In the dressing room, Nora quickly tried on several tops and skirts. Nothing fancy. Nothing expensive. Just something that would make her look presentable. Joe was waiting for her, and she wanted to get out of her telltale blue dress as soon as she could, so she decided not to linger. She purchased an inexpensive blouse and skirt and a pair of sheer stockings. In the drugstore, she bought a poppy-red lipstick and a thin comb. In the ladies’ lounge, which was completely unchanged from her last visit, she stepped into a stall, tore off the price tags, and put on the clothes. Making sure that no one was watching, she balled up her blue dress and threw it into the trash once again. She dabbed on the lipstick and used the comb to tease her hair into a wave. Then she picked up the booze at the liquor store and headed back to the Biltmore.
* * *
—
While Nora was doing these errands, Joe had fallen asleep on the carpeted floor and awakened to find that the ice Nora had wrapped in a washcloth had melted beneath his back. He managed, cursing and on his knees, to get to the bathroom, where he pulled himself up to the sink. He stayed in the shower for a full fifteen minutes, the hottest water he could stand beating down on his lower back. Between the ice, the aspirin, and the heat, he could feel his muscles starting to loosen.
When Nora walked in, she found Joe sitting in the armchair, wearing only his undershorts.
“Progress!” she said. “Getting dressed or undressed?”
“Dressed,” he said. “But it’s slow going.”
“Well, you made it off the floor,” she said. “That’s a start.”
“Not only that,” Joe said. “I took a shower.”
“Well, you’ll be wanting a drink to celebrate, won’t you?” she asked.
“You read my mind.”
He saw her slim figure in the simple skirt and blouse she had bought. It had taken her just a few hours, but she had transformed herself with lipstick, clothes, and hair into exactly the person she’d been when she’d left. The years of their separation were apparently not troubling her: She was chipper and fiery—his Nora.
She brought the glass from the bathroom sink, poured the bourbon for him, clinked the bottle against it, and took a jaunty swig from the bottle.
“What is it?” she asked when she saw the look on his face.
“I just can’t believe you’re back.”
* * *
—
In all their time with the Floating Keys, Nora and Joe had never ordered room service because they had never wanted to call attention to themselves. But tonight they were legitimate paying guests in a hotel. A heavyset waiter who looked too large for his vest wheeled in a cart covered in a damask cloth and loaded with stacked plates under metal hats, a red rose in a crystal bud vase, and a tub of butter with the Biltmore B stamped into its smooth top.
After he’d left, Nora removed the two metal plate covers and banged them together like cymbals. “Dinner is served,” she said.
It was steak and eggs for Joe, spaghetti with meat sauce for Nora, and an unusual quiet between them as they sat down to eat. The silences in Joe and Nora’s conversations had always been as soft as breath. This silence seemed almost harsh.
“Well?” Nora finally said.
“Well what?”
“Did you have anyone in your life while I was gone?”
Joe salted his eggs, took a bite, and salted them again. “No one who mattered,” he said. “In the end.”
“Did you finally get to travel at least?” Nora asked him.
“There was a war,” he said.
They shared a long look. The ties between them seemed tangled by devotion and fuzzy with doubt.
“What about Faye?” Nora finally asked.
“What about her?”
“You still haven’t told me how things really were,” she said.
“Sure I did.”
“All you said was that she was fine.”
Joe cut into his steak. “What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I want to know how you felt, how the kids took it, how much time you spent with Faye—”
“Look,” Joe said. “It was a hard time. We made the best of it.”
Nora had so many other questions. Why did he look so old? Had he made love with Faye? Had he moved back to the Y? Had he moved back to Queens? Had he been with other women? She twirled her pasta around her fork and said, “I thought the two of you—”
Joe drank half his glass of beer. “It didn’t work out,” he said.
“I know she loves you. She loved you even when Finn was alive. I could tell. I remember that day you and she sent the kids to camp. And when she told me to leave—”
“Maybe then,” Joe said. “Maybe for a while. But not now. Nora. I’ve never in my life been in love with anyone but you.”
They never called room service to pick up the table. At about midnight, Joe quietly folded the flaps down and wheeled it out into the hall.
6
THE DREAM APARTMENT
1946
Joe went back to work the week before Christmas. He started with half shifts, but soon realized that standing was less painful than sitting or walking. Several passionate nights with Nora had done nothing to help his back, but they were well worth the price, and in any case lever pulling didn’t require bending. It was a relief to work again, to sink into the rhythm of the track calls and the blinking board, to sweat under the lights and feel his strength returning.
Max Colton was no longer at the Biltmore, but Brian, the head bellman, found Joe a Floating Key and a room, and while he worked, Nora began to go through the boxes he’d been bringing over, one by one, from the Y. She started with a carton of clothes and was immediately struck by their slightly musty smell, the proof—not that any more was needed—that time had indeed passed. Aside from the smell, though, nothing had changed. There was still a button missing from her gray wool skirt and fresh cellophane around a sweater she’d bought but never worn. There wasn’t that much in the box: a few skirts, a few dresses, a coat, some blouses and shoes. But it was exciting to think that, in her time since the accident, she had accumulated at least some history. Except for her clutch and bracelet, every item of clothing—every knickknack, purse, and pair of shoes—held a story that had started sometime after 1925. A person without a past is no more alive than a person without a future. Looking through her boxes, settling back into Grand Central, Nora felt that she once again had both.
* * *
—
She was delighted to see that Leon Forrester was still manning the desk at the art gallery. Unlike Joe, Leon seemed to have gotten younger in her absence. His formerly triangular shape had slimmed down into something more like a rectangle. His mournful face looked a little brighter, and it brightened further when he saw Nora. She gave him a quick hug and raced past the sculptures, the tapestries, and the many new works on the gallery walls. The stairway that led up to the art school was dim, but she climbed it with enthusiasm.
What she came upon when she opened the door was the shock of a wasteland, bleak and deserted. Though the skylight had been partially scraped free of tar, the studios were dark and almost completely empty. In Nora’s old classroom, the smells of paints and turpentine—not to mention Mr. Fournier’s own spicy mystery sandwiches—had been replaced by an airless odor of sawdust and cement. All the tables, easels, and cabinets had been removed. There were no paintings on the walls. This was the first time Nora had seen how large the room really was, and the first time she’d noticed the floor, which was so flecked with paint droppings that it looked as if it had been strewn with confetti.
“Mademoiselle Lansing.”
Startled, she turned to see Mr. Fournier, bent at an alarmingly greater angle than he had been three years before, but more dapper without his artist’s smock.
“I thought perhaps you had
vanished,” he said.
The word startled Nora for a moment. “No, not vanished,” she said. “Not for good, anyway. I just went back home for a while.”
“This must be something of an unpleasant surprise, then,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I was just at a meeting of the committee, and that sad fellow at the front desk told me you had come up here.”
“No, I mean what happened to the school?” Nora asked.
“Well, the gallery is still thriving. The committee and I have seen to that. But the school closed last year. The war made it too much of a luxury to maintain.”
“But the war’s over.”
“Oui. Thank heavens.”
“And when does the school open again?”
Mr. Fournier frowned. “I am afraid it does not.”
“But why?”
“The classrooms are being turned into some kind of training center.”
“Training for what?”
“Who is to say? Come,” he said. “But I will show you.”
Nora followed him down the corridor to the last studio, where the contents of the other rooms had been stacked and labeled with various destinations: schools, churches, hospitals. Art supplies had been apportioned to each. Yet the job hadn’t been completed. Dust had settled on most of the furniture, easels, and boxes, and there were a number of items that were yet to be packed up.
“It’s such a waste,” Nora said.
“Too true.”
She was standing with Mr. Fournier beside a few tables where wide Irish oatmeal tins held brushes of all heights and widths. Wistfully, Nora reached for one and used her thumb to riffle the bristles, releasing little puffs of ancient colored powder that smelled like clay. She looked longingly at the half-used tubes of paint, the piles of rags, the stacks of dusty blank canvases leaning dejectedly against a wall and a door.
She didn’t know how to convey the depth of the yearning she felt. She looked at the confetti floor, her eyes tearing.
“What is it, Miss Lansing? Have I said something to upset you?”
“Oh, no,” Nora said.
“What is it, then?”
“It’s just that I don’t know where I’m going to paint.”
“Oh, that. Well, surely you will find a studio of your own somewhere. You certainly do not need lessons, although there are other schools—”
Nora shook her head. “I could never afford my own studio.”
“Your apartment, then,” he said.
“No. It’s tiny. And my—husband—he gets sick from paint fumes.”
“Ah. So you have married. Possibly this is why artists should never marry.”
Nora smiled wanly but leaned toward Mr. Fournier conspiratorially. “Couldn’t I just work in one of the classrooms?” she asked him softly. “I wouldn’t bother anyone.”
“Well, for a while you could, I suppose,” he said. He looked over his shoulder, his eyes full of life.
“What is it?” Nora asked.
“I may have a much better idea,” he said. “How good are you at keeping secrets?”
Nora laughed. “Probably better than I am at painting,” she said.
“And how good are you at climbing?”
With a smile but no further words, Mr. Fournier began shifting the blank and gessoed canvases that were obscuring the door. As more of the door became exposed, Nora could see the words NO ADMITTANCE, hand-painted in bold capital letters that matched the style of the signs on the Grand Central passageways. Soon that prohibition could be seen in multiple spots on the door, in a kind of conversation of lettering styles and colors. NO ADMITTANCE. NO ADMITTANCE. Nearly at the bottom, in an elegant, italicized addendum, were the words Except by Invitation.
“Allow me, madame, to invite you,” Mr. Fournier said.
He opened the door to a set of steps that led to an enormous empty attic with a thirty-foot-high ceiling and dusty, warped wood floors. The long walls were covered, nearly all the way to the ceiling, with faded painted figures: studies of men in chariots and women in blue robes, prancing horses with braided manes, sleek dogs and classical temples, ships and sails, clouds and waves.
“What is this place?” Nora asked, amazed.
“I believe this could be your studio,” Mr. Fournier said.
* * *
—
Nora hurried back to the hotel room, where on impulse she unwrapped the two paintings of hers that Joe had kept in his closet at the Y.
When he came back from his shift, the winter sun had already set, and the room was mostly in shadow, but Nora looked younger and brighter than ever. Her two paintings were leaning, unwrapped, against the desk. Hurriedly, she told him all about seeing Mr. Fournier, and she asked Joe if he’d ever heard about the secret studio.
“Maybe,” Joe said. “I heard some artist used to give parties up there during the twenties and thirties. I didn’t know if that was true or not. Sort of like M42.”
“I think Mr. Fournier is going to look the other way and let me work there,” Nora said.
Joe smiled and shook his head. “Is there anyone you can’t get to eat out of the palm of your hand?”
Nora laughed. “Meanwhile, it made me want to see these again. What would you think about my hanging them in place of those for a while?” she asked.
She was gesturing to two unusually ugly flower paintings over the couch.
“Nope,” Joe said. “We’re not going to hang anything anywhere till we hang them in our own apartment.”
The apartment. Nora hadn’t let herself think about it. For her it had been only weeks since Joe had told her that their dream apartment would have to wait.
“Have you been by the place?” she asked him.
“No.”
“Do you know something I don’t know?” she asked.
“I know a thousand things you don’t know,” he said. “I know about couplings and ties and relay systems and rotary converters and—”
“I mean about whether there’s actually an apartment available,” she said.
“How about if tomorrow we take a look?” Joe said.
* * *
—
The next evening, Joe came back to find Nora ready to go. She was dressed in one of her favorite skirts, her copper hair upswept with the good brush and comb she had fished out of one of her boxes. He kissed her, held her coat for her, and together they strolled through the lobby and out onto the street.
The last time they had taken this walk it had been spring, not too long before the horrible night of Manhattanhenge sunset, when Nora had almost died for good. This evening, the snow was gray and yellow in the shadows and under the streetlamps. Nora had always loved the way the snow in New York could make everything seem clean and fresh: one large, gessoed canvas. Tonight her footprints and Joe’s seemed like the first strokes of a painting.
At the apartment house, they waited for the super. It was cold, as cold as it had been the night Joe had first tried to walk Nora to Turtle Bay. Again—as when Nora had made this pilgrimage alone—it took a while for the super to appear. When he did, he was wearing the same, apparently ineffectual, hearing aid, but he didn’t seem to recognize Nora.
“Haven’t you heard?” the super said. “The boys came back. There’s a housing shortage on. They’re putting up Quonset huts in Brooklyn.”
Nora turned to go, but Joe wasn’t moving. He reached into his pocket, and Nora saw him slip the super a bill.
The move had the intended effect: Suddenly the impossible seemed worthy of discussion. It turned out that the super had some tenants on the second floor whose lease was going to be up in a few months.
“What makes you think they won’t renew?” Joe said.
The super cupped his ear again, even though he was now the one spea
king. “Oh, they’ve already told me. The husband comes home from the service, you know, and one, two, three, she’s pregnant again. Kid number four. They’re moving out of the city.”
“Well, that’s probably too many bedrooms for us anyway,” Nora said.
“It’s just the one,” the super said.
“Three kids and two parents in a one-bedroom apartment?”
“Well, as I say, they’re moving.”
Another subtle greasing of the super’s palm by Joe, a quick climb to the second floor, and now Nora and Joe were offering apologies to a pregnant woman whose children—there seemed to be more than three—were clamoring around her as she dished out spaghetti from an enamel bowl. Barely noticing the adults, the woman gestured kindly but vaguely to the living room. Not wanting to intrude any further, Nora and Joe stayed no longer than five minutes, but that was enough time for Nora to decide that the place was perfect. It had a kitchen that was just big enough for a table, a living room with a view of Lexington Avenue, a bedroom with two doors she assumed were closets. Through the partly open bathroom door, Nora could see there was a footed bathtub nearly as elegant as the ones in the Biltmore. Yet all this was covered—for now—by an almost comic-strip chaos of children’s toys, baskets of laundry, newspapers, magazines, and groceries. There was nothing on the walls except room for Nora’s paintings.
* * *
—
Drifting to sleep that night, Nora started mentally clearing the apartment of its current clutter and beginning to fill it, piece by imaginary piece, with the things she and Joe might have one day. Unlikely though it might be, she could see it all, and she had to smile at how appalled Elsie would have been at the décor: not the formal silk and velvet, the carved feet and burnished tabletops, of Nora’s youth, but a place more like that wonderful attic room she had shared with Margaret in Paris. A bit of this and that: some cheerful fabric on the curtains and bed; chairs in which you could curl up, not slide off. She would have to figure out how to coach Joe for the shopping, but nothing would have to be an antique, or “the best,” or “a great find,” or any of the things that had made Elsie so proud of their home. Nothing would have to match. Joe and Nora had lived out of boxes in a series of rooms that changed just slightly from one to another; it would be enough just to know that whatever they had would be able to stay in one place.
Time After Time Page 31
