A Window Across the River (25 page)

The phone rang; she answered, but no one was there.

She picked the story up again and wondered whether she really needed to finish it. It wasn’t as if she was going to
do
anything with it. Isaac had been having such a rough time. The kindest thing to do would be to spare him the sight of what she’d written. He didn’t need to see it; no one did. She’d managed to write it, instead of clamping down on her imagination: that was the important thing.

She went to the closet door and opened it and sat on the floor. There were three cardboard boxes against the wall. One of them contained the five stories she’d published. The second contained stories that she’d tried to publish, but hadn’t been able to, at least so far. There were eight stories in that box.

She leaned over and dragged out the third box, which was heavy, filled with paper. It contained stories that she’d never finished, or stories that she’d finished but had decided not to send out into the world. A few were simply misfires, stories that had never found the right shape, but most were things that she hadn’t wanted to show to anyone because of the unhappiness they might cause. There was a folder full of notes for the story about Benjamin that she’d never finished, that she’d barely even begun. There was “Problems of the Middle Game,” the unfinished story about Daryl and the death of his ambitions to be a chess champion. There was “What She Wasn’t,” about her old friend Sally Burke. There was a group of connected stories about her high school friend Helen. They were about Helen’s family, about the way her father’s mental illness had twisted their family life when Helen was young. There was the story about Isaac that she’d begun years ago and never completed. It
seemed there was a story, finished or unfinished, about everyone who’d touched her life.

Maybe it was only because of what she’d been through earlier in the day, but she felt sick. It made her sick to think of putting the Gabriel story into the box—burying it as she’d buried all these others, and moving on to a new story that she’d probably bury as well.

She didn’t want to do that anymore. If that was what it meant to be good to Isaac, then she couldn’t be good to him anymore. She’d have to finish this story, and then she’d have to ask him to read it.

She pushed the box back against the wall and closed the closet door. Then she stood up and tossed the story back onto the card table.

If anyone had been watching her—say, from an apartment in the next building—this would have seemed to be an insignificant moment. It would have seemed to be simply a woman dropping some paper onto a table. But it was more than that.

I
SAAC WAS CHEWING ON STUFFED
grape leaves. Mealy, mushy, slick, slimy, sour. Nora was late.

He was in a diner on Forty-second Street. The waitress was a gorgeous dark-eyed Arab girl. He watched her as she leaned over a table, stretching to retrieve someone’s plate. She was probably still in her teens.

When a man reaches a certain age, there are no more innocent pleasures. You see an attractive woman down the block, your senses leap, and as she draws closer and you see her more clearly, you suddenly feel like a child molester.

Nora was more than half an hour late. He tried to make himself feel worried. Billie had taken a turn for the worse. Nora herself was sick. He didn’t want to believe that she’d simply forgotten about the reception.

If this had happened a month ago, he just would have called her and said, “Where the hell are you? We’ve got a date.” But he couldn’t do that tonight. He was still feeling demoralized—because of the failure of his show, because Renee’s success had highlighted the limits of his talent. He was feeling weak, meek, mouseified.

And for another reason. Two weeks ago, he’d left a phone message for Nadine Lyle, telling her that he’d spoken to Yehuda Landau, and that, unfortunately but not surprisingly,
Landau had no interest in taking part in the panel discussion in Washington.

He’d expected to get a call from Nadine in response—one of her flattering phone calls, in which she’d thank him for trying and find a few fresh reasons to tell him she thought of him as a god. But she didn’t call; instead, she sent him an e-mail, informing him that, because of a regrettable mix-up, one of the other conference organizers had asked someone else to moderate the discussion, so she had to withdraw her invitation to Isaac. But, she assured him, there was another panel that she hoped he’d moderate, “also filled with people who are very prestigious, though perhaps not as known”—people, in fact, whom even he, who had been in this world for two decades, had never heard of. She was offering him a place at the kiddie table.

So he ended up thinking that he’d been had. She’d probably always known that Landau was a friend of his. She’d probably asked him to take part in the discussion in D.C., he thought, only because she hoped he’d deliver Landau. Maybe that was the only reason she’d selected one of his pictures for the show in the first place.

This was probably paranoid. He wouldn’t be thinking like this if he weren’t feeling so demoralized.

It was time to go. He went to the pay phone near the men’s room and called Nora. She answered. Obviously, she’d forgotten about their date.

He didn’t say anything.

He remembered the night she’d called him and he’d recognized her silence. She didn’t recognize his. He hung up.

Isaac walked east toward the library. It was a cold night in October, the first night that year that truly felt like fall. There was an end-of-everything feeling in the air.

When he got to the library, the reception was already in full swing. The room was dotted with photojournalists, each of whom was in the midst of a little cluster of friends. Photo-journalists: a curious tribe. The most successful, the most famous of them were those who had traveled to the world’s danger spots. Some of them did it out of political conviction, some out of a sense of journalistic calling, some because it seemed one of the best ways, one of the only ways, for a photographer to become a celebrity. They went into it for many different reasons, but all of them shared a certain style. They all seemed like swashbucklers. Most of them smoked, as if they believed they’d soon meet with violent ends and therefore didn’t give a damn about cancer. None of them went so far as to wear safari jackets, but they all
seemed
to be in safari jackets just the same. There were about twenty of them in the room, and there wasn’t one of them who couldn’t have been a big-game hunter in another life.

The first thing he did, of course, was look for his picture. The photographs were arranged in groups that made no sense to him. “Witnesses,” “Visionaries,” “Redeemers,” “Mourners,” “Avengers.” How can a photojournalist be an avenger? The tragedy of photojournalism is that you can’t avenge anything. You can only watch.

His own photograph was of an elderly victim of the Tuskegee Experiment—in which the government had secretly left untreated a group of syphilitic black men, in order to study the long-term effects of the disease—confronting one of the bureaucrats who’d dreamed it up. He looked through Witnesses and Mourners, and his picture was in neither group. It must have been lumped in with the Redeemers somehow.

But it wasn’t among the Redeemers, or the Avengers, or the Visionaries. Or at least he couldn’t find it. I must have
walked right by myself, he thought. He noticed a table with a stack of brochures about the exhibit, picked one up, and scanned the list of photographers. His name wasn’t there.

He leaned against a wall and tried to breathe normally.

A tall and embarrassed-looking young woman in a vest came by, bearing a tray of fried zucchini sticks. As she held it out to him she said something that sounded like, “You look like the one person here who isn’t verifying the mumps.” He thought of asking her to repeat herself, but he was so disconsolate that he couldn’t form the words. He smiled and nodded, hoping that this added up to an appropriate response, and he felt old. This is what old deaf men do: they smile and nod at everything.

He looked around the room for Nadine, but he couldn’t see her. Finally he caught sight of her underling, a jolly-bearded man named Freddy. Isaac took another moment to collect himself, and then bore down on him. He was glad to be so tall, glad that he could use his height to intimidate people when he chose to.

“What’s the deal here, Freddy? Where’s my picture?”

Freddy looked stricken with concern; he had the same expression Isaac’s grandmother used to have when Isaac had a fever. “Oh gosh. Oh my gosh. You were supposed to get a fax. There were space problems, and we had to cut about ten pictures out of the show. Don’t worry, though—you’re still going to be in the book. And the book’s the thing that lasts.”

“Freddy, that’s bad.” He put his hands on Freddy’s shoulders and for a moment considered picking him up and letting him dangle in the air. But then he remembered that Freddy had nothing to do with the decision, so he let him alone, and Freddy slipped away.

A few minutes ago, he’d been excited about mingling with
the people in the room, but now he felt he didn’t belong here. Over the years he’d met a fair number of these people, but though some of them passed their eyes over him, none gave any sign of recognition. It wasn’t that they were snubbing him: they didn’t remember him. He wasn’t important enough to snub.

Nathaniel McCall, who’d made a name for himself with his photographs of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, was heading Isaac’s way. He was a large man with long and lovingly tended hair. For reasons Isaac had never been able to fathom, McCall had always disliked him.

“Hello old man,” McCall said. He had somehow acquired an English accent over the last few years. “Wouldn’t have expected to see you here. Are you still with—what is it? The
Bergen Bugle?
”

The insult was like a chess move you couldn’t parry. The name of the paper was the
North Jersey Register,
so if Isaac were to correct him, he’d merely be humiliating himself a second time.

If you can’t parry an attack, launch one of your own. “How are you, Nathaniel? Still carrying around that curling iron?”

Nathaniel, a legendary fop, had traveled to North Korea for
Newsweek
at a time when relations with the United States were particularly tense, and when the border guards had come upon a portable hair dryer in his luggage, its vague resemblance to a gun had given them a (completely spurious) excuse to detain him for two days.

“I’m serious, Isaac. I’ve often wondered about you. I’m really curious as to why you decided to hide your light under a bushel.”

Isaac began to search for a comeback, but then decided that it wasn’t worth it. McCall must not have gotten the news
that I’m not even worth being hostile to anymore, Isaac thought. He patted him on the arm and walked away.

He ended up at the bar and ordered his usual: club soda. He liked to order club soda rather than, say, Coke, because it seemed more romantic. A man who orders a club soda, one must assume, is an alcoholic, waging a lonely war against his demons. He’d never quite been an alcoholic, but he wasn’t above playing the lonely tragic haunted alcoholic card—as feeble as it was, since no one was watching.

Someone was waving to him. Earl, his former assistant, Renee’s semi-boyfriend. Earl was here.

He was wearing overalls and a Nike cap. He looked like a country bumpkin, gawking at the city slickers, all agog. He looked as if he was astounded to be in a room where there was free food.

“Wow,” he said to Isaac. “Great party.”

Isaac had invited Renee and Earl to the show a few weeks ago. He’d invited Earl only because he wanted Renee to come, and if you asked one you had to ask both. He’d thought—this was before Renee got her
New Yorker
news—that she’d be impressed. He’d had a fond picture of Nora and Renee standing next to him, bearing witness to his success, bearing witness to the fact that he was good enough to play with the big kids. Which, it had turned out, he wasn’t.

“Renee asked me to tell you she’s sorry she couldn’t be here. She’s leaving for Indonesia on Sunday and she has a lot of packing to do.” He tugged on his cap, looking like Huntz Hall in the old Bowery Boys movies, except that Huntz Hall used to wear a beanie. “Man,” he said. “This is great.”

Isaac felt embarrassed to be standing here with him. Where was Nora? Where was Renee? How had he ended up
like this—squiring around a coarse twenty-three-year-old boy at a social function where you’re supposed to have an interesting woman on your arm?

Isaac was actually glad that Nora and Renee weren’t here to witness his evening of defeat. But he would have liked it if Earl wasn’t here either.

Isaac finished his club soda, excused himself, and went to the men’s room. When he returned, Earl had a drink in his hand and was chumming around in a little cluster of young people. He’d already made friends. Isaac felt relieved, because Earl was off his hands, but also strangely angry: insulted, because Earl had already found some other grown-ups, assuredly more successful than Isaac, to latch on to.

Someone had made a joke, and Earl was laughing, with a high, horselike laugh. Maybe later he’ll bark like a dog for them, Isaac thought, and felt ashamed of himself.

Another young woman came around with a tray; she looked arch and remote.

“What are those?” Isaac said, grinning, trying to flirt, although “What are those?” wasn’t much of a line.

“Stuffed mushrooms,” she said. “They’re superb.” And then, before he could take one, she moved on.

She was probably heading over to McCall—hurrying, so the mushrooms wouldn’t cool off before he could taste them.

Earl seemed to be at home around the “superb” hors d’oeuvres and the inflated reputations. No, Isaac thought, that idea was not only unkind, it was inaccurate. Even if some of these photographers weren’t as good as their reputations, the fact was that they’d stuck with it, as he hadn’t. They deserved their success.

He finally spotted Nadine, but he didn’t approach her. She
was talking with a man he didn’t recognize, a broodingly unshaven man in his twenties. Although he looked quite grave, she was laughing at something he’d said. She threw her head back, baring her throat in a gesture of animal invitation.