Visible City (16 page)

“I was thinking we should make plans to help you move back home. I imagine you’re ready to get back to your life,” Claudia said.

“Am I in your way?” Emma asked.

“Of course not. I love having you home. But surely you don’t intend to live with us forever. And surely you don’t plan to make baby-sitting your full-time career.”

“I like baby-sitting,” Emma said. “I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun.”

“So why did you go to college and graduate school?” Claudia asked, trying to sound lighthearted.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Emma said, and looked at Leon, a coded transaction passing between them.

“Please, Emma. Is it too much to ask for the truth?” Claudia said.

Emma finally met her gaze. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m thinking about dropping out of school. I don’t want to write my dissertation. And I don’t know if I want to get married.”

Claudia was silent. Was this some kind of belated adolescent crisis? Was even a happy, well-adjusted child an exquisitely crafted time bomb that, at any moment, could go off in your hands?

She glanced at Leon, who was staring into his coffee. She was accustomed to his ability to bear any news with only the slightest trace of outward reaction, but when she met Leon’s eye, she realized that despite what he’d told her, Emma had already confided in him. Fathers got away with their absence. Never so parsed or scrutinized, they got credit just for showing up. Where was her own father in her memories? He had died when she was ten, but even when he was the quiet figure behind the pages of a newspaper, the half-asleep shadow in the comfortable corner chair, she had loved him boundlessly.

“Every relationship has difficulties. Don’t you think you and Steven can work this out? And you’re doing so well with your dissertation, but if you feel stuck, you could take some time off. I’m sure you can defer your fellowship for a year,” Claudia said.

“I’ve already taken time off. What do you think I’ve been doing for the last six months?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Claudia asked. “I could have helped you find your way through it.”

“All you wanted to hear was that I was fine,” Emma said too loudly, inviting the gaze of curious onlookers.

Claudia recoiled in embarrassment at how they must sound, a family drama, splayed in public. Even if the people sitting nearby didn’t look up, they were still taking in every word. But their sympathy, she realized, was exactly what Emma wanted. All those listening in would hear the oldest story of all, the mother who had wronged her daughter. They would hear nothing of all she had wanted to give Emma.

“I don’t understand,” Claudia said.

“I know you don’t. That’s always been the problem,” Emma said, her face pink with anger as she stood up and pushed her way through the tables.

“You knew,” Claudia accused Leon.

“It wasn’t mine to tell,” he said. He glanced toward the door where Emma was making a quick exit.

Claudia shook her head. She didn’t know what to do. “Go with her,” she said, and with only a glance in her direction, he followed Emma, leaving Claudia alone with the startled faces around her. She slammed down her teacup, which once again had the same pattern as those stored in her mother’s breakfront. Had the blue-haired girl behind the counter reserved the cup especially for her?

How foolish to imagine that she could create a family that would soothe the pain of the past; how foolhardy to believe that she and Emma could avoid the distorted lenses through which mothers and daughters saw one another. When Emma was born, she’d felt the chance to redo what had gone wrong with her own mother. In her daughter’s dark hair and round, dimpled face, she had seen a mirror image of herself. She had rocked Emma to the promise that she would never be the mother who looked her daughter up and down on a fault-finding mission. She would be the mother who—how simple it once seemed!—gave her daughter everything she needed. She had no idea that one day she too would wind up on the other end of an angry gaze.

The laws of probability, briefly suspended, were back in effect. It had been almost two weeks since Nina had run into Leon, and she looked for him on every corner, expecting him to turn up in the unlikeliest of places, pushing through the crowds at the Children’s Museum, walking through the gate of Hippo Park. After a few more days without crossing paths, Nina called Leon on his cell phone, tentatively mentioning the long-ago promise of a borrowed book.

“I was just thinking that I haven’t run into you in a while. Where are you now?” Leon asked.

“Broadway and 98th.”

“I’m a few blocks from there. A patient canceled and I have an unexpected free hour. I was going to walk to the boat basin,” Leon said.

“I’ve never been there.”

“How is it possible you’ve never been to the boat basin?” he said, and she heard the smile in his voice. She laughed; she could write a dissertation comparing the merits of each playground in Riverside Park, but the boat basin remained on the list of places she had yet to take the kids.

“I almost didn’t recognize you without your kids,” he said as she approached.

“They’re with Emma. They love her, and so do I,” Nina said, and told him how each time Emma came over, she was excited about the day she had planned. Even doing laundry or going to the park was made out to be such an adventure that she wanted to join them. Nina liked to tell herself that Emma could be so enthusiastic because she got to go home at the end of the day, but she knew it was more than that. When she relayed the kids’ antics, Nina felt how quickly Emma had fallen in love with her kids. It probably filled some other need inside her, but that was fine; it filled their needs as well.

As she walked next to Leon, the streets seemed newly strung with currents of attraction. The kids slipped from her mind. There was nothing but time, free and open. Shyness fell away; so did effort. On every street corner, at every passing, people looked each other up and down, invisible threads of energy connecting eyes to hips, eyes to chests, eyes to eyes. She initially checked out everyone approaching her for fear someone might recognize her, but she pushed the worry from her mind. What was there to see? she reassured herself; she was having a conversation, he was her friend. Even if someone saw her, who would linger long enough to notice the ways in which she leaned ever so slightly toward him or held a smile a second too long? What kind of security camera, mounted overhead, could catch something so imperceptible?

They walked under the highway overpass and along the promenade, surrounded on both sides by Rollerbladers and bikers. They walked down to the river and onto the pier. A few feet away, seagulls swooped down. On the pier, a man was fishing beside a sign that instructed No Fishing. By the river, Nina’s senses were heightened. The sounds of traffic were replaced with the caws of seagulls. For once, Manhattan actually seemed like an island.

“Are you taking any vacation?” Leon asked.

“We were supposed to go away next week, but Jeremy had an emergency at work. I probably should be angry, but mostly, I’m just no longer surprised,” Nina said.

“There’s always something to fight about, isn’t there? Claudia and I are going to Cape Cod for the last two weeks of August. There’s a beach I go to every morning—I pretend to Claudia that I’m doing work but the truth is, I just want to be by myself. On the beach, you can’t see anyone for miles. You actually forget anyone could walk by. Behind the beach are huge dunes that make you feel like the area is impassable. I’d be perfectly content to sit there all day.”

They leaned forward into the pier’s wooden railings, the breeze providing relief from the heat. Kids screamed nearby, but they weren’t hers so she didn’t care. She wanted to speak and listen at the same time; she wanted to stand here until everyone else had gone home. She would tell him everything Emma had said, then have him fill in the conversations with Claudia that she’d watched from her window, to confide whether their quiet nights were signs of closeness or distance. She would ply him with more questions, numbered and in chronological order, some of which would require the equivalent of essays, each answer peeling away another layer until there was nothing of him she could not see.

“I still have to lend you a book,” Leon said as his arm grazed hers, the faintest of touches, yet her whole body was electrified. Though they pretended nothing had happened, she was sure that, at that moment, for both of them, it was the only thing in the world that had.

“One of these days, I’ll actually have time to read,” Nina said, but the lightness of her tone didn’t match the intensity on her face, or the way in which her entire body had turned inside out. Her body’s swell was so pronounced that surely it was evident to Leon; her heart was beating so furiously that it had to be audible to everyone who passed. And in that moment, she wouldn’t even mind. No one could find her, no one would know who she was. All she wanted was to give in to the great gasp of desire, to the feeling of freedom unencumbered.

“Do you know that our windows face each other? I see you from my living room,” she confessed.

A small noise, somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, escaped Leon’s throat. Looking at her with half-lowered eyelids, he asked: “What can you see?”

Whenever Jeremy saw Magellan in the hallways of the firm, he tried to avoid him. Richard was already looking at him suspiciously, and he didn’t need to be seen hanging out with members of the staff. Ever since Jeremy handed in his book report about La Farge, Richard had given him small, easy assignments and watched him carefully. Maybe Richard had seen this before: the associate who cracks up or burns out. For all Jeremy knew, the firm had an underground office with round-the-clock staff whose job it was to punish those who no longer cared.

Magellan kept him updated about the plans for their upcoming mission, and each time, Jeremy told him that if he had free time, he should be home with his kids. Magellan stared at him as though he’d offered the most bizarre of excuses, but then, he probably lived in an apartment with an ever-shifting cast of roommates, spending his nights sprawled on a futon where he ate cereal for dinner and watched hours of TV.

Oblivious to Jeremy’s attempt to avoid him, Magellan smiled mysteriously, willing to play along with the conceit that there were spies around every corner. He reminded Jeremy of the college classmates who’d played Assassin through the hallways of their dorms, so intent on their missions that they forgot where they were.

While Jeremy was getting a cup of coffee, Magellan suddenly appeared. “It’s not enough to read about a ghost station. You have to see it for yourself,” he whispered in Jeremy’s ear.

Jeremy looked away, trying not to be lured deeper into the fantasy. “Aren’t you afraid?” Jeremy asked Magellan when he next saw him in the hallway.

Magellan looked as though he had been waiting for this question. “When we were climbing up the girders of the Brooklyn Bridge, I was scared out of my mind. I had to turn back. It took me three attempts before I made it up there. When we were in the Croton Aqueduct, the tunnel narrowed out of nowhere and one of the guys I was with literally shit his pants. But the best expeditions are when we’re petrified and we go anyway.”

On Magellan’s websites, there had been no mention of these moments of doubt. He’d described only the view from the top of the bridge and posted a picture of himself and a group of people at the entrance to the Croton Aqueduct in an inner tube, a six-pack of beer in hand, ready to merrily set sail. But Jeremy wished he had added a description of his fear; he’d rather read the version in which Magellan and his band of intrepid explorers had almost, almost, turned back.

Jeremy stopped thinking of this as a voyage of the imagination. With his admission of fear, Magellan started to seem real.