Alternate Side(22)

Charlie still gave blood once a year, maybe because Nora had said, a couple of months after that night, that the blood donation was one of the reasons she had given him her number. She couldn’t tell him that, after all the bright young men who had talked about themselves manically as she nodded, the ones who were well and truly pissed that she wouldn’t sleep with them in exchange for coq au vin and Cabernet, the ones with whom she had slept, including the guy who had given her an STD she now had to mention on almost every damn medical form even all these years later—after them all, Charlie one-l no-d Nolan, literal, guileless, all the things that would eventually make her sometimes want to scream, on that night, in this city, made her feel like that moment when you walk out of the waves, teeth chattering, gooseflesh from shoulder to ankle, and someone wraps you in a towel. That towel is just a towel, ordinary, humdrum, but at that one moment it feels like fur, better than fur, like safety, care, the right thing. Walking her back to the minute first-floor apartment into which she’d just moved, in a deeply unfashionable but not horribly dangerous neighborhood, Charlie had stopped at her corner and said, “You are great.” When Rachel had rolled her eyes at the story, Charlie said it had never happened, but it had.

You. Are. Great.

Of course it now seemed forever ago. What had happened to all of them after they left behind those shabby little apartments, with the DMZ of boric acid showing white at the borders of cabinets and closets to ward off the roaches? When Nora had first met him at that bar Charlie had planned to practice environmental law, had instead been seconded to a junior partner in the corporate area, had traded in a job representing finance types for becoming one himself. Nora had meandered her way to something that might be called the top, she supposed, with her job at the museum.

The identities of everyone they knew were illusory: they considered themselves New Yorkers but all of them were from someplace else. And many of them had become people who loved to hate the city where they lived. But Nora had never stopped loving it. She still liked the sound of someone ranting on the street, someone screaming at a person who hadn’t picked up after a dog, someone fighting over a parking space that two cars thought they had claimed with their blinkers, or someone simply spouting random crazy talk, although now, with cellphones, it was sometimes hard to tell. In the old days a person speaking on the street was either a delusionary or an actor rehearsing for an audition; now it could be someone taking a meeting through an earpiece. Nora still found it all oddly soothing, the idea that she was safe and warm and drinking a cup of tea and reading The New Yorker and outside some woman was screaming at her boyfriend that he never, never, paid attention to what she was telling him (which had made Nora want to throw open the window and yell, “Duh!” into the raw and rainy night). She liked that she could hear the woman and the woman could see the light in her window and yet they were separate, unacquainted.

But even loving New York as she did, Nora sometimes felt it was like loving an old friend, someone who had over the years become different from her former self. Of course, Nora and Charlie had become different, too. It was as though, as the city had prospered and become less dirty, less funky, less hard and harsh, the Nolans and their friends had followed suit, all their rough edges and quirks sanded down into some New York standard of accomplishment. The price they had paid for prosperity was amnesia. They’d forgotten who they once had been.

Nora sometimes thought that if, through some magic of the space-time continuum, which she didn’t understand but had heard Oliver and his geeky friends discuss through an entire year of high school, she might run into her younger self on her walk some morning, the two of them would scarcely recognize each other. The old Nora would have contempt for the new. The former Nora would be buying a hot dog with the works at the hot dog place on the corner of Broadway near their house, an outpost of sanity in a five-dollar-latte world, and the now-Nora would trudge by after picking up a salad, thinking of nitrates and acid reflux.

“The best hangover cure on earth is one of those dogs with cooked onions,” Oliver had said his senior year in high school.

“Excuse me?” Nora said.

“Wake up and smell the mustard, Mommy,” Rachel had said. Every time Nora walked past the hot dog place she remembered that, exorcising the nitrates. Wake up and smell the mustard. Or the pickles outside the last old deli on the Lower East Side, an area that had improbably become cool, as had the deli. Or the gyros that marked the moment when she turned onto the block where the museum hunched over the narrow street. The gyros were sold from a truck that played tinny Greek music starting at ten in the morning. Nora nodded at the guy at the truck window as she went by.

“Here she comes,” called Phil, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. His sleeping bag was a dirty brown, his T-shirt gray, his sign, black marker on tan cardboard: VETERAN NEED SOMETHING TO EAT GOD BLESS YOU. The sky was as gray as his blanket.

“They’re predicting rain this afternoon,” Nora said.

“The driver for the big boss told me,” he said. Bebe was the big boss. Nora was merely the boss.





Nora couldn’t complain to Charlie about the poop bags on the stoop because she knew he would once again talk about leaving the city, which had become his answer to everything from the clogged drain in the parking lot to the rise in real estate taxes to, she suspected, her meeting with Bob Harris. “When you start your new job,” he would say sourly sometimes, no matter how often she said she had no intention of leaving the one she had. Charlie clutched his grievances close. He remembered every co-op building at which the real estate person had been high-handed, every restaurant at which they’d sat at the bar for too long while others were led to a table.