Visible City (19 page)

In the past Claudia would have dismissed such an e-mail. Even now, she saw it first through the skeptical eyes of her colleagues who would articulate the reasons for its implausibility. It was foolish to stake years of academic research on the serendipity of discovery. Too many times, she’d heard about art historians who eagerly answered queries from people who were sure that the objects in their possession were long-lost works of art. Instead of breaking the disappointing news that the vase or painting or lamp wasn’t anything extraordinary, they were pulled into hopeless treasure hunts, seduced into seeing what they wished to be there.

The possibility pressed on her, the word
maybe
cresting repeatedly in her mind. She allowed herself a moment’s fantasy in which she was the one who opened a box, broke down a wall. Something lost could still be recovered, something once beautiful could still be revealed. Several years ago, a stained-glass window at Tavern on the Green that had been previously attributed to Tiffany was proven to be a La Farge. Renovations in the Ansonia turned up a rare eighteenth-century leaded window that had been walled over. And during the recent restoration of Trinity Church in Boston, construction workers had uncovered a La Farge mural hidden behind a panel.

Claudia wrote back to the caretakers and agreed to come to Boston for a day to visit the Medford church. She was no longer, if she ever was, the disinterested academic. She felt La Farge’s presence. Close her eyes and she summoned him at work, each color both a small jewel of glass on a studio floor and a shimmering indispensable part of a whole. Close her eyes and she felt the genius who knew how to access the part of his mind in which light was visible. Close her eyes and she was with him in his studio, her hand on his, a partner in his majestic creation.

Leon read on the couch, but shadowing every word was the pleasurable sensation of being watched. When his curiosity won out, he put down his book and went to the window to check for Nina’s presence.

Now that he’d started looking for her as well, he was surprised by how often he saw her. Usually he maintained the pretense that these sightings were accidental, but tonight, after Claudia had soundly closed the door to her office, he wanted to acknowledge Nina, even put on a show. But it was hardly a striptease Nina was after, except of the emotional sort; she’d want him to peel off one feeling after another, to reveal more and more.

Even when Nina wasn’t there, Leon felt her presence. She could see everything—in the kitchen, in the shower, in rooms to which she had no access. He had tried to tell himself it would be only that one time—a rash act, a passionate mistake that would be wrapped in the sheaves of memory and taken out to be looked at from time to time. Having grown accustomed to the dormancy of his desire, he didn’t know he could feel this way. He’d never before been unfaithful to Claudia. There had been opportunities, but he would have strayed only from boredom, never from sufficient feeling or desire. So why now, why Nina? Maybe he was unable to tolerate this degree of familial involvement. The more he was pulled in, the more he needed a way out—for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. Maybe Nina was as restless as he, particles in motion that would inevitably collide. Though it had been nice to think of their burgeoning friendship as primarily her doing, he knew he had initiated this as much as she had. He’d offered to lend Nina a book and had shown her Claudia’s office, where he could measure both his proximity to Claudia and his distance.

At midnight, he knocked on Claudia’s door—an attempt, surely, to allay his guilt—but she was still working and didn’t want to be disturbed. He went to bed without her, still jittery and dissatisfied. There was something to be said, after all, for the semi-somnolent condition in which so many people spent their days. But there was no return to that quiet state; all he could think of was Nina. Everyone knew of the danger—how many stories had he heard of the wreckage left behind?—yet so many still ventured off. Even if he could skillfully take apart his feelings like small electronic devices, he would never be able to reassemble them; he might understand better how they worked, but he was still subservient to their power. He was a teenager again, on edge with possibility. He wanted Nina in his arms again, against his body. But he also wanted her eyes on his face, looking at him in that probing way.

In the morning, only partially awake, he rolled toward Claudia’s side of the bed, remembering how the previous week she had turned to him with an intensity that took them both by surprise. Usually the sight of her made him feel only inertia—every day, every feeling, the same. But in a matter of seconds, she had pulled him on top of her, wrapped her legs around him, pressed him deeper inside her. At first he had wondered if she was awake, or if in her mind he was someone else. For those few moments, they managed to defy the paradox of familiarity, of seeing someone so much you didn’t see him or her at all. He had been reminded, however briefly, that you could never really come to the end of another person.

A few hours later, they’d become the same people as always, which was why he’d preferred to leave unmentioned the passion that had come over her. He was certain that discussion would diminish the memory, equally certain that those who wanted to share everything with their partners, who defined intimacy as full access, did so at their own peril.

Claudia still wasn’t by his side, and jarred by her absence, Leon went looking. The door to her office was partially open, which he took as a sign that he wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

“Have you been in here all night?” Leon asked. Claudia’s normally neat desk was cluttered with manuscript pages. A plate of desiccated chocolate cake sat in front of her.

Her lip was smudged with chocolate, and Leon reached to wipe it off. When she pulled away from him, he felt a stab of anxiety that she wasn’t annoyed at him only for hiding what Emma had confided. She knew, somehow, about Nina.

“I’m famous,” Claudia said, handing him the
Times
article. “I don’t think it makes anyone sound very good, but I suppose the café owner thinks there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

“You look very focused,” Leon said as he scanned the article, reading of the mothers’ outrage at being so publicly shushed, then the café owner’s description of the “spoiled moms” who frequented the café.

“These mothers think they know it all,” she said, but he was barely listening. At the sight of his patient’s picture next to Claudia’s, he wanted to laugh, then scream. His world was tied too tightly around him, yet he could reveal nothing. His wife, his patient: their worlds could intersect, but for them at least, those lines would cross unnoticed.

“I sound fairly curmudgeonly,” Claudia said.

“No, just tired of the noise,” Leon reassured her, though she did sound more caustic than he would have expected. On full display, in the article and on her face, was the anger that he knew was directed, in large measure, at him. At the sight of it, so long in coming, all he wanted to do was duck.

“I should have Emma show it to Nina. She probably knows some of these moms,” Leon said.

“Nina?” Claudia asked.

“You know. The woman Emma baby-sits for,” Leon reminded her. Though they jointly accused one another of having faulty memories, in his case it was because he wasn’t paying sufficient attention to have noticed in the first place. For Claudia, it was a willful attempt to shield herself from sustained involvement with people she didn’t know. Though he didn’t know how to do it, he felt the urge to rouse her, him, all of them, from this disconnected state. He marveled at his impulse to mention Nina. If he were to tell Claudia what had happened, it would shatter what remained in place between them. The words lined up inside his mouth, waiting for a nod of permission, and then out they would march, small soldiers bent on attacking the stable foundation of their lives.

“Nina knows you, actually,” Leon said. “She was your student, at Columbia. She loved your class.”

“How do you know her so well?”

“Apparently she once went to talk to you about going to graduate school. I ran into her in the neighborhood,” he said, inching his way closer.
I ran into her in this very apartment,
he would say.
While you were in the library, while you had no idea where I was.
And then, what would be left behind? He didn’t want to think of the pain that would come a few moments later; all he wanted, for that one instant, was the razing relief of the truth.

“That was a long time ago,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, feeling a rush of sadness. “It was.”

Claudia ignored the pained look on his face—as always, they made it easy for one another to retreat to separate corners. He felt a terrible surge of regret—not for any one decision he’d made but for the way they had all accumulated, bringing him to this moment where he was trapped by his own self. He didn’t have it in him to start yelling—what true complaint did he have? Only that he could not stand in this room with her any longer, could not bear a silence so laden with disappointment and anger, hers and his own.

He fled her office, the apartment, and went to his car. In this space, which he regarded as a home as much as any other place he inhabited, he would once again become immune to unwieldy emotion.

After he’d been there an hour, or maybe two, Nina walked by and knocked on the window, as though he’d summoned her.

“Nice place,” she said, and he smiled at the sight of her. Anyone looking at them would surely know. No one smiled so widely without good reason. No one had reason to look so pleased. She’d told him that when she was with him she felt the space inside her chest widening as though suddenly able to take in more air, and he understood what she meant. He saw her not as she looked among other people, her face coated in a responsible maternal cast that required enormous effort to hold in place. Instead she looked as she had when she was beneath him, flushed pink, her long dark hair strewn against her bare shoulders. In those moments, her whole face opened up into relaxation and her body was both alight with energy yet calmer than he had seen before.

“Have a seat,” he offered.

“Where can we go?” she asked, getting into the passenger seat.

“Anywhere you want,” he said.

“How about as far away as we can?” she said.

“And then what happens once you get there?” he said.

“I don’t want to think about that. I’d rather pretend that whatever comes next doesn’t exist. That’s what I’ve always done,” she said, and hesitated. “I never thought I was the kind of person who would do this.”

“I don’t think you know yet what kind of person you are. I don’t know if any of us do.”

When she smiled, he wanted to bask in the interest and attention she turned upon him. Sometimes a patient gazed at him adoringly, and the mood in the room shifted, an erotic presence making itself known. There was pleasure, undeniable, in being wanted in this way, yet he knew, of course, that what those patients imagined had little to do with who he was in real life. Their longing was mere projection, composed most prominently of longing itself. Even when he felt the tide of his own arousal, he knew where the boundaries lay.

With Nina, those lines had ceased to exist. It was not the idea of her, not what she represented. He couldn’t explain with enough precision to make anyone else understand why he was so drawn to her. But why was it necessary to offer rational explanations for everything, especially this? He was tired of the internal voice that analyzed his every move. For once, he wanted to submit himself to life’s unknowability, to give himself over to confusion and exhilaration, worry and arousal, guilt and happiness, the messy pile-up of feelings in which nothing fit neatly together and there was always too much at once. He saw into her wild inner plain where she was struggling to free herself from the press of obligation and expectation. It was this fluttering, flapping part of her that stirred the one inside him and made him want to hold her tightly and say, “Take me too.”

“Let’s drive,” she said.

“The bridge or the tunnel?” he asked, because then the whole world would await. With no time to go that far, he instead drove uptown along Riverside to the top of the park where the odds of knowing anyone were lessened. If he looked to one side, all he would see were the grass and trees of the park, then the stone walkways that led to the river. The George Washington Bridge was visible just ahead. If only they had a kayak, a motorboat, a cruise ship: off they would sail.

He dangled his hand, lightly grazing Nina’s leg. It was not going to be only that one time after all. He stroked her thigh. He was already starting to lose sight of the path back home; anything dropped to mark the way back was becoming obscured in his mind. Shielded inside his car, safely beneath the line of the windows, his hands could roam across her thigh, to her knee, unseen. All he thought of was the feeling of his hand on her leg. His other hand came to life as well, on her waist, brushing across her breast. Wasn’t he supposed to pull away, tell her, “We need to stop”? Wasn’t he supposed to remind her in a serious yet kindly voice that they had responsibilities, commitments? He put his hand on her face and brought her toward him and kissed her. When she kissed him back, he allowed himself to fall into the well of his feelings without knowing where he might land.