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by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  “Tell him,” Ezra urges, his voice turned in her direction. It comes as a surprise: she thought she had gone unnoticed when she glided into the room, wearing socks.

  “It’s true,” she says to their child. “Julia was huge. She was everywhere.”

  “And I bladed right into her,” Ezra says with satisfaction, the splendor of the story holding all of them in its embrace. For a moment they absorb the fact of being together in the darkened bedroom, just the three of them, the older child probably off brushing his teeth somewhere. Ezra says to his wife, from the low edge of the bed, “You remember that day,” in the sure-sounding voice she’d first liked in history class, and huskily she answers him, “Mm-hmm, I do,” when in fact she has been quickly sifting through her brain only to find that she has no memory of it at all.

  This is the second time today that her mind has failed her, but the first instance was so mild that it barely registered. In the late afternoon, drowsily driving the boys to their martial arts studio, she heard on the radio a story about the chain restaurant Medieval Times, where diners can watch live jousting tournaments while eating without the help of utensils. The big news was that the restaurant had decided to replace all of its resident kings with queens. Despite this change in leadership, the radio host remarked dryly, the servers at Medieval Times would still be referred to, going forward, as “wenches.”

  She perked right up at the sound of that friendly old word, which carried her instantly to the broken-backed couches and burnt-popcorn smell of their high school student center. For a brief spell there, wench had been the slur of choice—originating with the boys, one had to guess, but soon enough used in good-natured address from girl to girl. To her ears, it summoned not so much a barefoot slut with a tankard as the lanky, lacrosse-playing classmates of her youth, addled on weak hallucinogens and jam bands. The word filled her with sadness and warmth. But she couldn’t for the life of her recall how to use it convincingly in a sentence. Hey wench, good game today. Stop being such a wench and pass the popcorn. Bye, wench. Later, wench. It all sounded wrong.

  “Why are you talking to yourself?” her younger child asked from the back seat.

  “I’m just trying to remember how to say something,” she told him.

  “In English?” he asked, sounding worried.

  The problem, she sees now, is that in its heyday she never seized the chance to say the word herself. Nor was it ever said to her. So the failure wasn’t of memory but of another sort. She hadn’t shaped her lips around the word; it hadn’t been lobbed fondly in her direction. Somehow the lacrosse players had known not to say it to her, or for that matter to any of the black girls, few as they were. For them, a tone of collegial respect had been specially reserved. So many pleasant exchanges, straightforward smiles! She might as well have been wearing a pantsuit during all those years. Yet dull Christina had been called a wench more times than could be counted. Along with a few humorous observations about the size of her mouth. Which would explain, wouldn’t it, popular opinion regarding her resemblance to—

  “Funny that she didn’t have an entourage in tow,” she says.

  “Was she being followed by the paparazzi?” the child asks.

  “Nope,” Ezra answers serenely. “She was completely alone. Enjoying the day.”

  “Without even a bodyguard?” his wife asks in the dark.

  “Not as far as I could see. But then again, I didn’t see that it was Julia Roberts until I was looking down at her.”

  “Between your legs,” the child says.

  “I helped her back up to her feet and we each went on our way.” Ezra is straightening out the comforter, by the sound of it. “I wasn’t looking around for bodyguards. I wanted to get home as fast as I could and tell you.”

  “We didn’t have cell phones,” she explains.

  “You were too poor,” the child says soothingly.

  She doesn’t protest. The history of technology is too great an undertaking at this hour.

  Also it’s true: they lived on very little then. Home was a garden-level apartment in a neglected corner of an outer borough, its distance to the nearest subway stop the original inspiration behind the Rollerblades. From next door came the incoherent cries of an old man and the smell of decades’ worth of fried meat. They kept the windows open in all seasons, because of both the smell and the furious radiators, controlled by some invisible hand.

  A steel-legged café table with a laminate top was where they ate, worked, studied, and wrote thank-you notes. Despite the small checks that occasionally arrived in the mail from relatives living in less expensive places, Ezra still needed to have a part-time job while taking classes. He was descended from two generations of advanced-degree-holding black professionals who loved him unconditionally but regarded the project of “art school” with incredulity. Graduate work in painting? they’d repeat, as if maybe they had misunderstood. As for her, she’d inherited her parents’ immigrant terror of nonfamilial debt, and so had yet to apply for even a credit card, much less to a graduate program. They were extortionists preying on directionless people in their mid-to-late twenties, and she wasn’t interested. She liked the magic of direct deposit and also the green-bordered Social Security statement that would appear every few years, telling her just how much she had earned so far in her working life. After moving to New York, she promptly found employment, with benefits, in the alumni relations office at Ezra’s school. Her parents approved of the job but seemed undecided, even after all this time, about Ezra. When she watched television with them, the handsomeness of a young actor might make her mother pensive. “You have to be careful with a man who’s better-looking than you,” she’d been heard to say, to a character onscreen.

  * * *

  Every day his girlfriend set off for the university uncomplainingly, but Ezra wanted to be on campus no more than what was already required. Instead he got a job at a gym. He had to wear an orange polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched over his left pectoral. Standing at a counter, he scanned members’ ID cards as they entered and then checked on the computer to make sure that their payments were up to date. This was how he first learned her name, Meg Sand. He was familiar with her name long before he noticed her looking at him from the lat machine. Or gazing, maybe. It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.

  “Thanks,” she said, as she turned in her towel.

  “Why, hello,” he said jokingly, leaning forward on the counter.

  Meg Sand wore a stretchy top that matched her reflective leggings, new sneakers, and a full face of makeup. The makeup wasn’t loud; she looked like a girl who had moved to the city from upstate and, upon the shock of arrival, severely trained herself in how to do things nicely. She clutched a rather elegant brown purse. Her voice was deeper than he’d expected and when she spoke to him she sounded unnatural, as if she were a grown-up trying to be pals with a kid. Did he also work out here? Or just work? She laughed lamely at herself. Yet Meg Sand was, according to the computer, practically the same age as him. Not even a full year older. It was her hair, he realized: she wore it short and gently teased, in a mature little pouf, a style chosen, he saw with a pang, to conceal the fact that it was thinning.

  Quickly enough he developed the trick of not letting his eyes drift above her forehead. Sitting at the Polish restaurant around the corner from the gym, he would watch her tuck into a plate of cherry blintzes and finish off a big glass of ice water. She seemed to take undue pride in not being the type of gym-goer who only ate healthy. The booth’s seats were sticky and made funny sounds whenever he adjusted himself, which he did often, sucking listlessly at a fountain soda and describing what had happened that week in crit. She
would listen with a stolid expression and barely move. To his surprise, she did not share an upsetting story straightaway, as white girls who liked him were in the habit of doing, a story told slowly, as if with reluctance, but always aired fully by the time they were making out. Bulimia and bad parents. Depression. Social pressures, double standards, a sister who had been hospitalized. All offered unconsciously, he guessed, in a nervous spirit of redress. Yet Meg Sand rarely said anything about herself. And girl, in her case, didn’t exactly fit.

  Without making a big fuss, she’d pay the bill for both of them. Together they would walk to his subway station and after giving her a brisk hug he’d jog downstairs into the clatter and the heat, feeling light of heart. Nothing was going on. Nothing was going on! He sailed into the basement apartment, pulled off his orange polo shirt, and made love under the open window to his beautiful girlfriend. He planned, any day now, to propose to her. But not on his knees: they already spent enough time as it was practically underground. Instead he imagined, absurdly, a wide empty field, where he would toss the glittering ring in the air and she would catch it with her outstretched hands.

  It was not only his heart that felt newly light. His legs on the long walk to the subway, his hand as it moved across a thick sheet of paper. His advisor’s caustic sense of humor, which had made him insecure at the start of the semester, was now a source of amusement and private laughter. The gym regulars no longer greeted him as “Man” or “Dude” but by his real name. Hey, Ezra, what’s up. Rearranging the free weights took almost no effort at all. He felt agile and clearheaded. His skin looked good. Out of the depths of her boxy brown purse, Meg Sand produced little tubes and flasks of extravagant ointments made by companies he’d never heard of before. She worked in a large department store on the housewares floor, but she claimed to have friends at all the cosmetic counters, and these were samples, she said. They were free.

  From inside the humid broom closet they called their bathroom came his girlfriend’s gentle voice. “I have to say these look regular-sized to me,” she said clearly. He had emptied a shelf in the medicine cabinet so he could create a display. The little flasks were elegant, and he had nothing to hide. Only a month before, the three of them had gone to the movies and watched a terrible action thriller. His idea, both the movie and their meeting each other. The whole thing had come together in such a casual way as to feel practically spontaneous.

  His girlfriend had met them at the theater. She was coming straight from work, from an alumni networking event that she had helped organize, and as she approached them he could tell that one of her high heels had started to hurt. He could also tell that she immediately took in the problem of Meg Sand’s hair. Her whole face relaxed. The job in retail, the degree from SUNY Potsdam, now the hair: there truly was no cause for alarm. Meg Sand stumbled backward slightly as his girlfriend went in for a hug. Oh, she was a ruthless snob, as only the recently respectable can be. Before she even said hello, he knew that she would speak to Meg in the silvery, childlike voice she used when communicating with maintenance staff or bus drivers, as if making her voice smaller might somehow diminish the existential distance between them.

  Once the movie was over, they stood outside on the street, shivering. He didn’t suggest that they go get a coffee somewhere. His girlfriend had slipped off her shoes in the theater and when the credits started to roll, had a difficult time getting them back on again. Her blouse was softly askew, the long day had loosened her hair, and he wanted to take her home and into bed.

  But she persisted in being gracious. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked Meg Sand, who paused, shot a furtive look at the movie poster, and then seemed to remember the risk-free response she had prepared for these occasions. “It wasn’t what I was expecting,” she said slowly. She gave one of her close-lipped, knowing smiles: a precaution she used all the time, he’d noticed, a smile showing that whatever the joke at hand might be, she was in on it.

  “Me neither!” his girlfriend replied. “A lot more blood than I signed up for. And all that gurgling when people died. It was very graphic. Or is that more sound design? They didn’t leave anything to the imagination, did they. Her knife skills were—amazing.”

  Meg brightened a bit. “Amazing. Yes. I loved the fight sequences. She was so fierce. I think she must have trained for a long time to play the part. I read somewhere that she did most of the stunt work herself.”

  “Well, I believe it,” his girlfriend said. “The action looked very real.”

  “I must have read that in the Times,” Meg went on. “Yes, that must have been where I read it. In last weekend’s Arts section.”

  “Oh! Did you see that piece about Merce Cunningham and the dog?”

  Meg shook her head mutely.

  “It was funny.” His girlfriend smiled at Meg with almost professional kindness. Then she tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You know, with that jacket on, you kind of look like—” She said the forgettable name of the actress. “Especially the whole section when she’s in Budapest. I’m not imagining it.”

  He didn’t see the resemblance himself. He told them flatly that he thought the movie was garbage. “You thought so, too,” he said to his girlfriend as they rode the subway back to their outer borough. She shrugged sleepily. “I didn’t want to be judgmental,” she murmured, placing her head on his shoulder. By the time they reached their stop, she was dead to the world. He had to guide her up the stairs and through the empty streets like a parent steering a child toward bed.

  As the end of winter dragged on, Meg Sand wore the jacket more often than not. Was it coincidence that she also bought a pair of tall, zippered boots similar to the ones worn by the female assassin? “I used my employee discount,” she said apologetically from her side of the booth. He’d had to ask for more hours at the gym, in order to recover from the reckless amount he’d spent on a new computer. Also, his girlfriend was preparing to take an unpaid leave from her job at the alumni office; she’d already used up all her vacation days by the time they found out about her mother’s breast cancer. At first she had wept uncontrollably, but then she became very quiet and matter-of-fact, and started researching airfares. It was Stage II, they caught it early, she wouldn’t even need chemo. A lumpectomy, not a mastectomy. These facts he repeated to Meg Sand in their corner of the Polish restaurant, as if to reassure himself. Nothing had prepared him for the secondhand jitters he was feeling. The container ship that had looked toylike on the horizon was now, upon making its way into port, revealing its true dimensions. Since the scheduling of the surgery, he’d been having trouble falling asleep, and though Meg ordered him a Coke, he hardly touched it.

  With his girlfriend gone, he was thankful for the company of his new computer, which was faster than his old one to an incredible degree. The enormous monitor, the powerful processor, the highly sensitive keyboard—all necessary now that he had decided to expand his practice into video. The overall lack of light in the basement apartment was proving to be a plus. He was hypnotized by the way that editing could turn the sloppy footage he’d shot at school into something rich with possible meaning. A sudden cut to black, the amplification of ambient sound. Hours melted away without his realizing it. The first weekend he spent alone, he managed to get groceries and do his laundry, but the second weekend he didn’t leave the apartment at all. When the telephone rang, he had no sense of whether it was this day or the next, and as he answered, confused, his heart inexplicably racing, the unbearable thought that occurred to him was: She’s dead.

  “Ezra? I’m sorry to bother you.” The deep, uninflected voice of Meg Sand was on the other end. He was briefly even more confused, and then strangely comforted that it was only her. “I know I shouldn’t be calling this late. I tried calling two other people before I called you.”

  “Is it late?” he asked. “I don’t even know what time it is.”

  “It’s 11:47,” she replied. “It’s almost midnight.”

  As she was speaking, he saw
that the time had been right in front of him all along, tucked away in a corner of his vast computer screen. “Look at that,” he said aloud. Then he realized: “I think the last meal I ate was breakfast.”

  “I’m sorry,” Meg said again, and fell silent before announcing, “But I’ve been robbed.”

  He flew across the city in the back of a Lincoln Town Car whose shocks seemed in need of immediate replacement. The traffic lights turned green one after the other, benevolently synchronized, as if wishing him Godspeed as he drew ever closer to Meg’s apartment. He didn’t know what he would find there. A jimmied lock, a gaping window, stuff spilling out of drawers, strewn across the floor, or…? Darkened blocks scrolled past the smudged glass. With a sense of deliverance he understood that, whatever crisis he encountered, he’d be able to help. And if it turned out that in the end he couldn’t—well, she was just a friend from the gym. Teeth rattling, he hurtled forward, at once weightless and full of purpose.

  Her address was on York Avenue, which despite its Manhattan zip code appeared to be even more desolate and remote than where he lived. The car jerked to a stop in front of her building; he looked up at its expanse of monotonous midcentury brick and felt depressed for her. She was waiting in the lobby, dressed in her jacket and boots. He almost didn’t notice the doorman sitting wordlessly at his station but then found himself wondering about him as they rose upward in the elevator. On the seventh floor, she led him down a carpeted corridor to her apartment door, which she unlocked with trembling hands. It swung open onto a single room that contained her entire life: stove, bed, clothes rack, television, all laid out plainly before him. On the wall hung a poster-size reproduction of a black-and-white photo of the Flatiron Building, framed. The bed was piled high with expensive-looking pillows of different shapes and sizes that she must have acquired through her job. She went to the little stove and started boiling water—not in a teakettle but in a saucepan.