Asymmetry Read online

  “What?”

  Walking toward him on her knees: “Let’s do something awful.”

  It knocked him back a little. “Mary-Alice, that’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said.”

  • • •

  They sat in the last row, so as not to be conspicuous, also so that he could get up and stretch his back if he needed to, but he didn’t. It was a Saturday matinée, and the movie theater was swarming with small children; when an especially excited one spilled popcorn on Ezra’s sleeve, Alice worried he might be having second thoughts. But then Harpo lit his cigar with a blowtorch, and Groucho passed his hat through the “mirror,” and it was Ezra’s laugh, head-back and unthrottled, that could be heard above everyone else’s. At the end, when Freedonia declares war on Sylvania and the brothers waggle their hips singing “All God’s chillun’ got guns,” Ezra drew a plastic water pistol from his pocket and gave Alice a furtive squirt in the ribs.

  “We’re going to war!” they sang, walking back down Broadway, past the colored lights and tempera snowdrifts and Christmas trees bound up tightly to look like cypresses. “Hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey HO!” At the sturgeon shop, crowding with the others up to the sneeze-proof glass, they gazed down on the smoked fish, pickled tongue, and taramasalata as if at newborns in a maternity ward. Alice pointed at a cheese labeled FIRM SMEAR and whistled primly. When it was his turn, Ezra raised a finger and ordered “two pieces of gefilte fish, some horseradish, half a pound of kippered salmon, and—what the hell? Two ounces of your finest paddlefish roe for Miss Eileen here.”

  “Oops,” said Alice.

  Ezra turned to look at her calmly. Then, tutting and shaking his head: “I’m sorry darling. You’re not Eileen.”

  • • •

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “Hello?”

  “Good evening. May I speak to Miranda please?”

  “Miranda isn’t here.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In jail.”

  “Is Emily there?”

  “Emily’s in jail too.”

  “What for?”

  “You don’t wanna know.”

  “What about . . . ?”

  “Katie?”

  “That’s right. Katie. Katharine.”

  “She’s here. Want to speak to her?”

  “Please.”

  . . . “Hallo?”

  “Hi, Katie? It’s Mr. Zipperstein, from school.”

  “Oh, hiya, Mr. Zipperstein.”

  “Hiya. How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. Listen. I’m calling to ask whether you’d like to study at my house one night this week.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’d like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Shoot. I can’t do tomorrow. I have a piano lesson tomorrow.”

  “Thursday?”

  “Art Club.”

  “What about afterward? After Art Club?”

  “Thursday’s my night to set the table.”

  “I spoke to your mom about that. She said you can set the table twice on Friday instead.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thursday at six thirty then?”

  “Sure.”

  “Which one is this again?”

  “Katie.”

  “Stay outta jail, Katie.”

  “I will Mr. Zipperstein.”

  “Zipperstein.”

  “Zipperstein.”

  “Good girl.”

  • • •

  “ ‘My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. . . . Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. . . . You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere.’ ”

  “That’s disgusting,” said Alice.

  He lowered the book and gave her a dully affronted look. Sweetly, Alice slithered under the covers and scrabbled around there until he came like a weak water bubbler.

  They dozed.

  When his watch beeped eight, Alice groaned and whispered, “I have to go.” Ezra nodded warmly, softly, not opening his eyes.

  Sitting at the table to buckle her shoes:

  “You know that homeless man? The one who stands in front of Zabar’s and wears a hundred coats, even in summer?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Did you buy him all those coats?”

  “Yep.”

  “And do you think he went crazy before he became homeless, or the other way around?”

  Ezra thought about this. “Don’t sentimentalize him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t pity him. Don’t overempathize with him. He’s fine.”

  In the bathroom, she rinsed her mouth, brushed her hair, and tied a dental-floss bow tie around the dildo standing on the vanity; then she left.

  Coming down the steps of her own building:

  “Good morning, dear! You look pretty today. Tell me: Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not yet, Anna! Not yet.”

  FOR THE HOLIDAYS, HE went out to his island. Alice took the train up to see her mother, whom she would decide it was impossible not to sentimentalize, and returned on New Year’s Eve to attend a colleague’s dinner party. The eggplant was tough and the risotto too salty and afterward everyone got drunk on cheap Brut and wrote stupid things on Alice’s cast. “Any resolutions?” she asked the boy slumped beside her; someone had told her he had a book of poems coming out in the spring. “Sure,” he replied, straightening a leg and running a hand through his long, spiraling hair. “Quality and quantity.”

  In Union Square, a girl in gold sequins threw up in the subway trough while her friends took pictures and laughed.

  When Ezra came back, they opened Champagne, real Champagne, and ate Bulgarian caviar from Murray’s. He also brought her a box of jelly doughnuts from the Shelter Island Bake Shop and an eight-CD box set of Great Romantic Standards entitled They’re Playing Our Song.

  “Any you don’t know?”

  “ ‘My Heart Stood Still’?”

  Ezra nodded, leaned back in his chair, and took a deep breath. “ ‘I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do / And then my heart stood still . . .’ ”

  “ ‘September Song’?”

  Another deep breath. “ ‘For it’s a long, long while from May to December / But the days grow short when you reach September . . .’ ”

  He had a good voice, but he distorted it, for levity’s sake. Shyly, Alice smiled down at her doughnut. Ezra chuckled softly and rubbed his jaw.

  “You have jelly just here,” he said.

  “Ezra,” she said a moment later, passing their plates to him, in the kitchen. “I don’t think I can do it tonight.”

  “Neither can I, sweetheart. I just want to lie down with you.”

  On the bed she struggled to find a place for her cast.

  “When does that come off?”

  “Wednesday morning.”

  “Why don’t you come here afterward and I’ll give you some lunch, okay?”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  “How’s work?”

  “What?”

  “I said how’s work darling.”

  “Oh, well, you know. It’s not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, but it’s fine.”

  “What do you want to be doing for the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed softly. “Live in Europe.”

  “Do they pay you well?”

  “For my age.”

  “You have a lot of responsibility?”

  “Sure. And my immediate higher-up is going on maternity leave next month, so I
’ll be doing some of her job soon.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Midthirties, I guess.”

  “Do you want children?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Not now.”

  Ezra nodded. “My darling Eileen got to be forty and wanted a baby, with me. I didn’t want to lose her so I thought about it very seriously. And I came close to doing it. I’m glad as hell I didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “We split up, which was very hard, and it took a while but she found someone else, Edwin Wu. And now they have little Kyle and Olivia Wu, who are four and six and pure enchantment.”

  They drifted toward sleep, even though he hadn’t done his hundred things. Alice sniffed.

  “What?”

  “My grandmother, the one who likes baseball, her name is Elaine, and when my grandfather, who was an alcoholic, proposed to her, he was so drunk that he said, ‘Will you marry me Eileen?’ ” Alice laughed.

  Ezra’s arm around her stiffened. “Oh, Mary-Alice. Sweet Mary-Alice! I want you to win. Do you know?”

  Alice lifted her head to look at him. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He ran a hand over his eyes, fingers trembling. “I’m afraid some man is going to come along and fuck you up.”

  • • •

  The night before his birthday they shared a praline tart and watched the president announce the invasion.

  In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war, or rules of morality. . . . We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and to restore control of that country to its people.

  “This man is so stupid,” said Alice, shaking her head.

  “This is going to kill me,” said Ezra, forking the tart.

  She gave him a cord for his reading glasses. He gave her another thousand dollars to spend at Searle. The following evening a friend was going to throw him a party to which Alice was not invited.

  “Is this the same friend who calls me The Kid?”

  Ezra tried not to smile.

  “Hasn’t he ever heard of a kids’ table?”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there. Besides, you’re the one who doesn’t want people to know about us. You’re the one who doesn’t want to wind up on Page Six.”

  His back was better. His book was going well. He wanted Chinese food.

  “One order of shrimp with lobster sauce, one order of broccoli with cashews, one order of hacked chicken, and—Mary-Alice, do you want a beer?—two bottles of Tsingtao. . . . Yes. Uh, no, I think it was one shrimp, one broccoli, one hacked chicken, and . . . That’s right. Two sing-sow. Sing-tow. Yes. Exactly. Ching-dow.” Helplessly, he clapped a hand to his forehead and laughed. The voice on the other end became indignant. “No!” he said. “I’m laughing at the way I talk!”

  He hung up. “Forty minutes. What should we do?”

  “Take a Vicodin?”

  “We’ve already done that.”

  Alice sighed and flopped backward onto the bed. “Oh, if only there were a baseball game on!”

  “Ooh, you’re going to pay for that, little bitch. . . .”

  He was telling her about a beautiful Palestinian journalist who’d been at the party and wanted to interview him when Alice frowned and lifted her head from his chest.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What?”

  “Your heart is doing something funny.”

  “What’s funny about it?”

  “Shhhh.”

  He raised his eyebrows at her and waited. Alice lifted her head again. “It’s doing three beats then a pause, four beats then a pause, three beats then a pause.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  “Hmm. Maybe I should call Pransky.”

  “Who’s Pransky? The best heart guy in New York?”

  “Smartass, would you get me the phone please, and my little black notebook there?”

  Pransky agreed to see him the following morning and detected nothing amiss but decided he should be fitted with a defibrillator anyway. This time, while she was waiting to hear, Alice was at work, interviewing her boss’s daughter’s babysitter about an internship.

  “So how do you know Roger?”

  “He lives next to my uncle in East Hampton.”

  “And what does your uncle do?”

  “He’s in, like, securities.”

  “But you’d rather work in publishing.”

  The girl shrugged. “I like to read.”

  “Who do you like to read?”

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “. . . Do you want me to go outside?”

  “No, no, that’s okay.”

  “Okay. Um. Ann Beattie and . . .” CALLER ID BLOCKED. “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t worry. Ann Beattie and?”

  “Julia Glass. I just finished Three Junes and it was so good.”

  “Mm-hmm. Anyone else?”

  The girl turned to watch a window washer rappel down the building across the street. Several seconds went by and then she sniffed and lifted an arm laden with bangles to scratch her nose.

  Beep.

  “Oh!” said the girl, turning back. “And I love Ezra Blazer.”

  • • •

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Like I’ve got a cigarette lighter in my chest.”

  “It looks like you’ve got a cigarette lighter in your chest.”

  Sitting on the toilet, he watched attentively as she wrung out a washcloth and dabbed at his stitches that ended only an inch from his quintuple-bypass scar. The spiky black thread wound in and out of his skin like barbed wire. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Alice asked. “Getting it wet so—”

  “BZZZZZZZZZZT!” he said, making her jump.

  On the eve of the first Boston-Yankees game they went to a restaurant called Il Bacio but which Ezra referred to as The Meatball. “The food here is shit,” he said cheerfully, opening his menu. “But we can’t spend all our time in that little room, do you know?” Under the table he passed her a bottle of hand sanitizer.

  “I’ll have the salmon,” Alice said to the waiter, still rubbing her hands.

  “And I’ll have the spaghetti vongole without the vongole. And a Diet Coke. And—Mary-Alice, would you like a glass of wine? A glass of white wine please, for the lady.”

  A woman in a fuchsia pantsuit approached their booth, ecstatically wringing her hands.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m embarrassing my husband, but I just had to tell you how much your books have meant to us.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve got two of them on my nightstand right now.”

  “Good.”

  “And you,” said the woman, turning to Alice, “are very pretty.”

  “Thank you,” said Alice.

  When she’d left, they sat looking at each other, shyly. Ezra rested his elbows on the table. He massaged his hands.

  “So, Mary-Alice, I’ve been thinking . . .” The waiter came with their drinks. “That maybe you would like to visit me out in the country this summer.”

  “Really?”

  “If you’d like to.”

  “Of course I’d like to.”

  He nodded. “You could take the train out to Greenport one Friday after work and then catch the ferry and Clete or I will pick you up.”

  “Oh, I would love that. Thank you.”

  “Or you could take a Friday off.”

  “That sounds wonderful. I will.”

  He nodded again, already seeming to weary of the idea. “But listen darling. We’ll be out there alone, for the most part, but there is Clete, and a few others who come around to mow the lawn and whatnot, so I suggest we take the precaution of giving you an alias.”

  “What?”

  “A different name.”

  “I know what
an alias is. But why?”

  “Because everyone’s a gossip, you know? So we’ll call you something else while you’re there, and if anyone asks we’ll say you’re helping me with some research, and that way, if anyone talks, which of course they will, you won’t have to worry about it getting back to work.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Deadly serious.”

  “Um, okay. Did you have a name in mind?”

  He leaned back and folded his hands on the table. “Samantha Bargeman.”

  Alice laughed so suddenly she had to put down her wine. “And where,” she said, “did you get that name?”

  “I made it up.” He wiped his hands on his napkin and pulled a business card from the pocket of his shirt:

  SAMANTHA BARGEMAN

  Editorial and Research Assistant to Ezra Blazer

  “But there’s no number on it. What kind of a business card doesn’t have a number on it?”

  “Sweetheart, you don’t want anyone to actually call you.”

  “I know, but . . . for credibility’s sake. Who’s going to believe this is really my card?”

  Unfazed, he sat back to make room for his spaghetti. He picked up his fork.

  “Fine,” laughed Alice. “Did you . . . ? When were you . . . ?”

  “Maybe in July. Maybe Fourth of July weekend. We’ll see.”

  That night, in addition to the rest of the cards—two hundred cards, printed on butter-colored cardstock and packed tightly into a heather-gray box—he gave her:

  Six green peaches.

  A Vermont Country Store catalogue, from which he said she should order some Walnettos, plus whatever else she wanted, and charge it to his account.

  Fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills wrapped in a notebook-lined piece of paper on which he’d written, in red marker: YOU KNOW WHERE TO GO WITH THIS.

  • • •

  “This week the United States Congress passed historic legislation to strengthen and modernize Medicare. Under the House and Senate bills, American seniors would for the first time in Medicare’s thirty-eight-year history receive prescription drug coverage. We’re taking action because Medicare has not kept up with the advances of modern medicine. The program was designed in the 1960s, a time when hospital stays were common and drug therapies were rare. Now drugs and other treatments can reduce hospital stays while dramatically improving the quality of care. Because Medicare does not provide coverage to pay for these drugs, many seniors have to pay for prescriptions out of pocket, which often forces them to make the difficult choice of paying for medicine or meeting other expenses. In January, I submitted to Congress a framework for Medicare reform that insisted on giving seniors access to prescription drug coverage, and offering more choices under Medicare. The centerpiece of this approach is choice. Seniors should be allowed to choose the health-care plans that suit their needs. When health-care plans compete for their business, seniors will have better, more affordable options for their health coverage. Members of Congress and other federal employees already have the ability to choose among health-care plans. If choice is good enough for lawmakers, it is good enough for American seniors—”