A Window Across the River Read Free Page B

hold of it and zapped out of existence a story
Nora had been working on for six months. Nora hadn’t saved it to disk, hadn’t printed it out. After a night during which she looked seasick, and in which she watched the entire six-and-a-half-hour
Godfather Saga
on TV because it cheered her to see people blowing one another away, she calmly started afresh on the story the next morning. “This version’ll probably be better,” she’d said.
    That was the Nora he knew.
    The Nora he knew had a quietly ferocious tenacity that wouldn’t let anything stand in her way.
    She was more beautiful than ever, in his eyes. This was maddening; it would have been easier, in a way, if she weren’t.
    It was funny to think that when he first met her, he wasn’t even that attracted to her. He liked her immediately, but she looked too pure to have lustful thoughts about. She looked very
healthy
—that was his first impression. She had the glowing skin of an athlete: a runner or a swimmer or a rock climber. Her nose was slightly, interestingly, crooked—probably, Isaac assumed, from some challenging activity too zealously pursued. A kayaking accident, maybe, or a pole-vaulting mishap. She didn’t instantly stir up feelings of desire; she stirred up thoughts of hearty outdoor activities.
    When he got to know her, he learned that she wasn’t athletic in the least. The freshness of her skin, the subtle muscles of her arms and legs, her swimmer’s shoulders—all this was part of her genetic inheritance, entirely unearned. She’d never been on a hike in her life, and she didn’t even know
how
to swim. She hardly ever left the city. Once he’d managed to drag her off to a weekend in Maine, and when they got back to Manhattan, after they emerged from Grand Central, as they stood in the twilight with the Empire State Building and the
Chrysler Building blazing above them, she’d spread out her arms and said, “
This
is God’s country, my friend!”
    She liked to portray herself as a neurotic writer, housebound, averse to natural light, but that wasn’t the way he saw her. He still saw her as a mountain climber, or as the moral equivalent. Confident and strong. She was a small slim slight woman, but he thought of her as the person who, if you were pinned beneath a car, would be the most likely to be able to free you.
    After she broke up with him, one or two of his friends had suggested that his estimate of her—her brilliance, her beauty, her force—was exaggerated, and that he’d soon be able to see this, soon be able to downsize her in his imagination. But, for better or for worse, he never had.
    He wondered whether she was really going to call him again. She’d always been impulsive. She was always getting in touch with people she hadn’t spoken to in ages. She’d call up to apologize for something she’d done years earlier, usually something the other person didn’t even remember. And then, after that, she might not call again, and if the other person called
her,
she might forget to call back.
    He wondered whether he was going to have to wait another five years.
    Didn’t some guy have to wait seven years for a woman in the Bible—and then have to wait another seven years? The guy who wanted to marry Rachel, but ended up marrying Leah by mistake? He tried to call it up, but he couldn’t quite remember the story.

7
    N ORA STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK , waiting to catch the keys. Her aunt Billie lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Fifty-first Street, in the neighborhood that used to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Nora couldn’t remember what it was called now. Billie couldn’t buzz her visitors into the building, so she’d stand at the window and toss them a set of keys.
    When Nora was a girl, she and her mother would come to New York to visit Billie two or three times a year, and she was always thrilled by the sight of Billie throwing down her keys. It seemed like something from a fairy tale—Rapunzel letting down her hair.