Asymmetry Read online

  “Oh shut up,” muttered Alice, getting up to change the station before resuming cutting the tags off her new clothing from Searle.

  At her door:

  Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  It was Anna, wearing a misbuttoned robe and tremulously extending a jar of sauerkraut. “Dear, can you open this?”

  “. . . There you go.”

  “Thank you. What’s your name?”

  “Alice.”

  “That’s a pretty name. Are you married?”

  “Nope.”

  “I thought I heard someone. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No, no boyfriend, I’m afraid . . .”

  In addition to the Walnettos, Alice put a checkmark next to Coconut Watermelon Slices, Mary Janes, Turkish Taffy, and Toy Army Men Gummy Candy (“A Salute to Your Sweet Tooth”). Then she got into bed and fell asleep with the radio on, Camus listing off her knees and the pen she’d been using to underline certain passages blotting her pajama sleeve with ink.

  “. . . I love you,” Cormery said quietly.

  Malan pulled the bowl of chilled fruit toward him. He said nothing.

  “Because,” Cormery went on, “when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone . . . you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.”

  • • •

  Her back hurt. Her breasts were swollen. At work, she snapped at the new girl for unloading the office dishwasher too slowly.

  From under her bathroom sink, she pulled out a pink plastic clamshell graying with dust. TUE read the last blister no longer containing a pill. White tells your body you’re pregnant; blue says just kidding. Three years earlier, six weeks of this had made her weepy and irascible to the point of lunacy, and she’d quit. But she was older now, older and more alert to the probability of hormonal ambush; this time, she’d be ready for the hysterical thoughts, and outthink them.

  So: one white pill tonight, one white pill tomorrow, one white pill on Friday, plus a fourth on Saturday, after lunch. That, she reckoned, should get her through the weekend blood-free. . . .

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “Hello?”

  “All packed?”

  “Just about.”

  “What time’s your train?”

  “Nine twelve.”

  “You won’t believe this, but I’m rereading David Copperfield, for my book, and four lines down on page one hundred and twelve I’ve just come across the word ‘bargeman.’ ”

  “No.”

  “Yes! Listen to this: ‘He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black-velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the—to me—extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes.’ That’s what I’m going to call you from now on, Mary-Alice. Mealy Potatoes.”

  “Good.”

  “Can you imagine? That I should read bargeman the night before you come? How often does one see that word?”

  “Hardly ever.”

  “Hardly ever. That’s right.”

  Alice took a sip of Luxardo.

  “Fucky fuck?”

  “If you want.”

  “No, I guess we shouldn’t. It’s late.”

  She waited.

  “Darling.”

  “What.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?”

  “On the contrary,” Alice said a little too loudly. “I think it’s very good for me.”

  Ezra laughed softly. “You’re a funny girl, Mary-Alice.”

  “I’m sure there are funnier.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Anyway,” she said. “You make me happy.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. You make me happy, too.”

  LIGHT SHIMMERED IN THE trees, whose leaves, when the wind ran through them, sighed like the gods after a long and boozy lunch. The air was balmy and brackish and here and there carried a whiff of pinesap bubbling under the sun. Alice dove into water that he kept heated to a temperature approaching that of blood and after torpedoing half a length surfaced to settle into thirty laps of an unhurried breaststroke: legs froglike, hands coming almost together before swiveling away again and again, always the right reaching forward to touch down between the insects that crawled along the flagstone edge, always the left folding close to wipe her nose before the next lap commenced. Some days, it could even seem to her that she was making a kind of progress with this routine—as though the laps she swam were not the selfsame distance traveled and untraveled over and over, but lengths laid like pipe end-to-end and that would someday deliver her to a destination as far away as their great sum. Coming almost together and then pulling apart, her hands looked to her like the hands of someone once tempted by prayer but who had since renounced it for other means of mollifying herself: someone learned, someone liberal, someone literate. Someone enlightened. The pumphouse hummed.

  In the evenings, they listened to Music for A Weekend to Remember, which was like Jonathan only cornier, and took their plates out to the screenhouse, or, if there was a game on, into the pink-glowing den. On the mantelpiece, next to a glass pyramid that threw quivering rainbows onto the wall, sat an antique wooden calendar with three windows in its face and dowels that rolled the linen scrolls inside ahead to the correct weekday, date, and month:

  SATURDAY

  2

  AUGUST

  The dowels were pale and smooth and whenever passing Alice could not resist twisting one ever so slightly . . . although she never dared shift SATURDAY all the way to SUNDAY, or 2 to 3, or AUGUST to SEPTEMBER, for fear of not being able to shift them back.

  Behind the sofa stood a narrow marble console stacked to her elbows’ height with books. Many were by prominent writers, others by names she knew as friends. The friend who called her The Kid, for example, had written a book about Auschwitz that Ezra had given a guardedly favorable quote. There were also several galleys, including one of a biography of Arthur Miller and another of a novel scheduled for publication that fall by Alice’s own employer, a letter from her boss tucked crisply inside:

  Dear Mr. Blazer,

  As you’ll see in my introduction, Allatoona! is a very special novel, not to mention a subtle, respectful, and ultimately triumphant tribute to your influence. I’m not asking for an endorsement, only that you might enjoy the book as much as all of us here at Gryphon have done, with surprise and delight at its confidence, its exquisite calibration, its searing wit—

  Alice shut the galley and took the Auschwitz book out to the porch.

  Some dinnertimes, an elderly neighbor would drop by, bearing eggs from his henhouse along with the local hearsay. Other nights she and Ezra played cards, or read, or took a flashlight down to his dock to look up at the stars. One Saturday they walked all the way to the Ram’s Head, where a wedding party was still going strong: men wielding croquet mallets chased barefoot bridesmaids around the lawn while a jazz quintet rolled out big band standards in the bar. “No,” Ezra said firmly, when Alice pulled teasingly on his arms. But then the tribal rat-a-rat of “Sing Sing Sing” started up and a moment later he was percussing the air as if possessed by Lionel Hampton. A bit of finger snapping here, heel swiveling there; at one point he even got up on his toes and dared a brief accordioning of the knees. He’d taken Alice’s hand and was spinning her through Spirograph designs that became longer and looser with each rotation when a woman wearing an upside-down corsage shimmied over to announce: “You know, everyone says you look just like my husband.” “I am your husband,” replied Ezra, before proceeding to dip Alice almost horizontal and leading her up toward the band.

  His bedroom was at the top of the house, where the floors creaked sedately and the gnarled branches of an old oak tree filled the windows with undulating green. In the mornings, as she lay facing him, staring into the radiating br
own of his irises and marveling at how unworn they looked, how limpid and alert, even after so many birthdays and wars and marriages and presidents and assassinations and operations and prizes and books, Alice sighed. Ninety-seven years they’d lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own. Outside, the birds gossiped blithely. When the sun reached her face, Alice sat up and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. Her cheek was still creased with the pillowcase’s wrinkles. Solemnly, she touched a finger to her nose, then her chin, then her elbow, the tip of her nose again, and tugged on one ear. “Bunt,” Ezra said hoarsely. Yes! Nose, chin, elbow, thigh, earlobe, earlobe, tip of her nose again, three quick claps. “Steal.” Good! Chin, thigh, earlobe, earlobe, elbow, elbow, imaginary visor. “Hit and run.” When it was his turn, Ezra mirrored what she had done, but in double time, and with a deadpan face, and every sequence ended with him pointing at her belly button. Laughing, Alice fell back to the pillow. Ezra gathered her in and kissed her hair. “Sweetest girl. You are the sweetest girl.” The words were like a hot feather in her ear. In her other ear, with a tone that sounded almost apologetic for having to remind them, his watch beeped noon.

  • • •

  “I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.” And yet a sleepwalker’s course is anything but precise and secure. It is the uncertain leader who strains to reassure his subjects and perhaps above all himself that his objectives are sound and pure. Of only one thing does he feel certain: that he would like to lead. He would like to have power; he would like to be worshipped; he would like to be obeyed. To an extent these desires are felt by all politicians, or else they would have chosen another, less authoritarian profession. But in some cases the desires are extreme, borne of a compulsion to compensate for past humiliations—an illegitimate father, maybe, or rejection by an academic institution one aspired to attend. There chafes a sense that the world does not understand him, does not appreciate him, and so he must remake it into a world that does. Domination is not merely a fantasy but also a form of revenge for his status as a failure, a subordinate, “an outcast among outcasts”—as The New York Times would put it in an obituary of the Führer running to no fewer than thirteen thousand words.

  In the kitchen stood three half bottles of Pinot Noir, a jug of Stolichnaya, and an unopened bottle of Knob Creek. Looking out the window down to the pool, where Clete was skimming impurities off the surface with a long-handled net, Alice uncapped the vodka, tipped it up for a swig, and returned to the porch.

  But megalomania is not the word. Both suffix and prefix imply an excess, an incongruent sense of one’s own influence, delusion. Yet Hitler was not deluded as to the magnitude of his power. He was deluded as to the worthiness of his objectives, yes, but it does not seem possible that he could have overestimated his impact on the history of humanity. When, then, does one man’s delusion become the world’s reality? Is it every generation’s destiny to contend with a dictator’s whims? “By shrewd and constant application of propaganda,” we read in Mein Kampf, “heaven can be presented to the people as hell and, vice versa, the wretchedest experience as a paradise.” But only when the people in question fail in their duty toward vigilance. Only when through inaction we are complicit. Only when we are sleepwalking ourselves.

  Another swig.

  “Baby? Baby, where are you?”

  A radio came on. A toilet flushed. Feet crossed the old floorboards and treaded boyishly down the stairs. Alice watched through the porch window as he went over to what looked like an old wooden munitions box, selected an album from the stack inside, and slid it ceremoniously from its sheath. A moment later there was an abrupt, furry blurting sound, followed by the tropical strains of what sounded like a luau.

  Beyond the blue horizon

  Waits a beautiful day

  Goodbye to things that bore me

  Joy is waiting for me!

  Between verses he shouted through the window: “Want a drink?”

  They were in the screenhouse, licking barbecue sauce from their fingers and watching a canoe glide across the glassy harbor, when a figure appeared on the lawn, approaching unsteadily through the dusk. “Virgil!” Ezra called out. “What’s the good word?”

  “Mole got under my toolshed this morning but I took care of him.”

  “You took care of him?”

  “I took care of him.” The old man coughed, lifted the screenhouse’s door, and stooped warily to enter.

  “Listen, Virgil; I’ve got a favor to ask. You know this lot over the road? The one that goes down to North Cartwright?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you know who owns it?”

  “Lady down in Cape Coral’s had it for years.”

  “What sort of a lady?”

  “My age about. Stokes, her name is. Uncle used to live in that little gray clapboard over on Williette. When he died his kids sold it to those musical fellows.”

  “Well, I’d like to get in touch with Miss Stokes, if I can, because I’ve been thinking I’d like to buy that lot before someone else comes along and puts up a car wash.”

  Virgil nodded, coughing again, his shoulders convulsing and the skin around his liver spots flushing a vivid shade of plum. “Darling,” Ezra said quietly. Alice nodded and went into the house; when she’d returned and handed Virgil a glass of water, Virgil said, “Thanks, Samantha.”

  Later, she and Ezra were in the kitchen playing gin rummy when Alice inquired casually what one “should do out here, in case of an emergency.”

  Calmly reordering his hand, Ezra replied, “You mean what should you do if we’re in the middle of doing it and my cigarette lighter goes off?”

  “That sort of a thing, yes.”

  “Call Virgil.”

  “Ha.”

  “I’m serious. Virgil’s the local EMT.”

  “The local EMT is a hundred years old?”

  “He’s seventy-nine years old, and he was an ambulance medic in World War Two. He was there when Patton said, ‘We’re training you bastards to kick the butts of the Japanese.’ Not that you should know who Patton was. Gin.”

  He got up to go to the bathroom and came back looking impressed. “I’d almost forgotten we had asparagus.”

  “So . . . there’s no hospital on the island?”

  “There’s a hospital in Greenport. And another one in Southampton. But don’t worry. Virgil knows what he’s doing. And anyway”—he flung out a hand—“look at me. I’m fine.” After blinking at her thoughtfully for a moment, he brought his hand back in to look at his watch.

  “Have you read this?” She held up the Auschwitz book.

  Ezra shook his head. “It’s no good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Too much toilet training.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hitler was toilet-trained too early, Mussolini was left on the pot too long. It’s all Freudian speculation that has nothing to do with anything. If you want to learn about the Holocaust I’ll show you what to read.”

  On Sundays, she brooded. How dreary it would be, back in the city, five more days of answering phones, hustling blurbs, unjamming staplers. When Ezra went down to the pool for his Aqua Fitness, Alice stood by the window and watched as he descended to wade back and forth across the sun-dappled shallow end, savoring its resistance. Then the wind picked up, erasing him from view, and the rest of the morning she spent drifting from room to room, picking up books and putting them down again, pouring glasses of lemonade and sitting at the kitchen table to drink them, listening to the bees. The clock over the sink ticked loudly.

  He came in a little after two to find her lying on the sofa, a forearm over her eyes.

  “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Don’t you want to use the pool?”

  “I will, in a bit.”

  “What time’s your train?”

  “Six eleven.”

  “What time
do you get in?”

  “I should be home by nine thirty.”

  “Clete’ll take you to the ferry. As for me . . .” He looked around, as though the room were a mess and he didn’t know where to start. “I’m going to stay out here for a while. At least until the end of September. I’ve got to finish this draft.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s giving me trouble.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I have something for you.” From his shirt pocket he pulled a sheet of paper with three ring holes in it, folded neatly into fourths:

  GITTA SERENY, INTO THAT DARKNESS

  PRIMO LEVI, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ

  HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM

  “Thank you,” said Alice.

  “You’re velcome,” he said.

  • • •

  He was born in Altmünster, a small town in Austria, on March 26, 1908. His only sister was then ten, his mother still young and pretty, but his father was already an ageing man.

  “He was a nightwatchman by the time I was born, but all he could ever think or talk about were his days in the Dragoons [one of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial élite regiments]. His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe. I was so sick of it, I got to hate uniforms. I knew since I was very small, I don’t remember exactly when, that my father hadn’t really wanted me. I heard them talk. He thought I wasn’t really his. He thought my mother . . . you know. . . .”