Florence Gordon by Brian Morton Read Free Book Online

probably would have gotten a kick out of hearing that she’d been assailed by selfish thoughts. But she could no more have told him than she could have traipsed around in a miniskirt and a nose ring. His illness had sealed him off from normal conversation. It was one sign that illness was taking him away.

19
    She felt dismantled as she walked to the bus stop. There was something wrong with her balance. Her left foot kept flapping or flopping or something. She briefly wondered if she’d had a stroke—when you’re in your seventies, this is what you think whenever you feel a little strange. But she knew she hadn’t had a stroke. She knew that the world was tilting because she was upset about Edward.
    The nature of time baffled her, just as much as it had on the morning of her ninth birthday, the first occasion on which she’d tried to grasp the fact that the moment she was experiencing would, a moment later, be in the past. Edward was alive; she could turn around and go back and embrace him if she wanted to. But soon he’d be gone.
    When she was nine, and newly reflecting on these matters, she’d earnestly thought that if she could just concentrate hard enough, just cherish the moment strongly enough—this wasn’t the language she had used at the time, but this had been the thought—she could stop time.

20
    Five days a week, Janine walked twenty blocks from the apartment to her job. She’d been doing it for months now and it hadn’t grown stale.
    Sometimes she thought she was drunk on New York. She’d been in love with the city when she went to college here, and she was even more in love with it now.
    The city was overwhelming, in all the best ways. On a crowded street, you felt as if worlds were hurtling past you: men, women, and children, unknowable, with exaltations and miseries of their own. Each of them looking both battle-hardened and hopeful in that distinctly New York City way.
    She stood on the corner, waiting for the light to change. In New York, even this was an event. She loved the way no one in the city stayed on the sidewalk during a red light. No matter how old or how young, everyone moved out into the street, impatient, looking for an edge.
    It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, the day after Memorial Day, and, as always, she was happy to be going to the lab.
    At first she’d attributed her happiness to the work itself. For years she’d been interested in matters like self-control, willpower, decision making, attention—how we can cultivate those faculties and why it’s so difficult for many of us to cultivate them—but she’d been interested as an amateur. These were things she read about and thought about on her own, but she’d never found a way to integrate any of it into her practice.
    When she learned she could apply for a research fellowship at Columbia, she was excited and hesitant in equal measure. She enjoyed seeing her clients—she worked with students at the University of Washington—and she’d miss them if she took time off. She was nervous about picking up and going to New York, nervous about being without Daniel. But it came at a perfect time. The kids were out of the house—she didn’t yet know that Emily would soon be back. And Daniel had been talking about taking all the vacation days he’d saved up, since the right to take them was unlikely to survive the next municipal budget. So it wasn’t as if she’d be away from him for an entire year.
    And she was eager to learn more, eager to do more with the learning she had. At a conference about “executive function” in adolescents in San Francisco last year, she found that she knew as much about the literature as some of the people who were lecturing there. The opportunity to work day by day alongside other people who were thinking about these things was finally too good to pass up.
    Lev, at first, was like a pleasant background hum. It was a piece of good fortune that the director of the lab was such a nice