Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  “The Red Sox–Yankees game. The Yankees won fourteen to five.”

  “I don’t have a television. Who pitched?”

  “Who pitched. Everyone pitched. Your grandmother pitched a few innings. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to come over?”

  Alice took off her pajamas and put on her new dress. Already a thread needed biting off.

  When she got to his apartment, only the lamp on his nightstand was lit and he was propped up in bed with a book and a glass of chocolate soymilk.

  “It’s spring!” cried Alice, pulling the dress over her head.

  “It’s spring,” he said, sighing wearily.

  Alice crawled lynxlike toward him across the snow-white duvet. “Mary-Alice, sometimes you really do look sixteen.”

  “Cradlerobber.”

  “Graverobber. Careful of my back.”

  Sometimes, it could feel like playing Operation—as if his nose would flash and his circuitry buzz if she failed to extract his Funny Bone cleanly.

  “Oh, Mary-Alice. You’re crazy, do you know? You’re crazy and you get it and I love you for it.”

  Alice smiled.

  When she got home, it had been only an hour and forty minutes since he’d called, and everything was exactly as she’d left it, but her bedroom looked too bright and unfamiliar somehow, as though it now belonged to someone else.

  • • •

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  He left a message.

  “Who takes the greatest pleasure in leading the other one astray?”

  • • •

  Another message:

  “Does anyone smell mermaid in here?”

  • • •

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “Mary-Alice?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reading.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Oh, nothing interesting.”

  “Do you have air-conditioning?”

  “No.”

  “You must be hot.”

  “I am.”

  “It’s going to get even hotter this weekend.”

  “I know.”

  “What’ll you do?”

  “I don’t know. Melt.”

  “I’m coming back into the city on Saturday. Would you like to see me then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Six o’clock?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry. Six thirty?”

  “Okay.”

  “I might even have some dinner for you.”

  “That would be nice.”

  He forgot about dinner, or decided against it. Instead, when she arrived he sat her down on the edge of his bed and presented her with two large Barnes & Noble bags filled to the handles with books. Huckleberry Finn. Tender Is the Night. Journey to the End of the Night. The Thief’s Journal. July’s People. Tropic of Cancer. Axel’s Castle. The Garden of Eden. The Joke. The Lover. Death in Venice and Other Stories. First Love and Other Stories. Enemies, A Love Story . . . Alice picked up one by a writer whose name she had seen but never heard. “Ooh, Camus!” she said, rhyming it with “Seamus.” A long moment followed in which the writer said nothing and Alice read the copy on the back of The First Man. When she looked up he was still wearing a gently startled expression.

  “It’s Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He’s French. Ca-MOO.”

  • • •

  Her own apartment was on the top floor of an old brownstone, where it caught the sun and stoppered the heat. The only other tenant on her floor was an old lady called Anna, for whom ascending the four steep flights was a twenty-minute ordeal. Step, rest. Step, rest. Once, Alice passed her on her way out to H&H and when she came back the poor thing was still at it. From the shopping bags she carried you would have thought she ate bowling balls for breakfast.

  “Anna, may I help?”

  “Oh no dear. Been doing it fifty years. Keeps me alive.”

  Step, rest.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes. Such a pretty girl. Tell me. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Well, don’t wait too long, dear.”

  “I won’t,” laughed Alice, running up the stairs.

  • • •

  “Capitana!”

  His doorman greeted her chummily now. He called the writer down and saluted them off as they set out for a walk. Swinging a bag of plums from Zingone’s, the writer asked whether Alice had heard about the city’s plan to rename some of its luxury residences after major-league baseball players: The Posada, The Rivera, The Soriano. “The Garciaparra,” said Alice. “No no,” he said, stopping her importantly. “Only Yankees.” They entered the little park behind the natural history museum, where, biting into one of his plums, Alice pretended to chisel his name under Joseph Stiglitz’s on the monument to American Nobel Laureates. But mostly, they stayed in. He read her what he’d written. She queried the spelling of “keister.” They watched baseball and, on weekend afternoons, listened to Jonathan Schwartz swoon over Tierney Sutton and Nancy LaMott. “Come Rain or Come Shine.” “Just You, Just Me.” Doris Day wistfully warbling “The Party’s Over.” One afternoon, Alice burst out laughing and said, “This guy is such a cornball.”

  “ ‘Cornball,’ ” repeated the writer, eating a nectarine. “That’s a good old-fashioned word.”

  “I guess you could say,” said Alice, searching the floor for her underpants, “that I’m a good old-fashioned girl.”

  “ ‘The party’s over . . . ,’ ” he sang, whenever he wanted her to go home. “ ‘It’s time to call it a d-a-a-a-a-y . . .’ ”

  Then, going cheerfully around the room, he would switch off the phone, the fax, the lights, pour himself a glass of chocolate soymilk, and count out a small pile of pills. “The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.”

  The party’s over. The air-conditioning’s over. Alice would stagger a little, taking herself home in the heat, her belly full of bourbon and chocolate and her underwear in her pocket. When she had climbed the four increasingly steamy flights up to her apartment, she would do exactly one thing, which was to move her pillows down the hall to her front room, where, on the floor next to the fire escape, there was at least the possibility of a breeze.

  “So listen darling. I’m going away for a while.”

  Alice put down her cookie and wiped her mouth.

  “I’m going back out to the country for a bit. I’ve got to finish this draft.”

  “Okay.”

  “But that doesn’t mean we can’t speak. We’ll speak regularly, and then when I finish, we can see each other again. Should you want to. All right?”

  Alice nodded. “All right.”

  “Meanwhile . . .” He slid an envelope across the table. “That’s for you.”

  Alice picked it up—Bridgehampton National Bank, it said on the front, next to a logo of a sailboat regatta—and took out six one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “For an air conditioner.”

  Alice shook her head. “I can’t—”

  “Yes you can. It would make me happy.”

  It was still light out when she left for home. The sky had a stagnant quality to it—as though a thunderstorm were due, but had gotten lost. The young people drinking on the sidewalk were just beginning their evenings. Alice approached her stoop slowly, reluctantly, one hand on the envelope inside her purse, trying to decide what to do. Her stomach felt as if she were still back in his elevator and someone had cut the suspension.

  There was a restaurant one block north with a long wooden bar and a mostly civilized-looking clientele. Alice found a stool at the far end, next to the napki
n caddy, and arranged herself as though she were there primarily for the television mounted high in one corner. New York led Kansas City by four runs in the bottom of the third.

  Come on Royals, she thought.

  The bartender dropped a napkin down in front of her and asked her what she wanted to drink. Alice considered the wine specials listed on the wall.

  “I’ll have a glass of . . .”

  “Milk?”

  “Actually, do you have any Knob Creek?”

  Her tab came to twenty-four dollars. She put her credit card down before picking it up again and taking out one of the writer’s hundreds instead. The bartender returned with three twenties, a ten, and six ones.

  “Those are for you,” said Alice, sliding the ones toward him.

  The Yankees won.

  IN THE RELUCTANT, MUSTY current of a secondhand Frigidaire:

  . . . I didn’t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word, we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn’t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants. It warn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in and made us drop everything and cut. . . .

  In the night, rain fell on the part of her air conditioner that extended into the air shaft with the sound of metal arrowheads shot earthward. Thunderstorms came and went, their patter crescendoing into sharp cracks and lightning that penetrated the eyelids. Water siphoned off gutters like spring water off mountain boulders. When the storm retreated, what was left of it counted out the early-morning minutes in slow, metronomic drips. . . .

  I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no show for me; so I laid outside—I didn’t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they warn’t high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway. . . .

  With the money left over, she bought a new toilet seat, a teakettle, a screwdriver, and a small wooden dresser from the weekend antiques market over on Columbus. The teakettle was a sleek, all-metal, Scandinavian design. The toilet seat she screwed on with tremendous satisfaction while listening to Jonathan Schwartz.

  Her work seemed to her more boring and inconsequential than ever. Fax this, file this, copy this. One evening, when everyone else had left and she was staring at the writer’s number in her boss’s Rolodex, one of her colleagues poked his head into the room and said, “Hey, Alice, à demain.”

  “Sorry?”

  “À demain.”

  Alice shook her head.

  “See you tomorrow?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  It got hotter before it got cooler. Three weekends in a row she spent lying on her bed, bedroom door closed, the Frigidaire whirring and rattling away at its highest setting. She thought about the writer, out on his island, shuttling between his pool and his studio and his nineteenth-century farmhouse with its unobstructed harbor views.

  She could wait a very long time, if she had to.

  I do not want to conceal in this journal the other reasons which made me a thief, the simplest being the need to eat, though revolt, bitterness, anger, or any familiar sentiment never entered into my choice. With fanatical care, “jealous care,” I prepared for my adventure as one arranges a couch or a room for love; I was hot for crime.

  Malan had a Chinese look, with his moon face, a somewhat flattened nose, scarcely any eyebrows, a bowl-cut hairdo, and a big moustache that failed to cover his thick, sensual lips. His soft, rounded body, the fleshy hand with pudgy fingers suggested a mandarin who disapproved of traveling by foot. When he half closed his eyes while eating heartily, you could not help seeing him in a silk robe holding chopsticks between his fingers. But the expression changed all that. The feverish dark-brown eyes, restless or suddenly intent, as if the mind was focused on a very specific point, were the eyes of an Occidental of great sensitivity and culture.

  The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bedsheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am a slave!”

  Alice picked up her phone.

  NOKIA, was all it said.

  But about the smell of rancid butter . . .

  • • •

  There was a party one night, a retirement thing for one of the editors, and afterward she slept with an assistant from the Sub-Rights Department. They did use a condom, but it stayed inside Alice when it should have come out.

  “Shit,” said the boy.

  “Where did it go?” asked Alice, peering down the shadowy gorge between them. Her voice sounded girlish and gullible, as though this were a magic trick and any moment now he might produce a fresh prophylactic out of her ear.

  Instead, it was she who completed the trick—alone in the bathroom, one foot on her new toilet seat, holding her breath. It wasn’t easy, groping around with one hooked finger among the deep slippery swells. Afterward, and although she knew it couldn’t prevent every dreaded outcome, she got into the tub and flushed herself out with the hottest water she could stand.

  “Any plans?” she asked the boy in the morning while he belted his corduroys.

  “Dunno. Might go into the office for a bit. You?”

  “The Red Sox are playing the Blue Jays this afternoon.”

  “I hate baseball,” said the boy.

  • • •

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  • • •

  On the second Thursday in October, while she was tugging a brush through her damp tangled hair, she heard on the radio that they’d given the Nobel Prize to Imre Kertész, “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  Breathlessly, as if to outrun her own advice, Alice told him about all of the things she had bought, including the toilet seat and the teakettle and the dresser that the antique dealer had described as “a vintage 1930s piece.”

  “Like me,” he said.

  “I have my period,” Alice apologized.

  Three nights later, as she lay with her bra around her waist and her arms around his head, she marveled at how his brain was right there, under her chin, and so easily contained by the narrow space between her elbows. It began as a playful thought, but suddenly she distrusted herself to resist crushing that head, turning off that brain.

  To some extent, the sentiment must have been reciprocal, because a moment later he bit her abruptly through a kiss.

  They saw each other less frequently now. He seemed warier of her. Also, his back was giving him trouble.

  “Because of something we did?”

  “No, sweetheart. You didn’t do anything.”

  “Do you want to . . . ?”

  “Not tonight darling. Tonight only tendresse.”

  Sometimes, when they lay facing each other, or when he sat across his little dining table from her, head pulsing to the side, his expression would settle into a sad sort of bewilderment, as if with the realization that she was life’s greatest pleasure at the moment, and wasn’t that a sorry state of affairs?

  “You’re the best girl, you know?”

  Alice held her breath.

  Sighing: “The best girl.”

  “Ezra,” she said, clutching her stomach. “I’m so sorry, but suddenly I don’t feel very well.”