Asymmetry Read online

  For a moment I thought she meant for a girlfriend. Oh, I said airily. Something will come along.

  By the time she had run out of questions our combined handwriting had filled nearly thirteen pages. All right, Denise said brightly, standing and tugging her trouser thighs back into place. I’m just going to take you to our holding room while I make some general inquiries.

  Then what?

  Then I’ll be discussing your case with the chief immigration officer on duty.

  When?

  I don’t know.

  I’m sorry, I said, I know you’re just doing your job, but could you please give me a sense of what you’re discussing? What the problem is?

  There’s no problem; we just need to check a few things. The background of your passports, that’s all. As I’ve already explained to you. Just some general inquiries.

  I looked at her.

  Are you hungry?

  No.

  Do you need to use the toilet?

  No. But I’m worried about my friend. I’m supposed to meet him in town in less than an hour.

  We’ve explained things to Mr. Blunt. He knows you’re here. He knows we’re just making some general inquiries.

  INITIALLY, I HAD MY eye on someone else. Then I went to see a performance of Three Sisters in which one of my roommates was playing Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Maddie was playing Olga, and now I can’t even remember the other girl’s name. Like many Ivy League student productions, this one had an overwrought quality that gave you the impression the twenty-year-old at the helm could now cross direct a play off his list of things to do before winning a Rhodes scholarship. The night I attended, the girl playing Anfisa had taken a morning-after pill at lunchtime and at the moment of her entrance at the top of Act 3 was in the bathroom retching into a toilet. Consequently, Maddie opened the act alone, accounting for both actresses’ lines, the most crucial information being distilled into a riveting monologue premised upon (a) Anfisa having been too tired to complete the walk from town, where (b) a great fire was raging, traumatizing Olga such that she was hearing voices and talking to people who were not actually there. What if he is burnt! cried Maddie/Olga/Anfisa. What an idea . . . all undressed, too! [Opening a closet and flinging clothes to the floor.] We must take this gray dress, Anfisa . . . and this one . . . and this blouse, too . . . Oh, you’re right, of course you’re right, Nanny, you can’t carry them all! . . . I’d better call Ferapont. By the time the imperious Natasha had come on, Maddie was huddled on a divan with a lace tablecloth over her head, trembling deliriously. Uh, Anfisa? Natasha ventured. What are you . . . ? Twisting under her hood, Maddie threw Natasha a meaningful look. Anfisa! said Natasha, when the penny dropped. Don’t you dare to sit down in my presence! At which point Maddie stood, removed the improvised shawl from her head, and—playing Olga again—fixed her castmate with a withering stare. Excuse me, Natasha, but how rude you were to Nanny just now!

  Well, I thought that was some of the best acting I’d ever seen. Were it not for the scandalized traditionalists whispering behind me, I would not have suspected anything amiss. That night, when Lieutenant Tuzenbach returned to our suite with a bit of pumpkin-colored makeup still collaring his neck, I learned that Maddalena Monti had had her pick of the semester’s leading roles and was already hobnobbing with the seniors bound for graduate school in Los Angeles and New York. After that, like a word you come across for the first time and then it’s everywhere, she began to appear in my path or periphery several times a week: reading in the dining hall, smoking a cigarette outside the language lab, legs outstretched in the library, roaring a silent yawn. I thought she was beautiful in the way some girls are beautiful despite having bypassed pretty entirely. It was a fickle beauty, undermined in an instant by her sardonic mouth, or by her eyebrows arching to angles of cartoonish depravity. A moment later, these same features that made her an electrifying Olga, or Sonya, or Lady Macbeth, would rearrange themselves into the radiant symmetry of a Yelena or Salomé. At first, I was wary of this inconsistency, which was reflected in her moods. I suspected it was deliberate, calculated to manipulate and seduce, and, worse, that Maddie possessed little awareness of the motives and consequences of her behavior. But in time I came to think that in fact Maddie more than anyone suffered her tendencies toward the mercurial, and moreover that this was probably the reason she was attracted to me: I was an antidote to what she liked least about herself. And contrary to the impression that she was not cognizant of her psyche’s causes and effects, she was capable of startlingly articulate admissions of self-awareness. When we’d been having lunch together every Friday for a month, I asked her why she wasn’t closer to her roommates. Oh, I’m not good with other women, Maddie replied simply. They make me feel inessential.

  The night before Christmas break during our freshman year, she came to my room chewing on a thumb and consulted the calendar hanging on the back of my closet door. She was pregnant—by a graduate student in the Classics Department, though I never did learn his name nor how they’d wound up in bed—and someone at the campus health center had informed her that one must be at least five weeks along before a pregnancy may be terminated. December thirtieth, Maddie concluded, if she did not want to do it a day later than necessary. December thirtieth in 1994 fell on Isra and Mi’raj, by which time I was back at home in Bay Ridge, getting dressed to go to the mosque. Maddie called from her mother’s house outside Albany and confessed that she had not been able to have it done after all. She was eager that I understand this was not owing to any late-breaking moral qualms. Undetected by her mother, she’d driven herself to the Planned Parenthood downtown, registered, paid for the procedure up front and in cash, changed into a paper gown, submitted the requisite blood and urine samples and lain down for a sonogram, then sat in a room with approximately half a dozen other women to wait. There had been a television on, and whatever they were watching was interrupted by a news report about what had just happened in Massachusetts. A man had taken a rifle to the Planned Parenthood in Brookline and shot and killed the receptionist there. Then he went up the street to a preterm clinic and shot and killed the receptionist there. Where’s Brookline? the girl next to Maddie asked. Far away, Maddie had reassured her; there was no need to worry. But then the clinic’s telephone began to ring and two policemen arrived to tell the women in the waiting room that they should all put their clothes back on and go home.

  And now I don’t know if I can go back.

  Maddie, do you want a baby?

  No.

  Do you want to have a baby and give it up for adoption?

  No.

  I waited.

  I know I need to do it, she said. I just don’t want to go alone.

  That night, I kneeled beside my father in the mosque and thought about what it would be like to accompany a girl I had not got pregnant to her abortion. There were children present, many more than usual, and as they listened with wide darting eyes to the story of Muhammad and Gabriel ascending into the heavens, I felt at once flattered and perverse. Afterward, in the parking lot, I was introduced by my parents to the daughter of some Lebanese friends, a pretty girl with long glossy hair and black eyeliner drawn expertly around each intelligent eye. She was home from Princeton, where she was a junior majoring in evolutionary biology, and I suggested that we meet for coffee one afternoon before we each went back to school. But I never did call her.

  Maddie knocked on my door the following week wearing a skirt.

  Was I supposed to dress up? I asked.

  Oh, Maddie said quietly. No. I just thought it would make me feel better to look nice.

  We did not say much after that. The cold felt so reproachful of our mission that when we came to a cheerful-looking coffee shop I suggested we stop in for some hot drinks. Maddie declined, on the basis that her stomach was supposed to be empty, so I went in to buy something for myself and we walked on. The clinic was not at all what I’d expected. Vaguely, I’d imagined something more, well, clinical, mayb
e a modern cinder-block affair, but instead Maddie was going to have her abortion in a three-story brick manor whose gabled roof, multiple chimneys, and lawn running the length of the block looked altogether more like a Victorian asylum. I was not allowed inside with my hot chocolate so to register she went in alone. Standing by the door I watched her walk to the receptionist’s desk, where, with her hood up and her hands in her pockets, she looked like an Eskimo asking directions. Next to the receptionist’s computer stood a miniature foil Christmas tree, strung with colored lights that blinked quickly, then slowly, then quadruple-time, like a disco strobe, then went dark for a long, suspenseful moment before the cycle started over again.

  Why was I there? I was eighteen. I had had intercourse with only two girls, each of them once, both times with a condom employed so successfully that we might have been shooting a video for educational purposes. Maybe for this reason I felt faintly censorious of Maddie’s condition—but then of course even the most conscientiously donned condom does not always stay on and/or intact. At any rate, this was not about me. You could draw a circle around me and my morals and another around Maddie and hers and the two needn’t have overlapped. I had no share in this embryo. I had not asked her to do this. Later, Maddie would be in her room and I in mine, catching up on some reading over a Cup O’Noodle, having relinquished a few hours of my time but nothing more.

  Anyway, would I mind so much if our circles overlapped?

  All at once, my morals, whatever they were, felt too antiquated, too abstract. I threw the rest of my drink away and went inside to tell the receptionist that I was there with Maddalena Monti and how long did she think she would be? The receptionist said that it had been quiet and Maddie had not had long to wait but the anesthesiologist was running behind so it would probably be three hours at least. I sat down in the waiting room and picked up an old New Yorker. An unseen speaker softly played Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. The only other person in the room was a woman knitting, of all things, a baby sweater. After watching her needles gently fencing for a while I flipped through the magazine until I became distracted by an ad offering Finest Ruby Red Grapefruit From Florida’s Indian River! TREE-RIPENED—BRIMMING WITH JUICE—ORCHARD SWEET—NO SUGAR IS NEEDED—SATISFACTION GUARANTEED!

  The receptionist’s phone rang.

  . . . No, not here. . . . No. . . . None of that matters here, honey. You can come here and it doesn’t matter. . . . Between four and seven, depending on how far along you are. . . . You do the exam and ultrasound here. . . . Do you live in the area? . . . Okay, talk to him, and why don’t you guys call me together and we’ll schedule an appointment for you to come in. . . . Everything is confidential here, hon. . . . No. . . . No. . . . Monday through Saturday. . . . Do you know his schedule enough to schedule an appointment now? . . . Okay. But just don’t— . . . Just don’t— . . . Uh-huh. You know what, don’t . . . If I were you, hon, don’t bring him in. Forget about that, and— . . . You don’t have to call us back. Just come in before six thirty, okay? . . . My name is Michelle. . . . Okay? . . . Okay. . . . Okay . . . Bye.

  Much later, when Maddie emerged, holding her coat, she looked smaller all over, though I couldn’t imagine why she should have.

  I’m starving, she said.

  We bought doughnuts in the coffee shop on the way back to Silliman and when we got to my room Maddie asked if I had anything to drink. On the mantelpiece I found a bottle of Midori that belonged to my roommate who wasn’t due to return until the following week. Maddie filled half a mug with the emerald syrup and drank, making a face. What’s it supposed to taste like? she asked. I looked at the bottle. Melon, I said. Honeydew, I guess.

  She took off her boots and lay down on my bed. I put a CD on and sat in a chair to flip through the spring course catalogue. The CD was Chet Baker, and the first three tracks were deeply mellow, depressing really, so I was about to get up and look for something else when we were saved by what I think is the only upbeat song on the album:

  They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.

  They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

  They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.

  They told Marconi, wireless was a phony; it’s the same old cry!

  They laughed at me, wanting you, said I was reaching for the moon.

  But oh, you came through; now they’ll have to change their tune!

  They all said we never could be happy; they laughed at us, and how.

  But ho-ho-ho, who’s got the last laugh now?

  I thought Maddie was asleep, but when the trumpet interval came around she spoke without opening her eyes.

  Do you know who Bob Monkhouse is?

  No. Who’s Bob Monkhouse?

  A British comedian my dad likes. Still alive, I think. And he tells this joke that goes: When I was a kid, I told everyone I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up, and they laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.

  • • •

  Two years later, when Maddie told me that she too wanted to become a doctor, I laughed. I laughed with the haughtiness of a ballet mistress informing a dwarf that she will never be a prima ballerina. But twenty-four hours later Maddie was sitting across from her academic advisor discussing the logistics of changing her major from theater studies to anthropology and applying to postbaccalaureate conversion courses at many of the same medical schools to which I had applied. My reaction to this was febrile indignation. And I suppose, I said, that next month you’ll want to be an astronaut. Or a Wimbledon champion. Or a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic. No, Maddie said quietly. I’ll want to be a doctor. I’ll want to be a doctor because I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams and I’ve decided his is an exemplary life. Oh I see, I said contemptuously, even though I hadn’t ever read any William Carlos Williams. So you’re going to become an overrated poet as well. And in the middle of a downpour Maddie left my room and we did not speak for three days. What I decided during this enforced period of reflection was that my girlfriend would make a truly terrible doctor. I did not doubt her intelligence. Nor had I observed her to be unusually squeamish about blood or pain. But her being! The clamorous, dizzying way she inhabited the world—never on time, cardigan inside out, Amar where are my glasses, my ID; has anyone seen my keys? On a good day, the chaos was barely containable. But Maddie onstage was something else. Acting organized her. It sorted her out. Like a laned highway, it regulated her speeds and, for the most part, prevented her emotions from colliding. She was good at acting, but also, and this was the elegance of the fit, acting was good for her. It made sense of her. It made sense of us. Maddie was the artist; I was the empiricist. Together we had an impressive and mutually enriching range of humanity’s disciplines covered. Or so I believed. And so it seemed to me a perverse and even ungrateful surge of whimsy that she should want to be something else, anything else, but especially something so workaday, so unglamorous. A doctor! Maddie! It seemed, if you will, not unlike a prima ballerina wanting to become a dwarf.

  Undoubtedly, I felt this way in part because I did not want to become a doctor. And maybe Maddie figured this out, and perhaps even felt sorry for her poor boyfriend and his repressed condition, because she tacitly forgave me my tantrum and went about recalibrating her life’s path with little regard for the cynical glances I dealt her along the way. Meanwhile, of the eight medical schools contemplating my candidacy, only one said yes. Curiously, it was the one I most wanted to attend, yet after opening the deceptively thin envelope I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour and a half. Then I walked to the Office of Career Services, feeling, I suppose, like a man slinking off to a strip club even as his beautiful wife awaits him in lingerie at home. Most of the application deadlines in the binder labeled RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS had already passed. Of those that hadn’t I narrowed the choice down to two: an assistant position in a cancer lab in Seattle and publications coordinator for a bioethics think tank in London. The la
tter was described as a nine-month post that came with free airfare and a stipend of one hundred pounds a week. I applied. Three weeks later, a man unforgettably named Colin Cabbagestalk phoned to say that if indeed I was still interested the position was mine. Something in his voice, hasty yet cagey, led me to think I had been selected from a candidate pool of one.

  That summer, of 1998, I lived with Maddie in Morningside Heights. We subleased a studio on Broadway and spent eight weeks doing very little other than exactly what we wanted to do, which is to say a lot of drinking coffee, eating waffles, taking long walks around the reservoir or up and down Riverside Park and reading magazines cover to cover in the bath. Never have I felt so free, so unfettered by obligation. Also buoying our time together was something of the thrill of a clandestine affair, for Maddie had not told her parents about our living together and nor had I been altogether honest with mine. It seems foolish now, that we should have felt unable to tell them, and so went on acting like children even as we chafed at being treated as such. It is not implausible to think that my parents would have been relieved to learn I was in love with a lapsed Catholic bound for medical school in New York; a Muslim girl would have been preferable, of course, but at least with Maddie I was unlikely to join their only other child halfway around the world anytime soon. As for Maddie’s mother, the presumed objection seemed to be less on religious grounds than simply a preference for someone with a whiter-sounding name. Still, we persisted with our ruse. When my parents came to visit, Maddie’s things went into a closet. When her mother and stepfather took the train down from Loudonville, Maddie entertained them in the apartment of an old high school friend who lived over on York. We left our landlord’s name on the mailbox, his voice on the answering machine, and steadfastly ignored the landline whenever it rang. It was not until Labor Day of that year that I bought my first cell phone, a Motorola the size of a shoe, and which had to be held out the window to get a signal, if there was a signal to be got at all.