“You can’t just will your visions,” he said, and that was true.
I said, “Well, that’s true.”
He said, waving a hand, “She’ll get pregnant again,” and I said, “I hope so.” I almost told him that Chrissy had said he was being a dickwad, but this man across from me seemed different, strange without his mustache and his hair cut shorter. So I said nothing.
We kissed on the cheek and he left.
* * *
As I lay in bed that night, thinking of William and his face in my apartment, of our conversation, all of a sudden I thought: Oh. He has lost his authority.
It made me sit up.
It made me get out of bed and walk around the apartment.
But he had lost his authority.
Because of a mustache?
Maybe. How did I know?
* * *
—
I remembered this then:
* * *
—
A few years after I left William I was with a man who lived across the street from a museum in Manhattan. The man loved me; he wanted to marry me （he was the man who took me to the Philharmonic）， but I did not want to marry him. He was a good man, but he made me anxious. And what I remembered was this: Always across the street was the tower of the museum. Every night—I was there maybe three times a week—a light was on in this small tower, and I always imagined a person working there late; I pictured a man, youngish or middle-aged, or sometimes a woman, so interested in the work that he—or she—had to stay there late, and I was always moved by the loneliness the person must be feeling as he—or she—worked alone in the lighted tower of this museum. The comfort I took—！ Night after night as I looked at those lighted windows in the tower of that museum I felt so comforted to think of this lonely person working there all night.
And only years later did I realize that I had never not seen the light, whether it was a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday night, the light was always on, and so only many years later did I realize that no person was working there during the hours that I watched it, past midnight and at three o’clock in the morning, right until the light outdoors became bright enough so that you couldn’t see that the light was still on… Only many years later did I realize I had been sustained by a myth.
There was no one in that tower during those times.
But I never got rid of it—in my memory—the comfort that I had taken those many, many nights of my life, when I had left my husband and I was very frightened, and I saw the light on as I lay next to the sleeping man who loved me but who always made me nervous. And the light in the tower had helped me through.
But the light had not been what I thought it was.
* * *
And that was my story with William.
I could not believe this; it was a huge wave that poured over me. William was like the light in the museum, only I had lived my life thinking it was worth something.
* * *
—
Then I thought: It was worth something!
* * *
—
I sat in the chair and looked out over the lights of the city. You can see the Empire State Building from my apartment, and I watched that, and then I looked at the apartments that were closer to my own, always there were lights on in some of them.
* * *
—
And then I thought: Okay, I will do whatever I can do to pretend this has not happened.
* * *
—
I wanted to protect William from this understanding that I had just had. And I wanted to protect myself from it as well. Yes, that would be true, but I am saying, as honestly as I can, I did not want William to sense on any level that he had lost this with me.
* * *
—
But the Hansel and Gretel that I had carried throughout my life, it was gone. I was no longer that kid looking to Hansel as a guide. William was just—quite simply—not the person who made me feel safe any longer.
* * *
—
I knew there was no point in taking a sleep tablet. I got up and walked around the apartment and then I sat for a long time in the chair by the window.
* * *
—
I thought of our girls. I thought of how Becka was the one who needed him most: the sense of her father as having authority, although she had never used that word. But it touched me deeply as I sat and thought of her sweet, childlike face. And I thought of Chrissy, who also, probably, still thought of him that way; he was her father, after all. But she seemed—to my eyes—more prepared to deal with him than dear Becka had ever been. And who knows why? Whoever knows why one child turns out one way, and another a different way?
* * *
—