Nora Jane (21 page)

“Excuse me,” Nora Jane muttered to the girl on her right, and leaving her books, went out into the hall and called the twins’
school and talked to the receptionist. “Their grandmother is picking them up at three-thirty,” she told the girl. “Mrs. Ann
Harwood. She has a pale gray Bentley or else a black Porsche. Don’t let them leave with anyone else for any reason. Unless
you call me first. Here’s the mobile phone number.…Okay, I know. Well, thank you.”

She went back into the classroom and took her seat and listened to the rest of the lecture. Then she put the books into her
backpack and put it on her shoulder and struck out across the campus to find Nieman and Freddy.

Nieman and Freddy were at their designated table at Aranga’s waiting for her. “I may sell Clara too,” Freddy was saying. “Now
that he knows where we are. Of course, Nora Jane always told him they might not be his. The whole time she was pregnant she
told him that. Isn’t that just like her, the darling. Of course the thing is he’s AB positive and so am I and so are both
of them. It’s such a bizarre coincidence.”

“Is he bright enough to remember all that and call it into play? I thought he drank.”

“Well, obviously he doesn’t anymore for what it’s worth. He’s bright, Nieman. Lydia tests at 130. Just because she’s not as
smart as Tammili. Of course, psychopathic personalities are never dumb. That’s been proven.” Freddy played with his coffee
cup. “I hope she’s all right. Where is she? She got out at eleven.”

“It’s ten after eleven. Maybe you should prepare to buy him off. I hate to keep bringing this up, but you could just offer
him money.”

“Solicit blackmail? So we can spend the rest of our days wondering when he’ll show up wanting more? It’s frightening, Nieman.
We can’t know what he’s thinking. What he’s up to.”

“I
DON’T KNOW WHY
that woman who saved him never came back to get the present,” Claudine was saying. They had stopped at San Jose to get lunch
and were still on the road. Claudine was driving and Sandy was watching Zandia and manning the CD player. “Two ounces of Joy
I bought her. I wish I’d just taken it home with me. I thought she was rude, didn’t you? I keep thinking they think I’ll sue
for letting him fall in. I keep reading fear of lawsuits, don’t you? Did you see the way they beat it out of there?”

“I told you, I used to know her. Maybe there’s something she doesn’t want her husband to know that she thinks I’ll tell him.”

“She had a bad reputation, huh?”

“I didn’t really know her. She just went to our church. Well, that’s over, baby. You’re right about one thing. If your mother
wants to see the kid she can come and visit us.”

“If she ever saw our condo maybe she’d buy me a bigger one. She’s got tons of money but her shrink tells her not to give it
to me. I hate his guts, the son-of-a-bitch.”

“Think about something good. You’re making wrinkles, baby,worrying about things like that. We’ve got plenty going on. I hope
that deal down in Mexico works out. We could have a lot of fun living down there for a while. I love it down there. The more
I think about it, the more I think it’s a breakthrough script for you.”

“Sandy, Sandy, Sandy,” Zandia yelled from the car seat. “Sandy, Sandy, Sandy.”

“He’s crazy about you,” Claudine said. “I think he likes you better than he does me.”

Later that afternoon, while Claudine was at the store, Sandy found a piece of stationery and wrote a letter to Nora Jane.

Dear N.J.,

It was really good to see you looking so happy. Your husband looks like a nice guy. You shouldn’t have run off like that.
I saw you leave. I thought, there she goes. She always did think she was invisible when she had her head in the sand.

Don’t worry about me, baby. I’m glad you got a life. I got one too. We’re doing afilm in Mexico as soon as we finish this
one.

Thanks for saving Zandia. I really like this kid even if I do wish sometimes the little helicopter blade on his hat would
fly him off to cloud land fora couple of weeks. Around here we call him IN YOUR FACE.

Take care of yourself. Love always,

Sandy

He carried the letter around for a couple of days, then he tore it up.

Freddy Harwood called his old friend Jody Wattes, who had given up a profitable law practice to be a private investigator,
and asked him to put a tail on Sandy. Then he and Nora Jane and Tammili and Lydiamoved back into their house while they waited
for the new one to be renovated.

“I still don’t know why we went over to Grandmother’s to begin with,” Tammili was saying. “Or why all of a sudden we have
to have a house on the beach. It’s because the neighborhood is anti-Semitic, isn’t it? You just don’t want us to know. I don’t
think people should move because of things like that. So is that what’s going on?”

“No, it is not.” Nora Jane was doing all the lying on this matter. Not that she was good at it, but she was better than Freddy
was. “I have always wanted a house on the beach. I never really liked this house. This house is pure nineteen seventy. I want
to look out a window and see you playing on a beach. If we are going to live near an ocean, we might as well live on it.”

“We want room to grow and change,” Freddy added. “We might want some foreign exchange students. More dogs. Anything can happen.
Besides, think how happy it is making Grandmother Ann.”

“I’ll have to get up at six in the morning to get to school.”

“Maybe you’ll want to change schools in the next few years. We’ll go and look at some. You might want to go to a different
school that’s closer.”

“You aren’t telling me.” Tammili stood with her hands on her hips.

“We’re evolving,” Freddy said. “Rilke said, You must change your life. Are you afraid to live in a different house, Tammili?”

“No. I just want to know what’s going on. You all are up to something and I want to know what it is. Grandmother’s getting
married to that guy, isn’t she? Is that it?”

“I doubt it,” Freddy answered. “It wouldn’t be like her to get married.”

Nora Jane went to her daughter and put her arm around her shoulders. “Your college student mother is going to write a report
on the new cave they found in France. Come help me pull up the data on the computer. Will you do that?”

“They told us about it.” Tammili got excited. “They showed us a picture of the paintings. There was a herd of animals so good
no one could paint it any better. I almost fainted. They showed it to us today in art class. You had that too? They talked
about it in college?”

“Uncle Nieman knows about it.” Lydia had come into the room from the shadow of the door where she had been listening. “Uncle
Nieman’s been inside the one at Lascaux. He’s one of the few people in America who ever got to see it.”

“It was a religion.” Tammili took her mother’s hand, began to lead her in the direction of the room with the computer. “They
weren’t very big or they wouldn’t have fit through the crawl spaces. I bet they weren’t any bigger than Lydia and me. I can’t
believe you guys are going to college. It’s amazing. Come on. I know exactly where to find it. It was all in the newspapers
a while ago. Uncle Nieman made me copies of the stories. I’ve got them in my room somewhere.”

Lydia and Tammili and Nora Jane disappeared in the direction of the computer and Freddy walked out onto the patio and looked
up at the stars and started making deals. Just keep them safe, he offered. That’s all. Name your price. I’m ready. Don’t I
always keep my word? Have I ever let you down?

Going to live on the beach, his father answered. Well, that’s all right until the big storms come.

What’s it like up there? Freddy asked.

I don’t know, his father answered. I’m too busy watching you to care.

I
N JANUARY
of nineteen hundred and ninety-five the esteemed movie critic of the San Francisco Chronicle took an unapproved leave of
absence from his job and went back to Berkeley full time to study biochemistry. He gave his editor ten days’ notice, turned
in five hastily written, unusually kind reviews of American movies, and walked out.

Why did the feared and admired Nieman Gluuk walk out on a career he had spent twenty years creating? Was it a midlife crisis?
Was he ill? Had he fallen in love? The Bay Area arts community forgot about the Simpson trial in its surprise and incredulity.

Let them ponder and search their hearts. The only person who knows the truth is Nieman Gluuk and he can’t tell because he
can’t remember.

The first thing Nieman did after he turned in his notice was call his mother. “I throw up my hands,” she said. “This is it,
Nieman. The last straw. Of course you will not quit your job.”

“I’m going back to school, Mother. I’m twenty years behind in knowledge. I have led the life you planned for me as long as
I can lead it. I told you. That’s it. I’ll call you again on Sunday.”

“Don’t think I’m going to support you when you’re broke,” she answered. “I watched your father ruin his life following his
whims. I swore I’d protect you from that.”

“Don’t protect me,” he begged. “Get down on your knees and pray you won’t protect me. I’m forty-four years old. It’s time
for me to stop pacing in my cage. I keep thinking of the poem by Rilke.”

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world….

“You are not Rilke,” his mother said. “Don’t dramatize yourself, Nieman. You have a lovely life. The last thing you need is
to go back to Berkeley and get some crazy ideas put in your head. This is Freddy Harwood’s doing. This has Freddy written
all over it.”

“Freddy’s in it. I’ll admit that. He and Nora Jane and I have gone back to school together. I wish I hadn’t even called you.
I’m hanging up.”

“Freddy has a trust fund and you don’t. You never remember that, Nieman. Don’t expect me to pick up the pieces when this is
over….” Nieman had hung up the phone. It was a radical move but one to which he often resorted in his lifelong attempt to
escape the woman who had borne him.

Nieman’s return to academia had started as a gesture of friendship. Nieman and Freddy had attended Berkeley in the sixties
but Nora Jane was fifteen years younger and had never attended college, not even for a day.

“Think how it eats at her,” Freddy told him. “We own a bookstore and she never even had freshman English. If anyone asks
her where she went to school, she still gets embarrassed. I tell her it’s only reading books but she won’t believe it. She
wants a degree and I want it for her.”

“Let’s go with her,” Nieman said, continuing a conversation they had had at lunch the day before. “I mean it. Ever since she
mentioned it I keep wanting to tell her what to take. Last night I decided I should go and take those things myself. We’re
dinosaurs, Freddy. Our education is outdated. We should go and see what they’re teaching.”

“Brilliant,” Freddy said. “It’s a slow time at the store. I could take a few weeks off”.

“Here’s how I figure it.” Nieman stood up, got the bottle of brandy, and refilled their glasses. “We sign up for a few classes,
pay the tuition, go a few weeks, and then quit. The university gets the tuition and Nora Jane gets some company until she
settles in.”

“We have spent vacations doing sillier things,” Freddy said, thinking of the year they climbed Annapurna, or the time they
took up scuba diving to communicate with dolphins.

“I need a change,” Nieman confessed, sinking down into the water until it almost reached his chin. “I’m lonely, Freddy. Except
for the two of you I haven’t any friends. Everyone I know wants something from me or is angry with me for not adoring their
goddamn, whorish movies. It’s a web I made and I’ve caught myself.”

“We’ll get applications tomorrow. Nora Jane’s already registered. Classes start next Monday.”

Nieman went to the admissions office the next day and signed up to audit Dante in Translation and Playwriting One. Then, suddenly,
after a night filled with dreams, he changed the classes to biochemistry and Introduction to the Electron Microscope.

This was not an unbidden move. For several years Nieman had become increasingly interested in science. He had started by reading
books by physicists, especially Freeman Dyson. Physics led to chemistry, which led to biology, which led to him, Nieman Gluuk,
a walking history of life on earth. Right there, in every cell in his body, was the whole amazing panorama that led to language
and conscious thought.

The first lecture on biochemistry and the slides from the microscopes excited Nieman to such an extent he was trembling when
he left the building and walked across the campus to the coffee shop where he had agreed to meet Freddy and Nora Jane. A squirrel
climbed around a tree while he was watching. A girl walked by, her hair trailing behind her like a wild tangled net. A blue
jay landed on a branch and spread his tail feathers. Nieman’s breath came short. He could barely put one foot in front of
the other. Fields of wonder, he said to himself. Dazzling, dazzling, dazzling.

“This is it,” he told Freddy and Nora Jane, when they were seated at a table with coffee and croissants and cream and sugar
and butter and jam and honey before them on the handmade plates. “I’m quitting the job. I’m going back to school full time.
I have to have this body of information. Proteins and nucleic acids, the chain of being. This is not some sudden madness,
Freddy. I’ve been moving in this direction. I’ll apply for grants. I’ll be a starving student. Whatever I have to do.”

“We don’t think you’re crazy,” Nora Jane said. “We think you’re wonderful. I feel like I did this. Like I helped.”

“Helped! You are the Angel of the Annunciation is what you are, you darling, you.”

“Are you sure this isn’t just another search for first causes?” Freddy warned. “Remember those years you wasted on philosophy?”