Visible City (5 page)

His father had often talked of those who left Orthodoxy in anger, forging fiery trails of rebellion as they wandered foolishly, recklessly from the path. Now Jeremy was among them. For months after he’d stopped wearing a yarmulke, he had expected to put his hand to his head and feel the small crocheted circle there. For far longer he was sure that its imprint was still discernible in his hair. He hid each trespass, censoring what he said to his parents. Long ago, he had imagined himself angrily, bravely demanding his right to be his own person, while other times he imagined timidly sneaking the words in as a casual aside at the end of a conversation. All these would-be scenarios took place at far-off future dates, but his father had died before Jeremy could tell him, before he allowed himself to wonder if his father already knew.

When the subway had come, Jeremy had pushed his way into the crowded car. He could not think about the press of fear, not now. If he forced those feelings into increasingly smaller spaces inside himself, perhaps one day they would disappear altogether. At 96th Street, the passengers rushed across the platform to the express train, which miraculously waited. He’d transferred to the Shuttle, then got on the downtown 6 train. A seat opened, and Jeremy squeezed himself into the valley between two people. With exhaustion the most effective salve against fear, Jeremy closed his eyes.

After a few minutes or an hour, he’d awoken. An empty car. A black tunnel. A screech of wheels. The car was turning, and out the window he saw a sign for City Hall station. He had missed his stop. Or was on the wrong train. Or survived an emergency by sleeping through.

As the train curved through the tunnel and quieted, Jeremy had pressed his face to the window to catch sight of a station he hadn’t known existed. It was eerily deserted, yet even in its neglected state, the station’s one-time grandeur was evident. The ceilings were vaulted and arched, lit with skylights held in place by ornate wrought-iron canes. A grand staircase, just visible from the train window, led to the street level. The walls were decorated with bursts of red and green tile that had darkened with age but still revealed their intricate handiwork.

With Jeremy’s face against the glass, the train had sped up and reentered the dark tunnel. Intent on seeing what was rapidly disappearing from view, he’d craned his neck backward for one last glimpse, and as the subway hurtled forward, a passageway had opened inside him, a vista to somewhere else.

With an hour until he was supposed to meet his family, Leon walked toward home. By the end of the day, he was used up. After he’d stepped inside so many people’s lives, his own family felt farther away and the prospect of meeting them made him weary. His emotional saturation made him wonder why everyone didn’t shut themselves away from the tangle of need, from the inevitable frictions of life among people.

His mind was still on his last appointment of the day, a woman whom he didn’t particularly look forward to seeing, having to hear each week of her fear of losing her temper with her kids. From the outside, she appeared poised and calm as she diligently recounted her interactions with her twins. It had taken a few sessions to notice that she always sat with her arms tightly folded across her chest, as if holding herself together, and that her nails were digging into her skin. She expended so much effort to sound happy and was so tightly controlled that he couldn’t help but imagine the moment in which the pressure reached such a level that she erupted before his eyes. Until that happened, any admission of a negative feeling felt like a victory painfully extracted.

As he’d prepared to leave his apartment that morning, Leon had already been thinking about her and the various patients he would see that day. He had padded across the living room and had almost made it out the front door without waking his daughter. But when Emma awoke, she had caught him off-guard, searching his face for an answer to a question she hadn’t posed. Underneath her confident exterior, he glimpsed a scared child. He stepped back into the living room but gave himself away by glancing at his watch. At the wounded look on Emma’s face, he realized this was a mistake, one he wouldn’t have made at work. His patients never liked to feel that they were taking up his time, even though they were paying for it, and because of this, he kept his clock on the bookshelf behind where they sat so he could unobtrusively keep track.

He had waited for Emma to say what was on her mind, but all she offered was the pain in her ankle. Of all the things she might have said, this was the least complicated, and in his hurry to leave, Leon hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility that it was anything more. But when he said goodbye, he could see that he had failed her. “It is a pleasure to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found,” he thought, from the work of the child psychologist D. W. Winnicott. It was true, and not just of children playing hide-and-seek.

Until Emma had come home, he and Claudia had passed their nights reading on the couch, turning pages as a form of conversation. But every night was now spent in hushed conference, Claudia picking apart Emma’s words to assemble an explanation of what was really wrong. Even if he had the patience for the discussion, he couldn’t muster the same concern. From a young age, Emma had not been the kind of child you worried about. He took great satisfaction in his daughter’s self-sufficiency, a trait she had inherited from him as surely as her dark curls and heart-shaped mouth were from Claudia. They had been subjected to the usual jokes about therapists’ kids being screwed up, but he’d always laughed off those comments because Emma, with her ebullient confidence, her ease of accomplishment, had so clearly emerged unscathed.

After leaving the apartment, he had sat in his car which was as old as Emma, a Volvo wagon, boxy and white, with 250,000 miles on the odometer. It had begun its life as a family car, with toys and crumbs buried under the seats, but now it was his private ship. He was in control of the music and the climate. The doors could be locked. People who walked by might see him, but no one would knock.

He’d watched the people who passed: The old man shepherded by his female attendant, then the children on tricycles, metal poles attached to the backs for the mothers to push when the kids grew tired. Next came the two dogs who hated one another. The small gray terrier wearing a bejeweled blue collar was seemingly of a different species from the black Great Dane. The little dog was fearless, barking incessantly, as though no one had informed him of the impotence of his high-pitched yap. The owners were well matched to their dogs. A petite woman with cropped gray hair and bright blue glasses, exuding the same nervous energy as her dog. A tall, pompous, dark-haired man with excessively straight posture and an air of proprietary combativeness. If Leon were to guess, he’d say that the man drew his fierceness from the dog. Was that true for all pet owners? he wondered. On the leash or in the cage, was some real or imagined aspect of ourselves made manifest?

His fellow parkers began stepping out of their cars as though given word that they’d docked on dry land. He too emerged from his car, now allowed to park in the spot he’d been holding all morning. Instead of moving forward into his day, he was still thinking about the look on Emma’s face. Though he feigned being in a hurry, he’d had enough time before his first patient to go back and ask her what she’d really wanted. He wasn’t proud of this aspect of himself, but there it was, true and unchangeable: At work, he had the capacity to give endlessly. At home, he was impatient before he’d even begun. Instead of going to talk to Emma, he’d gone to Starbucks. Though he’d once chafed at the idea of paying three dollars for a cup of coffee, now he gladly paid for the luxury of sitting undisturbed. Was this the secret to the chain’s success? No one wanted to be home.

Now, at the end of his day, Leon walked back uptown, the streets crowded, people’s worshipful faces upturned toward the sun. For a few blocks, he was behind a woman in jeans, pushing a stroller laden with bags. As Leon drew closer, he recognized her. She was the young mother—Nina, he recalled, was her name—whom he’d met earlier that day in Starbucks. He’d spoken to her only because he’d become aware that she snuck glances at what he was reading, and he felt a prickle of pleasure at her interest.

When she stopped at a Don’t Walk sign, he had a few seconds to decide whether to acknowledge her. Better, perhaps, to leave unexamined those moments of strangerly connection, to allow them to dangle without taking on a fixed meaning. But it didn’t matter what he decided. As though she knew him far better than she did, she turned and smiled as he approached.

“Leon, right?” she said.

“Are you following me, or am I following you?” he asked.

“Both,” she said.

He fell into step beside her. They were going in the same direction, and like him, she was a fast walker. The first time he met her, the children were sleeping. Now they were babbling, snacking, spilling. Both kids had inherited her straight, dark hair, pretty blue eyes, and round face with its innocent, unguarded expression. Once again, he noticed her unexpected curiosity, as though she was waiting for him to say something. It wasn’t unlike the look Emma had given him that morning, but somehow with this woman, it was intriguing rather than exhausting.

“Are you heading home?” she asked.

“I’m meeting my wife and daughter at that new café at Broadway. Have you been in yet?”

“The cakes look tempting, but my kids are too noisy,” Nina said.

“The whole city is noisy,” Leon said, and thought about their earlier conversation when he’d lied about not having heard the woman screaming. At the sound of Claudia’s voice, he’d rushed into the bedroom thinking she was hurt but had stopped in the doorway, shocked, as before his eyes, his even-tempered wife had come unleashed. It was one thing for him to see Claudia this way, but disturbing to realize that of course others heard her as well. She would be mortified if anyone knew that she was behind that screaming voice, yet he was propelled, inexplicably, by the need to say more.

“My wife is the one screaming at the construction workers,” Leon confessed.

She took in what he’d told her, as surprised as he was by the revelation.

“Why does the noise bother her so much?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “To be honest, it didn’t occur to me to ask her.”

They walked quickly. Leon had no need to look at the signs to know which block they were on. The Victoria’s Secret on 85th Street jarred with his inner map, and for those who’d lived here long enough, the storefront with the pink-and-white-striped awning and lingerie-clad mannequins would always be Broadway Farm. All those who lived here crafted their own internal rendering of the city based on how long they’d been here. He too carried his own version of the neighborhood—he’d grown up on the West Side and remembered when it had boasted one of the city’s highest crime rates. His parents had lived with an ever-present worry that he would be mugged, and had they been alive, they would have relished the upscale stores and safe parks. Like him, they wouldn’t have bemoaned the neighborhood’s transformation. He could never summon the indignation of those who’d once gathered outside Victoria’s Secret to protest, with equal vigor, the skimpiness of the attire and the lack of a good neighborhood grocery store. Skeptical of their motivation, he wished their placards conveyed not the slogans written in bright, bold letters, but the quieter internal ones, such as
Afraid of Change,
or
Need Outlet for My Anger.

“How long have you lived in the city?” Leon asked Nina.

“Since college. My main criterion for picking a school was that it had to be in New York.”

“I take it you like it here?”

“I do. I want to stay here but my husband has had enough. He doesn’t know where he wants to move, as long as it’s far away.”

On the corner of Broadway and 100th, they stopped in front of a small brick building. Signs plastered on the window of the dollar store on the ground level announced, in big red letters,
LOST OUR LEASE
.

“It’s going to be another luxury apartment building,” Nina told him.

“How do you know?”

“Jeremy, my husband, is a real estate lawyer, and he’s been working on the deal nonstop,” Nina said, and Leon noticed that all the while, she had been stealing glances at him, her gaze lingering a little too long. Like him, she was an observer, though he doubted that for her it was a means of avoiding engagement. On the contrary, her watchfulness seemed like a prelude to something more.

Her interest ignited his own. Perhaps she thought her curiosity was well hidden; so intent on watching other people, she forgot they were doing the same to her. He had the surprising urge to call Claudia and say he would be unable to meet her and Emma after all. Instead of being recruited into a family conversation, he wanted to ask this woman whom he barely knew if she wanted to walk until they reached the edge of the city, then walk some more. There was little risk: he could easily return to the state of not knowing her. Strangers were blank canvases, and there was an inexhaustible supply of them.