Visible City (3 page)

Nina stopped the stroller in front of the construction site on their block, which was Max’s favorite form of entertainment. It was wondrous, really: these sandy canyons opening up all over the neighborhood, the diggers and backhoes trawling across the dirt like slow desert creatures, their bladed mouths lowering to the ground to dig for food. They continued walking, the streets identifiable by their smell: the foul urinous tang of 100th Street, neutralized by the fresh bread of 99th, which vanished into the exhaust fumes at 98th. Upscale bakeries and cafés intermingled with rundown newsstands, bodegas, and SROs. Up ahead, a woman was handing out flyers protesting the neighborhood’s lax zoning laws. And then, on the next corner, she saw her friend Wendy.

“Your kids look tired!” Wendy exclaimed as they approached, her four-year-old twins, Sophie and Harry, buckled into their stroller. “Are they sleeping any better?”

“Max is still up at least twice a night. And so is Lily, but never at the same time,” Nina said.

“I feel so lucky that my kids are such great sleepers,” Wendy said.

Nina grimaced as Max rattled off a series of demands. “Cheez-Its,” he screamed. “Apple juice,” he insisted as the pacifier fell from Lily’s mouth. Nina couldn’t hide the fact that she was dispensing such unhealthy snacks, but even though there were no signs of dirt on the pacifier, she pocketed it as if she were planning to take it home and run it through the autoclave.

“We finally made a decision,” Wendy announced. “We’re moving to Larchmont.”

Nina was about to respond, but Wendy was already in cheerful forward march. “Our day is packed,” she said. “We have a playdate and a coffee date, but we’ll see you later, at Gymboree!” Wendy had once been a management consultant, but though she now was home full-time with her kids, she never seemed to share the regret Nina felt over leaving her job. In between exclamations of how delicious her kids were, Wendy only occasionally mentioned the work she had once done, as if referring to a past life. As far as she could tell, Wendy looked at her kids and their needs filled the lenses of her eyes.

Nina kept walking and didn’t notice, until they were almost face-to-face, someone else she knew. A woman whose class in nineteenth-century American art Nina had taken years ago as an undergraduate at Columbia was coming toward her. At the last moment before she passed, Nina was about to say hello, but the woman drew back, surprised at the show of recognition. It wasn’t the first time Professor Stein hadn’t remembered her. Nina often passed her on the street and once, after introducing herself, told her how much she’d loved her class. She’d hoped to have a longer conversation, but her former professor had pretended to recognize her, then, afraid of being ensnared in conversation, had nodded politely and hurried away.

After ten blocks, Lily was quiet. After twenty, Max was drowsy. By the time they reached 79th Street and turned back uptown, Nina had accomplished her mission. The kids’ heads bobbed and their eyes closed. She stopped walking. Until they awoke, Nina sat in Starbucks and read. Her children’s dreams would smell of coffee.

“Didn’t I tell you not to do that?” screamed an elderly woman sitting near her.

“Why do you have to be like this?” her husband screamed in return.

“You idiot!” she yelled, and swatted him with a napkin.

They’d forgotten they were in public, or else hoped people would take sides. Nina exchanged amused looks with the man at the next table. She’d seen him here before and he always looked familiar. The last time she saw him, he was immersed in a book titled
On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored,
and until she saw the subtitle—
Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
—it had sounded like a good description of motherhood.

“They must not want us to know how their fight ends,” the man said, once the couple shuffled out, both stooped and, despite their argument, clutching each other’s hands.

“If they scream in public, don’t you think they want us to hear?” Nina asked.

He looked to be in his late fifties, tall with graying hair that swept across his forehead. He wore a pressed button-down shirt and dress pants and had an air of muted distinction that she found appealing. She’d never initiated a conversation though, not wanting to be one of the people who lurked all day, using a moment of eye contact as an excuse to talk. Nor, in case he turned out to be one of these overly loquacious strangers, did she want to be entrapped.

“I think we’re neighbors,” he said, and they introduced themselves.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“298 Riverside.”

“Then you’re right. We live right across the street.”

“I’ve seen you outside with your kids, in front of the building,” he said with a smile.

“My son is obsessed with the construction. If it were up to him, we’d spend all day watching.”

“You should hear what it sounds like in our apartment.”

“Have you heard the woman who’s always yelling at the construction workers? She makes more noise than they do. This morning, I almost expected her to start throwing things,” Nina said.

He startled slightly. “I’ll have to listen for her. It probably makes her feel better—it gives her the sense that she has control. It’s funny, I never used to think I could get anything done in here, but I’ve discovered that I work better with noise.”

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a psychologist. And you?”

“I used to be a lawyer. I’m on what was supposed to be a three-month maternity leave but has turned into full-time leave.”

“I have a daughter too, but she’s a little older than your kids,” he said.

“How old?” Nina asked.

“Twenty-eight.”

“Where does she live?” Nina asked.

“Actually she’s staying with us for a few weeks. She broke her ankle and lives in a fourth-floor walkup.” He studied her kids’ sleeping faces. “You know the saying: ‘Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems.’”

His expression was wistful but worried too. If she’d caught it on videotape, she could have played it back and better deciphered it. But in front of him, Nina managed to hide her curiosity. Even when the city contracted, taking on the guise of small-town life, you had to maintain the illusion of anonymity. You couldn’t say, “I wonder if it’s you and your wife I watch every night. I wonder if it’s your naked daughter I saw from my window.” You couldn’t ask what you most wanted to know.

Claudia gave Emma the space she needed. When her daughter was ready to talk, she would come to her as she always had. At her desk in the so-called maid’s room, Claudia tried to lose herself in her work. She was accustomed to working while distracted. Emma was born while she was in graduate school, and as a result, her dissertation had taken nearly ten years to complete, an amount of time that might appear unimaginable from afar, yet each of those days had been filled with the seemingly infinite needs of her daughter. With Leon finishing his doctorate, she had been on her own, writing while Emma napped, sure that the sound of her ideas flowing was what woke her daughter.

Eventually she had received a teaching position, but despite the publication of a book about the history of American stained glass, she hadn’t gotten tenure. After a few years on the job market, she had received a lectureship at Columbia, but this too hadn’t worked out, and the disappointment had been hard to recover from. For years after, she had floated from college to college, holding various adjunct positions, always carrying with her the taste of failure. This year she had no position lined up, and in the absence of teaching, she had resumed work on a long-standing project, a book about the great American stained-glass maker John La Farge.

Usually the pleasure of her work was enough to block out her other worries, but today when she managed to corral her thoughts, the incessant noise of construction set them loose. Eager to maintain her concentration, Claudia decided to leave the apartment and work at Georgia’s, even though she planned to meet Emma and Leon there later. It was such an inviting place she was happy to go twice.

In the elevator were two mothers, their children in tow. One of them was talking about how the construction inevitably woke the kids from their naps, and when they glanced at her, she worried they’d heard her screaming. She felt a rush of shame, pelted suddenly by the possibility that the entire neighborhood had heard her.

Outside, the construction site was boarded in bright blue plywood on which someone had scrawled, in black letters,
Yuppie Condo.
Overhead a billboard proclaimed
The Celestial: Reaching New Heights of Luxury City Living,
with a rendering of the new building, a Richard Meier knockoff with glass walls. Despite the attempt at transparency, it would still be far taller than any building in the vicinity, casting shadows and blocking natural light. Though she normally liked glass exteriors, she had to agree with that scrawl of graffiti. The abundance of windows seemed not a function of design but a means of showmanship, not so the investment bankers who would live here could look out, but so envious passersby could see in.

As Claudia waited for the light to change, she noticed an acquaintance approaching her. The woman ran a neighborhood organization whose bimonthly newsletter was slipped under every apartment door and which most people threw away along with the menus for Chinese food that accumulated there.

“What do you know about the monstrosity being built outside my window?” Claudia asked, and told Barbara about the morning’s noise, omitting her part in it.

“I could kick myself. We barely protested the demolition of the brownstones that made way for that eyesore. And now another condo is going up in the same five-block radius. But this time I’m prepared to fight,” Barbara said, and described her plans to call the head of the community board’s Land Use Committee and implore them to schedule an emergency session. “It’s a wake-up call. They’re putting these buildings up as fast as they can, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. You should come to one of our meetings. Or what are you doing right now? We can have coffee and I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

Claudia wrote Barbara’s number on a scrap of paper she fished from her bag, even though she knew she wouldn’t get involved. Though she’d sign a petition, she felt both admiration and embarrassment for those who manned tables and carried clipboards. She suspected that other needs were being filled.

She also decided against joining Barbara for a cup of coffee. Her worries about Emma occupied too prominent a place in her mind. She didn’t want to appear standoffish, but she wasn’t one to forge friendships through confession, nor would she talk about her work. Except for the one or two colleagues with whom she’d stayed in contact, her interest in the minutiae of window frames or leaded glass would make the uninitiated feel sorry they’d asked. This was true even for Leon and Emma, who joked that Claudia studied details most people didn’t notice. People would rather ask about Leon’s work, hoping to be entertained with stories of other people’s craziness. But too principled to reveal anything, he told those who asked that despite popular perception, his was a profession not of grand drama but of small moments of insight.

Few people understood the pleasure she took in her own work. Like Leon, she too studied something as ever-shifting as a person’s emotional map. When she stood in front of a stained-glass window, she saw not one great work but a myriad. Because the light was always changing, it was futile to think that she could ever know any of John La Farge’s pieces entirely. But with the prospect of discovery tantalizingly ahead, she kept trying to capture some elusive part.

Claudia found a table near the window of the café. If she worked well, the next few hours would be spent inside her book. It would be noon, then it would be three; the hours between would cease to exist.

She’d been working on the La Farge book for so long that even when she wasn’t actively writing, the book was there, hiding behind a wall in her mind. She had stopped thinking she might ever find her way to the end. But she was happy to spend her life inside these pages, especially now when she was on the verge of a potential discovery. It had been so long since she’d published anything that most people in her field had probably forgotten her name altogether, but now she’d written an article for the
American Art Journal
making a bold claim. After years of meticulous research, she believed she had discovered the existence of a lost work of art, one last great La Farge window.

As she was arriving at that clearing in her mind, another pair of mothers and their kids entered the café and installed themselves at the next table. Unbuckled from their strollers, the kids circled Claudia’s table. The mothers turned their enraptured gazes from their children’s faces to check for equivalent reactions around them. When she was a young mother, such swooning hadn’t been as central to the job description. Of course there were moments of joy, but her generation of mothers hadn’t talked of parenting with the same language they used to describe falling in love.