But it was true. I did enjoy taking pictures, even if the medium constituted a small betrayal. I wasn’t sure it was the same level of joy that qualified pursuing it professionally, so that a name like photographer could be mine, but it made me feel like I was participating in the city. Each picture implied a kind of fantasy life beyond it, like a window, and every time I posted one, I felt that it added a new room around the window and each room housed another self. It made the whole city more manageable, was a way to take apart the pieces of the machine.
I tried to explain this to Silvia.
“So it’s like a scrapbook,” she said finally.
“No,” I replied, faltering. I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t.
“What’s different?”
“The grid format of the app means you play with juxtapositions.”
“So?”
“Um. It’s public, I guess. And if you put one of these—” I pushed my device towards her and she jerked backwards.
“Number sign,” she said warily. “Yes, I know what that is.”
“Hashtag,” I corrected, detecting impatience, even arrogance in my tone.
“Well, what happens if you use that?”
“Then it links you up with all these other people who have used it for something they’ve posted, and people can look through—they’re called threads.”
“What people, strangers?”
“Yes, I guess.”
After this conversation, which had a distancing effect, I stopped talking to Silvia about that part of my trip too. Talking about it with her made me feel like a stranger in her eyes. The way she had cut it down to size had also made it feel less like I was part of something bigger, more like I was spreading out my experiences too thin, so that nothing would grow out of them. It didn’t feel like an initiation quite so much anymore; it was more juvenile than that. I knew Silvia was disappointed in my new pastime. And this meant that when I got back from Columbia, her white linen suit all creased and damp with sweat, I avoided walking past the chink of light coming from the door into her den. I didn’t want to tell her about my day, because I felt guilty that instead of going up there and writing relevant observations in my journal—which is what she had recommended I do, as a journalist might—I had gone round taking pictures and putting them all up online. Given that it was a pilgrimage she said she found too hard to make, I knew it would upset her to know this.
I had come back tired, and feeling on the whole less heady from my return walk than usual. I’d finally discovered that though walking alone in New York can be healthy and encourage mindfulness, it can also make you feel like shit. Halfway there, halfway there again, destined never to make it. Though it seems like everything is in motion and you are changing and growing as a person with every step, your belief in yourself and your progress all at once turns out to be mistaken. An illusion, like legs that have spent too long at sea. You laugh at yourself like you laugh at someone alone in a gym at night, pounding at a treadmill. The kind of laugh that echoes and makes you feel empty. I’d finally let myself notice the rats scurrying in and out of garbage, the cockroaches crawling amongst the rotting fruit, the overripe smell outside the 7-Elevens, and the currents of warm urine from mystery recesses that seemed to follow me wherever I went. It was the first time that random strangers calling after me on the street upset me, an irony I am now aware of, given my willingness to interact with strangers online. But it’s exactly this kind of interaction that makes a stranger acknowledging you on a public street seem like an impertinence, possibly a sign of psychosis. The city is tricky. The highs are so much higher, but in the lows you drop straight down again to bedrock. It helps that streets are snapped to a grid. There are also psychic boutiques and sidewalk prophets, but until you contrive your own love story set in that city, even one as warped as mine, you remain outside it, looking for signals in the white smoke that rises from under, in the sudden hot laundry smells and the LED typos of street vendors—donut easily becomes dount, ominously like don’t, to my mind. There was a DOUNT sign on Second Avenue which more than once redirected my superstitious footsteps.
Back in my bedroom, I saw that Silvia had left a Post-it on my pillow in her shaky red pen:
Nat coming tomorrow, 11 a.m. Red alert.
I went to bed in all my clothes, wanting to be ready for whatever was coming.
9
* * *
After such an extended period of silence between Silvia and me, Nat’s arrival the next morning was a shock. I opened the door and she practically fell on me. She was tall and muscular and wore ruby-red lipstick.
“Hap-pee Memorial Day!” she bellowed.
I hadn’t known if it was appropriate to wish someone a happy Memorial Day.
“Hello, hello, hello!” she continued, stepping around me into the hall. “How are we, how are we all? You must be Alice. I never forget names.”
This turned out to be a kind of threat.
“I remember you when you were tiny and now you’re e-normous.”
She was carrying a box. “Pastries,” she said emphatically, shoving them at me, and then, baby-voiced, “Do you want to put them nicely on a plate?”
I nodded as if I couldn’t wait.
“Where is Her Majesty?”
I indicated the den. My voice had dried up from lack of use.
“Don’t get up, Silvia. Coming to you, sweetie!” She swung the door open violently. “Good Lord, it’s hot in here, Silvie. Hi, hi, no need to get up.”
Silvia hadn’t gotten up but was smiling at Nat from a supine position on the couch. She was holding a magnifying glass she used to read the small print of her financial portfolio. They blew kisses at each other across the coffee table that Silvia kept books and papers on. Silvia looked even smaller and frailer now Nat was here.
“I won’t stay too long,” Nat continued. “I’m going across to Roosevelt Island to meet Ingrid and see her new project at two.”
I looked at Silvia and felt newly protective of her. Two was a long way away, and I imagined she would not be able to talk for that long.
“How are you, sweetie? I feel like I haven’t seen you for ages. Not since this one arrived.”
Nat waved away my offer of the sofa adjacent to Silvia’s. “I do yoga, so I prefer the floor,” she said, squatting gingerly and then losing control. There was a loud crunch as she sat on her glasses. She retrieved them from the pocket of her flat, square rear and inspected the damage. “Well, these are fuck,” she declared, leaving the obscenity dangling uncertainly.
I went to fetch two vodkas and arrange the pastries on a plate. When I came back, Nat was looking for something on her device to read to Silvia.
“Here it is!” she crowed. “‘Greeting I am Mrs. Olive Jana Lofer the daughter to the cancer woman copyright sign.’ ‘The cancer woman’ is copyrighted,” Nat explained, looking over the top of her cracked glasses, held to her face. She read in a stilted voice, uncertain how to punctuate the text. “ ‘My precious mom may her soul rest in perfect peace contacted you some time ago in respect to the funds transfer of her late husband Lofer Jana, to help take care of me Olive Jana Lofer, before my mother passed away, she issued a cashier check to you for your help initially although you—’”
“Spam,” I said, hearing my voice burbling up from some deep reserve and rising to meet the volume of Nat’s. I felt instantly self-conscious.
“That’s what my daughter told me too,” Nat said. “She asks for a thousand dollars, which I was just about to send before Ingrid stopped me. I was just reading it to your grandmother. Silvia’s godmother to my daughter, you know.”
“Email is the scourge of our age,” said Silvia. “Email and cancer.”
“Agreed. I filled out a questionnaire for something yesterday and I had the great pleasure of being asked if I had any of the following—Facebook, Skype, thingummy, and the rest—and I ticked the box marked ‘none of the above.’ How d’you like that? I thought.”
Nat str
etched out where she was on the floor. She seemed much younger than Silvia, who was eighty-one. I later learnt she was only sixty-four. I guess age gaps between friends when you’re that old are less noticeable, or you have less choice in the matter.
I cleared some space on the coffee table for the pastries.
“I know you won’t have any, sweetie,” Nat said to Silvia. And then, to me, “She doesn’t eat, you know.”
I grimaced, annoyed that Nat would assume I didn’t know something so basic about Silvia, after two years’ correspondence and so long living under her roof.
“But I thought you might.” Then, to Silvia, “She’s such an enormous thing now!” indicating me. “Hello, Lurch!”
I must have looked dense.
“He’s the butler from The Addams Family,” Silvia croaked.
Nat turned back to the pastries. “They’re pretty, aren’t they? I get them from a little French place by me, luh pan koh-ti-dyan,” she pronounced.
Silvia and I dutifully agreed.
“But the trouble with buying pastries,” Nat said with a sigh, “is that then you have to eat them. It’s the same with honey. I always buy it but forget to eat it. Here,” she said to me, thrusting one, “you have that one. I hate raisins, I always say it’s like eating blisters.”
I took the pain aux raisin from her even though I also hate raisins. “How do you two know each other?” I asked between mouthfuls.
“I was Silvia’s assistant at MEA,” Nat said with pride. “Has she told you much about me already? We had the best time.”
When I heard the two of them pronouncing the journal’s title, I thought it was a magazine title in a foreign language that meant something like she, me, or mine. As a result, I assumed MEA was a kind of naff women’s magazine full of arcane advice and advertorials for control pants. I didn’t realise it was an acronym, or that it had been a very well-respected, though short-lived, contribution to literary criticism, championing feminist critics in particular. But I had by this point discovered how to access the Wi-Fi in the apartment by rooting around in Rex’s bedroom, now the study. The password was Silvia’s name. Something about that made me want to cry, even though I had never met the man. What does it say about me that I find that romantic? Knowing the password had become key to occasionally impressing Silvia, who did not fully grasp the ease with which any and every piece of obscure information could be instantly retrieved online. I had got her to think I was much smarter than I was by retreating to my magic thinking room whenever she wondered out loud about crossword clues or what films a certain actor had been in and then returning with a flourish, astonishing her with the full list from IMDb.
When there was an opportunity, I went into Rex’s study to enter the search terms “MEA,” “Silvia Weiss,” “Nat Rooiakker.” The Wikipedia page told me that the final issue had been printed in November 1968. It also explained the acronym. It was a French phrase meaning, in its literal sense, “placed into an abyss.” Mizuko did her own version of this on her Instagram, taking a picture of herself and then another picture of herself holding the picture of herself, and again and again as the picture got smaller and smaller. She’d had a lecture at Columbia on the subject, which inspired her. When it occurs within a text, it gets to the point where everything becomes unstable, a loop that takes you back to where you started.
As I came back in, Nat was sitting upright on the floor, balancing a book on her head to improve her posture. All the pastries were gone.
“We travelled to Paris together without our husbands. We were very naughty—we booked a single room and that was that,” Nat said, bringing me up to speed.
“Do you remember that boy?” Silvia asked.
“Did you keep in touch?”
“No, he just gave me the book.”
“What was his name?”
I watched silently as the two of them rolled their eyes back into their heads like prophets, trying to remember. Nat, I noticed then, had white eyelashes over one eye, which explained the uneasy feeling I had had so far that she had not really blinked since arriving.
“Don’t remember his name,” Silvia said at last, defeated.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“A boy who fell in love with your grandmother even though she was married.”
“He was French,” Silvia said, as if this explained everything. “Obviously he thought I was a stupid American girl. He gave me a book called The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism—Bernard Shaw—probably one of the few he had in English. He thought I should be educated.”
“He was no doubt right,” Nat said.
“Where’s it gone? I wonder. Have a look on the shelves, Alice.”
Silvia had said more in the last ten minutes than she had since I had arrived. I stood up, the back of my neck prickling with something like jealousy, and began to systematically scan the floor-to-ceiling shelves around the den, which were heaving with books. I listened to the conversation continuing without me, which became increasingly politically incorrect, so that at last, out of embarrassment more than anything else, I felt I had to intervene.
“I can’t see it,” I said loudly. “I’ll look in Rex’s study.”
Silvia shook her head and tapped her glass. “Don’t bother. We’ve moved on.”
I went to refresh their drinks and left the door open because I was holding the glasses. I wasn’t supposed to do this because Silvia liked to keep the room hot, but it meant I could still make out their voices in the kitchen.
“. . . two CT scans and a brain MRI. I can’t pick up stuff with my hands much. Nothing anybody can do about it. I put away my typewriter the other day as my fingers are useless.”
“If you’ve given up the typewriter, you really must be giving up,” I heard Nat say.
“Well, you know what I say. Where there’s a will, someone’s died.”
I heard Nat’s booming laugh and felt angry.
“I fully intended to leave the house on time this morning,” she was saying as I returned with more drinks on a silver tray, “but I ended up doing some research and getting more stuff down from the cupboards in the kids’ old rooms. Whenever Ingrid comes round she gives me a hard time about my little project, says it looks like someone broke in.”
Nat was addicted to those TV shows where celebrities find out “who they really are” by tracing their family tree. She was currently watching one—a PBS show called Finding Your Roots—which boasted Carole King, her favourite singer, as a participant. Later that afternoon, helping Nat with this project, I set up an account for her on an ancestry website where you could create your own tree, which then tied in to other people’s trees. You paid money and that got you “coins” that work only on the website, and I could see how you could get addicted to scrolling down, down, down, falling deeper and deeper until you couldn’t climb out.
I’m sure it is even more addictive if it is your own family. If the names mean something to you. And I’m sure Nat thought, when she asked for my help, that she was doing me a favour, keeping me busy, but Silvia felt it was a bizarre thing to ask an adopted kid to do. I never liked people to see that I had taken offence. That, incidentally, is why Mizuko first started calling me Rabbit. It is not on account of either a leporine appearance or something euphemistic, or even, actually, on account of my last name. It was to do with the glazed look that always comes over me when faced with somebody who has offended or hurt me and yet whose approval I want. The timidity with which I accepted each and every one of Mizuko’s mood swings, or when I sensed the approach of conflict with Susy, the arguments I tried to defuse just by nodding and staring blandly, inoffensively, into her face, the twitch of my nose and mouth that suggested to Mizuko I might cry: Mizuko later told me this was how she decided on the name.
“And you, Alice,” Nat said, turning to me as I handed her a heavy-bottomed glass, “what are you going to do with yourself now you’re here? How old are you, for a start?”
“Twenty-three. I just turned twenty-three in January.”
“Well, it’s the end of May now, so you mean you’re nearly twenty-three and a half.”
“I guess.”
“And when did you graduate?”
“June.”
“You mean last June, as opposed to next month?”
“Yup.” I recalled Silvia’s note. Red alert. She was a bloodhound.
“Well, maybe you’d like to help me this afternoon. First, I’d like you to set up an account for me on this.” She passed me an ad she had ripped out from a magazine which had the details of the genealogy website. “I really want to get some more Dutch ancestors. I want to prove the Rooiakkers go back to the first Dutch settlers. Silvia tells me you did history, so—”
“Philosophy.”
“Oh, okay, well, same sort of thing—you’ll still be better at this site than me, I’m sure. My kids refuse to help me. The second thing is maybe you’d like to come with me, once you’ve set me up a thing, to Roosevelt Island, given that it’s right there. I checked with my daughter, she says you’re more than welcome. I told her you’re at a loose end.”
I turned the words loose end over in my mind, cringing. I couldn’t think of a reply except No, so I said, “Sure.”
Silvia said it was shameful that all the residents of the hospital had to leave in order to make way for what they (Nat’s daughter, her goddaughter) were doing. Roosevelt Island still had hospitals then—Bird S. Coler to the north, Goldwater Memorial to the south—but these were already emptied out and about to be torn down. Silvia said she sometimes looked at them through the binoculars, the patients sitting in their wheelchairs or on the benches, staring back at Manhattan.
“Wasn’t it supposed to be a kind of utopia?” she’d asked Nat. “I remember they were going to have buses that ran on batteries, pneumatic garbage disposal, and stuff like that.”
“That was in the sixties, though,” Nat replied. “Everything was going to be a utopia. Ingrid says it’s going to be an incubator now.”
Sympathy Page 10