Visible City (29 page)

The groups on both corners had dispersed, but the streets were still crowded with people enjoying the warm October day. The city was awash in color. Calves and elbows, cleavage, necks and waists sailed across Leon’s frame of vision. After leaving Nina’s apartment, he walked to clear his mind, but he could no longer ignore the press of faces, the bombardment of bodies all around him.

“I don’t think I can,” Nina had said to him in her living room, even as she looked longingly at him.

“I know,” he had said as they held one another. He felt her pull toward him at the same time as he heard her words taking her away. He considered what to say: the unknown future before all of them. She was in battle with herself, so much still unexplored. Eventually she would find a more definitive answer. Life itself was reckless. Despite all attempts to the contrary, no one made it through unscathed.

“Can you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I can.”

He had been about to leave Nina’s apartment, but before he closed the door, he stopped, because what would she do now—take care of the kids as though none of this had happened, live beside Jeremy with a part of herself sealed away?

“Do you really think you can go back?” he asked her.

She looked stunned, as if the question had never occurred to her. He saw the road ahead more clearly than she could. She might spend years, maybe her whole life, discovering what he knew. You couldn’t go back. So many tried, so many even stayed at least with their bodies, but in their hearts, in the widest, deepest parts of themselves, did anyone really go back?

He’d left Nina’s apartment though he hadn’t wanted to. “Where are you going?” she’d asked, and all he could say was that he didn’t know. As he walked, he looked at the jigsaw of buildings above. He wanted to steal one of the bulldozers perpetually parked on his block, demolish every old building, every piece of stone and terra cotta, and replace them with a glass city built entirely anew. He didn’t want to let go of the feelings Nina had sparked. It would be easy enough to do what he decried as impossible, go back and let the days of his marriage pass quietly by. He would live as most people did, perched between acceptance and resignation. So much of life was behind them, so much already shared. To take it apart at this stage was to cling to the idea that enough still lay ahead.

On a corner, Leon passed the two warring dog owners, and he expected a fight to break out. But they were working together, leaving him to wonder whether he’d misread the hostility of their earlier interactions.

When Leon came closer and saw what was written on their posters, he stared in disbelief. It was impossible, yet here it was. Not just Claudia’s windows, but her name. Her work, out in the world. He’d formulated multiple explanations for why she so badly wanted to find the window, but he’d rarely considered the possibility that it actually existed. In his mind, she was someone who would always toil in vain, and he’d felt not compassion but pity at how long the work had taken her and how lost she was inside it.

“Barbara,” he called. “Does Claudia know you’re doing this?”

“I told you to have her call me,” she said. “Don’t you remember? I said that she might want to get involved, but I never heard from her so I assumed she wasn’t interested.”

“I never told her,” Leon admitted.

“Why don’t you give her one of our flyers. It’s her work, after all. We’d love to talk to her,” Barbara said to him, but her attention was on her fellow dog owner, both of them bearing the stance of shared purpose.

His envy was aroused and he felt stabbed by loneliness, a condition to which he’d thought himself immune. He didn’t know what Claudia would make of these signs. The simplest of questions, yet it felt hard to imagine asking her, as though he would be prying too deeply into her private world. For how long had he and Claudia mistaken silence for companionship, how long had loneliness been dressed up to look like anything but? Now that he felt such loneliness, it was hard to bear for a single moment, yet he had borne it unknowingly all these years.

He went home to an apartment that was as empty as he’d always wanted, yet he longed for distraction or disruption. He went into Claudia’s office where the window was open, and her glass bottles were gone. On the ledge, one bottle remained though it was cracked. He leaned out to retrieve it and tried to see the site as the impossible intrusion that Claudia had. When he’d come upon Claudia yelling out the window, he’d assumed that she was embarrassed to be seen, though now he realized that this was precisely what she wanted.

He looked around her office for some understanding of what she was feeling, but there was nothing more legible than her Post-its. Leon tried to decipher what Claudia had written, but even if he could make out the words, he’d no longer know what they meant. Once, long ago, soon after they’d met, he’d asked her why stained glass mattered so much to her. Eager to discuss her work, Claudia had gathered photographs of her favorite windows. “Stained glass is an art form that’s never static,” she’d explained. “It’s entirely dependent on the time of day, the quality of light, the direction of the sun, and where you’re standing. As long as it’s exposed to light, the colors are in a continual state of creation.”

When she’d said that to him long ago, he had been moved by the look on her face, so flushed with excitement and ambition. Once upon a time, he had enjoyed the fact that he was as comfortable in her presence as he was when he was alone. But how far past that point he was, and how late it was to recognize this. Only now, when he’d come to the end, did he wonder if she’d always made the connection between the windows she loved and the people around her. Had she always known that they were equally in need of having sufficient light cast upon them?

It wasn’t simply that he had wanted to be alone. He hadn’t wanted to be with Claudia, not nearly enough. He had tried to protect himself, and her, from this knowledge. But after this gasp of dizzying wakefulness, he wouldn’t settle again into the approximation of love, of life. It was far easier, of course, to leave with someone—to jump off while holding on to another hand. But he was willing to do it alone, because once you were aware of how else it might be, going back was far more terrifying than moving forward.

Parked on a side street, Claudia contemplated what to do. She had been sitting in the car for what felt like hours, unsure of where to go. She pulled out of her space and drove through the neighborhood, aimlessly. She had once conjured a city that opened itself up, the streets leading to wooded trails that would take her into green pastures, but those had closed down not because of the noise of the streets but the sadness inside her. So many people stayed where they were because they thought that was the only option.

When she could stand being in the car no longer, she found a parking spot near the construction site. She’d felt such hatred toward this site, but in early evening, with work done for the day, it seemed like little more than a ghost town, a harmless, dusty remnant of a place people had once lived.

It took her a moment to see the posters. Taped to the scaffolding was the
Welcome
window, La Farge’s iridescent rendering of Andromeda, the mythological daughter punished for her mother’s sins. On light posts, pictures of
The Angel of Help
and
Wisdom.
The captions under each picture were drawn from her descriptions and attributed to her. At the bottom of each sign was information about the Committee to Save the La Farge Window, a group she hardly believed existed, unless it sprang from inside one of her dreams.

She drew in her breath. The buildings, the sidewalk, tilted. Was it possible that the window had been located, that these neighborhood activists might have used her work to uncover what had eluded her? Without knowing it, her work had gone into the world, making contact on her behalf.

Next to her, staring at the signs, was a man wearing a trench coat, and he smiled when he saw her.

“They’re your windows,” he said.

“How do you know who I am?” she asked.

“I met you at the New York Public Library. You gave me your article.”

Finally, Maurice. If he hadn’t said something, she would have walked right past him. She’d thought about him so many times, yet he barely resembled the person she had created in her mind.

“I didn’t recognize you,” she admitted. “You’re in graduate school, aren’t you?”

“That’s just my fantasy. In real life, I’m a real estate lawyer. Or at least I used to be. Now I’m not really sure who I am.”

“I wondered if you were really in school,” she said.

“How did I give myself away?”

“I went looking for you,” she admitted. “I was hoping we could talk some more.”

“It was your article that made this happen,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because you gave it to me, and I gave it to them,” he said, gesturing to the posters, to the names listed at the bottom. “E-mail me, I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said, and gave her his real name, which she wrote down. The interaction might not match what she’d created in her mind, but then, what of that image had been real? Here was the actual possibility of a friendship. It couldn’t fill every space inside her, but if she opened herself up, one small piece of emptiness might be colored in.

Before going home, Claudia turned back to Broadway, where on bus stops and storefronts more signs were plastered. She walked to the red brick building above what used to be the dollar store and lingered out front. It was one of the last low-rise buildings on the block, and it was a wonder it hadn’t been torn down earlier. At some point it had been attached with a party wall to the building next to it, but except for that addition, the building appeared to have gone untouched for decades, which made it more likely that the window could actually be there. Only a structure so nondescript could quietly house something so magnificent.

She came into the apartment where the door to her office was open and Leon was reading at her desk. He jumped up when she came in, but he didn’t look like himself, his expression uncharacteristically pained, anxious.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Where have you been?” she countered.

“I was worried about you,” he said.

“I assume you already know that Emma found an apartment. And she got a job in a nursery school,” Claudia said.

“I didn’t know. When did she decide this?”

“She told me a few hours ago.”

“Are you upset?” he asked.

“I’m glad she knows what she needs,” Claudia said, struck by the quiet of the apartment. Emma was taking one more step on the path toward becoming herself. The two of them would be standing here, sooner or later, alone in their lives.

“Did you see the signs?” Leon asked.

“They’re everywhere,” she said.

“Do you think it’s possible?” he asked.

“For all I know, it could be a ploy of neighborhood activists to attract attention to their cause,” Claudia said. “In all likelihood, the window would have belonged to a family member who lived up here. Cornelius Vanderbilt was known for giving works of art to his family, and it’s likely that those gifts would go unrecorded, especially if the family members in question weren’t worthy of public notice.”

She was trying to keep the hopefulness from her voice because she expected him to tire of the conversation and wander away. And now, at this late date, where should she even begin? How could she cram years of work into a single conversation? Lecture him about the origins of La Farge’s work for the Vanderbilts? About the way in which the works of art were divvied up before the mansion was demolished?

“I’d have to see when the buildings were attached, but I would guess it was done in the fifties. It’s actually not a bad way to preserve a window. If it is there, I would expect it to be in good condition, certainly better than if it was removed and stored elsewhere. It would need to be cleaned, but it stands to reason that the glass could be intact.”

“But why does it matter?” Leon asked.

“Because it might have been one of his most important works. Certainly from the sketches, it appears as monumental as the Ames windows—”

“No. Why does it matter to you?” he asked.

Long ago, he’d asked her this, on one of the many occasions they’d been introduced, each seemingly for the first time because he never remembered her. She’d answered the question with such passion, hoping he would finally see who she was.

Claudia met his gaze. “Because they’re alive.” Covered over for so many years, yet they would still maintain their beauty. Deprived of light, yet a blast of sunlight would change all that. It mattered so much to her, then and now, because no one had seen them in so many years. Because she had persisted even when she felt like giving up. Because despite the many painstaking hours, she hadn’t lost her love for the splendor of the work.

It was hard to recognize Leon, who was staring at her with something new and unsettling in his eyes.