A Window Across the River Read Free

sorry for asking.”
    “Then why’d you ask?”
    “It was like our conversation was getting too real. I was trying to hide out in small talk. But I don’t want to do that with you. If I can’t be real with
you,
then I’m finished.”
    “I’m glad you’re not finished,” he said.

5
    N ORA LIVED ON 108 TH AND B ROADWAY . Isaac had parked near there, so they walked together.
    “Do you like it up here?”
    “I do,” she said. “It’s exciting.”
    She used to live in the provinces—in darkest Brooklyn. She’d moved into Manhattan a year ago.
    She loved living up here. She was telling Isaac a story about how she’d lucked into her apartment; as she talked, she was reveling in the day. It was a summerlike afternoon in the middle of May; Broadway was crowded with Columbia students, and Nora wondered about each one they passed: two fierce young men who looked as if they’d just been arguing about Trotsky; a woman browsing at the table in front of the art supply store, with a meditative expression and independent-minded hair; a Paul Bunyan type in a flannel shirt and overalls, who looked as if he’d been shipped in a box from New Hampshire. Isaac, though he was a photographer, trained to
see,
had his attention fastened to Nora so closely that he didn’t seem to notice any of it. A beautiful young woman on Rollerblades swept by—tall, long-legged, in a halter top and shorts—and Isaac didn’t even take a glance.
    “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. “I only need to work for an hour. Then I can introduce you to the mysteries of New Jersey.”
    “That sounds like every girl’s dream. I wish I could. But I have to see Billie tonight.”
    Billie was Nora’s aunt. Isaac smiled when he heard her name. He’d always liked her; everyone did. Billie was the most lovable person Nora knew. If you didn’t love Billie, Nora sometimes thought, you didn’t love life.
    “How’s she doing?”
    “Not that great. They found a lump in her breast, and she has to go in for some tests this week.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that. Please give her my love.” He opened the door of his car. “How about tomorrow?”
    She felt weird about the idea of spending an evening with him. She
could
do it; Benjamin was at a conference in Berlin. But still.
    She sometimes thought that she and Benjamin abided by an unwritten law that held that both could retain the opposite-sex friends they’d had before they met but couldn’t make any new ones. Maybe most couples abide by that law.
    She hadn’t seen Isaac in years. Did he count as an old friend or a new one?
    And how about sleeping with him? Did the unwritten law permit her to sleep with guys she’d slept with before she met Benjamin?
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll call you.”
    She didn’t want to kiss him good-bye. In the old days, they’d never had a kiss that meant nothing. A Saturday-morning kiss on the street corner when he was heading off to
do his laundry and she was buying the paper, and they’d be seeing each other again in half an hour—even when it was that kind of kiss, it never felt like a small thing.
    But she didn’t know if she was prepared for something like that now.
    So no kiss.
    She took off her watch, dropped it into the heart pocket of his shirt, and patted him there.

6
    I SAAC DROVE BACK TO New Jersey, thinking about Muhammad Ali.
    He was excited. And upset. And excited.
    When Nora had called him last week, out of the blue—but not out of the blue at all, because he was always thinking about her—he’d had a mystical feeling that life was coming full circle. He’d always believed that someday she’d see the mistake she’d made when she left him, and that she’d come back to him.
    But she evidently hadn’t come back into his life to repair her mistake. It was impossible to tell
why
she’d come back. Or if she’d really come back at all.
    He drove to his office, got some coffee, and forced himself to