A Window Across the River (12 page)

Benjamin’s doctor was famous for his wondrous teeth.

“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” Nora said.

“That’s ridiculous. I’m just upset that that charlatan got his hands all over my book.”

But after half an hour on the couch he didn’t feel better, and he let her take him to the hospital. In the emergency room—overweight male with chest pain—he moved quickly to the front of the line. He sat on the examining table in a paper gown, his plump white hairless legs dangling. “I have an anomalous sensation in my chest,” he said to one of the doctors, and Nora was touched by this. Who talked this way? Nobody but Benjamin.

After twelve hours of testing, the doctors concluded that he’d had a mild “coronary event,” and they kept him in for observation.

He sat in his hospital bed, stiff with fright; when his brothers came by the next day, they made jokes to cheer him up, but Benjamin just sat there, nodding tightly. Later, after his brothers had left, Benjamin’s doctor stopped in, and Benjamin asked him, in a small voice, whether it was all right to laugh.

“Of course,” the doctor said. “Laughter’s the best medicine,” he added predictably.

“It won’t put a strain on my heart?”

Sitting in the corner, Nora felt ashamed of her own mind. Because at the same time that she was genuinely concerned about Benjamin, she was also wishing that she’d broken up with him a month ago. She didn’t know when she’d be able to break up with him now.

A
LL THIS HAD HAPPENED
more than a year earlier. Benjamin was as good as new: he’d lost weight; he’d gotten tenure; his book had been well reviewed in the scholarly journals. His golden bubble had long since reappeared. But still she hadn’t left him. She hadn’t been able to.

Her inability to leave him was stunning—and yet it wasn’t stunning at all. Anytime she thought about it, she remembered him as he was that night in her kitchen: the frightened boy who’d forgotten how to swallow; or as he was the next day in the hospital: the timid boy asking his doctor if it was okay to laugh.

She didn’t love him, but she stayed. And two days after he was discharged from the hospital, she’d put away the notes she’d been making for a story about him, and she’d written barely a word of fiction from that day until this morning.

During the past year, she’d become an amateur authority on coronary health. She’d subscribed to
Nutrition Action
and
the
Harvard Heart Letter,
she’d read half a shelf of books about “heart-healthy lifestyles.” She was trying to keep him on something approximating the Dean Ornish diet. She’d nudged him into an exercise program (he finally acquiesced when she explained that he could read while he exercised, and now he was dutifully spending half an hour a day on the treadmill, a copy of Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Idea
propped up on the instrument panel). And without his really being aware of it, she’d begun to oversee his schedule, trying to make sure that his afternoons were free for reading and writing so that he was no longer staying up till two in the morning and getting by on five hours’ sleep.

Sometimes she told herself that it made perfect sense that she hadn’t been writing any fiction: the creative energy that she normally poured into her stories had been diverted into the effort to take care of him. But she knew that wasn’t the real reason. She wasn’t writing fiction because she was afraid of where it would lead her.

T
HE RESTAURANT WAS ON
Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street. It was one of those places that make you feel like you’re back in the 1940s—it had a neon sign outside that said “Steaks and Chops.” It was a comfortable place, where you could sit as long as you liked.

She knew this was a big night for Benjamin. During the last six months, he’d grown restless with the confines of being an academic scholar, writing only for other academics. He wanted to write for
Harper
’s and the
Atlantic,
he dreamed of writing for the
New Yorker
someday. He wanted, he once told her solemnly, to become a “public intellectual.” He valued these monthly get-togethers, because many of the people who
attended them wrote for the magazines he dreamed about writing for.

At the back of the restaurant, ten or fifteen people were sitting around a long table. Nora knew about half of them—not well, but well enough to consider sneaking away. But then Benjamin spotted her. Too late.

The people at the table, in Nora’s view, could have posed for a collective portrait illustrating the varieties of self-glorification in literary life.

Sitting next to Benjamin was Marty Rubin, whose zeal for self-promotion took innovative forms. Two years ago, after he’d published his first book, a political novel about the drug war, he’d hired a team of college-age “assistants” to read the book for a few hours a day while riding the subway. Last year, after the death of a mutual friend of theirs, he’d sent Benjamin a packet in the mail. It contained a note that read, “I was so sorry to hear about Paul’s death. I want you to know that only an unbreakable obligation like the one described in the enclosed flyers could prevent me from attending the memorial service. If you get a chance, perhaps you could distribute them after the service, so that if any of our friends happen to be traveling to the West Coast they can attend the second or third lecture.” The note was accompanied by twenty copies of a flyer advertising a lecture series he was giving at UCLA; it featured a color photograph of him, standing shirt-sleeved in a blighted barrio in East L.A., looking both compassionate and streetwise.

There was Peter Anderson, who in his early thirties had written two books in quick succession: an authorized biography of Giorgio Armani and a slim study of foot fetishes. After the foot-fetish book flopped commercially, Peter had spent a
few months engaged in anguished introspection, a period that culminated in a trip to the Middle East, where, during a tour of the West Bank, he had discovered that the Palestinians were possessed by irrational furies and an inability to let go of their grievances. He had expanded on this insight in a series of articles, which had led to a contract for a book about world trouble spots; the thesis of the book,
The Limits of the Liberal Mind
, was that the conflicts in places like Ireland, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East were beyond the reach and even beyond the comprehension of idealists, humanitarians, and peacemakers. He now appeared regularly on
Charlie Rose,
offering deeply pessimistic reflections about global politics in a voice that was stricken, burdened, weary, weighed down by all he had witnessed.

And then there was Frank Millstein, an investigative reporter who in recent years had taken to referring to himself in the third person: “When people see Frank Millstein’s name at the top of the page, they know they’d better sit down. They know they’re about to read something that’s gonna pack a punch.” And why, Nora thought, shouldn’t he? If you consider yourself a figure of major importance, you
should
refer to yourself in the third person. Anything else would be false modesty.

All these forms of self-aggrandizement seemed peculiarly male. But
why
were men like this? And was it
only
men who were like this? Of course not. But it was much easier for men to be like this. She found a chair at an empty table and slid it next to Benjamin, who kissed her hello, but who was so absorbed in the discussion that he barely looked at her.

They were talking about an article that had recently appeared in
Harper’s.
Nora hadn’t read it, so it was hard for her to follow the conversation.

Just before she’d entered the restaurant, Nora had noticed a judo school next door. Now, after ordering a drink, she glanced up and saw a man who must have been one of the teachers. A small, compact Asian man in his late fifties or early sixties, he was standing near the door, waiting to be seated. He was dressed simply, in a white shirt and khaki pants; he was carrying a gym bag that bore the school’s emblem. His hair was wet and neatly combed, as if he’d just showered after his class. A busboy went hurrying by, holding up a tray of plates and glasses, and the man turned aside to let him pass; it was a tiny movement, a half step, but it was a study in economy of motion.

The hostess led the man to a table and a waiter immediately brought him a pot of tea. Evidently he was a regular.

Nora, watching him thank the waiter and pour himself a cup of tea, his movements elegant and precise, felt as if she could learn more of value from him than from any of the people at her table. Maybe he could even fix my arm, she thought.

She didn’t want to be reductive; she didn’t want to exalt the life of the body over the life of the mind. She didn’t want to engage in some implicitly racist assumption that as a representative of the Ancient East, he was in tune with the unchanging verities. But he
did
have a quiet grace—in the calm simplicity of his gestures, in the way he’d thanked the waiter who’d brought him his tea. He had the air of someone who had tended his life wisely.

But of course the people at her table, heaving their abstractions around, had tended their lives as well. Some of them were ardent readers; some of them were gifted and careful writers; almost all of them, she was sure, genuinely cared about
the ideas they were discussing. Even if their interest in these ideas was tied up with their own ego-strivings, their obsessive concern for their careers, they were serious people.

And even if they
were
to some extent full of shit, who wasn’t? What about the judo guy? Maybe if she knew him she’d discover that he was full of shit himself. She might find out that he spent all his waking hours boiling with envy of some other judo guy who was more famous than he was.

And what about me? Nora thought. Maybe the biggest fool at this table is the person who sees the foolishness in everyone else, the small hypocrisies, when the significant thing about them is that they’re trying, through their writing, to keep some sort of intelligent cultural conversation alive. Why was the transformation of Peter Anderson, the foot fetishist turned prophet, any less admirable than the transformation that Nora was trying to bring about in her own life? If there’s a joke here, it’s probably on me.

The discussion broke up; people were standing. Benjamin fell into conversation with a woman Nora had never met. She was almost as small as Nora, and she wasn’t much younger, but Nora felt as if they could have been from different planets. This little thing, you could somehow tell from the quickest glance, had a motor of ambition inside her that never stopped working. Even as she spoke to Benjamin she was scanning the room, making sure she could get rid of him before any of the heavy hitters left.

She was wearing a tight dress, short and sleeveless, so you could admire her arms and legs, which were, indeed, admirable: you could tell she worked out.

I should start working out too, Nora thought. That girl over there will never get pump head.

Nora talked for a minute with one of the few people she felt comfortable with there: Ilya Kaplan, a stooped, gentle guy who worked for an arts foundation.

“Are you still writing?” he said.

“Always.”

“Fiction, I mean. You tend to go back and forth, right?”

She thought of the thing she’d written that morning: her two or three pages about Gabriel.

“Right now I’m somewhere in the middle.”

“Well, I hope you get back to writing fiction soon. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’ve always loved your stuff—I guess I’ve only read two or three of your stories, but I loved them.”

“Why shouldn’t you be telling me that? Everybody should be telling me that.”

“What I shouldn’t be telling you is that I’m going to be judging a short-story competition this year for the
Atlantic.
It’s limited to writers who’ve published, I think, at least two stories, but who haven’t put out a book yet. So you’d qualify. The winner gets five thousand dollars, and the story runs in the
Atlantic,
of course. So if you have anything you haven’t published yet that you feel good about, think about it. The deadline’s pretty far off, so you have some time.”

“Wow. Thank you.” She’d never published in a magazine with a circulation approaching that of the
Atlantic.

“I can’t guarantee anything, obviously. They’ll probably get about a million submissions, and they only send the thirty finalists on to me. And even if you
are
one of the finalists, I might end up liking somebody else’s story better. But I’ve loved everything I’ve read of yours, so . . . give it a shot.”

Nora kept thanking him until he asked her to stop. It
would have been a very happy moment, except that she was still suffering in her arm.

“You’re funny,” he said. “You seem like such a sweetheart—you
are
such a sweetheart. I’ll never forget the way you were with my daughter when she got that bee sting.” Something that happened at a barbecue a year ago—Nora barely remembered it. “But in your stories, you’re like some—I don’t know what you’re like. But you’re no sweetheart.”

“I know. When I pick up my pen I become a monster. I don’t really write with a pen. But.”

“Not a monster. I wouldn’t say a monster.” He was thinking about this seriously. “That story of yours that was in
Boulevard
a couple of years ago—that had a touch of Adam Halliday in it, didn’t it?”

“I can’t believe you saw that.”

“
Was
it Adam?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Well, if it wasn’t, it was an interesting coincidence. How well do you know him?”

“I only really met him once or twice.”

“That’s what I thought. He’s a good friend of mine, and I was amazed at how much of him you got right.”

“Lucky guess,” Nora said. “Not that I’m admitting it was about him.” Adam was an English writer who’d come to New York to become the fiction editor of the
Atlantic
—promising to turn the staid old magazine around, to make it brilliant and edgy and snarky and all that—and had slunk back to London in obscure circumstances six months later. Nora had met him a couple of times—he’d rejected two of her stories, but kindly, and they’d met for coffee—and something about him had intrigued her.