Asymmetry Page 3
“What’s wrong?”
“I think maybe there was something wrong with my cookie.”
“Are you going to throw up?”
Alice rolled over, pulled herself up onto her hands and knees, and sank her face into his cool white duvet. She took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” But she didn’t move.
“Darling, let’s go.”
All at once, Alice covered her mouth and ran. Ezra got out of bed and trailed her calmly, quietly, closing the door behind her with a soft dignified click. When she was done, she flushed the toilet and rinsed her face and her mouth and leaned shivering on the vanity. Through the door she could hear him respectfully getting on with his evening—opening the refrigerator, clinking plates in the sink, stepping on the pedal that lifted the lid to the trash. She flushed again. Then she unspooled a bit of toilet paper and wiped the bowl, the seat, the lid, the edge of the bathtub, the toilet-paper dispenser, the floor. There was blackout cookie everywhere. Alice lowered the lid to the toilet seat and sat down. In the wastepaper basket lay a galley of a novel by a boy with whom she’d gone to college, his agent’s letter, requesting a blurb, still paper-clipped to its cover.
When she reappeared, Ezra was in his chair, legs crossed, holding a book about the New Deal. He watched frowning as Alice tiptoed naked across the room and slowly lowered herself onto the floor between the closet and the bed.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing?”
“I’m sorry: I need to lie down, but I don’t want to ruin your duvet.”
“Mary-Alice, get into the bed.”
He came to sit beside her and for many minutes smoothed a hand up and down her back, like her mother used to do. Then he pulled the duvet up to her shoulders and quietly withdrew to begin his one hundred things: silencing ringers, extinguishing lights, segregating pills. In the bathroom, he turned the radio on, softly.
When he emerged, he was wearing a light-blue Calvin Klein T-shirt and shorts. He set a glass of water down on his nightstand. He fetched his book. He rearranged his pillows.
“Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . .”
He got into bed and sighed theatrically.
“One hundred!”
Alice lay silent, motionless. He opened his book.
“Sweetheart,” he said finally. Bravely, brightly. “Why don’t you stay here? Just this once. You can’t go home like this. Okay?”
“Okay,” murmured Alice. “Thank you.”
“You’re velcome,” he said.
In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.
The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.
The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.
The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.
“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”
• • •
He left for his island again the following morning. When he’d called to tell her this, Alice hung up, hurled her phone into her hamper, and groaned. The same day, her father called to explain that fluoridated water is an evil propagated by the New World Order; an hour later he called again to declare that man never walked on the moon. Alice fielded such news flashes as she’d done once or twice a week every week for eight years: with an upbeat reticence that postponed her objection to a day when she’d figured out how to express it without hurting anyone’s feelings. Meanwhile, she discovered her beautiful new teakettle to possess an outrageous flaw: its contiguous-metal handle could not sit thirty seconds over a flame without becoming too hot to pick up. What kind of a handle, thought Alice, can’t be handled? Holding her scalded palm under the faucet, she blamed this on her writer, too. But this time, after only three days, he called. He called her from his screenhouse and described the changing trees, and the wild turkeys that hobbled along his driveway, and the tangerine glow of the sun as it sank behind his six acres of woods. Then he called her again, just two days later, and held the phone so that she could hear a crow cawing, and the shiver of leaves ruffled by the wind and then—nothing. “I don’t hear anything,” laughed Alice. “Exactly,” he replied. “It’s quiet. Blissfully quiet.” But it was too cold now to use the pool, and there were some disruptive plumbing repairs on the calendar, so he’d be staying only another week or so and then coming back into the city for good.
He brought with him an old Polaroid SX-70.
“Let’s see,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “if I can remember how to use this thing.”
They took ten shots, including one of him, the only one of him, lying on his side in one of his Calvin Klein T-shirts and his own very sensible wristwatch, otherwise nothing. Fanned beside him on the bed were the nine photographs already taken, arranged for his review in two concentric arcs: murky brown forms surfacing with an edge of opalescence, as though out of a sunlit river. In fact, the more vivid the photographs became, the more the pleasure of taking them faded, and while Alice got up to go to the bathroom Ezra deposited all ten into the pocket of her purse. Then they watched Top Hat, with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and Ezra brushed his teeth lightly humming “Cheek to Cheek.” It was not until she was back in the elevator the following morning, reaching for her keys, that she found them there: a neat square stack of herself bound tightly by one of her own hair bands.
At home, she arranged the Polaroids on her bed in several layered columns, something like the setup for Solitaire. In some, her skin looked like watered-down milk, too thin to conceal the veins running through her arms and chest. In another, a crimson flush spread across her cheeks and into her ears, while over the porcelain slope of her shoulder the Chrysler Building resembled a tiny flame in white gold. In another, her head rested against his thigh, her one visible eye closed, Ezra’s fingers holding aside her hair. In another, her breasts were plumped high and smooth and round, held upward by her own hands. This one he’d taken from beneath her, so that to look at the camera she’d had to gaze down the line of her nose. Her hair, tucked behind her ears, hung forward in heavy blond curtains on either side of her jaw. Her bangs, too long, separated slightly left of center and fell thickly to her eyelashes. It was almost a beautiful photograph. Certainly the most difficult to cut up. The problem, thought Alice, was its Aliceness: that stubbornly juvenile quality that on film never failed to surprise and annoy her.
Tinily, like distant traffic lights, her pupils glowed red.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Oh, sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to call you.”
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Mary-Alice, I’m still looking forward to seeing you this evening, but would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up a jar of Tiptree preserves, that’s Tiptree preserves—T-I-P-T-R-E-E, preserves, as in jelly—and not just any flavor but Little Scarlet, which is the most expensive one they’ve got. It costs about a hundred dollars a jar and that’s because they make it out of little girls like you. So: one jar of Little Scarlet Tiptree preserves, one jar of the best peanut butter you can find, and one loaf of Russian pumpernickel, unsliced. And you bring them here!”
“Capitana!”
More gifts:
A sheet of thirty-seven-cent stamps, one for each American state, designed to look like vintage “Greetings from” postcards.
A CD of Elgar’s cello concerto, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the London Symphony Orchestra.
A bag of Honeycrisp apples. (“You’ll need a bib.”)
“Yes, please.”
For all his assurances, he himself became gloomy. Not without pleasure, Alice felt herself being tested by these dramatic circumstances.
“Of course,” she said, “we all have to worry. I could get cancer. Or tomorrow, in the street, you could be—”
He closed his eyes and held up a hand. “I already know about the bus.”
The day of the procedure she got home from work and put the Elgar CD on. It was terribly beautiful, plaintive and urgent, and, in the beginning anyway, perfectly consonant with her mood. Twenty minutes later, however, still sawing away sublimely, the cello seemed to have moved on without her, indifferent to her suspense. Finally, at 9:40, her cell phone beeped, flashing an unfamiliar number. Businesslike, a man with an unplaceable drawl reassured her that after having been delayed the procedure had gone fine; Ezra would be staying overnight so that they could monitor a few things but otherwise everything was fine, just fine.
“Thank you so much,” said Alice.
“You’re velcome,” said the friend.
• • •
“The Kid,” he’d referred to her. As in: “I called The Kid.” Ezra thought this was pretty funny. Alice shook her head.
For a while, he was in a good mood. The stent had done the job. Paramount was going to make a movie out of one of his books. An award-winning actress had been cast in the leading role and his services had been engaged as an on-set consultant. One morning, he called her a little later than usual—Alice was already out of the shower and dressing for work—and said, “Guess who I had over last night?”
Alice did.
“How did you know?”
“Who else could it be?”
“Anyway, I didn’t fuck her.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t think she was very impressed with my spare change dish.”
“Or your humidifier.”
They took more pictures.
“In this one,” said Alice, “I look like my father.” She laughed. “All I need is a Colt .45.”
“Your father has a gun?”
“He has lots of guns.”
“Why?”
“In case there’s a revolution.”
Ezra frowned.
“Darling,” he said later, while she was slathering a slice of bread with Little Scarlet. “When you visit your father, these guns . . . Are they just lying around?”
Sucking jelly off her thumb, Alice replied, “No, he keeps them in a safe, but every now and again we get one out and practice shooting at a gourd propped up against an old dishwasher in the backyard.”
She was reading some fan mail his agent had forwarded to him when he said something into the closet she couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“I said,” he said, turning around, “don’t you have a warmer coat than this? You can’t go around all winter in this thing. You need something padded, with goose down. And a hood.”
A few nights later, he slid another envelope across the table. “Searle,” he said. “S-E-A-R-L-E. Seventy-Ninth and Madison. They’ve got just the one.”
The nylon made a luxurious swishing sound and the hood framed her face with a black halo of fur. It was like walking around in a sleeping bag trimmed with mink. Waiting for the crosstown bus, Alice felt pampered and invincible—also delirious with this city, which every day was like a mounting jackpot waiting to be won; then, hurrying up the steps to her building, she slipped, flailed for balance, and brought the back of her hand down on the stoop’s iron railing, igniting a searing flash of pain. She went to his apartment anyway and, for the duration of the evening, hid her throbbing paw in her lap, or, when they were in bed, out to the side, as if to protect a coat of nail polish that wasn’t yet dry.
In the morning, her palm was blue.
At home, she waited all day for the swelling to go down, then gave up and went downstairs to hail a cab for the nearest emergency room. The driver took her to Hell’s Kitchen, where for two hours she sat in a waiting room crowded with binge drinkers and homeless people feigning psychosis in order to remain inside where it was warm. Around ten, an intern called Alice’s name and led her to a gurney, where he clipped her great-grandmother’s ring off her swollen middle finger and tapped each of her knuckles to ascertain where it hurt. “There.” Alice hissed. “There!”
When the X-ray came back, the intern held it up and said, pointing: “It’s broken. Your middle metacarpal—”
Alice nodded; her pupils rolled back, and, after teetering for a moment, her body pitched slowly forward and to the side, like a discarded marionette. From here she journeyed many miles to remote countries with barbarous customs and maddening logic; she made and lost companions, spoke languages previously unknown to her, learned and unlearned difficult truths. When she came to some minutes later, struggling against a nauseating undertow that seemed to want to pull her down through the center of the earth, she became remotely aware of machines beeping and tubes scraping the insides of her nostrils and too many seconds elapsing between the asking of questions and her answering them.
“Did you hit your head?”
“Did you bite your tongue?”
“Did you wet yourself?”
There was a damp spot on her sweatpants where she’d spilled the little paper cup of water someone had given her.
“You’ll have to get in touch with a surgeon first thing Monday morning,” the busy intern said. “Is there someone you can call to come and pick you up?”
“Yes,” whispered Alice.
It was nearly midnight when she walked out into a fresh flurry, fat flakes sailing down at an urgent slant. Holding her hand as though it were made of eggshell, Alice walked to the corner and looked up and down and then up again for a cab.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello?!”
“I just wanted you to hear what my humidifier is doing. . . .”
“Ezra, no, I broke my hand!”
“Oh my God. How? Are you in pain?”
“Yes!”
“Where are you?”
“Fifty-Ninth and Columbus.”
“Can you get a cab?”
“I’m trying!”
When she arrived he was wearing black silk long underwear and had a Band-Aid on his head. “What happened?”
“I had a mole taken off. What happened to you?”
“I slipped on my stoop.”
“When?”
“This morning,” she lied.
“Was it icy?”
“Yes.”
“So you could sue.”
Alice shook her head sadly. “I don’t want to sue anyone.”
“Darling, the best hand guy in New York is Ira Obstbaum. O-B-S-T-B-A-U-M. He’s at Mount Sinai, and, if you want, I’ll call him tomorrow and ask him to see you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Meanwhile, you’re going to take this for the pain. Will you be able to sleep?”
“I think so.”
“You’re a brave girl. You’ve had a shock. Just remember: I’m here, I’m fine, I have the warmth and comfort of my bed.”
Alice began to cry.
“Sweetheart, you don’t have to cry.”
“I know.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m sorry. You’re being so nice to me.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
Alice nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”
; “Darling, don’t continually say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Next time you feel like saying ‘I’m sorry,’ instead say ‘Fuck you.’ Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So?”
Alice sniffed. “Fuck you,” she said weakly.
“Good girl.”
After swallowing the pills, Alice sat down on the edge of his bed, still wearing her coat. Ezra sat in his reading chair, legs crossed and head pulsing to the side, watching her darkly. “They take about forty-five minutes to work,” he said, glancing at his watch.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Sure you can stay. Want something to eat? We’ve got applesauce, bagels, tofu-scallion cream cheese, Tropicana with Lots of Pulp.”
He got up to toast her a bagel and watched her eat it with one hand. Afterward, Alice lay down to face the snow, which in the light of his balcony was falling more calmly now, stealthily and evenly, like an army of parachuting invaders. Ezra returned to his chair and picked up a book. Three times the silence was torn by a page turning; then a balmy effervescence flooded Alice’s insides and her skin began to feel as though it were vibrating.
“Whoa.”
Ezra checked his watch. “Is it working?”
“Mm-hmmmmmm . . .”
He called Obstbaum. He took her in a cab to Mount Sinai. He arranged for Zingone’s to deliver groceries to her apartment twice a week for six weeks.
He took pictures of her in her cast.
“I love you,” purred Alice.
“You love Vicodin is what you love. We’re out of film.” He went to the closet.
“What else have you got in there?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Yes I do.”
“More girls. Tied up.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“What are their names?”
“Katie . . .”
“No,” said Alice. “Let me guess. Katie and . . . Emily? Is Emily in there?”
“Yep.”
“And Miranda?”
“That’s right.”
“Those girls are incorrigible.”
“Incorrigible,” he repeated, as though she had made up the word.
Her cast was heavy. Heavier, it seemed, when she had nothing else on. Alice turned over onto her stomach and stretched like a three-legged cat. Then she pulled herself up, arched her back, her sides, rolled her head around on her neck, and grinned, wickedly.