Visible City (12 page)

The firm was unusually empty that night, and since face time was useless with no one to see it, Jeremy went home, wondering if he might catch one of the kids still up. He had sworn to himself that his kids wouldn’t try to keep themselves awake, as he had, in order to hear their father arrive home from work. Yet every choice he’d made led him away from that promise. To Lily he was a voice on the phone saying good night, step three in the five-part bedtime routine. She probably mistook his voice for one of the talking toys. If he ever came home early, Max was confused, then had five stories to tell him, three toys to show him, two games he wanted to play. It would take hours to do everything Max had in mind and require impossibly empty days with nowhere they needed to be.

When he got home, the kids were asleep, but Nina was in her usual spot on the couch.

“How are your neighbors tonight? Are they up to anything exciting?” he asked.

“I’ve stopped watching them,” she said.

He spread his documents out on the table, and Nina looked over his shoulder at them.

“There’s unexpected opposition and the client is flipping out,” he said.

“Do they have any legal basis?” she asked.

“Not as far as we know, but I’m a little behind,” he admitted.

“What does Richard think?”

“He’s nervous, but every time I talk to him, he’s either rushing out of the office or distracted.”

“Did you ask him what’s wrong?”

“Yes, I took his hand and told him that if anything was bothering him, he could talk to me.”

“Really. What do you think it is?”

“Midlife crisis? Who knows,” he said.

This was the moment when he should tell her about his glimpse of City Hall station, followed by the outings to the library. But having become so accustomed to lying to Richard, he found it easy to do the same with Nina. It was the same way he had been with his father, pretending to be Orthodox. If he had told his father that he no longer believed, his father would have felt betrayed. If he were to describe to Nina his outings to the library, she’d add up the hours when he could have been home. From everyone, he was stealing time, defying expectations, but what of his own life belonged to him? There was no room to consider what he really wanted. He had always imagined that when he no longer thought of himself as Orthodox, he would feel only freedom, but of course it wasn’t so simple. The world was supposedly wide open, but he had found other ways to close himself in.

When Nina gave up and went to bed, Jeremy stayed at the table, intermittently dozing. He fought the urge to join Nina, or to ask her to wait up. When it grew light, Jeremy went to the window and picked up the binoculars Nina had left on the windowsill. Apparently she was still watching after all. At first he’d enjoyed her interest in their neighbors’ lives; he’d always felt like one part of her hovered dreamily overhead, but close enough that he could still pull her back. Lately, though, she’d seemed out of reach and he’d started to wonder what the neighbors’ lives really meant to her. He held back from asking because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. At the end of the day, in the perpetual middles of the night, he had no energy for long, open-ended conversation. He would surely fall asleep if he attempted any such discussion; there was no room in his day, equally no room in his mind, for anything more.

“Jeremy,” Nina called, having woken up from the sound of his pacing, from the tapping of his pen, from the emptiness on his side of the bed. In a state that could no longer be called asleep but didn’t yet qualify as awake, she stumbled into the living room.

“What time is it?” Jeremy asked.

“Late,” she said.

Leaving his work on the table, he groggily stood up to hug Nina. He held on to her as though she had arrived in the living room on a rescue mission. He allowed himself to be led to bed, where under their blankets, Jeremy’s hand found her thigh. “Are you too tired?” They were always too tired. They were destroyed, ruined, wrecked; they were exhausted, they were sapped, they were crazed. Even so, small, tentative feelings of desire peeked out. Her body made a compelling case to forgo the extra sleep, or, in Jeremy’s mind, the equivalent of four units of billable time. But desire was no match for fatigue. He kissed her, she curled toward him, they fell asleep.

At his desk the next day, Jeremy studied the environmental issues, the neighborhood opposition, the historic possibilities. There were no easements, no reason to believe that construction would cause structural damage to neighboring buildings. From boxes of building department documents Jeremy pulled stacks of paper detailing the construction done since the building was built in 1897 as a townhouse and later subsumed into a larger structure. In 1963, an adjacent building was backed up to it with a party wall.

Rereading these documents, Jeremy slowed down. The building inspector had made more copious notes than was customary. In a hand-scrawled comment at the end of the last page, he had recorded that on the building’s south façade, all the windows had been covered when the new building was attached. One of those, he recorded, was a stained-glass window which had been boarded up front and back before the new building was connected.

Jeremy took a lap around the office. From his desk he retrieved Claudia Stein’s article and read it again, wondering if he’d fallen into a delirium brought on by sitting in one spot for too long. But if this was a dream, he’d rather stay inside it than return to the pseudo-wakefulness to which he’d been subjected for months.

In this state, more potent than the best caffeine, Jeremy’s mind was newly alive with the possibility that somewhere inside the building his client had acquired, sheetrocked behind walls, sealed off by later construction, Claudia Stein’s stained-glass window was embedded, lost and waiting to be rediscovered.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nina asked when Emma called and said she was interested in baby-sitting. What did it say about her, Nina wondered, that she was suspicious of an adult who wanted to spend time with children?

Until now, she had been reluctant to hire a babysitter; if she was going to give up her job in order to be home with the kids, she wanted to actually be with them. Instead of rushing out as soon as Emma arrived, Nina was tempted to stay and talk. Emma was barely in the door, and already she was talking to the kids and laughing. Nina tried to reconcile this woman with the figure she’d seen out the window, a memory she’d replayed again and again in her mind and that now seemed as hazy as a dream. Standing before her, Emma laughed easily and seemed at ease with the kids, but in her eyes there was a hesitance that made her seem far more delicate, as though her outer cheer were simply a role she had been assigned.

“So why baby-sitting?” Nina asked.

“I’m taking some time off, from school, from my fiancé, basically from my whole life. My poor parents—they thought I knew exactly what I was doing, and now I’m taking everything apart. I guess it’s never too late to have a huge meltdown, is it,” Emma said, trying for lighthearted, but the pain in her voice was evident. “You probably don’t want to hear this. I’m sure you have places to go,” Emma said.

“No, please, I want to know,” Nina said, envying the idea of every day wide open, Emma’s whole life, in fact, wide open.

“When I first broke my ankle, all I wanted to do was come home. I thought that I would be able to put everything back in place. But I’m learning that the idea of home is better than actually being home,” Emma said. “You can’t go home again, right? I love my parents but they’re the kind of people who are content with things exactly as they are. I used to refer to them as brains on a stick. I used to think I could be like them, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“Do you know what you want to do instead?” Nina asked.

“Anything but sit in a library all day. I hate my dissertation—I can’t stand the thought of writing one more word. If I even open one of my books, all I think of is what I’d rather be doing instead,” Emma said.

“Can you talk to your mother about it?” Nina said.

“I wish. She was thrilled when I first told her I was getting a PhD. You’d think that it was her own dream that had come true.”

“What about your father?” Nina asked.

“I never used to talk to him about anything. He was always the kind of person you could joke around with, but I always had the feeling that I had a limited amount of time. But now it’s easier with him—I don’t know if he’s changed or I have, but I can tell him more,” Emma said, only realizing belatedly that Max had stopped playing and was listening to every word. Nina glanced down at him, and Emma sensed her hesitance.

“You know my parents so I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” Emma said.

“I only know them from the neighborhood. I haven’t really talked to your mother since I was her student. Even then, I didn’t know her very well. You look so much like her, you know.”

“People always tell me that. I used to look at pictures of her when she was young and think that she was me,” Emma said.

“I want to do laundry,” Max interrupted. He had come over to where they were standing and instead of minding that his mother was going out, he was gazing at Emma with interest.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to the park?” Nina asked and explained that the laundry room had become Max’s favorite place to play. Loading the machines and waiting for the clothes to be washed was his new hobby.

“Why not let him do laundry, if that’s what he likes?” Emma said.

“It’s such a beautiful day outside. Don’t you think he should be at the park?” Nina said.

Emma laughed. “He’ll have the rest of his life to feel like there’s something else he should be doing.”

“Fine. Do laundry,” Nina relented.

Three hours was as vast as a day. She could be like Emma and do as she wished: sit in the park, ingest a whole novel, see a movie, wander through the Met. Time alone was the most endangered of species. She’d forgotten that she could leave the house with less than half an hour’s worth of preparations, that she could walk the streets without narrating every car, bus, dog she passed.

Nina was standing on the corner, still deciding what to do, when a silver Honda Odyssey pulled up alongside her.

“Hop in,” Wendy said, from inside. “It’s my maiden voyage. I’m supposed to be practicing my driving. We just bought the car. I’m officially a soccer mom.”

Nina got into the car, even though driving around Manhattan in a minivan wasn’t how she’d envisioned spending her free time.

“Where are your kids?” Wendy asked as she pulled the car out among the line of oncoming cars, cringing when she was met with the honking of horns.

“They’re doing laundry with the babysitter. Max is obsessed with the laundry room.”

“I didn’t know you had a babysitter,” Wendy said.

“She’s a family friend. And it’s just for a few hours,” said Nina.

“It’s so beautiful out. Shouldn’t they be at the park?” Wendy said.

“If Max loves laundry, why not let him do it?” Nina said.

“Maybe that’s why your kids aren’t sleeping well. I always make sure to get Sophie and Harry outside for a few hours. Otherwise they have too much energy at the end of the day.”

Her voice was confident but her body gave her away. Wendy gripped the steering wheel tightly, as though she were driving at the edge of a dangerous mountain road. Her eyes were glued on the rearview mirror, trying to anticipate everyone’s next move.

“Are you okay?” Nina asked.

“Of course I am. Why, do I not look okay?”

“Are you excited about moving?” Nina asked.

“Of course I am. We bought a beautiful house, with a huge backyard. When they’re older the kids are going to be able to walk to school.”

Such a pleasant picture. So why did Nina want to press against it until it oozed something darker?

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Wendy asked. “I’m fine.”

Instead of sitting here, Nina wished she had stayed home to play with Emma and the kids. Or else she wished she were inside a fantastically messy apartment where a play group was in full swing, the kids playing on their own, the moms on couches in the next room. Instead of assaulting one another with their tales of delight, they played a game of Truth where everyone was brutally honest and no one felt ashamed afterward.

“You’re always fine,” Nina said. “No matter what the kids do, you’re fine. You leave a fabulous job and you’re fine.”

“And what about you? You act like you’re always fine too,” Wendy said.

“Is that what you think? Because actually, no. I’m not fine,” Nina admitted. “Do you ever walk around your apartment imagining all the ways you could escape? Do you survive hours in the playground by concocting alternate versions of your life? Have you ever squeezed their arms too hard, leaving the half-moon indentation of your fingernails, then when they accused you of hurting them, pretended it was an accident? Have you ever put them to bed angry, then felt so bad you purposely woke them up so you could do the night over again?”

She hadn’t meant to say all this—she hadn’t even known she felt all this—but there was no denying the pleasure in speaking her mind. Wendy was staring at her as though she had gone crazy, but her face took on a starker expression than Nina had seen before. Gone was the beatific smile. Gone the scripted lines that the kids were always delicious and she wouldn’t miss this for the world, and there was nowhere she’d rather be, and yes, it did go so fast.