still feeling high, still feeling too thinky, and she was afraid that if she and Isaac came together physically, her mind would be wandering hither and yon.

Hither and yon? Was that the expression? She remembered why she’d stopped smoking pot: in a subtle way, it impaired her relationship to the language.