by Brian Morton
Even during this last week, while spending most of her time in the hospital, she’d managed to work a little every night. And her devotion was starting to bear fruit. The story was making sense to her again. Gabriel was on a train, on the way to visit his sister. Nora didn’t know why he was visiting her or what would happen when he got there, but she was feeling as if the story was ready to unfurl itself.
She’d barely gotten started when the phone rang. It was Isaac. He never called her this late. Their middle-of-the-night phone calls were strictly one-way.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“Oh, I just—I don’t know. How’s Billie?”
“She’s okay. She doesn’t know anything yet. She thinks she’s fine. At least she says she thinks she’s fine. Maybe she’s trying to spare my feelings.”
“Poor Billie,” he said.
Something was going on with him. She knew he was concerned about Billie, but she could tell that wasn’t why he’d called.
“What’s new with you?” she said.
“Something funny happened to me tonight. Renee—you remember Renee?”
“Sure. ‘Too bad you have such a small family.’”
“That’s right. Renee from the human family. She dropped by tonight. She told me that some of her pictures were accepted by the New Yorker.”
“That’s fantastic,” Nora said. “You must be proud.”
“Yeah. She’s got it made. Made in the shade.”
She didn’t know why, but when he said this, she realized that he was miserable.
“She might be a genius,” he said. “A genius with the camera, I mean. The funny thing is that she’s not even that devoted. I’ve met a thousand photographers who know more about the craft of photography, who care more about the craft of photography than she does. She just happens to be great at it. It’s a gift. You either have it or you don’t.”
He sighed: a heavy, defeated sigh.
“You either have it or you don’t,” he said again. “She has it. I don’t.”
She thought she should say something to comfort him, but she decided not to. She’d always liked his photographs, but she didn’t consider herself qualified to judge whether he was truly gifted.
“Life is funny,” he said. “It’s like, in my twenties, in my early thirties, when I didn’t think about anything except taking pictures—during all those years, it was like I was searching for genius. I was doing it as well as I could possibly do it, but I used to think that the one thing I didn’t have was that tiny little glint of genius that would have brought everything together. It’s like, I don’t know anything about cooking, but I’m sure there are complicated sauces, with a lot of ingredients, that don’t really taste like much until you add some tiny pinch of one last ingredient. Some spice or something. Maybe just salt. And when you add that last thing, everything else comes together and the whole thing tastes incredible. Am I making any sense?”
“I think so,” she said, although she wasn’t really sure.
“What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been searching for genius all my life. And I’ve finally found it. But it’s not mine.”
She didn’t know what to say. The thought went through her mind that what he was saying was ironic, but she wasn’t sure she knew what irony was anymore—not since Alanis Morissette put out that song “Isn’t It Ironic?” and all the reviewers pointed out that the things she was referring to as ironic, rain on your wedding day and so on, weren’t actually ironic at all.
Probably, she thought, I shouldn’t be thinking about Alanis Morissette right now.
Alanis Morissette and Christopher Hitchens.
Together at last.
“But why should I be sad about that?” Isaac said. “I’ve always known that the gift has nothing to do with the person it happens to express itself through. I mean, if you’re incredibly gifted, you can’t congratulate yourself on being gifted—it’s just something that happens to you. So I should be happy to have encountered a pure gift. Even if it isn’t mine. And the person who has it is someone I really care about. And she’s a terrific person. She is a terrific person, you know.”
“She seemed like it.”
“She is. I’m stunned, that’s all. And I’m not happy about the fact that—I’m not happy about the fact that I’m not happy. You know? I should just be thrilled for her.”
“I don’t think you should beat yourself up about it,” Nora said. “I think it was Gore Vidal who said, ‘I die a little every time a friend succeeds.’ Everybody feels that way, to some extent.”
Isaac laughed. “That’s not bad,” he said. “Well, thanks. I just needed to say all this to somebody, and you’re the only person I trust enough to say it to.”
She admired Isaac for taking the trouble to encourage younger people in the first place. Years ago, after her moment of triumph with Best American Short Stories, Nora had taught a writing workshop at Brooklyn College. She’d tried to be a good teacher, tried to help her students cultivate their gifts, but she’d never been able to rid herself of a secret desire to crush them—to guide them, through subtly humiliating assessments of their talents, into careers in dentistry. She had finished out the semester and never applied for a teaching job again. The young will inevitably surpass you, but she had no wish to speed the process along.
It seemed as if the conversation was finished, but they stayed on the phone. They didn’t speak. It was comfortable just to listen to Isaac breathe.
She turned off the light and lay back down on the couch.
“Isaac?” she said.
It had been a long time since they’d spent a night asleep together on the phone.
Isaac was sleeping, but he was fretful. His breathing was unsteady. His burdened energy, his restlessness . . . he was turning turning turning around tonight’s fresh hurt.
She still wanted to write, but her fatigue was catching up to her. Her second cup of coffee was sitting untouched on the card table, and the first had already worn off.
Anyway, she thought, it might be better not to write tonight. It would be cruel to work on the Gabriel story—to mess around with Isaac’s life like that—while he was feeling so wounded. And while he was still on the phone, sleeping, a tiny thing.
She remembered reading that when the frail and neurasthenic poet Alfred de Musset spent his first night with George Sand, he awoke at three in the morning, a few hours after they’d made love, and was astonished to find that she was not beside him in bed, but at her desk, working on her novel with a long quill pen and puffing contemplatively on a hookah. It was this intrepid spirit that made George Sand one of the baddest women of the nineteenth century.
But Nora was too tired to get up and work, too tired to stake a claim to being one of the baddest women of the twenty-first century. She lay on the couch listening to Isaac’s breathing.
Oh hell.
She got up, made another two cups of coffee, drank all three, took three Advils for the pain in her arm, sat down, and started to work. She put the phone receiver on the card table so she could hear if Isaac woke up.
She worked past three in the morning, past four. Something was happening. She felt as if she’d finally cracked the code. She finally understood what the story was about.
The story was about the night Isaac met his sister in New Haven to talk her out of moving to the commune.
Isaac’s sister, Jenny, had become a follower of a man who called himself Nan, a petulant guru who through the magic of his hands could cure any disease, although—because disease, as he often said, can be a teacher—there were some he chose not to.
Isaac had been sure that Jenny became smitten by Guru Nan only because she found him at a moment when her life was falling apart. She had been engaged and had found out that her fiancé was seeing someone else, and in the depression that followed she stopped going to classes and lost her scholarship at Yale. Isaac had been sure that if he spent an evening with her, he could help her see that it wasn’t a g
ood time to be making momentous decisions.
That was just about all Nora knew. She knew that he’d gone up to New Haven, and that the next day, mission not accomplished, he’d come back. She’d asked him what had happened up there, but he’d told her it didn’t matter.
Working on the story, Nora felt as if her mind was flooded with light. She had a protagonist she cared about deeply, and, although she knew the main outlines of the event she wanted to write about, she didn’t know the specifics, so she was free to invent. She was typing faster than her computer could handle—it kept giving off little beeps.
In the story, Gabriel took a train to New Haven, but it broke down just outside Norwalk, and he got in three hours late, weak from hunger, and it was the height of summer and he felt swoony in the heat, and when he met up with his sister she was with two friends, Yale students, one of whom was so beautiful that he became tongue-tied, the other of whom was so quick and articulate and confident about her future that Gabriel felt slow-witted and old, and when he and his sister were finally alone, he failed to say the things he’d planned to—because he felt so weak and worn and insecure, and because he was afraid that his little sister, whom he had always secretly considered more intelligent than he was, would win any argument that he launched in this depleted state. Instead of thinking about her and what she needed, he could only think about himself and his deficiencies, and he didn’t say a word. In the story, he saw her again the next day, at breakfast, just before she was supposed to meet her plane, and she seemed angry and on the verge of tears, and it dimly occurred to him that she was upset because he hadn’t helped her find reasons not to join the cult, that she’d wanted him to, but by this time it was too late, and they ruined their breakfast with a stupid argument about their parents, and they never saw each other again.
After an hour she’d almost forgotten that these details were her own inventions. Or rather, she hadn’t forgotten, but she didn’t care. If Isaac had woken up and volunteered to tell her what had really happened, she wouldn’t have wanted to hear it, because whatever really happened couldn’t have been as real as her story.
She knew that this wasn’t going to be a story Isaac would like. It concerned one of the saddest nights of his life: a night when he’d failed his sister. And she had an intuition that when she was through with it, it wouldn’t be about just this one night. It would radiate out into the main character’s life; that one night’s failure would seem to illustrate some essential truth about him.
All through the night, her phone was near her, and she could hear Isaac breathing and moving in his sleep. At five something happened on 108th Street: three or four police cars streaked down the street, their sirens strident and loud. She picked up the phone and pressed the mouthpiece against her breast to shield Isaac from the sound.
If he hadn’t called her tonight to share his mixed feelings about Renee’s success, the story would never have come together like this. His meditations on his own shortcomings had given her the key.
It occurred to her that this was the breakthrough she’d been seeking for years. It was the first time she’d found the strength to finish a story when she knew it was likely to hurt a man she cared about. It was a breakthrough, yes, but it was one that left her unhappy.
She wrote until 5:30. She brushed her teeth, put on her nightgown, got the phone, and took it into bed with her. She brought it close to her ear. She could hear him breathing, deeply and slowly. It was a trustful sound.
30
BILLIE HAD HER FIRST FALL on her third day home from the hospital. When she called Nora later that morning, she described it almost matter-of-factly.
“I was puttering around in the kitchen—I was reaching for a can of cling peaches—and then all of a sudden I was on the floor and Edwin was licking my face. Scratchy-tongue Edwin. You’re a scratchy, scratchy man.” Nora could hear Edwin purring, pushing his face against the phone.
“Where was Sofia?”
“She took the morning off. She had to do something with her brother. She just got back.”
Nora closed her eyes and tried not to let the anger overcome her.
“I’m really sorry.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Billie said. “The only scary part was that it was hard to get up.”
“What did you do?”
“I just lay there for a while. I think I went to sleep for a few minutes, and then when I woke up I made it to the couch. I slept on the couch with my babies.”
Billie was too important to be left with a stranger with a slit skirt. Nora decided to get rid of Sofia and stay with Billie herself. But not for a few days.
The deadline for the Atlantic’s short-story contest was coming up. She’d almost forgotten about it, since her writing had been going so slowly, but now that the story had finally come together she thought she had a shot at polishing it and getting it in the mail by the deadline, which was four days away. But she’d need to spend most of her time writing. She could visit Billie in the evenings during these four days, and after that she could stay with her around the clock.
When Nora went down to Billie’s that night, she had a talk with Sofia, who nodded smilingly and said that it wouldn’t happen again. “Family emergency,” she said.
THE NEXT MORNING, BILLIE called at six. Isaac had spent the night at Nora’s; she had to climb over him to get to the phone.
“Hi, sweetie. I’m calling from the floor.”
“Pardon?”
“I can’t seem to get up very good.”
“Where’s Sofia?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you fall?”
“I had to get up to pee at about three.”
“You’ve been on the floor all that time? You should have called me.”
“I didn’t want to wake you that early. I feel bad about waking you this early.”
Isaac drove Nora down to Billie’s apartment. When Nora let herself in, Billie was still on the floor.
“Isaac’s out in the hall,” Nora said. She’d asked him to stay outside, because she didn’t know if Billie would want him to see her in this state. “Do you mind if he comes in?”
“Not at all. I always liked that boy.” She sounded as if Nora had proposed a social visit.
Nora called out to him. He stood in the doorway, awkward and tall. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well.” Then he knelt next to Billie, lifted her up, and carried her easily to the couch.
“I feel like royalty,” Billie said. “Didn’t they used to carry Queen Victoria around?” He set her down gently and she patted his hand. “I’m only sorry I can’t entertain you. The last time I saw you we went out for tea and crumpets.”
Nora had forgotten. Six years ago, on Billie’s birthday, Isaac had taken them out for tea at the Plaza Hotel.
Isaac left to buy some groceries; shortly after he returned, he had to leave for work. He said good-bye to Billie, and Nora walked him to the door. She thought of her story and the way he was pictured in it, and then she put her arms around him and closed her eyes, trying to forget it, trying to put everything except this moment out of her mind.
Nora came back to the living room, where Billie was watching The View. “I think we’ve had enough of Sofia,” Nora said.
“She has a sick brother,” Billie said. “She’s very worried about him. I think that’s why she hasn’t been taking such good care of me.”
When Sofia showed up that afternoon, Nora fired her before she’d had a chance to take off her coat. Then she made a few phone calls and found out that Joyce, the woman she’d requested in the first place, was now available, and could stay with Billie around the clock. She was a woman in her late sixties, a grandmother who had been a schoolteacher in Jamaica until she’d retired and moved to New York to live with her children. Nora knew her to be trustworthy and skilled.
She went into Billie’s bedroom to tell her about the new arrangement.
“Joyce’ll be here in a couple of hours. You’ll
like her. I’ll show her around the place—you won’t have to get out of bed.”
“Thank you,” Billie said. “You take good care of me.”
Nora told herself that since Joyce would be staying with Billie, there was no need for her to move down here. At least not yet. All she needed was three more days to finish her story and put it in the mail.
This arrangement makes sense, Nora thought. There’s no harm in waiting another few days.
But experience showed that she wasn’t likely to follow through with this plan. She hadn’t been able to choose the MacDowell Colony over her aunt, and she doubted she’d be able to choose the story contest.
“I want to cook something for you tonight,” Nora said. “What are you in the mood for?”
“You know, when I was in the hospital and they brought the menu, I was thinking I wished I could have Iva’s omelet.”
Iva’s omelet was a family recipe, passed down from Nora’s grandmother. After Billie was gone, Nora would be the only person in the world who knew what it was.
“You know,” Nora said to Billie, “I think it would be better if Joyce just stayed here in the mornings and afternoons and I took over at night. I think I’ll bring my things down here and stay with you for a while.”
That was even quicker than Nora had expected.
“It’s very nice of you to offer,” Billie said. “But I don’t understand. You just went through all that trouble to get Joyce.”
“I just want to.”
Nora couldn’t explain that it was because of Iva’s omelet.
