A Window Across the River Read Free Page A

concentrate. He had to choose among sixteen photos of a town council meeting in Leonia; he had to choose all the photos for the sports section; and he had to put together a montage to illustrate an article on Disneyland. All in the next half hour.
    He was mad at himself for asking her to get together. He should have let well enough alone.
    It was
disturbing
to have Nora back in his life. It had taken him so long to wean himself, so long to let go of the longing. If he ever had. Which he hadn’t.
    Not too long after Nora left him, Isaac had spent a few months with a woman named Clarissa. She was bright, interested in him, accomplished—she was a cellist—and she was lovely; some people would have considered her far more attractive than Nora. One Saturday night they were in a bookstore on Broadway—he was still living in the city then—and he ran into Nora. Clarissa was upstairs in the poetry section, Isaac was browsing through photography magazines, and Nora floated over to say hello. They didn’t say much—just exchanged a few superficialities—and they didn’t touch, but he felt as if she’d placed her hand on his skin. When Nora left and he found Clarissa again, leafing through the love poems of Pablo Neruda, he knew he couldn’t be with her. He didn’t know if he’d ever see Nora again, but he knew he couldn’t be with Clarissa.
    In 1978, when he was in his teens, he had seen Leon Spinks, a negligible fighter, take the heavyweight title away from Muhammad Ali, who had grown listless and slow-footed with age. After the fight, talking with reporters, Spinks had graciously and accurately said, “He’s still the greatest. I’m just the latest.”
    Nora, Isaac was thinking, was the Muhammad Ali of his romantic life. The women who’d come after her had had their virtues, but each of them had merely been the latest. And because of the memory of Nora, he’d been unable to give himself fully to anyone else. There wasn’t room in his heart, it seemed, for more than one person.
    And now she was in some sort of crisis of the spirit.
    It was hard to listen to her talk about her crisis of the spirit. It was hard to listen to anything that didn’t lead to
him.
    He sat at his computer, scrolling through photographs of Daisy Duck. From some angles Daisy was pretty sexy.
    While Nora had talked about needing to change her life, needing to rededicate herself to her work, he’d been thinking, Do you really think that’s enough? Isn’t it fucking
obvious
what you need? Isn’t it fucking clear to you that the big thing missing in your life is
me
?
    When had men become women and women become men?
    It had happened at some point during his lifetime. When he watched movies from the forties and fifties, the men and women struck him as so different from the men and women of today that he sometimes felt as if he was watching science fiction. The wimpiest man of the forties was manlier than the manliest man of today.
    Pining after a woman for years, resenting her because she’s more interested in her career than in being with you—how had this happened?
    He didn’t even know
why
he loved her.
    Yes he did. He did know.
    She excited him. She thrilled him. He’d never felt bored with her. He was always eager to hear what she had to say. In the old days, when they sometimes went to dinner parties where they had to sit apart from each other, the experience itself counted for nothing; what counted for everything was talking about it with her later. In the midst of the party, he’d sometimes watch her from across the room, watch the play of intelligence and humor in her eyes, and feel lucky to know that later that night he’d find out what she’d been thinking.
    At the diner, listening to her story, he’d found it hard to believe that she was feeling so defeated. It wasn’t the Nora he knew.
    Years ago, shortly after he and Nora had started seeing each other, she lent her laptop to her friend Helen, whose four-year-old son got