“I’m sorry,” Nora said. “Did you not want me to see it?”
“I took it last night,” Joe said. “My mother used to keep all these maps of Ireland above our kitchen cabinets. Faye’s painting the kitchen, so she brought them all down.”
“And she let you take it?”
“It wasn’t hers to keep,” Joe said.
“It’s beautiful,” Nora said, picking it up.
Joe shrugged. “It’s Ireland.”
“Do you ever want to go there?”
Joe shrugged again. “My parents always made it sound like we got the better deal, being here.”
“And how were things with Faye last night?” Nora asked, putting the map back down. She reached for some tissue from the bedside table and gently wiped the frame.
“She’s got a fella.”
“A ‘fella’?”
“His name is Manny.”
“Manny what?”
Joe laughed. “What, you think you know him?”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t know. She certainly acted like it is. And Alice has a boyfriend too,” Joe said. “Rusty,” he added, as if it was the name that bothered him.
“And—”
“And no more questions,” Joe said. “It’s time for your present.”
When Nora saw her charm bracelet, she was confused. “You polished it up!” she said. “That’s so nice.”
“Look closer,” Joe told her.
She rolled it over her hand to her wrist, as she usually did, and touched each one of the charms in turn—the gold ballerina, the skates, the artist’s palette with the dots of paint—rubbing them as if one might produce a genie and grant a wish. Then she saw what Joe had added.
“Oh,” she said, smiling at the shining button. “ ‘G.C.T.,’ ” she read. “Since when does Grand Central Terminal make suit buttons?”
“For the Red Caps,” Joe said. “Ralston gave it to me.”
“ ‘G.C.T.,’ ” Nora read again. “Girls Can—what?”
“Talk,” Joe said.
“Tell.”
“Touch.”
She kissed him. “Tease,” she said.
He turned on the radio. Snow fell, the sky dimmed, and they danced.
8
IF HE’D MOVED AWAY
1947
By the middle of January, Nora had already found a way to honor the New Year’s Eve resolution she’d made: to look for a job with a salary so she could start saving for the apartment. It turned out that Hattie Pope—former general of the servicemen’s lounge, still in uniform but now operating with a hugely diminished mission and force—was back at her original job, overseeing the Travelers Aid station.
She recognized Nora and gave her a blue-suited, cushiony hug. Mrs. Pope explained that she herself had one of the only paid positions for the Travelers Aid team. But Nora got the sense that the older woman was itching to wield a bit of her diminished power, and within a few weeks she had flagged Nora down near the barbershop to say that the New York Central was looking to hire some new tour guides.
“It won’t pay much,” Mrs. Pope said, “but it’ll pay something, and I’ve already told them what a treasure you are.”
It was a perfect job for Nora. She and the other new guides were all given scripts, but Nora hardly needed one. By now she knew the catwalks and the subbasements, the errors in the painted sky and the county in Tennessee where the floor’s marble had been quarried. She knew about the Kissing Room, the idea of Terminal City, and the corkscrew staircase and exit beneath the information booth. For Nora, the challenge of giving tours was in remembering what not to tell. Visitors didn’t need to know about the Campbell office or the morgue, and they weren’t supposed to know about M42 or the small white lights on the rim of the information booth that subtly switched to red in order to summon police in emergencies.
Nora was leading a tour of fifteen out-of-towners on a Wednesday in February when she looked out from the north balcony and saw Joe crossing the concourse floor. There was nothing particularly unusual about that: She had seen him—even sketched him—dozens of times when he hadn’t known she was looking. But today he was walking with four or five of his fellow levermen. They were all talking and laughing about something, and Nora realized, more as a painter than as a person, that she was looking at the colors and postures of middle-aged men. These were Joe’s contemporaries, Nora thought. They were workingmen who, unlike Joe, no doubt had wives and children, cars and houses. These were regular guys who had shopped for furniture, picked apples in autumn, carried their kids on their shoulders, taken their wives to see It’s a Wonderful Life. Happily or not, touched by the war or not, they had lived normal lives and had normal choices.
That evening, as Joe scanned the real estate ads in the Herald, Nora noticed what she thought were even newer lines on his face, including one spot to the left of his chin where three or four lines converged to form what looked like an asterisk. It was mesmerizing, in a way. When he looked up to read her a rental ad, she wasn’t really listening. Mostly she was staring at this star-shaped wrinkle and remembering a French phrase that Ollie had taught her: prendre un coup de vieux. It meant that the signs of age could appear as suddenly as a surprise attack. How much longer would it be before Joe began to resent all the choices she’d stolen from him?
Joe Reynolds was only forty-two, but he looked, even moved, like an older man. Nora could no longer avoid the question: Wouldn’t he have been better off if he’d moved away before she’d come back?
* * *
—
That question began to dominate Nora’s life, the contradictory answers flaring through her mind: yes and no, no and yes, as if someone were standing by a light switch, relentlessly flipping it on and off. The question was insistent, punishing.
Nora was unpacking the last of the boxes from the Y when she felt the switch being thrown with more than the usual force. In this box were some of her sketchbooks, a stack of Joe’s New York Central newsletters, his childhood Bible, her childhood diary, and the atlas she had given him for Christmas in 1943.
Eventually she would wonder if things would have been different if she’d never seen this book or if it had been better made. But during World War II, when the nylon in women’s stockings had been used for parachutes, and the steel in the Trylon and Perisphere had been used for tanks, even paper had been in short supply: The good stuff was needed for packing guns and ammunition, and most books were printed on paper so thin it was nearly transparent. In the case of Joe’s old atlas, there were numerous pages dangling off the spine like broken wings.
Nora meant only to straighten them, but pencil markings caught her eye. As she gently handled the pages, she had the sickening realization that virtually every one of them had at some point been annotated by Joe. Nora sank to her knees as she tried to take it all in. The hours he must have spent poring over this book. The care he must have taken to devise these special markings. Each page looked like a treasure map, cryptic and complex. Joe had framed some place-names with rectangles, others with circles or ovals. Some had stars. Still others were the hubs of wheels with spokes connecting to places marked by colored pencils that she guessed he’d found in one of her boxes. On the maps of Italy and Africa, Nora recognized the lines Joe had drawn to trace the places where Finn had been posted. Around the town of Medenine in Tunisia, Joe had drawn a square in black and, beside it, the letters RIP, FDR. That was mystifying at first: She remembered from the newsreels that President Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, in Georgia. Then she realized that Medenine must have been the place where Finn had died. RIP, FDR. Rest in peace, Finnegan Damian Reynolds.
But most of Joe’s markings were on maps of the United States. Nora noted the cities he’d singled out: Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia. She saw the sites he’d starred: Yellowstone,
Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, the Florida Keys—a map of what seemed like his deepest dreams laid out on other maps.
Holding the atlas to her chest, Nora didn’t think she’d ever seen anything so beautiful or heartbreaking.
* * *
—
As far as she knew, Joe had never lied to her. She assumed he had left a few things out. There had to have been women other than Faye in the years of Nora’s absence. But Nora didn’t believe that Joe had ever purposely hidden anything that was truly important to him. So finding the markings on the pages of his atlas was nearly as shocking as it would have been to find a hidden bundle of love letters.
In a sense, each page of Joe’s atlas was just that: a love letter to a site, a city, a country—or at least an expression of his longing to meet them, a longing that Nora knew she could never satisfy, only squelch. She had always known that Joe wanted to travel, but she was stricken as she tried to accept just how deeply he’d felt that desire. She closed her eyes and imagined Joe in his black coat and maybe a new scarf and hat. He had a suitcase in one hand and a starry look in his eye as he got off a train to see the sights: the Golden Gate Bridge, say, or Yosemite. But that was where Nora’s vision stopped, because she had never seen those places herself and never would get to see them. And she knew that as long as she lived, Joe would never want to risk leaving her long enough to see them himself.
Coming right after her glimpse of him with the older men in the terminal, the atlas answered the question in Nora’s mind and replaced it with another. Yes, she was certain, Joe would have been better off if he’d gone away before she’d come back. But that was beside the point now. Now she had to ask herself how she could get him to leave.
9
SOMEWHERE ELSE
1947
The secret studio that Leon and Mr. Fournier continued to protect for Nora quickly became a refuge, not only from the squalls of her tour guide job, but also from the torrent of her feelings about Joe. The studio had an allure all its own. Nora learned from Mr. Fournier that the sketchy figures on the walls had been made by an artist named Ezra Winter, who’d first worked in this space during the Great War to create camouflage patterns for the U.S. Shipping Board. After the war, Winter became well known for his murals, including—ironically enough for Nora—one in the lobby of Radio City called The Fountain of Youth. When Winter’s work became too large for his Connecticut home, he reclaimed this space as a studio, promptly becoming as infamous for the debauched costume parties he gave there as he was famous for the works he produced.
Feeling more at home in the vast room, Nora imagined how she might someday paint these walls herself. For now, she left Winter’s sketches untouched and worked on her own paintings. The canvases she used, collected from the former classrooms, had almost all been painted before and gessoed over. Often Nora saw, beneath the chalky coating, faint images of what the first artist had painted: someone’s abandoned attempt at a still life, portrait, or abstract. These images, as it happened, were known as ghosts.
Nora increasingly saw her love affair with Joe as exactly this sort of ghost. The first image of them together—when she was twenty-three and he was just ten years older—had remained as a ghost beneath all the other layers of time and laughter, sex and strife, their gradual understanding of a singular event, and their shared, stubborn, impossible attempt to make the supernatural natural.
* * *
—
One afternoon in March, Nora snuck one of her new landscapes from the secret studio into their current room at the Biltmore and—without waiting for Joe’s approval—hung it in place of a dowdy still life.
“What’s this?” Joe asked when he came in from his shift that evening. “I thought we weren’t going to hang anything until we got the apartment.”
“Don’t you like it?” Nora asked.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“It’s England,” Nora said. “You could go there, Joe.”
“What would I do in England?”
“See England,” she said.
A week later she added a second landscape to the room.
“England?” Joe asked when he saw it.
“Actually, it’s the French countryside,” Nora said. “You could go there too, Joe.”
He tossed his jacket onto the bed. “Why are you trying to get rid of me?” he asked.
“Just tell me,” Nora said. “If I hadn’t come back, and once you’d known Faye and the kids were okay, where would you have gone first?”
Joe was silent, studying the richness of the scene Nora had painted, the layers of blue and purple—even green—from which she’d made a sky so deep and alive.
“You’re not going to tell me?” Nora asked.
She saw, even with his back to her, that his whole body had stiffened.
“I found your atlas, Joe,” Nora said. “I saw all your markings and your plans and—”
He wheeled around from the painting, enraged.
“You had no business looking through that!” he shouted.
Flustered, Nora countered, “You looked through my things too!”
Joe shook his head emphatically. “You know that’s not the same. I didn’t know if you were ever coming back.”
They glared at each other until at last Joe looked away. Gently, Nora said, “Joe. Just tell me where you’d have gone.”
He opened a beer, drinking through the silence.
“Please, Joe,” she said. “You can tell me. Please.”
He took another sip of his beer and sighed. “All right,” he finally said. “You want to know? I’ll tell you. I’d get on the Twentieth Century and I’d go straight to Chicago. I’d take in a game at Wrigley Field, and then I’d catch either the Zephyr or the Golden State. Probably the Golden State. The southern route. And I’d see Carlsbad Caverns, with all the bats, and then El Paso and Tucson and Phoenix and Palm Springs, and I’d end up in Los Angeles, and then I’d go to Santa Monica, and I’d put my toes in the Pacific Ocean.”
Joe was breathless, Nora wide-eyed. He might just as well have described the eyes, legs, and breasts of his ideal woman.
“The Pacific Ocean” was all Nora could say.
“Why don’t you paint me a picture of the Pacific Ocean?” he asked, his jaw set hard.
“I don’t know what the Pacific Ocean looks like, Joe. I’ve never been to the Pacific Ocean. I’m never going to get to go. You can go to the Pacific Ocean.”
He put his beer down on the dresser, hard, as if the bottle could leave a stamp.
“And I can also go somewhere else to get a beer,” he said, heading for the door.
“Joe!” Nora said. “I don’t think you even know how much you want to go.”
He turned back slowly and, helplessly, raised his hands. “And what the hell do you want me to say?” he asked. “What the hell do you want me to do? I’m in love with you.”
“That’s not my point.”
“That’s the only point.”
“Joe.”
“So tell me this,” he said. “What would you do if you were in my shoes?”
Nora looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m not sure I could have stayed this long,” she whispered.
It wounded him. She’d known it would. He looked around the room as if the right words were hidden somewhere. Not finding them, he lunged for the door and slammed it, hard, behind him.
Alone, Nora curled up on the couch, hugged her knees, and started to sob.
She had meant what she’d said about leaving. Maybe it was her own confinement that made freedom seem so important. But Nora at this moment couldn’t think of anything better or more important for Joe to have.
How could she give him that freedom? Should she try to make him jealous or angry? Should she become dependent, needy, na
gging, someone he’d want to escape? Could she drive him away with bad behavior? Reluctantly, she started to think that the only way Joe would ever leave was if he knew she was gone for good.
* * *
—
Things changed between them. Nora now understood the depth of his yearning, and Joe now felt exposed. Still, a few days later, when the lights went down in the newsreel theater, he took Nora’s hand, and in the darkness he kissed it. They saw a few cartoons, which were silly but fun, and they saw footage of police confiscating and burning pinball and slot machines. Next came an actress boarding a Chesapeake and Ohio train that would host “the first motion picture premiere on wheels.” In the semidarkness Joe could feel Nora studying his face, searching for a reaction. What was she hoping to see? Was he supposed to stand up, point to the train, and shout, “I want to go too!”?
He was about to ask her to cut it out when he felt her attention shift. Now it was his turn to study her face. What had caught her eye in this last story on the newsreel? It was just about the United Nations: a model of how the new buildings might look.
As the images rolled by, Nora dropped Joe’s hand and sat up straighter.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“Shh,” she said, though there were only a few other people in the theater, and they hadn’t seemed disturbed by his talking. “I’ll tell you later,” she said.
Nora didn’t want to explain anything until she was sure of what she’d seen. Despite the coziness of sitting beside Joe in the theater, despite the fact that she couldn’t quite imagine not being beside him, she was fairly certain that, in the images of the U.N. that had just passed before them, she had found the way to get Joe to leave. It would have to involve these buildings, a clear Manhattanhenge sunset, and a lie—the only one she would ever tell him.
* * *
Time After Time Page 33
