Visible City by Tova Mirvis Read Free Book Online

take it you like it here?”
    “I do. I want to stay here but my husband has had enough. He doesn’t know where he wants to move, as long as it’s far away.”
    On the corner of Broadway and 100th, they stopped in front of a small brick building. Signs plastered on the window of the dollar store on the ground level announced, in big red letters, LOST OUR LEASE .
    “It’s going to be another luxury apartment building,” Nina told him.
    “How do you know?”
    “Jeremy, my husband, is a real estate lawyer, and he’s been working on the deal nonstop,” Nina said, and Leon noticed that all the while, she had been stealing glances at him, her gaze lingering a little too long. Like him, she was an observer, though he doubted that for her it was a means of avoiding engagement. On the contrary, her watchfulness seemed like a prelude to something more.
    Her interest ignited his own. Perhaps she thought her curiosity was well hidden; so intent on watching other people, she forgot they were doing the same to her. He had the surprising urge to call Claudia and say he would be unable to meet her and Emma after all. Instead of being recruited into a family conversation, he wanted to ask this woman whom he barely knew if she wanted to walk until they reached the edge of the city, then walk some more. There was little risk: he could easily return to the state of not knowing her. Strangers were blank canvases, and there was an inexhaustible supply of them.
    Overhead a sign was displayed on the building, courtesy of the Royalton Company.
Building the New West Side,
it read, next to a picture of a smiling little girl holding the hands of her young well-heeled parents, striding happily into their towering new home. He could decry what these flashy façades represented and bemoan their assault on the character of the neighborhood. Yet as he stared up, he surprised himself once again. He wanted each colossus to rise proudly in their midst. With their glass and steel, their unabashed presence, they would shatter the inertia that suddenly felt suffocating, in his own life and all around.

     
     
     
     
    Her parents’ apartment triggered a Pavlovian urge to eat. As soon as her mother went out, Emma went into the kitchen where, supported by her crutches, she stood in front of the refrigerator, fighting the impulse to consume everything in sight. She was probably not supposed to feel such pleasure in eating her way through their fridge, just as she was probably not supposed to feel so relieved to be sleeping in her old bedroom as though she were still a child.
    Every morning since she’d been home, her mother had brought her breakfast in bed. She made her grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, the same as she’d done whenever Emma had stayed home sick from school, the day spreading out before her with a seemingly endless number of hours to fill as she wished.
    Emma had urged her mother to turn her former bedroom into an office, instead of squeezing herself into the tiny maid’s room, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. As a result, her bedroom remained untouched. On the walls were the black-and-white photographs she’d taken in college and developed herself. There were copies of her high school literary magazine which she’d edited and to which she’d contributed numerous poems that now made her laugh with embarrassment. On her bulletin board were a slew of tacked-up awards. She had starred in a high school play, won a school science award; she had spearheaded a fundraising project to buy goats for villages in India. The room was a trophy case to her early achievements.
    In the past, she had flitted from one passion to another; she might not have known what she wanted to do, but she hadn’t worried about it. The world was filled with possibilities, especially when you had parents who trusted every decision you made and were willing to support you through any adventure. Newly out of college, she had backpacked through Europe for six