Norah snorts. “You’re right. That must be it.”
“Does your dad work around here?”
“No. He’s all about downtown. Yours?”
Now it’s my turn to snort. “Not employed at the present,” I say. “Definitely for lack of trying.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No worries.”
“Are your parents still together?”
“In the sense that they live in the same house, yeah. Yours?”
“They were high school sweethearts. Married twenty-five years now. Still happy and still doing it. Complete freaks of nature.”
We sit down on the edge of one of the corporate fountains, watching the headlight show of passing traffic.
“So, do you come here often?” I joke.
“Yeah. I know, I’m so bridge-and-tunnel—for as long as I’ve been able to catch the train, I’ve been sneaking into the city to go to Midtown. Hang out with the bankers, merge some mergers and acquire some acquisitions. The whole thing just reeked of sex and rock ’n’ roll to me. Can’t you feel it in the air? Close your eyes. Feel it?”
I do close my eyes. I hear the cars passing, not just in front of us, but on streets throughout the grid. I hear the buildings yawning into space. I hear my heartbeat. I have this momentary fantasy that she’s going to lean over and kiss me again. But enough time goes by for me to know this isn’t going to happen. When I open them, I find her looking at me.
“You’re cute. You know that?” she says.
I have no idea what to say to that. So it just hangs in the air, until I finally say, “You’re just saying that to get me to take off my clothes and frolic in the fountain.”
“Am I really that transparent? Fuck!” Her look is quizzical, but I don’t feel like this is a quiz.
“We could go break into St. Patrick’s instead,” I suggest.
“With our clothes off?”
“I’d have to keep on my socks. Do you know what kind of people touch the ground there?”
“I’ll have to say ix-nay on the athedral-cay. I can see the headlines now: ‘RECORD EXEC DAUGHTER FOUND PLAYING PORNISH PRANKS IN PATRICK’S. “We thought she was such a nice Jewish girl,” neighbors say.’”
“You’re Jewish?” I ask.
Norah looks at me like I just asked if she was really a girl.
“Of course I’m Jewish.”
“So what’s that like?” I ask.
“Are you kidding me?”
Do I look like I’m kidding her?
“No,” I say. “Really. What’s that like?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something that is. It’s not something that’s like.”
“Well, what are your favorite things about it?”
“Like the fact that there are eight days of Hanukkah?”
“Sure, if that means something to you.”
“All it really means to me is that I was slightly less bitter about not having a tree when I was a kid.”
“So what about the real things?” I ask. I want to know more.
“The real things?”
“Yeah. Try.”
She thinks for a second. “Okay. There’s one part of Judaism I really like. Conceptually, I mean. It’s called tikkun olam.”
“Tikkun olam,” I repeat.
“Exactly. Basically, it says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job—everyone’s job—is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again.”
“And you believe that?” I ask. Not as a challenge. As a genuine question.
She shrugs, then negates the shrug with the thought in her eyes. “I guess I do. I mean, I don’t know how the world broke. And I don’t know if there’s a God who can help us fix it. But the fact that the world is broken—I absolutely believe that. Just look around us. Every minute—every single second—there are a million things you could be thinking about. A million things you could be worrying about. Our world—don’t you just feel we’re becoming more and more fragmented? I used to think that when I got older, the world would make so much more sense. But you know what? The older I get, the more confusing it is to me. The more complicated it is. Harder. You’d think we’d be getting better at it. But there’s just more and more chaos. The pieces—they’re everywhere. And nobody knows what to do about it. I find myself grasping, Nick. You know that feeling? That feeling when you just want the right thing to fall into the right place, not only because it’s right, but because it will mean that such a thing is still possible? I want to believe in that.”
“Do you really think it’s getting worse?” I ask. “I mean, aren’t we better off than we were twenty years ago? Or a hundred?”
“We’re better off. But I don’t know if the world’s better off. I don’t know if the two are the same thing.”
“You’re right,” I say.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘You’re right.’”
“But nobody ever says, ‘You’re right.’ Just like that.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She leans into me a little then. Not accidental. But still somehow it feels like an accident—us being here, this night. As if she’s reading my mind, she says, “I appreciate it.” Then her head falls to my shoulder, and all I can feel is her fitting there. I look up, trying to find the sky behind the building, trying to find at least a trace of the stars. When I can’t, I close my eyes and try to conjure my own, glad that Norah’s not reading my mind just now, because I don’t know how I’d react if anyone knew me like that. As we sit in that city silence, which is not so much silence as light noise, my mind drifts back a few minutes, thinking about what she said.