The Life Room (31 page)

She remembered sitting in the synagogue beside her mother on the high holy days. The seat beside them that belonged to her father was empty.
God’s will is inside you
, the rabbi said.
It is written in the book of life. We know how many will die, how many will live
. Did that mean that everything was mapped out already, no matter how we chose to live, it would come out the same way eventually? Was this her destiny?

After she came out of the park and turned up Broadway, she stopped. To her right was a church and on the church was a placard,
NEVER PLACE A PERIOD WHERE GOD HAS PLACED A COMMA. GOD IS STILL SPEAKING
. She thought about it. God is giving me permission to explore, she reasoned. He doesn’t want me to end the sentence.

When she arrived in her office, the red light on her phone was lit. She could barely swallow. “Call me, Eleanor,” Stephen said on her voice mail. “I’m in New York. I’ve been here all week. I told you I’d be back.” He had been in New York for a week and she had not known it. She imagined him wandering through the streets. She imagined him kissing her. It began slowly. In her fantasy no words were between them. He stood before her and lifted her head to his with his hand on her chin. Heat overtook her body. She snapped back to the piles of pink message slips on her desk. Outside the window, the wind was tangled inside the tree branches.

He was on assignment and was staying in an apartment on 57th Street. He had been in her city for a week and had not called her and within that week she must have thought about him hundreds of times. She would call and they would meet and that would be the end of this madness. There were things between them that had not been pursued, that had not been said, and they cut through her. He had come in and out of her life since they were children, and each time, it seemed with more significance. They had walked though an entire city nine months ago.
Almost a year of this
, she thought. Nearly a year and they hadn’t touched on any of it.
What should I do
, she whispered to God, but she heard only the thumping inside her chest. Stephen had been in New York all week.

She grabbed her coat and walked to the grand church on 112th Street. She belonged to a large Jewish congregation on the Upper West Side. Services were held in different venues, in a synagogue on 88th Street, in a Presbyterian church in Alice Tully Hall. God was everywhere. The synagogue had portable bemas and arcs. The torahs traveled.

If God existed, he would find her anywhere. She needed faith to help her understand her contradictions. It could not be a crime against God to follow her heart, could it? She heard Jordan talking to her about her affair with the Italian.
It was high style
, she had said.
If you’re going to do it, my God, do it in style
. What did she mean? She had been too frightened to ask. She sat down in the front pew of the grand church and realized it was all very simple. She would not call him back.

The church was too big and hollow. She couldn’t get comfortable. She looked at its stone walls and thought all it would take would be one loose piece and all the walls would come undone. It was drafty and cold. The images of Christ with blood spurting from his limbs frightened her.
We are all one under God
, she heard in her head.

Back in her office there was another message. “Eleanor, are you there? Where are you? How can I find you?”

The messages would stop if she didn’t call. She resolved to never do so again. But the little red light on her phone continued to light up with his messages throughout the next few weeks. Each morning she checked. And she checked her cell phone constantly; each time it rang she looked at the number lit up in the little window screen on her phone. When she returned from teaching, she checked again. At night she went into the bathroom with her cell phone and dialed her office machine. “I’m in my apartment now,” he said. “I’m talking to you overlooking the trees in Central Park. It’s desolate in the park without the leaves, Eleanor. I’m sorry to leave all these sporadic messages. But when will I see you?”

She grew to depend on the messages but knew it was also better not to answer. Just to hear his voice and imagine him was enough. “I can’t sleep at night with the sound of traffic at my window. I’m used to the silence of the mountains.” There was something about her connection to him that felt poetic and necessary; or was it his elusiveness that made him seem that way? What she felt for him contained deep emotion and special tenderness for his weaknesses. He depended on her somehow, and it was impossible for her to turn away. She played the last message over in her mind, sitting with his voice, feeling it in the pit of her stomach until she didn’t have to play it anymore.

Do you remember when we were kids? I used to feel safe knowing you were in your bedroom. Your window was like a lighthouse in the dark. Eleanor, when will you call?

A student knocked on the door. They talked about his paper on
Jude the Obscure
. Eleanor thought about those children, dead in the small rented room where Jude and Sue had loved, unmarried by the laws of the state, of the church, and yet wed in spirit. She thought of the agony their love had borne. Over a century had passed, but things have not changed. Soon she would be punished. When she taught, Stephen receded from her mind almost completely Only after she went through her daily routine and was in bed did she repeat the messages in her mind:
It’s desolate in the park, Eleanor
.

The messages came about once or twice a week. “This city’s crazy. I don’t know how you live here. There’s so much to absorb. So much to see. I’m in the bathtub. I did something to my back running yesterday. I thought about you as I jogged through Central Park. ‘Eleanor would love the light this early in the park.’ I saw you sitting on a bench watching me. I’m talking to you sitting in a bath full of ice. Leave me a time and place where you want to meet. I’ll be there. It’s cold without you.”

Time in between each message was like a long-lost dream. When she heard the sound of his voice she saw the image of his house in back of hers, the boy in the playhouse dealing the cards, the tormented teenager on her mother’s couch, the half-finished house in Colorado.

“I’m going to come find you,” he said. “I know where your office is. I’m going to sit on those steps we sat on last time until I do. I have to see you, Eleanor. You know that. I’ve come to New York.”

She visited the church daily. She sat on the same bench. She counted the rows each time until she found it. She came to be in the presence of something outside herself. When she left the church she felt almost released.

She walked up Amsterdam back to her office. Just as she was turning the corner through the gates she saw him. He was not a figment. He was before her in the flesh and blood.

“We’re having coffee.” He took her hand and gave her a superior smile. “You can’t betray anyone over coffee.”

“Is that what this is? Betrayal?”

“You look amazing.” He was standing by the gate in a black leather jacket, waiting for her. “Besotted. I’m besotted,” he repeated. He hugged her awkwardly. She did not look amazing. She was wearing Nicholas’s baseball cap and her unwashed hair was tucked in a bun inside it.

“What are you doing here? You can’t just be here.” She wanted to punch him and cry from happiness both at the same time.

“You know why I’m here.”

At a nearby Starbucks he explained he was staying in the apartment of his agent, who was in Los Angeles closing a movie deal. He was finishing up the magazine piece on pilots. They were considering making him a contributing writer at the magazine. If this happened, he could afford to stay in New York. He had interviewed pilots from several airlines. “Just last week there was this pilot on American. Once the plane was airborne he began proselytizing. ‘Those of you who are not believers, let’s take this moment to reconsider.’ Can you believe it? These guys are powerful. Think of the lives they control. It makes you wonder.”

She was in her judgmental mood. The piece on pilots sounded ridiculous. She had no interest in hearing about it. She tried to find other things about him that turned her off. She wanted to store them up so she could resist thinking about him when they were apart. When he smiled, she studied the silver fillings between his bicuspids.

“Did you know that women fantasize most about firemen and pilots? It’s a control thing, isn’t it? Women want to be saved.”

“You are not the Messiah.”

He looked at her strangely.

She was tired of hearing him talk, always listening to messages. She told him about the book she was writing that had grown out of the paper on
Anna Karenina
she had presented in Paris.

“I have an idea,” he said. “The film script we are going to collaborate on should be about a woman who throws herself in front of a train for having an affair. Does that sound familiar?”

“That’s ridiculous. I love that novel. And besides, it’s been done.”

“Eleanor, I know you do. You thrive on high drama.”

She thought about how to defend herself. She stopped. There was no point.

“It’s not a bad thing.” He paused to consider. “It’s just who you are.”

“What about you? Isn’t everyone emotional?”

“If that’s the way you choose to live in the world.”

“What if it’s not a choice?”

“For some people it isn’t.” He reached across the table to quiet her fingers that had been fingering the sugar packets tucked in their wire container, but before he touched her he looked at her knowingly, as if saying,
I know who you are
. He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s okay I like that about you.” He smiled. “Poor Eleanor. Your green eye is hazel today.”

She watched the way his lips moved and the way the joints bent in his fingers. She watched the hollow in his cheek when it throbbed.

“I knew you before your husband did. I knew you when you were a girl wearing your hair in braids. I used to watch you.” He pointed his finger at her chest. “I know what’s inside here. I know what you’re struggling with. You’re trying to decide who you are. If you’re like Kitty or Anna.”

“I’m not so sure.”

She thought about how often she must have sat by her window as a child, staring across at Stephen’s window and longing to receive a sign from him that acknowledged her nights and days of desire. There was never a sign. Now he was sitting across from her at the table in the café and she had no idea why or what to do about it. She felt a chill. There was no word to describe what they were to each other.

“It isn’t that simple,” Eleanor said, thinking once more about
Anna Karenina
.

“What? What did I miss?”

“Why Anna killed herself. She was tormented. She couldn’t bear the cost of having betrayed her family and society. And her son, for god’s sake. She had lost everything.” She paused. “She loved another man. That wasn’t supposed to happen.” She thought of the woman she and Noah saw that day on the subway platform who fell before the subway train. She pictured her vacant eyes and the unsettled way she held her body as she paced between the two posts on the platform. Did she die of love? Eleanor thought of everything she had witnessed that had transformed her. Stephen could not—did not—know her. She wanted to be sitting back in the church, in quiet, practicing restraint.

“You wouldn’t understand it. You’ve never been married. You don’t have a son.”

His face was stricken as if she had physically hurt him. “What makes you think I don’t understand? I’m a writer. I understand.”

“So you’re saying that because you are a writer you can read my heart?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. My novel is about a girl. My agent is shopping it around.” Eleanor pictured the novel wrapped up in brown paper like Michael’s dry-cleaned shirts, tied with twine, being shopped from one publishing house to another by a messenger wearing a bicycle helmet. She berated herself for not listening properly because she knew once he left and she was alone, she would struggle to remember every word. She listened with one part of her while the other was trying to quiet her feelings. “It’s about a girl who lived in front of this boy’s house—their windows almost kissed. A girl that he lost. It’s about a boy who only loved one girl his entire life and he didn’t know how to tell her or how to be with her. He doesn’t know how to do it. That’s what my novel is about. It has no plot. It’s about desire.”

“Is it still set in Alaska?”

“Yes. Where it’s always cold. The boy never gets warm.”

“Why in Alaska?”

“Because it’s fiction.” He looked at her carefully. “I’m trying to learn. Don’t you understand? It’s why I’m here.”

“Learn what?”

He reached for her hand. “How to be intimate, Eleanor.”

Eleanor looked at the second hand ticking on her watch. She was in Starbucks. Her latte was lukewarm. Stephen’s sweater had picked up crumbs from someone else’s snack. He was real. He was across from her and not a figment of her imagination. She wanted to touch him to see if her hand would slip right through. It was five minutes past 5:00 and she was late picking up the boys from their after-school program, though she wasn’t ready to leave.

“I have that poem you wrote for me, Eleanor. I brought it with me to New York. You know. The poem. Remember? You read it to me that first night. When we came home from the bars in Colorado.”

She studied his eyes to see what was behind his words. She remembered how in Colorado she waited for him all night to come home. Had he really changed? “How strange that I don’t remember it. Why did you bring it with you?”

He looked at his watch. “I have to get back to work, Eleanor. We’ll talk more later. This piece. It’s torturing me.”

“You still haven’t told me what happened that night.”

“I’ve already told you it wasn’t about you. I was afraid.”

It was time now to go home to her life of making dinner and sleeping beside someone who had grown as distant to her as a foreign land; to a life of reading her students’ wordy essays and watching her boys turn her living room into a
Star Wars
spaceship. She threw her unfinished latte into the trash receptacle and followed him out the door. Already she regretted what had happened. What had she gained in seeing him? Why had he insisted he see her? She walked briskly in front of him.