Alternate Side(21)
She loved this part of her day, even in the worst weather, when the wind, abetted by the open runway of the river, ripped at the spokes of her umbrella and rattled the nylon overhead. Even with the pale scrim of snowfall or fog, she could see the skyline of the New Jersey towns, what always seemed like a halfhearted attempt to echo their triumphant cousin across the Hudson. Charlie tolerated New York City, but was prone to spreading his arms and crooning, “Ah, smell that air,” when he found himself anywhere from her father’s house in Connecticut to an inn in the Tuscan countryside. Nora liked those places, but her relationship to the city was primal and chemical. There was a great immutability to the Hudson River, broad and gray and dappled like moiré taffeta, and a certain democracy to those she passed going to and fro, who, in workout clothes or the coat thrown on to walk the schnauzer, could be schoolteacher or CEO.
Occasionally she passed the walk-up building where she had lived for two years after college, sharing a one-bedroom. She and Jenny had flipped a coin to see who would sleep on the living room futon, and Nora had lost. Actually, Jenny scarcely needed the bedroom since there were many nights when she did not come home, and Nora lay awake wondering how long she should wait before calling the police. Then just after dawn, with mascara-ed raccoon eyes and pantyhose in her purse, Jenny would tiptoe through to the kitchen, and coffee.
She was getting her doctorate at Columbia then and stayed on to teach there, although when the time came she was almost denied tenure. She had expanded her thesis on matriarchal societies into a popular book that had gotten a lot of attention and landed Jenny on several television interview shows, which worked perfectly because she looked like an actress playing a young and beautiful anthropologist, all curly hair and big eyes and bohemian clothing. This led the chair of the department to refer to her as a “popular” academic, with the word popular used as a perjorative. But two weeks later the chair of the department had died of a stroke, and the week after that the provost’s wife invited Jenny to speak to her book club, which was convenient because all its members were the wives of administrators or professors. There were no other women in the anthropology department, and the university was being investigated for gender bias, and Jenny got tenure and then, later, an endowed chair. “Just a series of lucky breaks,” she always said with a grin. “Especially that stroke.”
Every once in a while, when she had a meeting, Nora would pass the narrow windows of the bar at which she’d met Charlie. Fourteen Carrots, it was called now, with its vegan menu, but then it had been The Tattooed Lady. Nora hadn’t wanted to go that night, she remembered. She’d had an unremarkable romantic life in the city compared to that of her other girlfriends, which was to say it hovered between pathetic and disastrous. She had arrived in the city still deeply in love with her ex-boyfriend from college and had had the bad fortune, on an early date with a broker who had been attractive and not at all obviously psycho, to see James at a table across the room, laughing, combing back his wavy, dark hair with one hand in a gesture she knew as well as she knew the alphabet. Nora had wept over the crème br?lée on the dessert menu, which had been their dessert, hers and James’s. (“Who has a dessert?” Jenny said the next day. “A song, okay. A place. But a dessert? And the most boring dessert. Okay, maybe rice pudding is more boring, but, Jesus, Nor, at least cry for lava cake.”) Of course the broker had never called her again.
Nora had lost track of all the ones who came after, and in retrospect she blamed herself. Her great love affair had ended under such an improbable cloud that she was suspicious of virtually every man she encountered. Every first date was second-guessing. There had been what seemed like a really nice lawyer, who brought a picnic to Central Park and took her to the Cloisters, and who for several weeks she thought might be in it for the long haul. Then he disappeared, and her friend Jean-Ann, also a lawyer, heard his name and mentioned that in her circle he was called The Phantom because he wowed every woman he wooed and then vanished without a trace. And Nora’s distrust only deepened.
It was Jenny who had insisted she come to The Tattooed Lady. There was a TA at Columbia Jenny wanted Nora to meet, not, she assured her, for a real relationship, but for reliable sex. Jenny always liked to say that she didn’t date, she slept with people, and once she had had a couple glasses of wine, slept with was not the term she used. Earlier that day she had helped Nora pick out her first leather jacket, and she made her wear it and wear her hair down, too. “What the hell with the ponytail, Nor,” she’d said, pulling the elastic loose. “You’ll be losing your hair by the time you’re forty.” Forty had sounded then like another country, like they would need passports and language lessons to live there.
The Columbia student was attractive in that peevish, elfin way that for some reason Jenny favored, and he wore ironic clothes, a vintage varsity jacket, brown-and-black saddle shoes. Charlie was his sort-of friend from Bowdoin, who, the Columbia student made clear in a series of asides, he had had to bring along after they’d run into each other unexpectedly. The TA chatted with Jenny while sizing up Nora sidelong, his index finger held in front of his lips in a way that looked disapproving. But Charlie bought Nora a drink and told her about a case he was working on pro bono, a school that was being dispossessed by the church in which it held classes. He’d just come from the office and he opened his briefcase to show her a drawing the first grade had made: THANK YOU MR. NOLLAND FOR HELPING OUR SHUL. “It’s a Jewish school?” Nora said, but Charlie smoothed out the drawing with his hand and said, “No, they’re kids—they can’t spell. My name is Nolan, one l, no d.” He had a Band-Aid on the bend of his arm, and when Nora asked about it he pulled it off and balled it up, said, “I forgot all about that. Company blood drive.”