Visible City (9 page)

When Jeremy next looked out the window, he imagined stained-glass windows unveiled from behind walls, and dark subway tunnels giving way to unexpected bursts of light.

Nina spent the night in front of the computer, Googling the neighbors. She learned that Leon specialized in anxiety disorders. She found Claudia’s book from ten years before about the history of American stained glass. She entered Emma’s name too and found listings for the French language classes she’d taught and two conference papers she’d presented.

Since recognizing Claudia, Nina had been overcome with the urge to talk to Leon. She took the kids on evening runs to the grocery store, hoping she’d run into him on their block. Twice, she saw him sitting in his car while she was outside with the kids, and after that, she timed their walks to coincide with his mornings in the car. She stood in front of the construction site, waiting for him to pass. When she saw him on the street, she always stopped to talk, and he too was willing to linger. She had to remind herself that she didn’t know him as well as she imagined, but even if he detected the longing in her expression, he wouldn’t know how to interpret it. He wouldn’t know what she saw out her window. He wouldn’t know that she’d recognized his wife.

At home, in front of the window, she was a hunter lying in wait for some flash of movement, some rustling of life. Instead of offering solace, the view from her window made her lonelier. If only she could summon an emergency babysitter, or leave two sleeping kids by themselves for an hour—anything to be outside. As though they’d been alerted to her watchful presence, the last few nights had passed without her seeing Claudia or Leon. The only one she saw was Emma. The television, whose existence had been hidden inside a wood armoire, now glowed blue for much of the night. But finally, one night, the lights came on and Claudia and Leon took their places on the couch. Their books were open, but this was no longer a vision of shared solitude. Instead of seeing contentment, she saw only loneliness. Instead of imagining quiet murmured conversations, she saw a clipped, tense silence.

She reached for the pair of Fisher-Price binoculars her mother had given Max, part of the Outdoor Adventure set that had arrived following their last visit to her parents’ house when Max looked nervously at the grass and asked if he was allowed to walk on it. As the faces across the way sharpened, so did the feeling that she was doing something wrong. But she tried to push away her guilt; if this was a crime, surely it was one without consequence or repercussion.

At the sound of Jeremy’s key in the door, Nina put down the binoculars. She couldn’t turn the lights on quickly enough, however, and when he came upon her sitting in the dark, binoculars next to her on the couch, he laughed.

“Stargazing?” he asked.

He was looking expectantly at her, as though arriving home at only eleven o’clock at night was a feat to be celebrated. She kissed him hello, but her mind was far from her body. She was glad she hadn’t told him about her growing interest in the neighbors. Her day was filled with details, few of which he would care about, but this omission felt like a secret. Jeremy didn’t have to say anything for her to read his thought:
So this is what happens when you spend your day with children.
Max had his world of make-believe. Now she had hers. If she thought about what she’d done all day, there were no large accomplishments, nothing she could point to except the fulfillment of a hundred different needs.

He took the binoculars. “Very high-tech. Does Max know you’re borrowing these?”

“How was work?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

“What took so long?” she asked, and he bristled. He didn’t have to say anything for her to know his response. It wasn’t his fault he worked so late, not his fault he could never come home. With these excuses, he thought that he escaped her blame, but now she realized that he left behind something more corrosive. She wished she could change the way she had started to view him, but there was no way to avoid seeing his weakness. He would always work these long hours, believing he had no choice. He saw himself as powerless to make any change, powerless inside his own life.

“Are our neighbors up to anything exciting?” he asked.

“Nothing unusual.”

“So why are you watching them?” he asked.

“I like to think about other people’s lives,” she said, and pointed to the quiet scene of Leon and Claudia still reading on the couch, long after so many other squares had darkened or closed off. “Look—they keep the same hours you do. We should have them over for a midnight snack.”

“Hold up a sign and invite them,” he said, spreading his documents out on the table. It was hard to believe she too had once worked these long hours, in an earlier century of their marriage. It was hard to believe that they had once been mere study partners, then friends. In their first year of law school, neither of them was sure why exactly they were there, but they both worked slavishly, lulled by the expectation that after three years they would know what they were going to be. One night, amid a pile of outlines and hand-scrawled notes, he had reached for her and kissed her. The notes lay crushed underneath their bodies, the next day’s criminal law lecture forgotten for the moment. They happily stayed awake all night, lying side by side in bed, whispering to one another,
Tell me everything.
All semester, when they looked at the crumpled pages, they had smiled at what had been kindled between them. Even years later, when they both brought home stacks of legal documents, their lives overrun with paper, they had joked about wanting to crush those pages beneath them.

That memory was so distant now that it was a story told about two strangers. They were no longer a married couple but the co-owners of a daycare center. Their lives before kids were as fantastical, or at least as inaccessible, as life on other planets. There was no time to even entertain themselves, as they once had, by concocting a thousand and one ways in which their lives could be different. “We sell our apartment,” one of them would begin. “And buy an RV.” “And move to the country.” “Or strap the kids to our backs and travel through Europe.” “Open a small-town practice together.” “Sell everything we own and go live in your parents’ basement,” they would say before they fell asleep and woke up the next morning to the way it had always been.

Watching fueled her restlessness. She wanted not just bodies laid bare but minds. With so many existing forms of surveillance, surely someone could invent a means of seeing inside people’s heads. Online, she entered Claudia’s and Leon’s names in combination, as if this might turn up what she wanted to know, the search engine powerful enough to access not just posted words but private thoughts. You should be able to Google your neighbors and hear conversations that took place behind closed doors. Google your friends and uncover their varieties of unhappiness. Google your husband and find an explanation for why, on the phone or in rare moments together, he sounded more distant than usual; add in the words
our marriage
and see a description of who you were going to become.

Only before going to sleep did Nina remember to check on Hop, the pet Max had already started to lose interest in. Unable to recall the last time she’d fed him, Nina steeled herself to the possibility that she’d killed him.

Not only was Hop alive, he was thriving. In the absence of attention, Hop had taken the final leap. Finally more frog than tadpole, he had emerged from the water and stood on the rock, calmly taking in his surroundings. It was almost midnight, but Nina tiptoed into Max’s room.

Breaking the cardinal rule of their existence, Nina woke a sleeping child. Max opened his eyes, confused, then thrilled. In the living room, they all looked into the bowl, Jeremy taking a break from his work, Max leaning in so close that his breathing fogged the glass.

“How did Hop know how to become a frog?” Max asked them.

“That’s just what they do,” Jeremy explained.

“It’s how their bodies work,” Nina said. In her son’s eyes, a look of pure wonder, the world on the cusp of breaking wide open.

In the morning, Nina took the kids to the neighborhood pet store where the man behind the counter packaged six insects in a small cardboard box with holes punched in the top.

“These should last you a week. But you’re going to need to feed the crickets too,” he said.

While Nina worried about the prospect of housing an entire food chain, Lily waved to the fish and Max eyed the snakes, deciding which animal he wanted next. There was no need to trek to the Central Park Zoo when they could wander through a store in which chameleons, lizards, and turtles were stacked in glass tanks. At night, when the lights were turned off, the store was aglow with eyes. Taped to the back of the tanks were pictures of tropical escapes, the same lush fantasies that hung in the window of the travel agency next door. But only the geckos were fooled by these backdrops, their arms and legs suctioned to the back of their tanks, stunned to come up against glass.

While they gazed at the animals, Wendy came into the store to order five hundred goldfish for Hippo Park’s summer carnival which she had volunteered to organize. Still embarrassed by the Gymboree tantrum, Nina pretended not to see her and tried to walk out. But there was no escape; the kids caught sight of each other and Harry threw his arms around Max, suddenly long-lost friends. Together, they pressed their faces to the tank of baby gerbils in a bald, red, wriggling heap.

“They have to separate the daddies because they might eat the babies,” Wendy explained matter-of-factly.

“Do the mommies ever eat the babies?” Sophie asked.

“The mommies! Of course not,” Wendy said as the kids moved on to the rats, exclaiming over them as though they were exotic creatures never before seen in the city.

“Can we get one?” Sophie asked.

“I’m so glad to see you taking such an interest in animals, Sophie,” Wendy said, and turned to Nina. “Normally I have a no-screen-time policy, but I decided to make an exception for
National Geographic
DVDs.”

“Please?” Sophie begged.

“You have a goldfish, honey,” Wendy said.

“I’m sick of Swimmy,” Sophie said.

“What do you have?” Wendy asked Nina as they walked out together.

“We have a frog. Or at least now we do. Max brought home one of the class tadpoles,” Nina said. Frog trumped fish. She’s exposing her child to nature, bolstering his sense of competency. She’s willing to feed live crickets to live frogs, all for the sake of her child.

“Can you believe that sign?” Wendy said when they’d walked farther uptown and passed Georgia’s. “When I saw it a few days ago, I thought it had to be a joke. It’s not really my problem, I know. In a few months I won’t even be living in the city. But it’s the principle that matters. I’m not going to let them get away with this. I’m going to call the owner and—”

“That bitch,” Sophie said.

Wendy’s face turned as pink as Sophie’s wardrobe. “What did you say?”

“You said, ‘That bitch hates kids.’”

“No one hates kids, honey,” Wendy soothed. “You must have misheard me. And I certainly don’t remember using that word, but it does sound like that’s what you heard, doesn’t it?” Wendy turned to Nina. “They’re upset that they were yelled at by a stranger a few weeks ago.” She turned back to the kids. “Were you scared? Do you want to talk about it again?” Wendy said.

Kids could say what they wanted, but the mothers were supposed to speak softly and have eternal patience. They talked to their kids this way, Nina realized, not because they wanted to respect their needs, but because they were terrified. The truth they took such great pains to cover: the kids were in charge.

“Do you ever get angry at them?” Nina asked.

Wendy looked up in surprise. “Of course not. They’re delicious,” she said as Sophie tugged on her arm, and Wendy gave that same joyous gaze, that same indulgent smile. Underneath perfect, Nina realized, she would only find more perfect.

“We’re just going in for a minute,” Nina said to Max and Lily once Wendy and her kids walked away and she realized that Leon was inside the café, reading.

Offering a prayer to the God of Tantrums, she navigated the double stroller into the café. Leon looked up at her with surprise, but it was apparent from his face that he was glad to see her.

“You just missed the old couple who scream at each other in public,” he said, sitting at the same table where she’d seen him and his family a few weeks before.

“They upgraded from Starbucks?”

“They started fighting as soon as they sat down. It’s hard to follow the argument, because they start up so quietly. Next time I should ask them to speak up.”

“Ask for some background information,” Nina said.

“Give me a list. I’ll go up to them and say, ‘You know that woman with the two kids? Here’s what she wants to know.’”

He invited her to sit, and she did, surprised to feel so comfortable with him when her other friendships had been whittled down to those people whose kids were close in age to hers. Until now, she’d thought of men his age only as fathers, not friends.