Visible City (20 page)

Hearing the distant honk of cars, he looked out the window and the rush of feeling came to a halt. A familiar figure crossed his line of vision. At the edge of the park, was that a patient staring at him? He’d imagined himself to be so far away, not in another neighborhood but on another planet. Squinting, he tried to be sure, to will her away. He remembered the fantasies this patient had confided, that she would see him on the street and interact with him outside of the office. The wish had surprised him little, but now he worried she was actually following him. He had none of the compassion he felt in his office. There was no escape, not from this patient, not from anyone. His patient had done nothing wrong, yet he was reacting as though she’d banged on his bedroom door in the middle of the night.

“Are you supposed to be incognito here?” Nina asked, pulling away, her face reflecting his discomfort.

“It’s not a very good hiding place after all,” he said.

“Who are you trying not to see?” she asked.

“It’s not important.”

“Was it a patient?”

“Even if it were, what can I do? If someone brings it up in a session, I just turn it around and ask what it means to them,” Leon said. “Everywhere I go, I get to be the therapist who stays safely out of sight.”

“And is that what you want to do?” she asked. Those round blue eyes, so open and waiting: she had a way of staring at him as though daring him to say more, as though her words came with hooks attached and could grab hold of all she wanted to know.

“Who am I kidding? It’s not possible anyway,” he said. He brushed her cheek with his hand, he wrapped his fingers in her hair. He looked out the car window again. If it had been his patient, she was gone. But if not her, then someone else could have seen them and know. Sooner or later, someone would always know. Fifty blocks from home or five hundred, privacy was generally an illusion. As much as they worried what it would mean to be caught, surely in some small conflicted place inside each of them, they also wanted to be found.

Emma was surprised to see Steven’s number on her caller ID. Until recently, he’d never called during his writing hours; he didn’t answer his phone and was annoyed if she dared to knock on the bedroom door.

“I can’t. I’m baby-sitting in half an hour,” Emma said when Steven asked her to meet him in the park. She wished someone had told her earlier that all she had to do was retreat and he would come in chase.

She veered from one feeling to another. She wanted to leave him, she wanted to stay and try again. She began to doubt even her own doubt. The worries of the past few months were a mere aberration, little more than the byproduct of having made a firm decision for her future; the terrible fear of the past few months was the belated recognition of what she knew to be true. “Take it slowly,” her father had advised. “You don’t have to make any decisions yet. You can find your way, as slowly as need be.”

“But what if I do that and I still don’t know?” Emma asked.

“You can push him harder, see what there really is between you. Tell him what you need. He might surprise you,” he said, then sighed and looked as confused as she felt. “I don’t know, Emma. Sometimes I think the goal is just to endure. It might not sound pretty, but for most people I suspect it’s the truth.”

Trying to heed his advice, however tentatively it had been offered, she’d been moving back and forth between apartments. She was no longer sure what she was referring to when she said “home.” But having two homes made her lonelier than when she’d had only one. If she weren’t baby-sitting, she’d have no idea what to do with herself. When she was with the kids, the future was so far off as to appear fantastical. For Lily, little existed beyond the need to be held and fed. Even Max’s worries were cloaked with the shimmer of unreality. Sometimes she imagined that the kids were hers and she felt a momentary burst of clarity. For Nina, there was no doubt that she was wholly needed. If she had kids, she wouldn’t have to finish her dissertation. She would have a ready-made excuse for every failing. She would always have something to show for herself.

“Bring them with you. I love kids,” Steven said.

“Since when?” Emma challenged him.

“Since right now,” he said.

After picking up the kids, she met Steven in Riverside Park by the dog run. She introduced him to Max and Lily, and he immediately adopted the overly friendly voice adults use to mask their discomfort with kids. Emma set Lily down on the ground, where she tried to consume a mouthful of leaves. But Max refused to come out of the stroller.

“Max, it’s fine, I promise you. The dogs are playing. They’re not going to bite you,” Emma assured him, crouching in front of him. She and Max were dressed in matching shades of orange, and she was wearing a plastic bead necklace he’d made for her.

“Is he always this afraid?” Steven asked.

“It’s not just dogs. It’s balloons, the subway, any kind of noise.”

“He’s in the wrong city.”

To Emma’s surprise, Max listened to her. He sat next to Lily, and she and Steven sprawled on the grass beside the kids, staring up at the leaves which would soon change color. Until this year, the arrival of fall had always kindled her schoolgirl’s pleasure in new pencils and blank notebooks, as though every year life really did start anew.

“This could be us in a few years,” Steven said.

“You wouldn’t say that if they were crying.”

“How often does that happen? Come on, Emma. I’m serious. I miss you. Let’s get married. Let’s have kids.”

“Now?” she asked.

“What are we waiting for? Let’s do it,” Steven said, tracing circles on her palm. “I’m here for you, Emma. I really am,” he said, as he leaned closer so that their foreheads touched and their eyelashes fluttered against each other’s skin. If the kids weren’t here, he’d roll on top of her, and she’d be unable to resist. He’d press her down until there was no thought of going anywhere.

She wanted to believe he better understood her. She wanted to listen to him, even though she could see the flaws; to hold on to the fantasy of how it might be even if she knew all the ways in which it would be pierced. Against the backdrop of trees and sky, Emma saw what her life could one day be. She would resume work on her dissertation, and begrudgingly it would open itself to her again. She would set a date for the wedding. She would have children of her own. Her urge to run would fade. Her need for something more from Steven might not ease, but she would learn to live with some parts of herself unfilled.

Steven was waiting, but instead of meeting his eye, Emma looked toward the dog run where a man threw a stick. Immersed in conversation with a fellow dog owner, he didn’t notice his dog’s escape through the open gate.

Off-leash and unfenced, the dog bounded out, ran toward them, and jumped around Max, who started screaming.

“Stand still,” Emma called to Max, who had begun to run. Lily started to cry as well, and Emma wondered if this was when she was supposed to swoop both kids to safer ground. Or call Nina and say, “Your kids are screaming, can you please come get them?”

“Hold Lily,” Emma said to Steven. He took Lily reluctantly and shuffled her from one hand to another. Imitating something he’d seen on TV, he held her over his shoulder while patting her back. When Lily continued to cry, he lifted her high into the air, brought her back down, lifted her up again, until finally she began to laugh. He was incurring the risk of being vomited on, but she was happy to let him take his chances.

Max continued to shriek until even the dog was stunned. Emma wrapped her arms around Max, forcing him to be still. The dog stopped running, came up to her, and with his panting pink tongue, he licked her cheek. When she laughed, so did Max.

In the distance, a man was calling, “Churchill,” and hearing his voice, the dog began to bark. Exchanging freedom for love, the dog returned to the fenced-in plot of grass, where his owner hugged him. With Max in her arms and Steven and Lily beside her, Emma lay back on the grass, watching the people pass in all directions, strangers alone and in pairs, until she startled and sat up.

Along the path, her father and Nina were walking, and for a moment Emma assumed they were in search of her and the kids, both in possession of a parental sensory device that sounded when their children were in need. From her spot on the nearby grass, Emma waved but they didn’t notice. She was about to call their names, but she stopped, because even from where she was sitting, she could sense their degree of familiarity. Nina was laughing at something her father was saying. When she said something in response, his face had a look of immense absorption, which Emma was accustomed to seeing, though rarely in relation to her.

She thought of the loneliness on her mother’s face and the dissatisfaction in her father’s voice. Steven took her hand, but it was an empty casing. His face came into focus, and she understood. It didn’t matter what cracks and imperfections other people were willing to live with. Emma pulled away from Steven. A strong, clear voice was audible inside her head. The words at once so simple and so true:
I don’t want this.

In Hippo Park, under the dense cloud cover of distraction, Nina sat with Wendy and a few other mothers around the sandbox, all of them intent on enjoying what could be the last warm day of the fall. A few minutes before Emma was supposed to baby-sit, she’d called to say that she wasn’t feeling well. She had sounded uncharacteristically curt on the phone, but there had been little time to wonder why. With the kids waiting to be entertained, the day had quickly remade itself.

“We haven’t seen you in a while,” Wendy said without meeting Nina’s eye and acting as though their conversation in her minivan had never taken place.

“We’ve been busy,” Nina said.

“He’s eating sand,” Sophie reported, pointing to Harry.

“We don’t eat sand.” Wendy lifted Harry onto her lap where she tried to wipe the speckles off his tongue. “Come on, honey, spit it out. Do I have to give you a time-out? Okay, there you go. Good boy. The sand can make you sick. You know that dogs pee in here,” Wendy said as Harry shoved another fistful into his mouth.

“The last time we talked, you sounded so unhappy that I thought maybe you’d decided to go back to work,” Wendy said to Nina.

“I’m thinking about it,” Nina said. This wasn’t really true, but it felt good to say it.

“You can’t go back to work until you help me with the fundraiser,” Wendy said. “I’ve scheduled it for October 27, and I think we should have a bake sale,” she said as the mothers around her nodded their agreement. “Why not give Georgia’s a little competition? I assume you saw the
Times
article. Everywhere I go, that’s all anyone is talking about. There’s a picture of a woman with her laptop—the same woman who shushed us, as though we were in her private office!”

Wendy pulled the article from her diaper bag and handed it to Nina. “I was completely misquoted. I wrote a letter to the editor, but it doesn’t matter what I actually said. The reaction would be the same. I Googled myself and the article is all over the blogs. Everyone is talking about how terrible it is that kids make a little noise. But you know what I realized?” Wendy lowered her voice and, looking down at her children happily playing, decided not to take any chance of them overhearing. “It’s not the k-i-d-s they can’t stand. It’s the mothers they h-a-t-e.”

“Why would they h-a-t-e you?” Nina asked.

Wendy laughed. “Oh, it’s not just me. It’s all of us. You too. Don’t think that if you go back to work, they’ll h-a-t-e you any less. They’ll just h-a-t-e you for different reasons.”

The word
hate,
so easily banished. And what of the other words that couldn’t be so easily erased, even if they were spelled out? Nina tried to follow the conversation, but she was continually disrupted by an image of Leon’s face. Was that really her, on his couch, in his car, and then the next day and the next day as well? It couldn’t possibly be, and yet in those moments with him, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. When she was with him, she didn’t feel the press of thoughts, the ache of being alone. He had a way of looking at her, his eyes slightly narrowed in concentration as he leaned toward her, and she felt that he knew all of her.