by Brian Morton
She wasn’t placing Isaac in this company. But he had his own distinctive way of seeing people, and it seemed to her that what he saw in people was their strength.
She was feeling an immense relief. She realized now that she’d been preparing a litany of euphemisms; she’d been preparing to lie to him. But she wasn’t a good liar, and she had already half envisioned the scene in which she was praising his pictures, but in a strangled, mangled voice.
She sat down on a marble bench. She felt suddenly exhausted, weak with relief. She wanted to crawl under the bench and take a nap.
It was odd that their art, his and hers, took them in such different directions. He was drawn to moments when people showed their strength; she, to moments when they showed their weakness. She wondered if he’d chosen his direction any more than she’d chosen hers.
Isaac was coming her way, but before he could reach her, two people she didn’t recognize—a man and a woman, neither of them over five feet tall—intercepted him and engaged him in conversation.
She thought of joining them, but she didn’t want to interrupt. The little people looked as if they were praising him, and he seemed to be basking in it.
22
ISAAC WAS SENDING THOUGHT messages to Nora, asking her to save him.
He was trapped by a couple he’d never met before. They’d seen a notice of the show in the paper.
“We’re lovers of the arts,” the woman told him.
“But more than that,” the man said, “we’re students of human nature.”
They were a tiny, shiny, merry-looking couple—they looked like two wholesome elves. They were telling him, somehow, about her grandfather, who had been a photographer in Latvia.
“He was a brilliant, brilliant man,” the woman was saying. “His pictures were more real than life itself.”
He was trying to back away, but there was nowhere to go.
Years ago, when he used to exhibit his photographs regularly, strangers would often come to these events and tell him about themselves. It was baffling: you’d think they’d want to find out about him, but they never did. At every event at which he was theoretically the center of attention, he’d found himself cornered by some stranger with a story to tell.
Everyone has a story, he thought, and I don’t want to hear it.
“He could make the light speak,” the woman said. “Even in Latvia.”
At any event like this, you wish you could edit the guest list. It wasn’t only the elfin couple; there were a lot of people there he could have done without. There was his sister-in-law’s brother, David, who’d spent ten minutes telling Isaac how nobody could take pictures like Robert Capa anymore. There were John and Theresa—one of the guys from the news department and his wife—standing in the corner glumly: sallow, sad-sack, perpetual mourners at life’s perpetual wake. And there was Louise, the paper’s financial manager, looking at all times as if she understood your pain. After twenty years of group therapy, Louise found it impossible to be interested in what people were saying unless they were sharing some sort of inner distress. She was looking at him with eyes filled with googly sympathy, as if she understood that this event was more traumatic for him than anyone else could imagine.
But finally there was Nora, sitting on a bench, relaxed, glowing. She looked, to his eyes, like Greta Garbo, whose face was always shot in a soft, gauzy light. Not, perhaps, as beautiful, but just as elusive. The thing that fascinated him about Nora was that as you glanced at her sitting there in the corner, you knew she was thinking, furiously thinking, and you wanted to know what she was thinking about.
Also, she was wearing a dress. He felt privileged to be the man she was wearing a dress for.
He wanted to be alone with her. A few of his friends were up from Virginia; his brother and sister-in-law were here; even his salesman uncle was here, looking very smart in a pompadour, with his fourth or fifth wife. Isaac was touched that they’d all showed up for his opening, and he was wondering if he could find a graceful way to ditch them.
It wasn’t really that he wanted to ditch them; it was just that he wanted to be alone with her.
He had known her for all these years and never gotten enough of her. He wondered whether it was possible to get enough of her. He wondered whether she’d remained mysterious, elusive, to her boyfriend, Whoosie. Experience showed that you pretty much get sick of anyone you live with, but he couldn’t imagine getting sick of her.
Maybe that’s love, he thought: if you can live with someone for years and say Baby, I’m still not sick of you.
He wished his sister were here, but she was busy serving God and Guru Nan in Oregon. The only other person missing—the only person important to him—was Renee. He would have liked her to witness his little moment of glory.
The elves were still going at him; he was still pretending to listen while he scanned the room. Miraculously, in the corner—closely examining a photograph of the mayor of Newark tossing a trophy into a cardboard box as he cleaned out his desk on his last day in office—was Cynthia Ellis, the photography critic from the New York Times. Isaac tried to reach her with a few thought waves—tried to influence her a few feet to her left, toward a photograph he considered stronger. But it was a miracle that she was here at all. He began to write her review in his mind; phrases like “brilliant” and “perhaps the most interesting photographer alive” appeared with a pleasing frequency.
About eight or ten people, friends and family, wanted to take him out to dinner, so, despite the fact that he didn’t want to, he went along. When it’s your party, you have no rights. The group drifted out in bunches; he and Nora fell behind the others.
“That was really wonderful,” she said.
He didn’t quite believe her; he was trying to find the irony in her voice.
“You really liked it?”
“You have your own way of looking at the world. You have your own vision.”
They were lagging behind the rest of the group, talking quietly. The big event was over; it had felt like a success. He felt high.
She kept talking about his pictures. This was one of the things he liked about her: she didn’t content herself with generalizations; she thought things through.
“Everyone in your pictures seems to be struggling toward something. They all seem heroic. Even your nephew.”
“My nephew is heroic,” he said. This didn’t mean anything, except that he liked his nephew.
As she went on, he began to believe her. He began to think that maybe these photographs—the ones he’d taken since he’d started to work full-time—expressed a distinctive vision. He began to think that perhaps he’d accomplished something in this latest phase of his career. Perhaps he’d added something to the sum of human something-or-other.
They walked to a Chinese restaurant. He owed his relatives some time, and if he sat with Nora he wouldn’t pay attention to them at all, so he sat between his aunt and sister-in-law and Nora sat at the other end of the table. It was all right. Just to have her there was enough. Leaning back in his chair in the loud restaurant, thrillingly exhausted after all the tension of the show, surrounded by family and friends, he allowed himself to feel something like pure satisfaction. He’d finally put up another show, after all these years.
It was true, of course, that he hadn’t actually started to take pictures again. And, as happy as he was right now, he didn’t exactly feel like he wanted to grab his camera the next morning and spend the day in search of the perfect picture. What he was hoping to do the next morning, really, was stay in bed with Nora.
Nora was talking to his uncle; they looked like they were joking around. He wished he could hear what she was saying.
He was amazed by how comfortable he was feeling, how at peace. Having Nora in the room made everything feel different. The woman he had always loved, the woman whose existence had proved to him that romantic love is not a myth: lo and behold, she was back in his life. He was a lucky man.
23
UNCLE CARL WAS ASTONISHED. He couldn’t believe that Isaac was a vegetarian.
“I’ve never heard of anything so brainless in my life.”
“Why is it brainless?” Nora said. “It’s healthy.”
“It’s brainless because we weren’t made to be vegetarians. We’re omnivorous creatures. Our teeth are made for eating meat. Our stomachs are made for digesting meat. For millions of years we’ve eaten meat. A vegetarian is someone who’s trying to deny human nature.”
“I don’t think Isaac is trying to deny anything,” Nora said, loyally.
“Not just human nature. Every kind of nature. Animals eat animals, and then they get eaten themselves. When I die I’ll feed the worms. I have no problem with that. I’m not about to beg the worms not to eat me. That’s what nature is. That’s what life is. It’s like, it drives me crazy when people say they’re against war—they’re against any and all war. If you read a little history, you soon find out that most of the technological advances that make your life and mine so pleasant only came about because somebody discovered them when they were looking for a better way to make war. Life is a circle of animals destroying each other, and if you don’t see that, then you’ve got your eyes closed.”
Uncle Carl seemed to want to go out and smite all those who tried to step away from the great circle of destruction.
Nora handed him a plate of beef with broccoli. “Have some meat.”
He was a large man, and he had a way of leaning over you when he talked. It wasn’t menacing; it wasn’t harassment. It was just uncomfortable.
His drink arrived—Scotch—and he drank it quickly and signaled the waiter for another. He drank the second more slowly, and grew mellow.
“That nephew of mine has a gift,” Uncle Carl said. “He has a special gift.”
“I agree,” Nora said.
“I’m serious. That boy has a gift. You should take care of him. He could go far—he could go very far if he has a good woman who believes in him.”
“I don’t really know if I am a good woman,” Nora said.
Uncle Carl didn’t seem to hear this. “Are you two thinking of children?”
“Well . . .”
“Because that fulfills a man. Men don’t always know it before the fact, but it’s true. A man does his best work when he has a stake in the future. If Isaac came home at the end of the day to loving children and a wife who stood behind him, there’s no telling what he could accomplish.”
I should have children, Nora thought, so Isaac can win the Pulitzer Prize.
“You always seemed like a tricky little thing in the old days. I never quite trusted you to take care of him. But you’ve calmed down. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I still am a tricky little thing,” she said, but Uncle Carl smiled indulgently, as if he didn’t believe her.
“You’re artistic too,” Carl said. “So you know how hard it is. I remember you. You used to dabble in writing, am I right?”
Her writing had been going so poorly that this remark made her angry at herself rather than at Uncle Carl. If I’d accomplished anything in life, she thought, he wouldn’t feel like he had the right to be so condescending. She’d been sitting down faithfully with the Gabriel story every day, but it was getting nowhere. Just before her birthday, she’d thought she was on the verge of a breakthrough, but it hadn’t come.
“You’ll remember what I’m saying, won’t you?” Uncle Carl said. He lifted his glass of Scotch to the light and looked up at it. “I might not remember this conversation in the morning, but I hope you will.”
Nora took her memo pad and a pen from her bag. “Let’s see,” she said. “Man needs support of a good woman. You’ve said some thought-provoking things tonight, Carl. You’ve really rocked my world.”
Uncle Carl, to his credit, laughed at this.
She noticed that Isaac, at the other end of the table, hadn’t touched his food. His sister-in-law was talking to him, and he was trying to act like he was listening, but Nora could see that he wasn’t.
She knew, without having to ask, that he’d forgotten to bring his needle and his insulin. He couldn’t eat before he had his shot. He must have left them in his car, which was still in the parking lot of the gallery, ten blocks away.
At any other time, she would have stood up and volunteered to get them. This was Isaac’s party; he shouldn’t have to duck out for twenty minutes to get his medicine.
At any other time, she would have done the right thing, but tonight she felt a twitch of resistance. It was because of Uncle Carl. After his speech about the importance of standing by your man, she didn’t want to get Isaac’s insulin.
But you can’t let yourself be ruled by other people, and if she didn’t do something merely because Uncle Carl would approve of her for doing it, she’d be allowing him to rule her.
“Excuse me,” she said to Uncle Carl, and walked over to Isaac and touched him on the arm. “Is it in the car?”
Isaac looked up at her with a puzzled smile, as if he thought she was psychic.
“I think so.”
“I’ll get it,” she said. He started to protest but she put her hands on his shoulders and said, “It’s your party. Stay here.”
She walked the ten blocks to the gallery. His insulin kit was on the passenger seat. She retrieved it and walked back quickly. It was the first Friday in September, a calm, cool night, and she was happy to be outside.
She got to the restaurant and handed him the kit, and accompanied him to the men’s room to help him give himself his shot. He’d been having trouble finding patches of unbruised skin; she ended up giving him the shot herself, in his back.
In the flimsy light of the men’s room, he looked pale. “I’m glad you got back so fast,” he said. “I was starting to feel a little vasty.”
Nora walked him back to the table. Uncle Carl, in conversation with Isaac’s friend Eric, was laughing. He had large teeth, constructed for pulverizing animal flesh. He winked at Nora—she didn’t know why. She wanted to run off and spend the rest of the night writing, just to avoid being the helpmate that Uncle Carl thought a woman should be. But Isaac needed her, and she stayed where she was.
24
THE NEXT DAY THEY SPENT the afternoon with Isaac’s brother and sister-in-law and then went back to Isaac’s apartment. Nora was planning to write after dinner while Isaac watched one of those interminable Ken Burns things. The Civil War, baseball, New York City—he somehow made them all seem the same. A cornball narrator, plinky banjos, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and everything slow, slow, slow. After that they were going to watch a movie together. Nora had rented The Talk of the Town: Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman.
It was important to her to write that night. She didn’t want to let the Gabriel story float away.
She had the story with her on a floppy disk—160 pages of unconnected scenes. She hadn’t brought her laptop: she hadn’t turned it off in a month, and she didn’t want to risk turning it off and turning it on again. She asked Isaac if she could use his computer.
“Writers are crazy,” he said. “But of course you can.”
It was a good night to stay in; it was storming. Standing at Isaac’s window, Nora thought the storm was beautiful, but Isaac was unhappy, because it meant no one would go to his exhibit. Though the woman from the Times had miraculously appeared at the opening, none of the other writers or buyers or gallery owners he’d invited had been there, and he’d been hoping some of them would show up on the second night.
As they were finishing dinner, he got a phone call. When he came back to the kitchen he was beaming.
“Nadine Lyle is in town.”
Nadine Lyle was the curator of the photojournalism exhibit at the New York Public Library, the woman who’d selected one of Isaac’s old pictures.
“I’ve never actually met her. She’s in the city for the weekend and one of her engagements fell through. She asked if I could come in there and meet her.”
“I know. But still. I think I should. She’d be a good person to cultivate. She’s connected to everybody who’s anybody in the photography world, living or dead.”
She was surprised to hear him talk like this. She thought of Isaac as more pure than that; she didn’t think of him as a networker. It sounded like something Benjamin would say.
The funny thing was that whenever Benjamin talked about networking, it used to send her into a funk of disapproval, yet now, when Isaac was talking about it, it didn’t seem like a bad thing.
“I’d love it if you’d come too.”
She didn’t want to. She wanted to spend the evening concentrating on her story.
“I could really use your support,” he said, and this made up her mind for her. If he needed her there, she wanted to be there. She could work later, when they got back.
They drove into the city. It was raining so hard that it was difficult to see. It was like a Hollywood rain. There were stagehands dumping buckets of water from all the rooftops of the world.
They met Nadine Lyle at a restaurant in a hotel in Tribeca. She was at the bar, smoking a thin brown cigarette.
She was an older woman, probably in her late fifties. She kissed Isaac, softly, on both cheeks. There was something sexy about the way she kissed him.
“I’m so happy to meet you,” she said. “For weeks I’ve been trying to picture the man who took that photograph. And here you are.”
She had a soft French accent and a kind of insinuating charm. She seemed like an aging seductress whose skills were still intact.
They found a table and ordered drinks—wine for Nadine and Nora, club soda for Isaac. Nadine said she was in New York because one of her artists, a Spanish painter, was having a show at the Whitney. People had been lining up down the block to get in.
“But I don’t think most of them will understand his work,” she said. “They’d be afraid to. They wouldn’t be able to contemplate the meaning of his work and then go back to their lives. It’s very dark. Even dangerous.”
