by Carol Anshaw
When Alice arrived, Nick was sitting alone by the door on one of two chairs provided for take-out customers. Although the windows were steamed over and it was about ninety degrees in the restaurant, he seemed quite comfortable in a heavy flannel shirt with a red quilted vest over it. Both looked as if they were from L. L. Bean. He enjoyed ordering from catalogs. He looked like he had just arrived from a logging camp.
At the moment, he was fascinated by a little electric fountain near the entrance that ladled water out of, then back into, a synthetically steaming, miniature wishing well. This piece of Asian bric-a-brac had been ladling and steaming through the two or three previous dinners they’d had here. So it fell into the category of peculiar, but no longer remarkable. Alice took Nick’s fascination as a bad sign.
He was holding a thick, plastic-sleeved menu—the cover a collage of lurid color photos, which at first glance appeared to be underwater shots of amorphous sea creatures, but when you looked closer were snapshots of various curries and noodle dishes.
“These pictures are just so fucking colorful. I’d really like to Xerox this for this woman who just moved into my building. She’s a photographer. Tina. No. Nina.”
From this neighborly impulse, Alice understood that Nina was a woman with large breasts. Nick went on.
“Do you think they have a copier in the back there?”
“Sure. Probably a color copier,” Alice said. “And a postal substation. Like most storefront restaurants.”
He twisted in his seat to peer back toward the kitchen. “Do you think it would be okay to ask them to make a copy?”
Alice said, “I think we ought to just get a table and use the menu to order the meal we’re going to eat here. You know—now.”
More bad signs cropped up when they were seated across from each other at a glass-topped table giving off a blue astringent smell. Alice noticed that Nick’s eyes, usually a clear green, were currently crusty pinholes. His face had too much definition, the skin was stretched a little too tight over the bone and muscle beneath. She was reminded of faces in Lucian Freud’s paintings.
He seemed to be in a hurry, although when she asked if he had to be anywhere, he said no. As soon as they ordered, he popped off to the bathroom.
Alice looked around. The restaurant appeared to be an extension of the life of the family that owned it. An old woman in a back booth worked on an adding machine amid piles of paperwork and long loops of register tape. Two small kids sat doing homework at a bamboo bar against the far wall. Above the bar, a Thai video ran on a TV hanging from the ceiling. In the movie, two Asian women—one in a sarong, the other in a jogging suit—were having a heart-to-heart. Then one of them turned to hide her tears and the music swelled and the scene changed to a jail cell.
Nick came back. He wrestled himself out of the vest and the flannel shirt until he was down to his T-shirt. His left forearm was mostly taken up with an aging tattooed portrait of Olivia. He didn’t talk about Olivia. She was a non-subject. A couple of years ago, she found a pill in the cuff of his khakis. That was all. One Vicodin. She left on the spot—left their apartment, her job at MarcAntony, apparently left Chicago—and he hadn’t heard from her since. He didn’t say a thing about her, ever.
He picked up his menu and scrutinized it for a long time. Whatever he’d loaded up on in the john was kicking in; he had pumped up from cold to hot, dropped from agitated to dreamy. He sat awhile without speaking. When he finally said something, what he said was “coconut.” Like this counted as conversation, or he had just taken conversation to some higher plane where everything was encrypted and compressed. While Alice was still working the old-fashioned way, with sentences.
When the food arrived, he did not remember having ordered it, and seemed to not be particularly hungry. He only poked at the curry and pad sieu with his chopsticks, which he was holding by the thin—wrong—ends. After taking a sip of the iced coffee, he tried to set the glass back down on the table. They both sat silent for the maybe minute-long stretch during which he brought the glass in for a difficult landing. Something heavy and slippery fell inside Alice watching this.
He said, “I’m okay. Talk to me.” He pulled a pill bottle out of a pocket in his vest. “Actually, why not join me?” He put a long white tablet on the table.
“Thanks anyway,” Alice said. “I might find out I like it. That would be a bad piece of information. But listen, before you fade out, can you talk to me? It’s about the girl.”
“About the paintings?”
“Sort of. They keep coming to me. It’s like I’m her portraitist, and she won’t fire me. And the paintings she has me make are always better than any I make on my own. Whoever is painting her is a better painter than I am. It creeps me out.”
“Plus it’s depressing.”
“Thanks for mentioning that,” Alice said. “So much time has gone by. I feel like everyone else has put the whole thing behind them, except me.”
“I haven’t put the whole thing behind me. I still drive down to Missouri to see Shanna.”
“The mother? I thought you only did that once.”
“No. I try to get down there every year around the time—you know. I don’t know about Tom Ferris. I guess his way of keeping her alive was making a bunch of money off a song about her. He’s just a jerk, but I don’t think anybody else has put this behind them. It’s like—” He drifted out for a moment. Then back in. “I think we altered what was supposed to happen. And we can’t go back and make it happen right. So we’re stuck in some kind of endless loop, trying to improve the past. Which, as you might notice, is resistant to revision.” He furrowed his brow and nodded, as though giving consideration to what he’d just said. But then he kept nodding, like a bobblehead doll in a rear car window.
“Come on. Please,” Alice said. “Don’t fucking go away.”
“This is the best I can do right now. I do my best for you.” For several minutes they were silent. Alice ate a little, Nick kept a close watch on his plate. “I do appreciate that you’re not trying to save me. Like Carmen. I feel like she’s wearing vestments when she approaches. Like she’s just putting up her hand to bless me. Like she’s riding by in the Popemobile. Fuck that.”
“That’s just her. She’s trying to save all of us. I’d miss it if she weren’t trying to save me. You would, too. What’s this?”
She tapped her finger on a manila envelope, the interoffice kind with a grid of senders and recipients listed and crossed out.
“Oh yeah,” he said, then with some difficulty, unfastened the string clasp, and pulled out a photo. “I brought this for you. A really excellent nebula.”
Orange sparks and a kind of roiling aqua steam burst off a deep, inky background. Like a storm made of vapor.
It was amazing to Alice that Nick still occupied a place in the world of astronomy. He had become a weirdo hotshot. His expertise got him off a lot of the usual hooks. He didn’t have to show up for classes or department meetings. He took on individual advisees and made and broke a lot of appointments with them. The students were apparently willing to put up with this for the opportunity of studying with him. He wasn’t pressured for regular performance of any kind. What got him all this latitude was a talent for ferreting out black holes. Envelopes arrived by overnight mail, as though understanding celestial activity that was thousands, millions, sometimes billions of years old was suddenly urgent. He also got flown to various radio scopes—Kitt Peak in Arizona, the Parkes in Australia—to observe and interpret what he saw. Incidents had occurred. He still had his little trouble with flying and airports, their temptations. But these missteps had, so far, been swept under various carpets. He had made a small success of himself in spite of his limitations. Everyone was surprised, Horace not so pleasantly. He’d been counting on Nick continuing to fail. He was totally unprepared for Nick succeeding. Now all he could do was feign overwhelming happiness for his son, so overwhelming that everyone would understand the sentiments were a parody.
“This is very, very cool,” Alice said, then looked up and saw he had already drifted off. She reached over and pulled some hairs on his forearm.
“Hey,” he said. “You think because I’m high that doesn’t hurt?” He then paused so long she thought he had finished speaking, but then he started up again, this time as though he was being forced to tutor a dullard. “It’s really just mapmaking. Eventually we’ll chart it all. It’s just a big project. Do you know how many stars there are? Just in our galaxy, the Milky Way?”
“Thousands,” Alice said. She knew she was going to be wrong no matter what she said.
“Billions. And billions of galaxies beyond ours.”
“I hate when you tell me this stuff. It doesn’t make me feel the majesty of the cosmos or anything like that. It makes me feel like a speck.”
“You are a speck. This whole life that seems so huge to us?” He gestured widely with his arm, nearly taking down a tiny waitress passing with a tray full of cocktails in ceramic pineapples. “All of human enterprise even? Fuck us. We are so tiny.” As he said “so tiny,” he bent over until his forehead was nearly touching the tabletop, as if he was homing in on the speck that was them.
“I can’t stand to think we only add up to a blip. I need to think we’re more than that.”
“Deal with it.” He looked around, as though someone had called his name.
He counted a lot on people being too polite to confront him about being high. Alice was not too polite; she just didn’t want their whole conversation to revolve around this. Easier, really, to ignore the problem and just let him take the time he needed to set down his glass of iced coffee. Or listen to him speak in small, deliberate word packets. Or watch him gaze for way too long around this restaurant. What did she know? Maybe he could live a sort of okay life even though he was on drugs most of the time. And anyway, her nagging wouldn’t make any difference. She left the reforming to Carmen. Carmen could keep pressing books and articles on Nick, dragging him to meetings, trying to keep him on track. By now Alice questioned even the notion of a track.
“I know I don’t have much credibility at the moment,” he said. “That you’ll just think this is all about the drugs, but I swear it’s not.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Something new. Keep an open mind. Please. The thing is, if I wait in just the right way, I can tell when it happens. It’s very easy to miss. The first time I noticed was a couple of months ago when I was making a pot of coffee, but I was out of creamer. On my way out I glanced at the clock on the stove—3:17. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I drove to the White Hen but things were peculiar, don’t ask me how.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean I was clearly in my car, headed the right way, and the weather was exactly what I’d noticed out the window—a cool, brilliantly sunny day. And the Indian guy at the counter was the same one who’s always there. Everything about the errand was routine, except it wasn’t. Something was off. The colors were too high contrast, as though some dials had been turned up, others down. The breeze was a little too warm, or with little bits of warmth inside the colder air. The Indian guy, who is usually very laid-back, was slightly impatient, as if he was nervous to be doing something else with this moment other than taking my money and asking if I wanted a bag for the Coffee-mate and Marlboros.
“Okay, so when I came back and was pouring the coffee I’d made, I looked at the clock on the stove, and it said 3:17.”
“And the clock wasn’t just stopped,” Alice said.
“Please.”
“Sorry.”
“Now I can tell when it’s happening. I don’t need the clock. I just exit regular forward momentum, then I come back in at exactly the place where I left.”
“Have you told anyone about this stuff?”
“What would be the point?”
Over dessert, which was beige and sweet and quivering in little dishes, they exchanged birthday presents. Alice had found Nick a boxed set of his namesake opera, Verdi’s Nabucco. He had two gifts for her. The first was a Chicago Bears keychain. (Alice didn’t follow football.) The other was a turtleneck sweater she had seen him wear a few times. He smiled graciously as she pulled it out of the grocery bag he brought it in. Like it was a real gift. Like he had handed her a check for a million dollars, the keys to a yacht, like he was waiting to see how thrilled she was going to be. Tonight was beginning to depress her. She tried to keep in mind that it was only through some stroke of good fortune that she herself was not a junkie or an alcoholic. That she was not the one at this table thinking an old sweater of hers with a food stain on the front was a pretty good gift.
A lull entered the conversation, out of which Nick emerged trying to be social, to appear to have social skills. “You seeing anyone?” He always asked this, but Alice had become leery of exposing her love life to his inspection. It only fed his interest in girl-on-girl action. Plus he found it hilarious that Alice was still looking for love; he found that quaint. “You still getting lucky at those women’s issues groups?”
“This woman is too good-looking,” she said. “It’s not going anywhere. I’m trying to steer clear of gorgeous women. They’ve dragged me under too much barbed wire. Over too many deserts. Deserts made of shattered glass. Plus this one has a kid and a husband. She’s still coming out. Everything has to be very quiet.”
“Sounds kind of interesting.”
“Interesting at first, but gets old fast. Like waterskiing.”
“Like drag shows,” he offered, then asked, “What’s her name?”
“What does it matter?”
“I’m putting a picture together in my mind.”
“Nora.”
He grew quiet, savoring this little nugget of information, a hard candy. He looked down at his plate.
“I’ve got someone new, too.” This turned out to be his new masseuse.
“I thought you went to that guy, Earl. The one who put your rotator cuff back in business.”
“This is different,” he said. “Her name’s Celeste. She does an herbal oil, hot stone thing. You have to go to her apartment. There’s this kind of Malibu atmosphere.”
“Right. That would go with the herbal oil thing.”
“And, well, it’s a nude thing, too,” he said.
“Well, of course. I mean I just don’t get people who keep their underwear on. I always just take it all off. Let them really dig into those glutes.”
“No,” he said. “I mean her. She’s nude while she does the massage.”
“Oh man,” Alice said, caught by surprise. “Boocs, I’ve got to tell you if I were on the table and popped open an eyelid and saw Eleanor—you know? my massage therapist—saw her prancing around in the altogether, I’d be flipped.”
“This is kind of a different thing. Celeste is a different kind of person.”
“Different like a hooker?”
“It isn’t just that. We take her dog for a walk afterward.”
“Oh, well then, sure. Sounds meaningful.”
Although he had spent much of his adulthood avoiding real life, what small contact he’d had seemed to leave him embittered and edgy. Although he still sought out women, he appeared not to like them very much. He didn’t have real dates anymore; it was all hookers now. When he was flush with funds from Loretta and research grants, these were call girls. When the money ran out, the hookers he could afford were junkies he picked up on North Avenue. “You have to buy them dope and wait until they shoot up,” he told her once. “Then wait some more until they stop shaking enough to fuck them.”
In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him, which was non-negotiable), Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely, or with her eyes half closed, or through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas.
After dinner, they hugged on the corner and Nick insisted on taking a cab home. Alice drove around for a long time. She was thinking ab
out the married woman. Nora. The husband, Alice knew, was out of town. Tonight started coming together as an opportunity.
The lights were off except in the basement where she could hear the TV going. That would be the daughter. Alice used the secret key the family kept in a fake rock by the front steps, slipped up the stairs into Nora’s bedroom, shut the door behind her, all without a sound, Alice thought, but still, something caused Nora to wake.
“Hmm?”
“It’s me,” Alice said as she shrugged her jacket and jeans and underwear into a fireman’s pile at her feet. Nora lifted the covers, still half asleep. She was wearing only a black T-shirt, and soon not even that.
the limited palette
Alice awakened into the first morning of the new year—the last of the current century—a little groggy. For a moment, she wasn’t sure whose bed she was in. Then life rolled back in like a tide. Last night she and Charlotte went to a party thrown by a collector friend, an apartment with a roof deck overlooking the Amstel. By eleven-thirty the sky was on fire with luminous anarchy. Afterward, they walked up through the city zigzagging along the ring canals among maybe a million other celebrants, ducking and weaving around all the amateur pyrotechnicians—many of them, of course, drunk—setting off crackers and cherry bombs inside trash cans, near the exhaust pipes of parked cars. They traveled through a fog of gunpowder so thick they could barely see across the Herengracht. If war were a happy thing, it would look like this. Even as they were going to sleep, late crackers were still popping sporadically, the last kernels in the bag of microwave popcorn.
Now, although technically morning, it was actually still night outside. The seasons this far north pushed the light around in dramatic ways. In mid-winter, the sun didn’t arrive until after eight, then slipped out of the sky before five. Alice checked the bedside clock—twenty past seven. The flat, narrow radiator was gently clanking and hissing. Then a distant, machine gun–like burst, then another, enlivened the air. The racket awakened Charlotte.
“These are crazy people!” she said, burying her head under her pillow. Her cat Melke—who was only middle-aged when Alice first slept over here the night of that long-ago museum show—was now skinny and stiff with arthritis as she walked along the wide windowsill of the bedroom. Quietly, Alice climbed out of bed; the lifted comforter released a small gust of sex.