Chapter Ten: Noah

The first thing Noah knew about Norah was what Ann wrote: “What gives ‘Re: Birth’ its power is the great deliberateness with which Reed moves. The smallest gestures, the wagging of her finger, the tilt of her head, the slump of her shoulders—familiar expressions she turns idiosyncratic with her own inflection—feel freighted with significance, deep meaning dredged up from her soul or psyche. And so I watched her every move the way the superstitious study palms, dreams, stars and tea leaves—certain that in these signs and symbols a key to life can be found.” 

She was reviewing Norah’s one-woman show for the Los Angeles Times. She told him, “You’ve got to see it. She’s the real deal.” 

That’s why he went. Because Ann knew what was what. Because she didn’t rave about just anyone. 

And, of course, she was correct. He’d been in some kind of mood when he walked into the theater, an ad hock black box downtown. His mind “distracted and diffused,” to quote Paul Simon. Twitchy, restless, as he so often was in that era. He was on the verge of leaving—thinking, “I haven’t got the time for this,”—when the lights dimmed, his row filled, and he was trapped. Fuck, he can vividly recall thinking, before he rethought everything. 

Norah’s background was in modern dance, but “Re: Birth” was more than choreography. It was a performative treatise, an immersive essay, a ‘body of thought,’ she calls it—a visual meditation on the cyclical experience of renewal, which we must come to again and again in our lifetimes. While she danced, projections played on the walls and ceiling, of every kind of genesis, from human births to the birth of stars, from the emergence of butterflies to the emergence of hurricanes, and the instrumentation of her soundtrack was overlaid with spoken word, soundbites of sermons, lectures and poems on her theme. 

Just as Ann had promised, Noah was entranced. So absorbed in the performance that, for seventy-five minutes, he forgot himself entirely. Only when she chose to break her own spell, when she took her bow, curtsied and waved, suddenly, for the first time, unserious, did his self-consciousness reassert itself in his mind. But what self-consciousness was this? Later he would say that, verily, he had been reborn, but in the moment all he could articulate was that he felt unlike himself. He was no longer the self that he had been. 

He was vibrating in some spiritual sense, but without the language to say so he believed he was collecting his thoughts. Momentarily immobilized by the intensity of his feelings, he let the theater empty out around him, lingering with the folks who knew her and the ones who wished to, waiting to make his introduction. 

“Ann’s partner!” she said, recognizing his name or his face. And of course that’s who he was, but for the first time the designation didn’t sound quite right. “Such a pleasure.” 

In retrospect, it’s clear he sensed—if not all that she would come to mean, at least how much she might. Because, though it was not requisite to their arrangement, though it was something they almost never did, he asked Ann for permission before he asked Norah on a date. 

“Sure, of course,” Ann said, having no premonition. Or else understanding perfectly what her recommendation had set in motion, and so knowing her word could not stop him now. He’s curious what she thought, but it would be too rude to ask. Maybe some day, maybe years down the line, when she too has fallen in love again, when she too has felt reborn, they’ll be able to discuss it. “She’ll be interesting,” was all she said at the time.

What a terrific understatement. 

Norah was not, herself, polyamorous. But she was a being about as liberated as any he had met, unshackled from all notions of social duty, disinterested in institutions, bored by convention. “I’m game to get to know you,” was what she said at the time. Smiling a smile like a wink. 

It took him a year to understand what they had so casually set in motion. To know what his heart had been telling him from the start, and that he could not argue with it. To fall to his knees before Norah, who was just juicing an orange for their breakfast, face to the rising sun, framed by the window, aglow and oblivious to her beauty, as well as to the fact that each thing she did was, to him, previous beyond belief. He fell, brought down by the arrow of his own truth, to his knees, and he confessed: he couldn’t live a minute longer the way he had been living. Dividing his time, dividing his heart, dropping in on her life when his schedule allowed, knowing her in part but never entirely. He wanted to set her at the center of his life, if she would let him. Because she felt like the center of his life. 

“To make a declaration of love,” writes the French philosopher Alain Badiou in his conversational treatise In Praise of Love, “is to move on from the event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth…The declaration of love makes the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.” 

Noah is no philosopher. He almost wanted to be one, but he didn’t have the discipline. He knew himself well enough to know that. He loved ideas—he loves ideas—but he’s just not a systematic thinker. He likes to dabble. Maybe this makes him a dilettante. But he’d prefer to think of himself as an omnivore, just an animal, just a man with a broad appetite, just voracious for any subject and all subjects. 

It’s what makes him a great editor. The way he can bring the same passion to bear on an encapsulation of string theory; on an exposé of a money-laundering mega church pastor; on a profile of climate activists. He approaches every project as if it’s The One, destined for a Pulitzer, destined to break hearts and usher in policy reform. It’s the reason writers love to work with him. Not just because he makes their essays better. Because his interest is infectious. Because, just when they’ve forgotten why they cared in the first place, he asks all the right questions to make them fall in love again. 

These are probably the same characteristics that suited him to an open marriage. The hunger. The curiosity. And, yes, the restlessness, too. 

But, put all that in the past tense; take a look at him now! Committed. Single-minded. Ready to eschew all passing distractions, to devote his whole attention to one singular experience of love. To the project of knowing Norah. To the adventure of building their shared life. 

Will his newfound focus, will his perfect fidelity, turn him at last into the philosopher he might have been? 

It has turned him, at least, into a student of the subject again. Here, in his office, where he should be correcting proofs, instead he’s got his nose between Badiou’s covers. On his bedside table, there’s Kierkegaard; on the coffee table, belle hooks. He’s read Barthes and Rose and Fromm and de Botton. He’s got Stendhal standing by. 

He’s obsessed. He’s seeing everything, now, through the lens of Love. Whereas, every other time he fell in love—with Julie Purcell on the track team, with Lizzie Ives protesting the war in Iraq, with Ann Tsing in the stacks of his hometown library—he perceived that love through a different lens, the social, the political, the artistic. His past romances were each a facet of his life. But Norah, she is his life. 

Are these declarations rash? Are these distinctions unkind? Is it possible that one day he will meet someone new whose presence compels him to look back on what he’s feeling now and claim it was just another prelude to the real Real Deal? 

It’s certainly a little fucked up that the person by whom he’d most like to run these ideas is not Norah, but Ann. 

Maybe it’s force of habit, sixteen years of confidences. Certainly it’s a reflection of the type of relationship they had: intellectual, analytical—a meeting of the minds. 

Noah is still trying to find the right way to approach Ann, post-separation—in life and in his thoughts. They have mutually professed their hope that this new phase of their acquaintance will change as little as possible. But how little can that be? It’s a strange sea to navigate. 

Their anchor has been their professional relationship. Since long before they both signed contracts with The Magazine and editing her became a part of his job, since the first year they were dating, Noah has been giving Ann notes on her work. It’s an established fact that he is her ideal reader and she his favorite writer. When they collaborate, they are both at their best. Something is perfect about the way their principles, interests and aesthetics overlap but do not perfectly align; in the process of creation there is never not a revelation. 

What a shame it would be to lose that, they agree. And Norah agrees—Norah, who, like Ann, was never jealous or covetous, who fully supports their friendship. But will it in fact be possible to maintain it, or will it seem too strange? Her present assignment, a profile of a group of climate activists for The Magazine’s “Saviors” issue, will be their testing ground for this new arrangement. In an hour he is meeting her to discuss the direction of the project, some complications that have arisen. No doubt it’s telling that, instead of preparing for that meeting, he has spent his morning reading about love. But if he doesn’t leave soon he’ll be late, so, at the last possible moment, Noah sets Badiou aside. 

In order not to go anywhere fraught with meaning or haunted by memories, they have chosen a bland chain half way between their homes. That is to say, half way between his old home and his new one. He planned to be early, he was certain he would be, but now he’s inching along on the 405, traffic even worse than he anticipated. A nightmare. “SO sorry!!!” he texts her, and shares his location, and wonders immediately if it was a mistake to share his location, an intimacy that used to be their rule and now is an exception. 

“I’m so sorry!” he repeats when he finds her in the booth where she’s been camped for forty minutes. Ann, who he believed would always be the one who knew him best, whom he knew best…now he cannot read her. That polite smile, that distant gaze. She doesn’t quite meet his eyes.  

“It’s fine,” she says, standing to give him a quick hug. “I brought my homework.” She gestures to the pages on the table.

“How are you?” he asks as they sit, and again immediately wonders if this was the wrong thing to say, just another way to pick at the scab of the wound he inflicted. 

“I’m fine,” she says. “We don’t need to do that.” 

He nods. “Right, of course. I’m sorry!” 

At least she laughs at that. “Oh my god! You doofus. Get your coffee and let’s get into it.” 

They used to have these conversations in bed, or at the breakfast table, or out at their favorite bar—impromptu, flirtatious. Never scheduled meetings, but a part of the flow of their lives; their shared life. What’s more, he’s used to hearing about her  process every step of the way, her first impressions after an interview, the surprising facts she’s unearthed in her research. He’s used to feeling like more of a collaborator than an editor. To be suddenly on the outside, though it’s the relationship he has with all of his other writers, feels foreign, throws him off balance. 

The thing to focus on, he reminds himself as he waits at the counter for his flat white, is the problem they have come here to solve: what to do about the activist who is leaving the group. Like a common enemy, this conundrum should allow them to team up, regain some conspiratorial ground. Yes, that will be his way to ease the awkwardness, he decides. 

“So,” he says, sliding into the booth, “Where do we stand with The Quitter? Can this work without him?”

“Them.”

“Sorry, yes, them. Can this work without them?” 

“Well, so, okay.” For the first time, Ann smiles. Almost actually grins. It’s the look she gets when she’s onto something, closing in. “Hear me out.” 

“I am literally all ears.” 

They both cup their ears, pretending to be bunnies, an old joke. 

“Okay. So, this is my idea,” she says, but stops. 

“Go on.” 

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

“So, okay. We know the problem. Z quitting complicates the picture of these nice kids trying to save the planet. Tricia thinks it sends a bad message, like maybe Z is right, right? And we’re beyond the point where activism can make a meaningful difference. Like, it’s just too late. There’s no hope. And that’s too grim to print.”

Noah knows it is possible. That our species has passed the point of no return. There are scientists who say it. And they asked themselves, he and Norah, what it would mean to have a child at such a time. But, “The world is always ending,” she said. And, “It’s equally possible humanity takes this moment and turns it into an opportunity to build a better, build an actually sustainable and loving society.” 

Without mentioning her, without mentioning their child-on-the-way, he raises this possibility to Ann.

“I mean, sure, of course that’s possible. I guess Z doesn’t think so. I don’t know what I think. But I don’t need to know what I think! The story is the debate, and what it means for this one activist, and what it might mean for the rest of us.” 

“They’re important questions, even if they don’t have answers.”

“They’re important questions! That’s what I’m saying. And is there any better vehicle for them than the story of Z’s leaving?” 

“So, you want to go ahead with it. You think it can work.”

“Well…”

“You don’t think it can work?”

“Well…”

“Spit it out.”

“I want to do something different. I don’t want to write about One Point Five. I want to write about Z.”

“You want to profile The Quitter for our ‘Saviors’ issue?”

“Why not? Every story of salvation can’t have a happy ending.” 

“Sure, in life. But in the pages of The Magazine? The month before the election?” 

“You have to admit, it’s the more interesting story.” 

This Noah does have to admit. And what he also sees is how happy, how alive the prospect of telling this story has turned Ann, who has been so unfailingly deadpan since he confessed his love for Norah. 

“I can’t tell you how hard it’s been,” she says, words like a sudden dagger to his heart, even though she’s only talking about the story, “how hard it’s been to get into this story.” Because, of course, she isn’t only talking about the story; or, her struggle with the story is a symptom, not the cause. “Like, how hard it’s been to care. I mean, if there’s anything someone should care about, it’s climate change! But I’ve been so stuck. Like I’ve never been stuck. And I’ve tried, but every step I’ve felt like Sisyphus—unconvinced by Camus—and then Z called and I just, it was a door I hadn’t known existed swinging open, setting me free.” 

“That sounds pretty definitive, Ann.” 

“I’ve asked them how they’d feel about me shadowing them for a bit, while they sort out what this moment means for them, while they decide what they’re going to do next.” 

“You already asked.”

“Noah, I have to do this.”

“I know you do.”

“It’s the only thing that interests me. It’s the only thing that’s interested me since—”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. Stop being sorry! You did what you had to do. Now this is what I have to do.”

She has found her thread. Not exactly her Norah, not an all-encompassing answer, but the feeling that could lead to one, or at least lead her out of her doldrums. It’s so obvious. He hates to say what he has to say. “I hate to say what I have to say.”

“I know, I know,” she says. “Tricia won’t okay it.” 

“She’ll never okay it.”

“Would you? If it was your decision to make?”

Noah considers the question. Considers what a crisis this moment must be, for him to seriously consider turning down an interesting story, for the sake of a more uplifting narrative. “To be honest, I don’t know. I’m glad it’s not my decision to make.” She barely reacts, but he still feels accused, feels his cowardice as he says it, and revises his answer. “I mean, Ann, of course I’d let you write it, what am I saying? Of course I would. I just worry—”

“I know,” she says, softening. “I get it. I do. You’re worried about your kid’s future.”

“Yeah.”

“It changes everything.”

“Yeah. I’m—well, I won’t say it. But I am.”

Ann smiles sadly. “I get it. I mean, I don’t. But I do. You know? I appreciate your position.”

“What will you do?”

“You know what I’ll do.”

“You’ll write it anyway.”

“I have to.”

“I see that.” 

“I’m sorry you won’t have One Point Five for The Magazine. You could put someone else on that. Maybe Emma? I’d be happy to pass along my notes.”

Noah shrugs. “I mean, we’ll probably just pull it. We’ve got plenty of content. It’d be late for anyone to start in, even with Ann Tsing’s notes.” 

“I’m sorry they won’t get the publicity for the Willow blockade.”

“Maybe you’ll work that into your story.” 

“Yes, that’s true. It could still have a place.” 

“Ann, you’re doing the right thing.” 

“I feel that.”

“And I’m really pleased you’ve found your story.”

“Yeah,” she says, exhaling. “Me, too, man. Me, too.” 

But now, having agreed how pleased they are, they both fall silent, and the air at the table is a sorrowful one. This essay was the last thing they shared. And doesn’t scrapping it feel like breaking up all over again? 

“I’m still, obviously, happy to lend an editorial eye, if you’d like it,” Noah offers, trying to bring the cheer back. 

“I’d love that.”

“And you’ll have no problem finding a home for it. You’re Ann Tsing! But if I can help with that—”

“If I need any introductions I’ll let you know.” 

They both nod, and fall back into silence. 

“I guess, I should hit the road,” she says.

“Yes, of course, as should I.”

“The traffic—”

“Right?!”

“Worse than it ever was. Oh,” she adds, “I almost forgot.” She pulls a file folder from her bag and passes it across the table. The final paperwork for their divorce. “You can take it with, get it back to me whenever.” 

“Ann,” he says, “I really am so sorry about everything—”

“You’ve gotta stop apologizing, man. It doesn’t help.” 

Noah nods. “You got it. You got it, Ann.” 

“You’re happy,” she says. “I can see that. You’re trying not to shove it in my face, and I appreciate that. I’m probably not ready to hear about it. But I’m glad you’re happy.” 

“You will be, too!” Lord help him, he can’t help himself. “I mean—”

“It’s okay, Noah.” Ann laughs, and certainly she means for this to put him at ease, it is an act of generosity. But her laugh today is not the one he remembers from not so very long ago: loud and lively, a peel of bells, an unabashed delight. And it is certainly nothing like Norah’s, which puts him in mind of a babbling brook: lush, flowing, playful but unhurried. No, this laughter is the opposite of that. It sounds like a desert, like a drought: flat and dry, all too quickly fading back into nothing.