Alternate Side(77)
Nora laughed. “You’re the only one who has been honest about that. The people here, the people on the block where I used to live, everyone says, Oh, we’ll get together, we’ll have dinner, we’ll have coffee.”
“Yeah, that seems like what you ought to say. But it doesn’t happen, right?”
“I guess people say it because it’s too sad to say what you said, that that’s that.”
Phil shrugged. “New York is a city of the mind,” he said. “I’m in yours, you’re in mine.”
“Who are you, really?” Nora said. “A city of the mind? Come on. Are you doing a book on New York street life and this is all research? Am I going to show up in some college course about interactions between the homeless and the people who give them money?”
“You’ve never given me money.”
Nora reached into her wallet and took out a twenty. “If I do, will you tell me who you really are?”
He grinned. “Nah, I wouldn’t take your money. And I’m Phil. You know that. I’m Phil. Enjoy the dictionary. You’ll remember me when you use it.”
Nora kept it on her desk at work, with a plaster vase Rachel had made in second grade and a paperweight that was Oliver’s handprint at age six. She didn’t have anything that Charlie had given her; she’d put her wedding band in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box months ago, when she noticed that Charlie had stopped wearing his. That was the day she and Charlie had met to sign some papers and had started to talk and all of it had come pouring out, his feeling that he’d always been her second choice, that he’d taken the wrong turn in his work, that his life somehow felt like a rented house whose rooms were half empty. She thought back to that weekend in Asheville. “New York isn’t the real world,” he’d said. Someday soon he’d decide to move south, work as a financial adviser for some wealthy clients, play a lot of golf. They’d known people who’d done the same, and Nora had always discussed it with contempt, but Charlie had always just kept quiet, and she knew now that he had been thinking her contempt was not only for that life but for the life he wanted, the life he thought would make him happy, for him. He would marry the nurse and take her away from the daily grind. Nora would have to remind Rachel to be nice.
Everyone would move on in ways that would make it seem as though their lives were much the same, perhaps even better. Ricky and Nita had their restaurant in the Dominican Republic, George a new crop of residents to insinuate himself with and then to annoy. Before long everyone on the block would forget that anyone but Joe had ever snaked out their back drains or washed their windows. Even the story of how Jack Fisk had lit into someone with a golf club, sensational as it was, would begin to dim. Sherry, Linda, Oliver, Rachel, Charlie, Nora: they would all just go on, with resilience or denial or just the right combination of both. People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still. Ricky would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. “Hell, I’d use a damn cane if there was enough money in it,” the man in front of the bodega had said. Nora wondered if that’s how Ricky felt.
Sometimes she would think of an alternate reality in which Charlie had worked for Legal Aid and she had gone to social-work school and their children had gone to public school and they’d had to turn the dining room into a bedroom because they’d only been able to afford to rent a smallish place. Would that have been so bad? Would that have been so good? The alternate reality she couldn’t allow herself was the one in which she never went to The Tattooed Lady, never met Charlie Nolan and married him, although she knew that there were alternate realities without him that might suit the Nora she was today better. But once there were children, you couldn’t zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.
Sometimes Nora wondered, too, about that alternate universe in which Jack Fisk didn’t need to get his car out that particular morning, in which Ricky went about his business as usual, Sherry Fisk didn’t move, the Nolans stayed married, no one got a windfall and moved to the Dominican Republic. It was a little like watching a version of It’s a Wonderful Life starring herself. But it also assumed that everything else remained in stasis. Was that what her life had consisted of, a game of statues in the center of a city that changed in ways big and small every single day, even Sundays and holidays, even Shavuot and Ascension Thursday?
Landed on her feet: that’s what everyone would say of Nora. “Still young,” her friends whispered, which meant still young enough to marry again. Running the foundation, furnishing her new place, starting fresh, except for Richard. He had followed her from the museum, gone from temporary to permanent. “That’s more my speed,” he’d said when she described the foundation, and it was. When they received applications for grants, he divided them into two piles: sketchy and not sketchy. Sometimes she took him on visits with her. She had rented office space on 125th Street, a part of the city she never knew before but which was growing more desirable every day, as every place seemed to have done. The areas of New York that were once shorthand for danger were changing one by one, until she heard her children’s friends talk about renting in places she would never have dared to walk, places in which, if she had gotten off the subway accidentally, she would not have left the station. “You’re saving me a ton of money in rent,” Bob Harris had said, “but be careful. Even poor people figure you get what you pay for.”