Norah’s phone rings and she pulls it out of her pocket. She looks at the screen and mumbles, “Caroline.” I see she’s about to answer it, and find myself saying, “Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Yeah.”
Another ring.
“What if it’s an emergency?”
“She’ll call back. Look, I want us to take a walk.”
“A walk?”
Ring number three.
“Yeah. You, me, and the city. I want to talk to you.”
“Are you serious?”
“Not as a rule, but in this case yes.”
Ring.
“Where will we go?”
“Wherever. It’s only”—I look at my watch—“four in the morning.”
Pause.
Silence.
Voice mail.
Norah bites her bottom lip.
“Thinking about it?” I ask uneasily.
“No. Just thinking about where to go. Somewhere nobody will find us.”
“Like Park Avenue?”
And Norah tilts her head, looks at me a little askew, and says, “Yes, like Park Avenue.”
And then she utters a word I never in a zillion years thought I’d ever hear her utter:
“Midtown.”
It’s ridiculous, but we take the subway. Even more ridiculous, it’s the 6 train that we take, the most notoriously slow local in all of Manhattan. At four in the morning, we’re on the platform for a good twenty minutes—the time it would’ve taken us to walk—but I don’t mind the delay because we’re talking all over the place, hitting Heathers and peanut butter preferences and favorite pairs of underwear and Tris’s occasional body odor and Tal’s body hair fetish and the fate of the Olsen twins and the number of times we’ve seen rats in the subway and our favorite graffiti ever—all in what seems like a single sentence that lasts the whole twenty minutes. Then we’re in the weird fluorescence of the subway car, sliding into each other when the train stops and starts, making comments with our eyes about the misbegotten drunkards, business-suit stockbroker frat boys, and weary night travelers that share our space. I am having a f**king great time, and the amazing thing is that I realize it even as it’s happening. I think Norah’s getting into it, too. Sometimes when we slide together, we take a few seconds to separate ourselves. We’re not to the point of deliberately touching again, but we’re not about to turn down a good accident.
We get out of the subway at Grand Central and walk north on Park. It’s completely empty, the skyscrapers standing guard up and down the avenue, sleeping sentries of the important world.
“It feels like we’re in a canyon,” Norah says.
“What freaks me out is how many of the buildings still have lights on. I mean, there have to be thousands of lights in each building that are left on for the night. That can’t be very efficient.”
“There are probably still people working. Checking their e-mail. Making another million. Screwing someone over while they sleep.”
“Or maybe,” I say, “they just think it’s pretty.”
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.
Then it hits me.
“Maybe we’re the pieces,” I say.
Norah’s head doesn’t move from my arm. “What?” she asks. I can tell from her voice that her eyes are still closed.
“Maybe that’s it,” I say gently. “With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces.”
She doesn’t reply, but I can tell she’s listening carefully. I feel like I’m understanding something for the first time, even if I’m not entirely sure what it is yet.
“Maybe,” I say, “what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.”
Tikkun olam.
16. NORAH
Nick and I have fallen silent again but I don’t think it’s the uncomfortable variety of silence. I think it’s dawn closing in and we’re both as sleepy as we are stimulated, and as Saturday rolls into Sunday, it’s almost mesmerizing to look up the canyon to the clouds, murky gray and yellow from the city lights, while on the ground the banking and secretarial types smoke outside the building lobbies as Lincoln Town Cars idle at the curb, waiting to take the overnight workers home. The scions of the financial world here do not appear to notice or care that time could stop at any moment, so why not obey that ‘on the seventh day ye shall rest’ thing? At least, go out and enjoy your life. Like I am now, watching you.
But I am so greedy to learn more about Nick that I can’t bear the silence, even if it’s a nice one. Maybe the way to find out more about him is to tell him more about me. So I inform him, “I get my flannel in the men’s department at Marshalls.”
“My mom loves that store,” he says.
“Your mom is smart.”
I wait. Will he tell me more about his mom?
While my mind plays through the information I’ve compiled about him so far on this night, my mouth is talking stupid f**king Marshalls because my head is still getting around Nick’s words about tikkun olam: Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces.
Because I am trying to put together the pieces that make up this guy. Let’s review. Straight-edge guy who survived a six-month relationship with Tris. Bassist in a queercore band, promising lyricist. Can get profound (at least for a goyim) in the matters of tikkun olam. And he’s a f**king great kisser—but one who said NO to the no-strings-attached sex that was basically offered to him by an idiot girl in a closet at a Where’s Fluffy show a couple hours ago, and yet somehow he still managed to pop up at Veselka for her later (pretty f**king sexy move); but then he didn’t make a move on her on the 6 train when opportunity and ambience were just so converging as the lights dimmed and the train lurched their bodies together. What am I supposed to do with this guy?