Visible City (28 page)

“Tell me about the zoo,” Max begged.

“Didn’t I tell you already?” she asked.

“More,” he insisted.

She thought for a minute. “Okay, here’s the part I didn’t tell you yet—and remind me when we get home, we should tell this to your mom too. I have a feeling she’d appreciate it. Once you see the night zoo, you can never really go back to how you used to be. For some people this might not be a good thing, but it’s true. You might go home, but you never go back, not for long anyway. Do you know what happens the next time you go to the zoo? You always have in the back of your mind what it looks like at night and you can’t help but wish you were there again. It’s not just the zoo that’s different. It’s you that’s changed.”

She held Max more closely in her arms, and he nuzzled against her. If she peeked inside his head, surely she’d see images of those animals running free at night. Kids knew the pleasure of such sprints, yet where along the way did they forget? It was one of the reasons she wanted to be around kids. That night she had run from her apartment, it was from fear, from panic, from a desperate need to make something change. But there had also been an unyielding sense of her own capacity for forward motion and speed.

When they reached Times Square station, Max tugged on her arm, needing to pee.

“You’re wearing a pull-up, aren’t you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I have my practice underwear on.”

Not only had she forgotten the diaper bag, but she’d forgotten to change him before they left. They could survive without snacks, but not without pull-ups. If he peed in his pants, she’d have to ride the subway with a kid who smelled like the subway.

“Max, you can wear diapers for the rest of your life, but just this one time, can you use the toilet?”

Emma looked around for anything that resembled a bathroom. Next to the Shuttle tracks, she pushed on a door labeled Knickerbocker Hotel, but it was locked, leaving her no choice but to look for a token booth and ask a clerk for the key to the nearest bathroom.

“Okay, Max. Let’s do this as quickly as possible. And do yourself a favor and try not to touch anything,” she said. Holding Lily in one arm, she pulled down Max’s pants to the layer of Bob the Builder underwear, and he peed into the toilet as though he’d been doing it his whole life.

“Are we all here? Do we have Maurice?” Emma asked when they were back on the platform, waiting for the train.

“Maurice isn’t here anymore,” Max said.

“Oh, God, where did we lose him?” Emma asked, envisioning a city-wide search for a missing imaginary friend.

“He decided to move. He left a few minutes ago.”

“I thought he was afraid to leave the laundry room. Last I heard, wasn’t he planning to live down there?”

“He got over it. He moved to the country. And he took Hop with him. Don’t you think they’ll be happier?”

She took his hand. “You know what, Max? I do.”

“My car was stolen,” Leon said when Nina answered her phone. She couldn’t help herself. She told him she was home alone and waited for him to come over.

When Leon came into the apartment, he looked around at what he knew only from her descriptions or had glimpsed from across the way. She wondered, briefly, how her life appeared in his eyes. But mostly she marveled at the strangeness of having him here inside her apartment as if until this moment, he was a figment of her mind. For the first time, she saw him in the light of her real life.

“Maybe it sounds silly, but I love my car,” Leon said.

“What are you going to do without it?” Nina asked.

“Claudia has always said that if something happened to my car, I’d have to invent some other excuse to be alone.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I will but I don’t think anyone is going to help. I can’t even reach Claudia.”

“Maybe she took the car,” Nina said.

“Maybe she left me,” he said, trying to pass it off as a joke, but his voice faltered. “My family life is a mess. I tried to be more involved, but that only made things worse. I have very little idea what any of us really need. I know you went looking for a vision of a happy family, but I told you, I’m not good at this.”

She shifted, excruciatingly aware of her body. Where should she put her hand, rest her gaze? There was no escaping the desire in Leon’s eyes and in her body as well. Once she had touched him, once she had felt the weight of his body upon hers, there was no other way to see him.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Leon said.

“Out the window?” Nina asked.

“On the street. In the park. In my mind.”

“In my mind too,” she said.

His hand swam through the air to find hers. His fingers laced through hers.

“I’ve tried to pretend that nothing happened. I told myself, ‘This is not really you, this is not really what you feel,’” she said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Look around,” she said, gesturing to the evidence of her already-made life all around them. “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

He came closer until his forehead met hers, so close that she saw not him, but her own face in the reflection of his eyes. He came closer still, until she saw only a single distorted eye. Their bodies brushed against one other, so many points of contact flickering at once.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “Every day, you’re all I think about. What if we decided that we’re going to be together? What if we took a chance and changed our lives?”

What if, a game she had played in her mind since she was a kid. What if every possibility could be brought into existence? What if no pathways were yet closed off? She listened to his idea. The two of them were trapped in the shells of their lives, but what if they pushed them open? They could leave their marriages and be together. It might seem impossible at first, but they could find their way to the other side. As improbable, as insurmountable as it sounded, it did happen that people discovered they were with the wrong person, in the wrong life.

And then, what would she find on the other end? This imagined life where she lived free and unfettered, not just in the privacy of her mind. Would it be there waiting for her, finally real, attainable?

The Leon of her mind, the Leon who stood before her. Her own life to think about, yet all she had wanted to do was hide from it. What would happen as she drew closer to Leon still: In her attempt to escape the press of her own life, would she end up in an all-too-familiar place? Was he, at least in part, a figment crafted from the rib of her longing? A mirage of escape that would vanish if she drew too close?

What she imagined crashed up against what she saw. What she thought battled with what she felt. The life inside her mind beckoned her forward. Her real-world responsibilities came after her with nets, with hooks. All she’d felt was the urge to run. Nowhere in her mind was the thought of where she might arrive.

At the end of the workday, Richard was waiting, and this time there was no way to avoid him. At his request, Jeremy went to the office in which he had spent so much time. Richard was joined there by Tom Markowitz, the head of the personnel committee, whom Jeremy had seen only in passing.

As they motioned for him to sit, Richard gave him a surveying, critical look. Here was his chance for the grand rebellion—run naked through the halls, throw the documents in Richard’s face—which he and Nina had joked about on those late nights when they’d concocted impossible plans of escape.

“Why don’t we get right to it,” Tom said. “You were due for your midyear review in a few months but given the recent circumstances, we decided to move it up.” He began to recount the filings that had not been done on time, the embarrassment Richard had suffered assuring the client that the deal was under control. “It’s become abundantly clear that you no longer have a role to play here.”

“You should also know that we’re planning to get the disciplinary committee of the city bar involved,” Richard said, and handed Jeremy a copy of one of the documents he’d given to Arthur. At the bottom of the page was the client matter number which, in his haste, he had forgotten to cover.

“I wonder who could have given this to the community groups. The client was very interested to know this as well,” Richard said.

He startled though he knew he shouldn’t be surprised. At least in some part of himself, surely he had intended this to happen. It had been the only way he could make his escape, yet he hadn’t expected to see such betrayal on Richard’s face. He felt bad about what he had done, but somewhere along the way he had forgotten that he could have just quit; there might have been illuminated signs marking the exits but he had stopped believing he could walk through them.

With one last withering glance, Tom left him alone with Richard. “I thought that you were going to be one of the few who made it to the end. I thought you had a future here. But you know what the trick is? You have to want it badly enough to be able to make it through all the hard work. You have to decide that this”—Richard held his arms out wide to take in his office and all that lay inside it—“is worth it in the end.”

“Worth what? My whole life?” Jeremy asked.

He was about to leave, but remembering something, he turned back. Draped over Richard’s chair was the familiar swath of khaki. “What’s with the vest?” he asked.

In response, Richard gave him a stony stare, a facial impasse. That was all he was going to get. With nothing left to say, Jeremy started to leave the office.

When Jeremy was halfway down the hall, Richard stuck his head out the door. He checked to make sure no one else was in earshot.

“Bird watching,” Richard called after him.

Jeremy waited to laugh until Richard was back in his office with the door closed. Several months ago, he would have viewed this admission with shock; now it made him sad that in all these years of working together there had been no available language to speak of any outside interests. Like his father with his models of planes and trains, Richard had room in his life only for a costume that was small enough to be tucked away like an airplane’s life preserver under his seat, taken out and inflated in a moment of need. Jeremy had initially thought that this would be enough for him as well—he had hung the trench coat Magellan had given him on the back of his office door, planning to put it on when he needed something all his own.

He had an hour to clear out his office, surrender his card key, return his BlackBerry. The reality of what he’d done began to sink in. Even more so, the fact that he would have to face Nina. How could he tell her that he had felt as trapped as she, consoled only by the fact that one day, this office, this building, would feel as distant as a dream? He would be missed by no one. He had worked so hard yet mattered so little.

There was nothing he wanted to take except the trench coat. When he left the building, it was late afternoon, but the moon was already visible in the blue sky, full and hanging so low over the city that the peaks of skyscrapers seemed like they could pierce it.

At the sight of the full moon, he remembered. He could go home; he should go home, and he would, soon enough. But first he got on the subway, in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge.