Visible City (14 page)

She couldn’t figure out why she cared, yet she felt a twinge of disappointment when he piled the clothes into his basket and left the room without looking back at her. When their own laundry dried, a man’s dark sock was clinging to a pair of racecar pajamas. Max surveyed it ominously. They could post a sign alerting the entire building to what they’d found, or ask the doorman which apartment this man lived in and knock on his door.

Suddenly fed up with her compulsion to go in chase of those who were the most elusive, Emma handed the sock to Max. “I think this is Maurice’s. He must have dropped it on his way out.”

Emma went from the kids to Steven. He’d called to say he was home, annoyed that she hadn’t been waiting for him with a homemade dinner and outstretched arms. Explaining that she’d had to baby-sit longer than expected, she suggested they meet at the 82nd Street Barnes & Noble. She’d claimed that the stairs in their building were still hard, and though the lie felt hollow, Steven had reluctantly agreed.

With an hour until Steven arrived, Emma browsed the self-help aisle at whose contents she’d always rolled her eyes. Now she would read every book if one of them listed ten ways to tell your fiancé that you weren’t sure you wanted to get married after all. “I’ve adopted two kids since you left,” she could tell Steven. “I’ve left you for a three-year-old.”

When their meeting time arrived, she went to look for Steven. As she was descending on the escalator, Steven turned. For a second, his face looked unfamiliar, but that quickly passed. Except for the goatee he’d grown, he looked like the person with whom she’d once fallen in love.

“No cast,” he said, and they surveyed each other, newly shy.

“Good as new,” she said, and couldn’t help but smile. He’d grown skinnier while he was away, or else she was just bigger in comparison, but even so, she had the urge to be tucked entirely inside his arms.

“Why don’t we walk a little,” Emma suggested. “I’m fine as long as we don’t go too fast.”

Each block they arrived at was going to be the one where she told him how she was feeling. By the time they reached 86th Street. Surely by 90th Street. But the blocks passed too quickly. The words wouldn’t come. They fell into step, holding hands, and it was possible to believe that nothing was wrong. If she tried hard enough, she could push away her doubts and force her love from its hiding spot.

Steven made initial efforts to slow his pace to hers, but after a few minutes, she struggled to keep up. As they walked, he talked about his wood-paneled writing room with a view of hills, lake, and sky. With nothing to do but write, he’d pretended that the rest of his life didn’t exist, or if it did, it was on the other side of impassable hills.

Emma listened, but the particular loneliness she felt in Steven’s presence returned. No matter how close he drew to her, he could see only himself. This time, though, she thought not of her feelings but of the look on her mother’s face as she’d rushed from the apartment earlier that day. She had longed for her parents’ contentment, but what of their relationship had she really replicated?

“I think I need a time-out,” Emma said finally, on the corner of 96th and Broadway.

“From walking?” he asked.

“From us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We need to talk,” she said, her voice suddenly hoarse. She wished she’d brought the list her father had made, so she could hand it to Steven with all the authority of a note to a teacher explaining an absence.

“I don’t want to finish my dissertation. I don’t want to be in school anymore. I don’t know if I want to get married.”

His disbelief changed to alarm. “I just came home. Why are you ruining it?”

“Do you remember that I ran? I kept waiting for you to ask me what was wrong,” Emma said.

“Of course I asked you,” he said.

“You asked about my ankle. Didn’t you wonder what was really wrong?”

“What did you expect me to think? You were running down the street like a crazy person.”

“You didn’t want to know. Did you notice that I wasn’t doing any work? Did you notice how unhappy I was?” she said.

“Of course I did. But what was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to fix whatever was wrong?” Steven asked.

“You were at least supposed to try,” she said, still wanting to believe that it was impossible you could feel this bad, yet be left so alone. Was it a leftover childhood expectation that someone would always come running if you called out in distress in the middle of the night?

The light turned, and with his hand on the small of her back, Steven steered her to the median in the middle of Broadway where they sat on a bench.

“What is it you want to do instead?” he asked, his voice becoming stony.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What don’t you know?”

She struggled to find words, her mind empty, her mouth dry. “Everything,” she said.

The light changed, and people began crossing the street, staring at her as she started to cry. A woman in black patent leather Mary Janes and a rumpled maroon taffeta dress speckled with rhinestones sat next to them on the bench, oblivious to the scene upon which she was intruding.

“Great, the march of the crazy people,” Steven said.

But Emma felt sympathy for the woman whom she recognized as the schizophrenic her father had pointed out. At the time, she’d felt a strange envy, a twinge of yearning to have her own malady be so easily diagnosed. Emma locked eyes with her. At least this woman didn’t have to maintain a pretense of normalcy; everyone who looked at her knew instantly that something was wrong.

“I like your dress,” Emma said, and reached for her hand. Shocked to have been touched, the woman stared at Emma yet made no move to pull away. Her nails were painted electric blue and were bitten down to the skin. Her hand, though, was surprisingly soft, as though one small part of her had been shielded from the forces that had made her face so ragged.

People continued to stare at their mismatched summit on the median, but by the next block, both she and this woman would pass from their minds, one small spectacle in a day already crowded with spectacle. You could position yourself in full view, but sooner or later you discovered that it was simply your own need reflected back. How many people had arrived at this realization; yet that was no comfort when you came upon it as well. She could lay herself bare before every person on Broadway. She could cling to the wish that others would solve her problems, that help in one form or another was on the way. Was this the great realization of adulthood, the iron bar that stood firmly across its doorway? It didn’t matter what other people said or did. She alone could decide what she wanted. Only she could save herself.

Jeremy skipped out of work and went to the Met. In the American Wing courtyard, he gazed at John La Farge’s
Welcome
window. In luminous color, encrusted with jewels of glass, an angelic-looking woman was depicted pulling back a curtain, bidding him to enter. How many people, and how many hours, had it taken to make such a creation? Even those craftsmen in the back rooms whose contributions were anonymous—had they been aware of the grandeur they were creating?

The light rushed in, and the exuberance and defiance of the colors reminded him of the story Claudia Stein had told him about the tension between John La Farge and his father. Had the son tried to lecture himself about the requirements of duty and responsibility? Had he eventually come to the realization that he had no choice; in the pages of his law books, had he seen only the glimmers of color? In Paris, where the son had gone to study, had a world opened up? Upon his return, had the son taken his father into his studio and declared, “This is what I want to do”?

There were other La Farge windows in Manhattan, mostly in churches, and on subsequent mornings, Jeremy went to visit them. How far he’d traveled from his former self, that he now spent his workday visiting churches.

At the Church of the Incarnation in midtown, a caretaker noticed him as he walked in and Jeremy jumped, half expecting to be told that he didn’t belong here. He worried he might turn and see Richard, here to collect his wayward associate. But it wasn’t only Richard he feared. Jeremy felt his father’s presence more viscerally here in this church than he did anywhere else. He remembered something that he hadn’t thought of in years. When he used to visit his father’s office, his favorite activity had been not to gaze out the windows at the view of downtown Chicago, but to open the bottom drawer of his father’s desk. There he kept supplies for his own hobby, building miniatures of boats, cars, and monuments. Jeremy used to carefully pick up the X-Acto knives and small squares of balsa wood, his father showing him with great pride what he’d built, his eyes lit with a sparkle his son rarely saw.

Inside the church, the sounds of traffic grew faint, and the bustle of the city vanished as it had at the library. In a red velvet pew, a man sat with his head bowed, also seeking refuge from some part of his life. The walls were lined with stained-glass windows, by Tiffany and William Morris, but Jeremy walked past those to the one by La Farge, which depicted a vintner looking down over his translucently bright purple grapes and the cherubic faces of young children. In the noon light, this window was the brightest; even without locating it in the pamphlet he’d picked up at the entrance, Jeremy immediately knew it was the one.

The window reminded him of a favorite phrase of his father’s: “My father planted for me, now I plant for my children.” Before, Jeremy had heard in these words only a sense of endless duty, but staring at the window, he also saw the glint of love. The language of work was their chosen dialect, but in all their conversations, he’d never once thought to ask his father if he liked what he did. Now, when it was too late, their relationship would be preserved as it had been then. Only in his mind, in his wishful fantasies, could it take on new forms.

The story Claudia Stein told him was probably more complicated than he had initially believed. John La Farge was a grown man when he’d gone to law school, a grown man when he’d run away in order to do what he wanted. Maybe his father had tried to prevent him from doing what he wanted, but surely his own internal conflict stood in the way as well. Perhaps the tether on his own father’s love had been longer than he’d realized. It was easy to blame it on his father, easy to blame it on his work: the entire world, a waiting repository for blame. In the center of himself, everything was dangling, unfixed, unformed. He had gone to college, to law school; he had married, had two children of his own—cocooning himself in all the things he was supposed to be—yet he had never grown past the larval stage of his own becoming.

Jeremy continued his treasure hunt to places he’d walked past but never noticed. When was the last time he’d stopped to look up? Only gaping tourists made such blunders. Metal plaques marked buildings of historical significance that only people on specialized tours stopped to read. Stone-carved wreaths and family crests decorated the buildings as gargoyle sentries watched over the streets. At the glistening gold entrance of the Fred F. French Building at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, Jeremy craned his neck to see the colorful terra cotta along the building’s exterior. He walked uptown to a building near Columbus Circle called Alwyn Court, whose façade was covered in lavish flowers, vines, mythical animals, grotesque human faces. If he stayed long enough, would swarms of people stop alongside him, to see what marvel he had spotted? But rather than join him, passersby regarded him with suspicion, everyone more likely to see danger than beauty.

Back in his office, Jeremy prepared an amendment to his original due diligence memo in which he’d wrongly claimed there were no foreseeable historical issues that could derail the proposed construction. Instead of filing the permits as Richard had ordered, Jeremy slaved over the new amendment. When he needed a break, he stood at the window. Traffic was slowing, the lights in other buildings shutting off, but Jeremy wasn’t tired. He wandered into the partners’ empty offices. In Richard’s office, he found a pair of binoculars on the desk, not Fisher-Price but an expensive pair of Swarovski. Wondering what use Richard had for them, he picked them up, tempted to bring them home for Nina as a consolation prize.

The amendment grew longer than the original document. Jeremy added footnotes, pictures, and a bibliography, not sure if he was writing a legal memo or a college term paper. But after hearing Richard say that his heart wasn’t in his work, Jeremy wanted to create something, however small, in which its beating was audible.

With fifty hours of billable time amassed, he sent the document to the word-processing center downstairs and dozed at his desk. When the document was ready, Jeremy went downstairs where the night shift was in full swing, in the area of the firm that Richard derisively referred to as steerage. The woman in charge directed Jeremy to Jon, a tall, skinny man with a long blond ponytail.

When Jeremy gave him the file name, Jon sprang to life and eagerly shook his hand.