A Window Across the River (16 page)

Sometimes she daydreamed that writing might be enough. She could become one of those odd women, one of those abrupt, withdrawn, eccentric women who did nothing but write.

Part of her was even excited by the thought of turning her back on the world. It was like taking holy orders, like becoming a monk or a nun. This is all I need in life, she sometimes thought. This desk, this keyboard, these imaginary people, this bare white room.

She could just stop worrying about hurting people. She didn’t have to take care of anyone anymore.

Except, of course, for Billie.

Billie had recovered quickly from her surgery. The lump that had been removed was “precancerous,” and she’d have to go in for tests every month, but she didn’t need radiation or chemo. Within days of getting out of the hospital, she’d gone folk dancing again. Supposedly she went folk dancing to meet men, but she never met any. Billie said it was because she was too fat and too old, but Nora suspected that the real reason was that she didn’t really want to. The truth, Nora thought, was that Billie was still married to Nelson.

Nora and Billie would meet for dinner once or twice a week. One night in the middle of June they met at a restaurant in Riverside Park, near the Hudson River. It would have been Nelson’s seventieth birthday. Billie and Nelson always used to do something in the park on his birthday, and since his death Billie had faithfully returned there every year.

As they ate, Billie barely spoke. Finally Nora said, “You still miss him a lot, don’t you?”

“I do,” Billie said. “But most of the time I can manage it. Most of the time I just feel happy about what we had. I only feel sad when I think about the things we didn’t do. I feel sad about all the places we wanted to see together. We wanted to see Stonehenge. We wanted to see the Nile. For a couple of years after he died, I thought I’d see them by myself. I thought it would be like seeing them together. But I don’t think I ever will.”

“You might,” Nora said. She hoped that she would. She hated the idea that Billie’s life had stopped after Nelson died.

In some ways Billie was the image of what Nora didn’t want to become. And yet she loved Billie with a love that was unbendable and complete.

Nora looked out across the river, trying to find Isaac’s building. She wondered what he was doing.

As the evening went on, Billie shed her sadness and started to joke around. She was good at putting her sadness aside. Nora felt more relaxed than she had in a long time.

This is what Billie had always given Nora: a zone of ease. When Nora was a girl, growing up in Illinois, she used to talk on the phone with Billie twice a week; she loved being able to talk with her about horses and the Olympics and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen, subjects her mother considered unworthy of a serious person’s attention.

It was hard to imagine two sisters less alike than Nora’s mother and aunt. Margaret once told Nora that when they were growing up, she’d been known as the smart one and Billie as the pretty one. She was the capable one, Billie the fragile one. That was their family mythology.

When Nora heard this, she got mad; she was fiercely loyal to Billie, and she thought her mother was putting her down. But a few years later she experienced Billie’s fragility for herself.

The day after Margaret died, Billie flew out to Lake Forest. There were several couples in Illinois who had offered to take Nora in—Margaret’s University of Chicago friends—but Nora assumed she’d go to New York with Billie and live with her. This was just after Nelson died, and Billie was living alone.

When they embraced at the airport, Billie put her lips near Nora’s ear and whispered, “I’ll take care of you.”

Later that day they went to arrange for the disposal of Margaret’s body. The funeral home was a beautiful building, a mansion, on a large tract of land. It looked like the main building of a campus, a school for the dead. They parked in the lot and walked across the long green lawn. Nora was wearing a
gray dress; Billie was wearing a sleeveless sundress—pink and orange flowers—and a floppy straw hat. She looked all wrong; she looked as if she was on her way to a dance.

In the middle of the lawn, Billie, wobbly on platform sandals, turned her ankle. She took her shoes off and held them in one hand, and with her other hand, to steady herself, she held on to Nora’s arm. She glanced up at the funeral home. “The Scary House,” she murmured.

After a few more steps, Billie began to have trouble catching her breath.

“I think I’m hyperventilating,” she said. “I feel a little panicky.”

“It’s okay,” Nora said. “We just have to take care of a few details.”

As they drew closer to the building, Billie grew more and more distraught. She was biting her lips in agitation. She was limping, supporting herself on Nora’s arm; after every two or three steps she’d pause, bend over at the waist, and take long creaky breaths through her mouth.

There was a bench in the middle of the lawn. “Let’s sit here for a minute,” Nora said.

They sat on the bench. Billie still couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The harder I try to breathe the more I feel like I’m not breathing.” She lowered her head between her knees, apparently thinking this would help; her straw hat fell to the ground.

“Maybe I should go by myself,” Nora said.

“Are you sure?” Billie said. She had bitten herself so hard that there was blood on her lips.

“I’ll be fine,” Nora said. “I think I might prefer to do it alone, really.”

She squeezed Billie’s hand, stood up, and walked toward the Scary House. When she reached the door she looked back, hoping that Billie might have changed her mind—might be hurrying forward, half limping half trotting, to catch up with her.

Billie was still on the bench. Her arms were wrapped around her body; she was shivering, in the baking sun.

Nora met the funeral director, a dark-jowled man named Mr. Tenzi—he looked as if he needed to shave five times a day—and made the arrangements. His office was filled with flowers. Nora asked if she could take a violet.

She emerged into the bright day. Billie was still on the bench. She looked renewed; she’d put her straw hat back on, and she was smiling.

As Nora walked toward her, she realized that she wouldn’t be going to New York with her. As much as she loved her aunt, she couldn’t rely on her.

Nora stood over Billie and held out the flower. Billie reached for it hesitantly, squinting in the sun, smiling up at Nora shyly from under the brim of her hat.

For the next few years, Nora barely spoke to her. Billie had failed to take care of her. In Nora’s sophomore year of college she came across a line from T. S. Eliot: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” This passage not only justified her anger; it gave it a glow of stern nobility.

But as time went on, Nora missed her aunt’s tenderness, her playfulness, her generosity—she just missed her. During her senior year of college, after she transferred to NYU, she finally called her, and soon they were getting together for dinner almost every week.

Forgiveness brings knowledge of its own. Nora came to
see the past differently. She came to understand that Billie had wanted to take care of her; she just wasn’t strong enough. And in time her memory of Billie on the bench—distraught, shivering, biting her lips—became transformed. It was no longer a memory of someone who had failed her, but of someone who’d wanted to help her, wanted it with all her heart.

N
ORA HAD BREAKFAST WITH HER
friends Robert and Judy, who lived in Toronto and were making their annual trip to New York. Robert had been one of Nora’s pot-smoking buddies in college; he’d turned respectable in his old age but he hadn’t lost his anarchist spirit. When Nora tried to talk about her problem—that she couldn’t write without writing about people she knew, and she couldn’t write about people she knew without hurting them—he let out a huge laugh. “Put
me
into your stories! You wouldn’t hurt
me
! Write about my sexual fantasies! Better yet, try them out!”

Judy patted him on the hand. “Back down, Rob. She’s not interested in writing porno.”

“That’s the problem. She’s been writing that literary shit long enough. If she spilled some of
my
secrets, she’d be on the bestseller list.”

Nora was sorry to say good-bye. It was good to be around friends who didn’t take her problems very seriously.

After breakfast, she picked up a rental car and drove to Connecticut. It was July second, the day before her birthday. Nora had been planning to spend the day working on the Gabriel story, but a company that made dental products had offered her a deranged amount of money to go up to Connecticut and help them with a last-minute rewrite of their brochure.

She spent the afternoon and early evening doing the job. They put her to work at a computer with a fancy new ergonomic keyboard, which was the most awkward thing she’d ever laid her hands on, and as she drove back to New York her arm was keening in distress. She couldn’t wait to get home and strap on an ice pack. She’d bought a new model a few days before, a Freeze Wrap, and she had high hopes for it. It was filled with space-age goo.

What she wanted to do after that was spend the evening playing around with the Gabriel story. Which, in truth, although the main character was still named Gabriel, was becoming a story about Isaac.

It still wouldn’t have been accurate to refer to it as a story. At this point it was still just notes toward a story. This was how it always went for Nora: she had to write for months, getting to know her characters, before she could begin to find her way into the story. Sometimes she felt like a private eye, spending months following up false leads until she stumbled upon the one that provided the key. She wasn’t always sure the effort was worth it—she found it embarrassing that it took her six months to write a story—but this was the way the process always went for her, and she had come to trust it.

It seemed to be turning into a story about Isaac and his sister, though she didn’t know much more about it than that. She wasn’t thinking about Isaac’s feelings or his sister’s feelings; she felt responsible to no one, responsible only to the story itself. So although Isaac called her faithfully every week, she was still keeping him at arm’s length. If she started seeing him again, she wouldn’t be able to write freely anymore.

She was driving down the highway, listening to a Tanya Donelly tape, when the car started to shudder. It felt like it was
having a seizure. She managed to guide it onto the shoulder just before it died.

What are you supposed to do when your car dies on the highway? Do you get out and flag somebody down? Do you walk to a service station? Do you just sit there?

She thought of the writer Andre Dubus, and concluded that she should just sit there. Dubus once stopped on the highway to give a hand to somebody whose car had broken down, and another car slammed into him, and he was rendered paralyzed and lived out the rest of his life in physical anguish.

A literary anecdote for every occasion, Nora thought.

For the first time in her life, she wished she had a cell phone. She realized she was at a bridge moment in history—or maybe just in the history of the telephone. Two years ago, it had seemed pretentious to have a cell phone; in two years, it would seem pretentious not to.

Trucks were blasting by her, trucks so huge that her two-door Chevy trembled as they passed. She put on her emergency blinkers, but no one stopped to help. An SUV slowed down, and the woman in the passenger seat, who seemed to be wearing a cowl—maybe she was a nun—leaned out the window and held up her middle finger and shouted, “Fuck you!”

Nora rested her head on the steering wheel. All she had wanted from the evening was to sit at her keyboard working on the Gabriel story, and here she was, stuck on the highway, being given the finger by nuns.

Clinging to your desk, as Kafka recommended, is not enough. It’s not solitary enough. I should live in a shack in Montana, she thought, with just a typewriter and some paper. No phone, no fax, no e-mail. Off the grid. Maybe the Unabomber’s place is still available.

After half an hour a police car pulled up behind her. The police officer was a woman. She walked slowly to Nora’s window.

After Nora explained what had happened, the officer looked under the hood and told her that her alternator was shot. Her name tag said “Officer Lundquist.”

“I suppose you don’t know anything about alternators,” Officer Lundquist said.

“Not really.”

“Figures. You think you don’t have to know anything about your car—you just drive it.”

Nora didn’t know what to say to this.

“I can give you a lift back to town,” Officer Lundquist said. “Then you can call Avis or whatever and demand your rights.”

Nora didn’t know why this woman was being so hostile. Maybe it was the eternal conflict between the pretty team and the not-so-pretty team. Nora didn’t overestimate her own appeal—whenever she looked in the mirror the first thing she saw was her nose, which meandered slightly off course—but she knew that men usually found her easy on the eyes. Officer Lundquist, on the other hand, had not been smiled upon by nature. She looked a little like the guy who played Carole Lombard’s father in
My Man Godfrey.
Or maybe it had nothing to do with prettiness. Maybe she was just having a bad day.

When they got into the police car, Officer Lundquist offered Nora a toothpick. Nora didn’t want it, but she took it, because she was scared of the police.

Her arm felt twenty degrees hotter than the rest of her. Her arm wanted to get this over with and get the hell home. It was like having a bad-natured cousin who accompanies you and poisons your own mood.

“You wouldn’t be from around here, of course,” Officer Lundquist said. “Where you from?”

“Montana,” Nora said. She said this just to take her attention off her arm. And also because Officer Lundquist was being so rude.

“Montana. Never been there.”

“It’s a beautiful state,” said Nora, who hadn’t either. “It might be the most beautiful state in the union.”