Visible City (24 page)

There was no escape from the bonds of family. Even when you tried to stay away. Even when you thought you could set yourself free. Everything, ultimately, was passed down.

The handwritten note inside the manila envelope directed Arthur to the microfilm room of the New York Public Library. It had a date and the title of an article and instructed him to be there the following day at 9:00 a.m. Accompanying it were a pair of sunglasses and a black flag.

The sound of applause still resounded in his head, as did the image of all those approving faces. He was no longer someone to avoid; he was a man who knew how to get things done. He wouldn’t have even gone to the meeting if not for the fact that when he got to the gym for his nightly swim, a sign on the door had announced that the pool was closed for emergency repairs. The stinging rebuke he delivered to the woman behind the desk came naturally. He would be lost, he realized, without his outrage; in its throes, he felt most recognizably himself. But what surprised him was how badly he craved the freedom of the pool.

He had gone home to another evening with nothing to do but prowl the apartment. Except for the brief interaction at the gym, he’d spoken to no human being the entire day. He felt trapped inside each room, a prisoner in his home. Churchill was no comfort, not even when he nuzzled against his leg. All he could think of, all he wanted to do, was stand before Georgia’s café. This time he would not simply gaze inside those windows, forlorn. He wanted to smash his hand through the glass and upend each gorgeous cake, leaving behind icing covered with shattered glass. Let her customers eat them that way. Let them see that though the cakes looked gorgeous on the outside, their secret ingredients were disloyalty and betrayal.

He had run downstairs, where in the lobby he’d looked for anyone to talk to. But the lobby was deserted, everyone else having places to be. He had noticed a sign hanging where his flyer about the missing laundry had once been.
Save our neighborhood!!!!!! Let your voice be heard!!!!!!!!!!!! Come talk about the plan to build another luxury high-rise building in our neighborhood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He’d seen these posters before but had been too preoccupied with the issues in his own building to get involved. He’d also been annoyed at whoever hung these signs on bus stops and the barriers to construction sites despite the warnings there to Post No Bills
.
But with more urgent outrages to confront, he overlooked these minor infractions. Arthur had glanced at the date and time, excited to see that the meeting was that night.

After the acclaim his suggestion had received, his anger was still there, but now it gave him purpose. Though he opted not to wear the sunglasses, Arthur went where he was told. In the main reading room, another black flag was detectable, high up on the coffered ceiling. He found the article about the demolition of the Vanderbilt mansion on the corner of Fifth and 58th Street, and despite his misgivings, he went to the site where this house once stood. The buildings there were so immense that it was hard to imagine anything else ever existing in their place.

As he looked at the bald mannequins in Bergdorf’s windows, someone jostled him from behind, and when he spun around to rebuke the careless offender, he realized that he had been the opposite of pickpocketed. Sticking out from his back pocket was a black flag, and at his feet was another envelope containing a list of all the places in Manhattan where certain stained-glass windows were installed. The same scrawled handwriting instructed him to visit each one, in the order in which they appeared on the list.

He considered whether he was being subjected to compulsory art appreciation. If he looked closely, he wondered, would he catch his neighbors following at a safe distance, hands cupped over their mouths to stifle their laughter? But remembering the good feeling of the previous night, he continued on to the Church of the Incarnation, followed by four more churches. Inside each was one of the stained-glass windows on the list. By the time Arthur reached the Met, he was eager to get home to Churchill, who would be whimpering by the door. The museum was closing soon, which gave him an excuse for paying only a dollar of the suggested admission. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been there. Did New Yorkers ever go, or was it just tourists who clogged the place?

He asked a security guard to direct him to the American Wing, getting lost along the way among the mummies and sarcophagi. In the nearly empty courtyard was the window he was supposed to be looking at.

The
Welcome
window was more interesting than the others, and the shimmer of glass and color allowed him to momentarily forget his accumulated list of slights and grievances. When he was swimming, he had the same sensation of having shed, however briefly, the parts of his body that weighed him down. An unfamiliar feeling jolted him. He realized, with surprise, that he was having fun.

At one of the café tables nearby, a skinny man with a ponytail was staring at him as he ate a piece of cake. Arthur scowled, but unintimidated, the man stood and held out another envelope. “Don’t think we’re not aware of your efforts,” he said, clapped Arthur on the arm, and was gone.

The note inside instructed him to go to the Department of Buildings and request the file for 2687 Broadway. When the office opened the next morning, Arthur was the first in line. He asked the clerk for the file, surprised that it wasn’t harder to gain access to a building’s floor plans and renovation records; it was like walking into a hospital and requesting the medical records of anyone you were curious about.

Arthur photocopied the pages and took them home. He read about the townhouse that was subsumed into a larger building, then attached to another building with a party wall. When he found the scribbled note about the stained-glass window being covered, he understood his mission.

He took a break only to walk Churchill and to swim. When he returned home, he looked for Barbara Kaufman’s phone number, steeling himself to the possibility that she was besieged by calls from people wanting to get involved. Though she remembered him from the meeting, she sounded guarded and skeptical. But no one had ever accused him of being insufficiently zealous.

“It’s recently come to my attention that there may be a long-lost stained-glass window boarded up between these buildings,” he said.

She agreed to meet the next day, and as Arthur hung up, he suddenly realized how he knew her. She was the owner of the terrier that antagonized Churchill on their morning walks, the dog’s small size belying its ferocity. He’d always assumed the owner to be as obnoxious as the dog. He’d responded to her with hostility because that was what he’d seen on her face.

The first impression he’d had of her softened. At the meeting, he’d recognized her like-mindedness, and all that evening, when he thought back to the window at the Met, her face replaced the one depicted in stained glass.

In his office Leon sat across from his patient, unsure of what to say. After seeing her from the window of his car, he had hoped that she wouldn’t show up. He’d wondered if he could come up with a good reason to tell her he couldn’t see her anymore. Gone was the feeling that at least with regard to his work, he remained in control.

She too was quieter than usual, but instead of directly addressing the discomfort, she launched into her customary account of her every interaction with the kids. He tried to listen but he couldn’t sit there for one more moment, not when he wanted her, him, all of them, to give in to the onslaught of feeling she was so afraid of.

“And what do you think would happen if you got angry and screamed, ‘I’ve had it’?” he interrupted her.

“But that’s not who I want to be. That’s not how I want my kids, or anyone, to see me,” she said.

“I know, but even then, how bad would it really be? Would Sophie and Harry survive? Would you?” he persisted. He had pushed her before, but never with as much conviction.

Her face took on a wild expression he hadn’t seen from her before. “I saw you in your car. You were sitting in it with a friend of mine.”

He startled. Of course she and Nina were friends. Even in this city of so many people, there was no escape from the expanding web of intersections. He fumbled to regain his calm, reminding himself that even if she had seen him and Nina talking in the car, what would that really mean? He had looked out the window before kissing Nina; he was sure of that. There was no way she had still been there. Only his guilty conscience would have him believe otherwise.

“First I thought I was imagining you. But I know it was you. I can’t stop wondering. How do you know each other, what does it mean? But now I realize. I have no idea who you are. I don’t know anything about you.”

“We can talk about what was actually happening in that moment, but I think it’s more important to talk about what it means to you,” he said, invoking the old formula he’d been taught to recite.

“Why were you in the car with her? Please, I really want to know.”

He could continue to turn the question back at her, ask her again why she was so interested to know. What had been her wish, that she was the one in the car? What had been her irrational fear, that they had been discussing her? Had she felt a child’s slight at being left out? Had she felt this way with her own parents? Had she felt the urge to break in and join them?

He was tired, too tired. All he wanted to do was step out from behind the screen.

“We have something in common, actually. I’m also used to being in control of my feelings. I’m not sure what to do otherwise,” Leon said.

“So what if you weren’t? What would happen? Would
you
survive?” she said, her voice growing more playful, lighter.

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he admitted.

Before his guard was back up, she leaned closer and took hold of his hand. What fantasy was he participating in now, what gaping hole inside her being filled? He allowed it to happen, unnerved by what she had seen and the questions open between them. He didn’t know how he would feel toward her in their next session, what meaning this would hold for either of them. But nowhere, not even in therapy, were there blank slates. Not even the strictest of boundaries, the most impermeable of barriers, could contain life’s messy drama.

He was rescued by the end of the session, life broken down in fifty-minute segments. But an image of Wendy screaming in anger, in relief, permeated his day. What if he were not to remain in control? The self unleashed: it was to risk the loss of who you knew yourself to be. For the rest of the day, he couldn’t put aside this feeling. Every patient who sat in front of him seemed on the verge of upheaval. Screaming, all of them. The pain in the room was more acute than ever, as though all his patients had descended upon his office at once and formed a chorus of lament. Their lives entered his; there was no protection.

At the end of the day, Leon left his office but didn’t want to go home. With this pocket of free time, he wondered if he should call Claudia—she was still out of town and hadn’t called, though until now he’d been relieved. The night before Claudia left for Boston, he reached for her out of guilt, knowing all too well the substitution he was making in his mind. But she pulled away, as if she knew as well.

He went to the park where he walked down the cobblestone pathways to one of the playgrounds Nina often mentioned. He couldn’t tell her what Wendy had said—he was ethically prohibited from confession—but he needed to see her nonetheless. It was cooler out than he’d realized. Soon it would be too cold to spend time here, but the mothers were determined to make use of every last day before being forced into their winter hibernations. He was the only one without a child, potentially closer to grandparenthood now than young parenthood, and he assembled excuses for his presence in case he saw anyone he knew. He came up with no good explanation, but it didn’t matter: it seemed impossible that anyone would recognize him when he hardly recognized himself.