“Well . . .” I was a bit dumbfounded by his reaction. “Isn’t that the whole point? What do you think Romeo and Juliet is about anyway? It’s about love. Specifically love that transcends tribal hatreds.”
“No, I understand this, bien sûr. This is not why I take offense. I take offense at sentimentality. At the whole idea of love.”
“What?” I said. “You take offense . . . at love? How can you say that?”
“Well . . .” Wiping the last bits of dust from his longest lens and placing it gently back into his bag, he began a lengthy diatribe, calling love a “mythical construct” foisted upon us by clergymen and poets who needed to believe in transcendence. “And Dante never loved Beatrice either,” he concluded, wrapping up a list that included Adam and Eve, Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, Kitty and Levin. “He loved the idea of her. Of something outside the realm of hell.”
At this I blurted out the one question to which I’d only assumed to know the answer: “But don’t you love me?”
To which Renzo replied, in English, “If I were to love anyone, I would love you.”
The tinny rat-tat-tat of random sniper fire echoed in the hills to our west, far enough away that neither of us flinched. When it grew quiet again, I congratulated Renzo on his excellent use of the conditional tense—his English had improved markedly since we started sleeping together—but he didn’t get that I was making a joke, that the joke wasn’t funny, that he’d just lost me to a verb.
The last time I’d seen or even spoken to Renzo was eight years earlier, when he was in New York for work and showed up at our apartment with a baby gift for Daisy, along with a bouquet of yellow tulips, my favorite, and a copy of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which he’d inscribed with, “Pour toi, mon Eliza, aujourd’ hui et toujours.”
The two of us had once spent a rare weekend of decompression and museum-trolling in Paris on our way back to Rome from Bucharest. “I don’t know, she’s kind of unimpressive in person,” I’d said in the Louvre, after we’d stumbled upon its most infamous smile.
“But you look like her,” said Renzo. Then he smiled—only slightly, no more or less than La Gioconda herself—and said it: “Mon Eliza.”
“Right. Ha ha. I get it. Very cute. Mon Eliza, Mona Lisa. And I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment. She’s a little homely, don’t you think?”
“Homely? What is this word? Like jolie-laide?”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s, well, it’s . . .” I pointed to the painting. “It’s like her. Not beautiful. But not ugly either. Someone you might pass by without a second glance.”
“But she is not homely,” said Renzo. “She is magnifique.”
Renzo, as it would turn out, found many things to be magnifique which I did not, but which, through his lens, I did: the tail of a scorpion, as seen from up close; the day after a flood, which he shot with a large-format Deardorf; the hundreds of corpses and near-corpses he photographed without cease, one of which, a portrait of a Chinese student lying dead on Tiananmen Square, had so enraged the photography critic of Il Corriere della Sera when it was included in a group show in Milan, she devoted her entire column that week to its condemnation. “When we beautify evil,” she’d written, after calling Renzo everything from a hack voyeur to a pornographer of death, “we lose our ability to understand it.”
“As if we ever could understand it,” Renzo had snapped, tossing the paper into the trash.
“WHAT THE HELL does Renzo want with me?” I was now practically yelling into the receiver.
“I don’t know,” Bernie was now saying. “But he insisted on working only with you. And since he’s on contract, well, you see the pickle I’m in . . .”
“Huh,” I said. “Let me just digest that for a minute.”
“I’ll give you a whole hour if you say you’ll go.”
I laughed. “Oh, Bernie, I miss you. I really do.”
“So go to Baghdad for me.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Elzy—”
“Bernie, come on. I’ve got the kids to think about, and—”
“The girls will be fine. Any other excuses?”
My phone beeped. “Mark Office,” it said on the tiny screen, and I was struck, as I nearly always am still, by the wonder of that. The world changed so quickly. One day you’re typing a story into a grouchy Telex, the next you’re sending an email from the palm of your hand. One day you’re grabbing hold of a man’s body, the next you’re grabbing six seconds of his disem-bodied voice.
“I’m sorry. Hold on another sec. It’s Mark. Let me just see what he wants.” The call clicked over. “Light of my life,” I said. We may have grown distant, but that didn’t keep me from trying, daily, to bridge the gap. Our first summer together, for corny reasons I can no longer recall, we started greeting each other with lines from Lolita.
“Blight on your what?” said Mark. His voice was pixelated, echoey.
“No,” I spoke slowly, deliberately. “I said, ‘Light of my life.’”
Whatever he said next was unintelligible.
“Never mind,” I shouted. “Must be a bad cell. Hold on.” I pressed firmly on the gas. “I’ll drive through it.” Were only marriages so easy to fix. “Better?”
“Better.”
“What’s up? And take me off speakerphone, please.”
“Okay.” Then, still on speakerphone: “You didn’t by any chance pick up my shirts today, did you? I’ve got a meeting with that guy from Simtech tomorrow.”
“Take me off speakerphone.”
“What do you have against speakerphones?”
“What do you have against picking up the receiver?”
“I can’t type with one hand.”
“That’s what I have against speakerphones.”
“But I have IMs coming through.”
“Take me off speakerphone, or I’m hanging up.”
“Okay, okay. Jesus. It’s off,” he said, the hollow buzz of detachment momentarily remedied. “So?”
“Mark, where am I right now?”
“Um, home?”
“Wrong.”
“Come on, Elizabeth. Stop playing games. I’m busy.”
“So am I. Where am I?”
“I give up. Where are you?”
How could he forget? We’d just had an argument—over speakerphone, no less—about my trip two nights earlier. “We can’t afford the extra hours of babysitting right now,” he’d said dismissively. “You know that.” As if his coming home to relieve Irma at 6:00 were not even up for discussion.
Lately, watching my daughters tackle their homework, imagining the future plot points of their lives and careers, I’d start to think about all the hours I’d spent as a young girl pondering the shape of things as they are—the circumference of the sun, the area of Nebraska, the atomic structure of zinc—with nary a minute devoted to imagining the shape of things as they might be. For all the pledges of allegiance we gave to a piece of cloth, why didn’t we ever discuss the implications of pledging allegiance to another person?
Marriage is the one institution I know which doesn’t require preparation for matriculation. There are no essays asking us to predict the number of children we will have, if any, and who will take them to the hospital if they bleed. There are no multiple-choice tests forcing us to envisage how our financial partnership might look, or late-night field trips to love’s inner sanctums (which from syntax alone—master bedroom—reveals a lot) to witness sexual politics in action. There are no textbooks offering tips on what to do when the baby is sick, the sitter’s on vacation, and both spouses are on deadline; no four-page syllabi containing his-and-her primary source material.
In fact, the only primary source material we’re given comes from the most unreliable of sources possible: our own parents. No wonder half of us flunk out.
When Mark and I met, at a quant conference in Rome, I wasn’t thinking, How will our bond be altered by the addition of chi
ldren? or, What is his relationship to money? What I thought was, He smells good. This was the summer after the first World Trade Center bombing in ’93, when Newsworld had us out working every angle. Mine was an analysis of the latest technology being used in counterterrorism: cryptography, mathematical epidemiology, face and voice recognition software, the modeling of terrorist networks as graphs. Mark was there to watch his thesis advisor present a lecture, which he’d helped prepare, on the idea of framing the probability of terrorist acts within a valid statistical model.
In that sweltering lecture hall, I was trying to pay attention to the topics under discussion, but the heat and the subject matter made it nearly impossible. The troika of professors kept throwing out concepts for which, like marriage, I had no background or contextual framework: data mining, complex systems theory, infrastructure vulnerabilities, Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom, Zorn’s lemma, the latter which I’d written down in my notes as “Zorn’s lemon.”
“No, it’s Zorn’s lemma,” whispered Mark.
Which is when I stared at the broad-jawed, lanky stranger perspiring so fragrantly next to me and thought, He doesn’t look like a math geek.
“Lemma. Like dilemma, without the di. It has to do with making an infinite number of arbitrary choices simultaneously. Like all left shoes or all right ones, only for socks, which are all the same.” He grabbed my notebook from me and wrote the phrase correctly.
“Oh, Zorn’s lemma,” I whispered, placing the notebook back on my knee and wiping the sweat off my brow. “Now every-thing’s perfectly clear.”
Mark smiled widely, his olive eyes catching the light from the podium as he grabbed the notebook and pen once again. “If you can help me find a good restaurant near the Trevi Fountain,” he wrote, “I can explain it all to you over dinner.”
“Trevi = tourist trap,” I wrote back. “I can take you to a trattoria in Trastevere instead.”
“Tra-riffic,” he wrote.
Later that night, as the candles between us dripped skeins of wax, Mark made a heroic attempt to teach me a doctoral thesis’s worth of applied math in just under an hour. Then we traded life stories: mine the standard fare of suburban angst and ennui, suffused with hints of patchouli and eau de mère déprimé, his a wild, nostalgia-soaked tale of picking grapes and singing Israeli folk songs under the frangipani trees on a kibbutz, where his mother had fled after finding herself pregnant during her senior year of high school. The two had thrived in this fragrant garden, this bubble-à-deux, until the day before his Bar Mitzvah, when the bus his mother had taken to Haifa to do some last-minute shopping was hijacked and redirected to Tel Aviv, during the Fatah attack of ’78. “Everyone on it was killed,” he said, “either shot or burned to death. My mom, her boyfriend, Dov, the bus driver, everyone.”
“Jesus. I’m so—”
“Yeah. It was . . . But I’m sure you’re used to . . . You know, with your job and all . . .”
“No,” I said.
“Really? I would think it would stop affecting you after awhile.”
“No, it just gets worse.”
“Huh.” He paused for a moment to take in the thought. “Anyway,” Mark continued, “the party, of course, was cancelled. Instead I flew back with the body to Boston, where my grandparents were waiting for us. We buried Mom that afternoon, out in Newton. Then, a few months later, both of my grandparents died, one right after the other. Mom never knew who my father was—he was just some lifeguard she’d met at a clambake, she never even bothered to learn his name—so I was suddenly on my own. That’s when I first became fascinated by statistics. What was the likelihood of my mother and my grandparents, all reasonably young and in seemingly excellent health, dying within a seven month period?”
“Slim, I would imagine,” I said.
“In a word, yes.” He smiled, close-lipped, and let out a little puff of laughter through his nose.
I followed his lead, marveling at his resiliency, at his facility for seeing the comic striations in grief’s granite. And it suddenly occurred to me that I might not need anything so complicated as Zorn’s lemma to make an infinite number of arbitrary choices simultaneously: out of all the men in the world, I could love this one. We could build a life, a family together. All of this had crystallized, in the arbitrary way such real-life choices do, in that one moment of shared mirth.
“I’m in Potomac, Mark, remember?” I now said. “And I’m actually on another call, so let me—”
“Oh, right. I forgot. Your dead friend thing. So did you get my shirts?”
I breathed in and counted to ten, which was Dr. Rivers’s idea. You cannot begin to work on your own issues, she told me during our second session, until you stop jumping down your spouse’s throat every time he opens his mouth. A thousand years of female oppression are not his fault, handcuffs or no. “No,” I said, with a new, practiced calm. “I did not get your shirts. I dropped off the girls at school early, then ran to the airport to try to catch the 8:30 shuttle.” And then, just as I was congratulating myself on my extreme maturity and reserve, just as I was about to remain silent and let Mark have a turn like a proper grown-up, I couldn’t stop myself from throwing in, “Which I missed, by the way, because I couldn’t find a taxi, so I got here late for my first shoot. Not that it matters to you.” Ugh! I thought. No wonder he never comes home.
“Of course it matters to me. Jesus, Lizard. I’m sorry you were late for your interview. I could have taken the girls if you’d asked.”
“I did. Yesterday. You said you had to get to the office by seven to run some numbers before your meeting with what’s-his-name.”
“Anderson. That was cancelled, actually. I could have taken them.”
“Now you tell me.” I suddenly remembered Bernie again on the other line. “Oh shit. I’m sorry, Mark. I’ve got Bernie on the other line. Lemme call you ba—”
“Zakowski? What does he want?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I’ll give you a call back in—”
“Wait! Will you have time to get my shirts tonight when you get back?”
I tried to count to ten again, to think of fluffy clouds and furry kittens and big sweaty glasses of ice-cold pink lemonade, but by the time I hit three I was already screaming, “NO I WILL NOT HAVE TIME TO GET YOUR GODDAMNED SHIRTS!”
I took several deep breaths and hit the green button once again.
“Sorry, Bernie,” I said. “Listen, about that assignment . . .”
“Yes . . . ?”
“Can you give me a few days to decide?”
What was I doing?
I couldn’t go to Iraq.
“Oh, Elzy, this is great. I’ll—”
“No, Bernie, I just said I’d think about it. Not that I could.”
Or could I?
“Of course, of course. Yes. Sure. Hold on. What’s today’s date?” I heard a fluttering of paper on his desk, the flipping of pages in a date book. Bernie had no use for electronic calendars. He needed to turn pages to mark time, he once told me, his life—or at least the life his reporters were living for him, the one he thought was passing him by—recorded for posterity in pen and ink.
“The thirteenth.”
“Yes. February 13.” More turning of pages. “I can even give you a week, as long as you get your passport to me tomorrow. Visas are tricky, as you can imagine . . .” I could feel my blood coursing, the once-familiar cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol surging through it like so many volts through a high tension wire, shocking to anyone not wearing protective gloves, as Bernie’s words—messenger, cash advance, Hep-B shot, satellite phone—blurred together into the notes of an oft-played song, the kind you once loved and overplayed until you could no longer hear it, but now triggers waves of syrupy nostalgia. “Oh, and Elzy? Renzo’s coming to New York tomorrow. To buy new camera equipment or something. He asked me for your cell phone number. Can I give it to him?”
I had to pause for several seconds before answering. “Yeah, sure. No problem,” I said.
CHAPTER 9
MY MOTHER SPENT her mornings on her knees, the bathroom tiles carving bas-relief tic-tac-toe boards into her skin as she scoured them, and the afternoons on the floor of her bedroom, blowing smoke signals from her Carltons up to the ceiling. Sometimes when I’d get home from school I’d lie with her there, on the shag carpet, careful to keep my arm from touching hers, lest she recoil, leafing through old TV Guides and catalogues stuffed with smiling mothers in floral prints to match their daughters’. The room, reeking of Oil of Olay and old ashtray, was always silent and dark, except for small smoke-streaked cracks of sunlight between curtain and window, and then one kid or another—waking from a nap, maybe bumping into the corner of a table—would start to cry. Mom would sigh, sit up, and pull herself up from the ground. “I’ll go!” I’d say, “I’ll take care of it,” but my mother would just crush out her cigarette with three heavy taps and then trudge down the hallway toward the noise.
When my father would come home, he’d hand each of us a tongue depressor, or a plastic syringe, or sometimes a small pad of notepaper with the name of a new drug stretched across it, like Enflucare or Pedia-Zilox, always in red, which drug companies would send to his office to remind him to use their drugs, even though he was a Dimetane man himself. Then he’d say, “What’s for dinner?” and Mom would answer, without removing her eyes from the stove, “Fish,” or “Burgers,” or “Spaghetti,” which she’d kind of drop-slide onto the table, so that a burger might slip out of its bun, or the spaghetti would hop in its bowl, or the fish would shift on the serving platter, leaving an inch-long buttery streak behind it, before she either walked out of the kitchen, saying she wasn’t hungry, or stood at the sink, filling dirty pots with water and lobbing tiny grievances over her shoulder.
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