Visible City (6 page)

Overhead a sign was displayed on the building, courtesy of the Royalton Company.
Building the New West Side,
it read, next to a picture of a smiling little girl holding the hands of her young well-heeled parents, striding happily into their towering new home. He could decry what these flashy façades represented and bemoan their assault on the character of the neighborhood. Yet as he stared up, he surprised himself once again. He wanted each colossus to rise proudly in their midst. With their glass and steel, their unabashed presence, they would shatter the inertia that suddenly felt suffocating, in his own life and all around.

Her parents’ apartment triggered a Pavlovian urge to eat. As soon as her mother went out, Emma went into the kitchen where, supported by her crutches, she stood in front of the refrigerator, fighting the impulse to consume everything in sight. She was probably not supposed to feel such pleasure in eating her way through their fridge, just as she was probably not supposed to feel so relieved to be sleeping in her old bedroom as though she were still a child.

Every morning since she’d been home, her mother had brought her breakfast in bed. She made her grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, the same as she’d done whenever Emma had stayed home sick from school, the day spreading out before her with a seemingly endless number of hours to fill as she wished.

Emma had urged her mother to turn her former bedroom into an office, instead of squeezing herself into the tiny maid’s room, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. As a result, her bedroom remained untouched. On the walls were the black-and-white photographs she’d taken in college and developed herself. There were copies of her high school literary magazine which she’d edited and to which she’d contributed numerous poems that now made her laugh with embarrassment. On her bulletin board were a slew of tacked-up awards. She had starred in a high school play, won a school science award; she had spearheaded a fundraising project to buy goats for villages in India. The room was a trophy case to her early achievements.

In the past, she had flitted from one passion to another; she might not have known what she wanted to do, but she hadn’t worried about it. The world was filled with possibilities, especially when you had parents who trusted every decision you made and were willing to support you through any adventure. Newly out of college, she had backpacked through Europe for six months. When she came home, she took acting classes, then dropped out because what she really wanted to be was an art therapist. Her parents never said anything directly but eventually she felt their impatience. In search of what she really wanted to do, she’d once marveled at how her mother could study one artist for so many years and never get bored. “It feels new every day. I always come away with something unexpected,” she had said, and Emma had never forgotten it. Her own interest in French was one of the few things that had lasted. In college, she had fallen in love with French history and literature, but more than either of these, it was the language itself she wanted to live inside. Her parents had treated their areas of interest as sacred subjects; when they spoke about their work, they possessed languages of their own. Now she would have her own language and world, one as robust, as all-consuming, as theirs.

After a few more false starts and abandoned plans, she had started her graduate program with great enthusiasm, studying late-nineteenth-century French women writers and writing her dissertation about the period between George Sand and Colette, looking at several relatively unknown women who were considered part of the burgeoning
littérature féminine.
Their increased visibility had prompted a rash of outrage by the male literary establishment, who likened them to hysterics and prostitutes. The fear of the female body was ever-present, but Emma wanted to study another fear, the fear of the female mind.

On the desk beside her, the books were waiting; there had once been a time when she would have viewed a broken ankle as an opportunity to get work done. But her inability to concentrate had persisted. Instead of reading, she ate one container of soup, two servings of pasta, three helpings of salad, but she was still hungry. Foraging through her parents’ kitchen cabinets, Emma found a bakery box, from the café where she was later meeting her parents. Inside the box, four purple cupcakes were decorated with tiny flowers. The only things missing were the candles and a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday.” She knew she should probably save two for her parents, but the cupcakes were already a few days old and looked like they’d been forgotten. It was sad to eat such pretty creations alone and all at once, but even when the sweetness became corrosive, Emma didn’t stop. Perhaps sugar was the best medicine of all, because with each bite, she minded less that Steven was gone, that she hated being in school, that she had no idea what to do with her life.

She first met Steven at a café near Columbia. He had been hunched over a laptop but looked occasionally in her direction as she talked to a group of fellow students in French. She had always been told that she talked too loudly, but when she was excited it was hard to hold back. At first she was flattered by his attention, wondering if he mistook her for a native speaker. She spoke louder until she finally realized that he was simply hoping she’d be quiet. His eyes were as dark as his hair, and his stare was remote and hard to read. She was always drawn to the ones who tucked themselves away and, in doing so, invited you to come in pursuit.

In preparation for her orals, she was supposed to be reading, or at least skimming, six hundred books in nine months. It was hard to sit still for such long periods of time, and to make it easier, she started spending her time in the café where there was the possibility of human contact. She glanced at Steven when he wasn’t looking, then stealthily looked away when she thought he was about to look up at her. The few times she got caught, there was no choice but to smile.

A few weeks later, they had both been on campus late in the evening, though a blizzard had been predicted. He was teaching in the Columbia MFA program and she had been holed up all day in the library. They ran into each other as the snow was falling, the streets emptied of both people and cars, and he had followed her lead in walking in the middle of Broadway. To fill the silence, she’d talked about her dissertation topic and her classes and her fellow students and the time she’d spent in France. He had listened at first but then playfully put his hand over her mouth. If anyone else had done this to her, she would have been outraged. But they stood with their eyes locked, their hair, their coats, dusted with snow. She willed herself not to look away until he brought his lips to hers and kissed her.

She grew accustomed to his quiet moods and to how he retreated when he was in need of space. Waiting for the moment when he would turn to her, she learned to hover silently at the edges as he slowly doled out pieces of himself. With past boyfriends, she’d simultaneously wanted them and wanted to be free of them, but she never got tired of being with Steven. She could chase him forever and never quite catch him.

They had been dating for two years when Steven broached the subject of marriage. Until now, she hadn’t been sure what she wanted, but her life was finally taking shape. She moved into his apartment where the two of them worked side by side, he on his novel, she on her dissertation. It was just as she’d imagined her parents’ lives when they were newly married. In her mind, they had managed seamlessly the task of being both together and apart.

If she had what she wanted, why, one day, had she awoken and been unable to get anything done? One week off turned into another and she still couldn’t return to her work. Instead of reading or writing, she decided that no one could live in an apartment with peeling white walls and so little color. She spent hours at the hardware store, plucking paint swatches from the display, enthralled with the range of possibilities as laid out by Benjamin Moore: Symphony Blue, Turquoise Haze, Harbor Fog, Sapphireberry, Billowy Down. Not caring if she dripped onto the floor, Emma plunged in, taking pleasure in the tangible work of her hand. This was her true calling. Instead of finishing her dissertation, she would paint houses professionally, matching moods to swatches. Her walls would take on the quality of the gemstone rings she’d worn as a kid that were said to change color according to your mood.

When every wall in their apartment was covered in Atlantis Blue, she biked through Central Park and baked bread and made gnocchi from scratch. She attempted, unsuccessfully, to make her own jam and pickle vegetables. She tried to talk to Steven but he couldn’t understand the part of her that was incapable of sitting still when he was proudly proclaiming that he was almost done with his book. A hard spot of envy grew inside her. Maybe if she knew more about his book she wouldn’t feel this way, but the secrecy shrouding his work was as important as the work itself.

She put off a meeting with her adviser as long as she could, but by the end of the semester, having run out of excuses, she hastily threw together a few pages which she submitted in advance of their meeting, in the hope that, if looked at in the right way, they might resemble the very preliminary outline of a very rough draft of a first chapter. She was used to being able to talk her way through any situation, but she was sure this would be the moment in which she was revealed as an imposter. Instead, she watched in silence as he rifled through her pages and nodded with satisfaction. “Excellent work. You’re off to a very promising start,” he said.

She felt relief, but what did it mean that her adviser was pretending to have read something she was pretending to have written? The writers she studied were flinging conventions aside, living boldly. She didn’t want to write about these renegade women; she wanted to be them.

When it was time to meet her parents, Emma went outside for the first time in two days and squinted at the brightness. The light wasn’t unusually blinding but she had been inside for too long.

From each person Emma passed, she received kind looks or expressions of sympathy. Her neighbors and the doormen didn’t hold back from asking what was wrong, a question that was usually off-limits. This was true any time she left the apartment—was one small excuse all people needed in order to start talking? To anyone who asked about the broken ankle, she explained that she was running late at night and had known, the second she fell, that the bone was broken. She described the way Steven had helped her up and had first assumed she was overreacting, despite the immensity of the pain. She knew she was giving too much information to strangers, but they were willing to listen, so why not tell of the six-hour wait in the emergency room where Steven brought her, annoyed at having to be there for so long? Finally, she told him to go home, which he did, leaving her to wait alone on one of the orange plastic chairs where people sat in silence, the stench of vomit doing battle with the hospital antiseptic. All patients would be seen in order of need, and unless she threw in a chest pain or coughed up blood, she’d quietly sit for hours. When it was finally her turn, a doctor drew a curtain around her and pressed on her foot. “Where does it hurt?” he’d asked, a question that struck her as the most beautiful in the world.

At the café her mother was reading, and Emma waited in the doorway until she looked up.

“Dad’s coming. He must be running late with one of his patients,” Claudia said as Emma sat down.

“He’s always running late.”

“That’s not true,” Claudia protested, looking her over. “Doesn’t it feel better to get out? It’s good to see you dressed.”

Emma shrugged. Her mother was on the verge of asking again what was really wrong, but she was saved by the arrival of her father, who slid into the chair next to her.

“I hope you ordered me a cupcake,” he said.

“We did, but I ate it,” Emma said.

He looked her over as well, a feeling of inspection to which she was becoming accustomed. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected earlier, yet she was still annoyed at how easily he’d walked away.

“I’m not used to seeing you awake. I thought you’d become nocturnal,” he said, oblivious.

The cupcakes arrived, but after a single bite, her parents glanced at each other.

“I realize I haven’t asked you why you were out running so late at night,” Claudia said, and at the knowing look on her mother’s face, Emma recalled the central tenet of her childhood:
You shall talk about how you feel.
Until recently, she’d never had reason to hold so much back. But once this restlessness and indecision had taken hold of her, she had only presented her life as she wished it was. As a child, she had been bolstered by her parents’ pride in her accomplishments, but now they were additional voices to which she had to answer. No matter what she did, both her parents always had the casual expectation of her success.

“Running at night is the best way. You’re not sure where you’re going and you have to trust your feet to find the way. And I’m so busy with my dissertation that I never want to take a break until late,” Emma said, and realized that lying was the right decision. Her mother’s words might be inviting her to tell, but the fearful look in her eyes was imploring her not to spoil who she imagined Emma to be.