Visible City (15 page)

“It’s great. Really great. If you want my opinion, I think it’s definitely possible. There’s stuff buried in this city you wouldn’t believe.”

Taped to the side of Jon’s computer was a small black flag, displayed in plain sight but invisible to most people. Jeremy had been down here countless times but never once wondered why it was there.

After his initial hopeful weeks, he’d stopped checking out each person in the building, having resigned himself to the fact that Magellan was nothing but a fanciful creation. But now Jeremy felt as though he were standing at the entrance to a previously unexplored realm, stepping through a wall in his building into an urban forest tangled with underground pipes and tunnels.

“Magellan?” Jeremy asked.

The proofreader glanced at his coworkers, making sure they were bent over their documents. “This is it,” he said. “My headquarters.”

The document Jon handed him was still warm from the printer. Thirty well-researched pages about the possible existence of a stained-glass window in a site where the Royalton Company wanted to build multimillion-dollar luxury condominiums. His eager, optimistic sentences, the photocopied color pictures attached. He could already anticipate Richard’s furious, bewildered response. No one knew for sure that the window existed. And even if it did, no one would allow it to derail a deal.

Jeremy started to leave but turned back, wanting to grab hold of Magellan. “I was just wondering. Have you ever been to the old City Hall station?” he asked.

“City Hall,” Jon said, and laughed fondly, as if Jeremy had inquired about a long-lost friend. “That’s our next conquest. In a month the MTA is going to service the tracks of the 6 train and that’s our chance. We’re going to make an attempt. You should come with us.”

Jeremy laughed as well. Even if he had time to sneak into underground spaces with eccentric members of the staff, he was afraid. And yet he surprised himself by asking, “When?”

This time the sign was all bold, all caps.
YOU MUST WAIT 20 MINUTES BEFORE REMOVING LAUNDRY FROM THE MACHINES. THIS RULE IS IN EFFECT EVEN IF THE LAUNDRY APPEARS DRY. IF YOU DISCOVER THAT YOU ARE IN POSSESSION OF CLOTHING NOT YOUR OWN, YOU ARE REQUIRED TO NOTIFY THE BUILDING STAFF IMMEDIATELY
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Arthur printed out multiple copies, then tore them up. His neighbors would no more heed this sign than any of the others. No matter what he did, the garbage can lids were never placed on tightly, the noise in the stairwell never ceased, nor was his laundry ever returned. The sock he was now missing had probably been stolen by the costumed woman in the laundry room, but there were others who would do him harm. He’d once seen a Roman Polanski movie about a group of neighbors who conspired to drive a new tenant crazy so they could have his apartment. He didn’t want to wallow in paranoia—surely that woman in the laundry room was just trying to annoy him—but it was hard not to wonder if conspiracies indeed lurked behind shaded windows.

Churchill bounded over, ready to go outside. Now that it was just the two of them, their needs had synchronized. More than ever, he couldn’t imagine his life without Churchill. When he’d started his own Internet security company and begun working from home, he hadn’t known that his wife was on the verge of leaving and that he would be alone day and night. He hadn’t known that, in her absence, he would miss the rhythms of an office. Even when he had complained, as he occasionally did, about those who typed or talked too loudly, those sounds had delineated his day.

On their way out, Arthur grabbed a bunch of signs and slid them under his neighbors’ doors, where there was a better chance they’d be seen. After doing so, he and Churchill walked toward Broadway, trying to ignore the stench of garbage that overtook the streets.

As always, he set out believing that this was the time they would take a different route, but once again he ended up in front of the café, which was crowded as always. Even he had to admit, the cakes displayed in the window did look wondrous, with flowers that cascaded precipitously off the tiered, deliberately uneven surfaces, their beauty like their maker, haphazard, almost accidental.

It wasn’t a quality he would have expected to be captivated by. He’d met Georgia at a six-week seminar for people who wanted to open small businesses. She always arrived late, with an air of disorderly upheaval. Her ginger hair was flyaway, her clothes loose and flowing, her scarves of a fabric so textured it was hard not to want to touch them. Sometimes her shirts were smudged with food and icing; once she’d arrived with a faint streak of blue frosting on her cheek. Some might have considered her heavy, but he loved the delectable curves of her body. The freckles that dotted her face and arms were speckles of cinnamon.

Initially he told himself that he was awaiting her late arrival just to see how much noise she would make as she climbed over people sitting in rows, offering apologies along with an endearing smile. No matter where he sat, she always ended up a seat or two from him, a fact that he turned over in his head, trying to parse her intentions. If it was impossible to arrive on time, it would make sense, of course, to arrange to have an aisle seat saved for her, but he couldn’t bring himself to suggest it, too enraptured by how she burst into the classroom with such unbridled exuberance.

On the whiteboard, their instructor detailed how to project expenses and calculate loans. Georgia looked confused as she tried to copy everything into a notebook whose every surface was covered with heart-shaped doodles. “I can help you with your business plan, if you want,” he’d said to her one day as she was trying to stuff her papers into her bag. It was, quite possibly, the bravest thing he’d ever said. His words might be as unadorned as any ever spoken. Yet hiding inside them were other words that confessed that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, words that made professions in language so flowery, so heartfelt, that they rivaled the love songs of the most romantic of poets.

For a year after that, Arthur had put aside his own professional aspirations and worked on Georgia’s business plan. By the time she secured initial financing, they were engaged. When she signed the lease, they had been married for almost a year. She spent months trying to come up with the perfect name for her café, but it was he who suggested that she call it simply, perfectly, Georgia’s.

How quickly your whole world could come undone. How little control you had over the most intimate parts of your life. One night she had come home smelling of caramel and buttercream and sat at the edge of the bed. “I don’t know if I love you the way I thought I did,” she had said. He had stayed silent, perfectly still. If he gave no sign of having heard, it was possible this wasn’t happening. Instead of thinking about what she was saying, he remembered the first time they had been alone. She had taken his hand and pressed it to her face, then took his other hand and placed it on her waist, on her breast, atop her beating heart. He felt the inviting call of her body and marveled with gratitude that she wanted him. As he lay atop her, his face to hers, his thin chest to the abundance of hers, he tried to see himself through her eyes. The discovery of her was equally a discovery of himself.

Now there was no escape from Georgia’s presence: the red sign in front of the café was indelible in his mind. He wouldn’t make this mistake again, opening himself to the havoc of people who trampled you with their rampant unleashed selves. He sealed off the part of himself that was capable of feeling love. To console himself, he cataloged Georgia’s faults, the clothes she dropped on the floor, the dishes she left in each room. Even so, he was unable to remove two cups she’d left in what had once been their shared apartment, one on the dresser, the other on the windowsill. They were dusty and dirty now, but he kept them, a monument to her one-time presence in his life.

Until a few weeks before, he’d planned to never enter Georgia’s. But if he couldn’t have her love, at least he could have a confrontation. He had gone into the café and asked to speak to her. They sat down at a table, and Georgia had waited for an explanation of why he was there. At his silence, Georgia had pleaded with him. “You have to let go.” But all he could do was stare, dumbfounded, at this woman who was once his wife. Because he was supposed to let go of what, his heart?

The memory pained him and he pulled himself away from the windows of the café. Trying to expunge Georgia from his mind, he and Churchill went to the dog run in Riverside Park. As soon as Arthur removed the leash, Churchill began to run, suddenly desperate for freedom, though when he was on leash, the confinement didn’t appear to bother him. Churchill bounded from one end of the dog run to the other. Not until he almost crashed into the fence did he turn and run in the opposite direction.

On the way home from the park, he and Churchill passed the gym where a sign announced a sale on memberships. Arthur had often thought about stopping in, tempted by the prospect of the lap pool, though it probably wouldn’t be the right temperature nor would the chemical balance be sufficiently monitored. But remembering Churchill’s joy in bounding back and forth, Arthur pushed those reasons aside, and after dropping the dog at home, he took a tour, then surprised himself by buying a yearlong membership.

Someone had actually listened to her complaint. When Claudia thanked the young woman behind the counter at Georgia’s for hanging the sign banning noisy children, she told her that one group of customers loved it, while another was incensed. Each time Claudia came in, she updated her on the neighborhood battle the sign had provoked.

“Don’t let them sway you,” Claudia said, and smiled at the young woman whose hair was now peacock blue.

“We’ve been flooded with e-mails. I’m hanging them all on the wall. Most are in favor, except for a few moms who are pissed off. I heard they’re even talking of boycotting. I say, go ahead.”

One of the posted e-mails caught Claudia’s eye. “I can only assume that those of you who cannot tolerate the sounds of children laughing have not been blessed with being a mother.”

Since the sign had been posted, Claudia had hoped to run into these mothers, to see their response to someone who had dared to say no to their kids when they, enthralled by love or beset by weakness, were only able to say yes. But now that several weeks had passed quietly, the urge for confrontation had dissipated. There were no noisy children in the café. The whole city in fact was quieter now that it was August, and so many people were away.

Claudia worked. The hours passed, uninterrupted, the pages unfurling inside her head. When she looked up, she wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed. Only the view out the window oriented her. She watched the passersby, then startled in recognition as Leon and Emma walked by with the hunched, hushed air of confidants. When she knocked on the window, they looked up as though she’d purposely ambushed them.

Theoretically she should have been happy to see Leon and Emma’s newfound closeness, but she felt slighted that it had come at her expense. “Obviously it’s fine if Emma is confiding in you instead of me. I’m just wondering what’s going on,” she had told Leon a few nights before. She didn’t know what she’d expected him to say, but his silence had outraged her.

“She’s not a patient of yours, Leon. Please tell me. I have a right to know.”

“It’s nice spending time with her, but trust me. I don’t know any more than you do,” he’d said finally.

She had believed him, because why at this late date would Emma turn to him? Though she should have been sorry that Emma was uncomfortable confiding in either of them, she’d felt, to her shame, only relief.

When Emma and Leon came into Georgia’s, the relaxed smile on Emma’s face faded; she looked like a child made to say hello to a long-forgotten relative. Claudia’s resentment deepened. There had always been strange comfort in feeling that Leon had little time for either of them.

“You’re walking well. Your ankle must be better,” Claudia said to Emma when she and Leon agreed to sit down for lunch. She’d never known Emma to pass up a free meal, certainly not now when it was impossible to keep enough food in the house. Emma had always been thin, though now she existed in a constant state of ingestion. The weight she had put on was evident, but Claudia wouldn’t dare mention it. The body that was once in her domain was now off-limits.