A Window Across the River

by Brian Morton

  Nora was trying not to smile at how silly this sounded.

  She didn’t quite know what this woman was. A curator, but also an agent . . . ? She’d have to ask Isaac when they got home.

  Nadine and Isaac talked about the photojournalism exhibit.

  “Did you know there’s going to be a book as well?” Nadine said. “Very lavish. You’ll be in it—if you give us your permission—and everyone else who’s in the show.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Isaac said. “When does it come out?”

  “Very soon, we hope. But we’re looking for someone to do the text. We almost have a commitment from someone—someone very, very brilliant, and very known. You would be surprised by the name if I told you. But I can’t mention it before we’re certain.”

  Phil Mushnick, Nora thought. I bet it’s Phil Mushnick. She almost said it, but she stopped herself.

  Phil Mushnick was a sportswriter for the New York Post. She was feeling hostile toward this woman. She didn’t know why. She hoped it wasn’t just because she envied her Continental style.

  “And you, Isaac Mitchell,” Nadine said. “What are you working on now?”

  “I’ve been working on a series of portraits of people after their lives have changed drastically.” He said this thoughtfully, slowly. “Cartier-Bresson speaks of capturing his subjects in the decisive moment. I want to photograph people in the moment after the decisive moment.”

  Nora was surprised. She was pretty sure that Isaac hadn’t picked up a camera in months.

  She’d been puzzled, during these last few months, by the fact that she never saw him take his camera out. It disturbed her. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t asked him about it. It was as if she sensed, somehow, that he didn’t want to be asked.

  What he had just said—Cartier-Bresson, the moment after the decisive moment—struck her as familiar. She wasn’t sure, but she had a feeling that she’d heard Isaac say it before, a long time ago.

  She hoped it was an old idea of his that he’d never pursued, but that he was intending to pursue now. She hoped it wasn’t just a line.

  Maybe this is the kind of thing you have to do to make your way through the professional world, she thought. You have to pretend you’re in the grip of a grand idea, even when you aren’t.

  Seeing Isaac play this game made her uncomfortable. But she didn’t put much stock in her own discomfort. The standard of integrity, of indifference to worldly success, to which artists, in her opinion, should adhere, was probably, professionally speaking, suicidal.

  “And what do you do?” Nadine said to Nora.

  “I work in puppet repair,” Nora said, before she could stop herself. “Mostly marionettes.”

  Nora wasn’t pleased with herself. This was someone who could be important in Isaac’s professional life! She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  “Fascinating,” Nadine said. She took a slow, sultry draw on her cigarette, and as she released the smoke she looked at Isaac appreciatively.

  “Isaac Mitchell,” she said. “I have a favor to ask of you. I want to ask it, but I feel a little shy.”

  Nora wondered whether this woman had ever felt shy in her life.

  “This exhibit, this show, is one of a series. There is going to be a show on the art of portraiture in Washington, at the Folger Library, this winter. I was wondering if I might ask you to take a trip down to Washington and moderate the panel discussion on the opening night. The very best people in the art world will be there. Only the very best. I think you would be perfect.”

  “I’d love to,” Isaac said.

  “Wonderful. I am very pleased. I think you will be perfect. I’ve only just now met you, but I feel as if I know you well. You are soft-spoken, but you are not soft. You are articulate, but you know when it is best not to speak. You are a presence, but you give other people room, to allow their presence to be felt.”

  This was all true, Nora thought, and she was impressed that Nadine had seen all this so quickly. But she also thought she was laying it on pretty thick.

  “It will be a wonderful event,” Nadine said. “We have Richard Avedon, we have Sally Mann, we have others—a very great French photographer, who perhaps you don’t know.” She smiled sadly. “It was my dream to have Yehuda Landau on this panel, but I can’t even discover his telephone number. It’s like trying to get the telephone number of God.”

  “You know,” Isaac said, “I might be able to help you with that.”

  “You can help me get the telephone number of God?”

  “I know Yehuda Landau. I studied with him. I won’t say we’re close, but . . . we’re in touch. I can’t give you his phone number, but I can call him for you. I doubt he’ll say yes, but I can ask.”

  Landau was little known outside the photography world, revered within it. He was a sternly private man. He never went to parties or openings; the Guggenheim Museum had staged an exhibit of his work in the early nineties, and until the last minute no one was sure he was even going to show up for that. A mutual friend, a man who’d been Landau’s student and Isaac’s teacher, had introduced them years ago. Landau and his wife had taken a liking to Isaac, and he still saw them for dinner once or twice a year. Nora had met him once; he was a formidable man.

  “Isaac Mitchell. If you can persuade God to take part in our discussion, I shall think of you as a god yourself.”

  Nadine had to leave; she had another appointment. When Nora and Isaac were alone, Isaac raised his eyebrows.

  “Puppet repair.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said.

  He didn’t seem mad. He seemed to think it was kind of funny. He was probably in too good a mood to be mad.

  They left the restaurant. The rain was still coming down in clumps.

  “Isaac Mitchell,” Nora said. “If you can drive us home through this rain, I shall think of you as a god yourself.”

  They finally decided to go to Nora’s place. They drove up Tenth Avenue slowly in the battering rain. It was only ten o’clock, and Nora was happy that she’d still have time to write. It was important for her to know that she could support Isaac and do her work—that she didn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

  Isaac went to bed and Nora got ready to write. First she strapped on her Polar Pack. She didn’t usually wear it while she was writing, but it helped a little if she wore it for a few minutes just before she got started. Then she spent ten minutes sitting with her eyes closed, letting the day recede. Then she made two cups of coffee with a lot of sugar and a lot of milk, and finally she sat down at the keyboard. She was feeling buoyant and alert; she thought she’d be able to concentrate for three or four hours.

  On the table next to her computer she kept an index card with a quote from Henry James: “To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.”

  Yes, she thought. This is the only thing.

  The phone rang; she let the answering machine take the call. She didn’t need any distractions.

  She’d forgotten to turn the volume down. It was Billie. All she said was, “Hi, it’s me. Call me,” but Nora could tell from her voice that she had bad news.

  25

  “I‘M REALLY SCARED ABOUT my operation,” Billie said.

  Nora was sitting in her aunt’s hospital room.

  “You don’t have to be scared. You know how good Dr. Kanter is.”

  Billie was having surgery. She’d been having stomach pains, and had gone to Dr. Cyclops for a CAT scan—she hadn’t mentioned this to Nora because she didn’t want to alarm her—which had turned up a malignancy on her gallbladder. The surgeon, Dr. Kanter, was going to remove it and examine the surrounding organs. She had explained to Billie that, luckily, we don’t really need the gallbladder: other organs can compensate if it’s gone.

  “You’re right,” Billie sa
id. “I like her. Dr. Candy.”

  She reached over to her night table for her plastic glass of water, but she couldn’t reach far enough because of the IV in her arm. “But I have a bad feeling about it.”

  Up until she said this, she’d seemed as calm as she ever was, but in saying this she seemed to spook herself. “I have a bad feeling,” she said again, louder, and she reached out for Nora’s hand. “I don’t think I’m going to get through this.”

  “Of course you will. She’s just going to take the thing out and you’re going to be fine.”

  “They’re going to find something else. They always find something else. They’re going to find something bad.”

  Nora didn’t know how to comfort her. What do you say to someone who’s sick and might get sicker? Do you offer false comfort? Is that the kind thing to do? The question was academic, because Nora didn’t know how to offer false comfort. She didn’t say anything, and held on to Billie’s hand.

  Nora had a feeling of powerful protectiveness, not quite like anything she’d experienced before.

  If Nora had believed in reincarnation, she would have found it easy to think that she’d known her aunt in many previous lives. When she asked herself why she loved her aunt so much, there wasn’t a reason. Billie was kind, but it wasn’t because of her kindness; she was generous, but it wasn’t because of her generosity. The love wasn’t there because of anything Billie had done. It was just there. Certain people are given into our care, and we have no choice but to care for them.

  In a little while a nurse came in pushing a gurney. “Time to get prepped,” she said, grinning, with a ghoulish excess of good cheer. She winked at Nora. “If you could just leave us alone for just two minutes, me and your auntie can get to know each other.”

  Nora was annoyed by her manner, but tried not to be, since this woman was here to help her aunt. She went out into the hall.

  After a few minutes the door opened and the nurse wheeled Billie out. Nora walked with them toward the operating room, holding Billie’s hand.

  Dr. Kanter met them outside the operating room. She was a woman in her early fifties with a manner that was both confident and gentle. Nora had met her two years ago, when Kanter had removed a growth on Billie’s spleen, a growth that had turned out to be benign.

  “Good morning, my friend,” the doctor said to Billie. “Any last questions before we take a look and find out what’s going on in there?”

  Billie looked up at her with an expression of childlike trustfulness and hope. “Is there any chance it’ll be like with the spleen, and it’ll be all clear?”

  Nora was surprised by this question. Billie didn’t seem to realize what was happening to her. She didn’t seem to realize that they already knew this new growth was cancerous, and that the only question that remained was whether the cancer had spread.

  “No, that won’t be a possibility,” Dr. Kanter said in a measured voice. “We know there’s a malignancy there. We’re hopeful we can get it all out. That’s what this procedure is about.”

  Billie nodded, seeming to take it in, but Nora wasn’t sure if she really had. She might have been too frightened to understand what her doctor was saying.

  Nora let go of Billie’s hand and the nurse wheeled her into the operating room.

  Billie, Nora thought, had won the jump-rope contest in fifth grade.

  A life goes by so quickly! We think of our lives as incredibly complicated and long, composed of many different stages, different eras, when the truth is that a life is but a single note.

  Nora found a pay phone in the hall and called Isaac at work.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you. How are you doing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Out on a limb.”

  He offered to take the rest of the day off and join her at the hospital. Someone else in her situation, she knew, would have been happy for the company. But in difficult moments she usually found it easier to be alone.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I’m all right. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  Nora went to the waiting room and got some coffee from a vending machine. She knew it would taste terrible, and she could have walked a block south to a diner for a cup of decent coffee, but the masochistic austerity that takes hold of you when you’re in a hospital waiting for news about a loved one made her want to drink the punishing vending-machine coffee. She looked around idly for something to read, and settled on a copy of Modern Maturity.

  She couldn’t concentrate. Instead she sat in the waiting room trying to make sense of Billie’s life. Trying to figure out what her life had added up to. If you looked at one side of the ledger—that she’d wanted children, but she and Nelson hadn’t been able to conceive; that ever since Nelson’s death, she’d spent most of her free time watching TV; that she was ending up like this, attended only by her niece—it was incredible how little a life could come down to.

  Thinking about all this, Nora felt old, because she was old enough to have witnessed the arc of Billie’s life. She could remember when Billie was in her thirties: exuberant, full of hope, and lucky—Billie, in the old days, had always seemed lucky; life always seemed to open its doors for her. Nora was old enough to have seen her transformed from the hopeful and high-spirited woman she was in her thirties to the ill and lonely woman she was today.

  What was the key? What was the key? Thinking furiously, but with a sense that it wasn’t going to get her anywhere, Nora was trying to understand why Billie’s life had gone this way, from promise to nothing.

  But maybe she was thinking about it in the wrong way. You can’t judge the quality of a person’s life from the way she ends up. Maybe Billie had lived a successful life—maybe a better life than Nora had. In Billie’s years as a pediatric physical therapist, she’d helped a great many children. Nora had once visited her at work and seen the kids clustering around her; they were all in love with her.

  Dr. Kanter had said the operation might take up to two hours, after which Billie would spend an hour or two in recovery. And after that, Dr. Kanter had said, she might still be too sedated to talk. Nora thought she should probably go home for a few hours. There was nothing she could do for Billie here. She could get some writing done.

  But she didn’t want to go home. Even though there was nothing she could do for Billie here, she wanted to stay.

  26

  DR. KANTER APPROACHED FROM down the hall, and Nora could tell she had bad news, just from the way she walked.

  “Well,” she said, “your aunt is in recovery. It’ll be a few hours before you can speak to her.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “The operation was a success,” Kanter said. “We removed the gallbladder. But, as I said, we wanted to take a look around, and I’m afraid the results aren’t encouraging. The malignancy has spread quite extensively, it turns out. It seems that her entire liver is compromised.”

  Nora didn’t know anything about the body, but she knew enough to know what this meant.

  “You can’t really survive without your liver. Can you?”

  Dr. Kanter raised her eyebrows in an expression of sympathy, sadness, answerlessness. Her eyes actually appeared to be shot with red. Only women should be doctors, Nora thought.

  “Is there anything you can do?” Nora said.

  Ranter’s expression didn’t change.

  “How much time do you think she has?” Nora said.

  “The variations can be very wide. But I think our main concern now should be keeping her as comfortable as possible.”

  Keeping her as comfortable as possible?! But she was comfortable, up until this morning! She was comfortable as pie! Just last weekend we were planning to go to the zoo! It isn’t cancer that’s killing her—it’s this fucking operation that you insisted on! She was feeling fine before the operation, and now you’re talking about keeping her comfortable!

  She was boiling with rage at Kanter, because all of this was Ranter�
��s fault, but she didn’t say anything, because she knew it wasn’t true.

  “Does she have anyone to stay with her?” Dr. Kanter asked.

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. There’s me.”

  “It might be a good idea to look into the possibility of hospice care. There’s a patients’ rights office on the first floor where you can get the details. Medicare can pay for an attendant who can care for her at home, or if that becomes impossible for any reason, there’s a hospice in the area that I can recommend.”

  A hospice! For my aunt Billie! For my aunt!

  No no no no no no no no no no no no.

  The thing about doctors is that they don’t stay. They’re sorry, but they have to run. Every doctor is a master of the art of backing away. And although Dr. Kanter—perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps just because she was kind—was more willing than most doctors to explain things in detail and to listen to the concerns of patients and their loved ones, she was still, finally, a doctor, someone who had been trained to withdraw herself emotionally from the plight of the people she was ministering to. It’s something you need to learn, Nora thought, because if you don’t learn it, the daily exposure to misery will destroy you. Dr. Kanter was moving off even as she was speaking. “Call my office,” she said. “They’ll give you the number.”

  Well, this was one doctor who wasn’t going to be able to walk away. Nora blocked her path. “A hospice is where you go to die,” she said, as if Kanter didn’t know this.

  “They provide very good care,” Dr. Kanter said quietly. “My mother spent the last three weeks of her life there.”

  Nora, humbled, let her go.

  Nora sat down heavily on a hard plastic seat. Her mind wanted to go blank, but she wouldn’t let it. She needed to think. She needed to figure out what to do.

  First, when Billie got well enough to go home, she needed to go home with her. She needed to take care of her.