Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  “He’s going to wait until the fall. Have you finished?”

  “I’m up to page one sixty-three.”

  “And?”

  “I like it.”

  “What.”

  “What?”

  “What’s that tone?”

  “Well . . . Who’s speaking? Who’s telling the story?”

  “What do you mean? The narrator’s telling the story.”

  “I know but—”

  “Finish it first. Then we can talk about point of view. Anything else?”

  “The girl in the bagel shop. Who talks like that, these days? So carefully? So formally?”

  “You do.”

  “I know but I’m—”

  “What? Special?”

  Alice raised her eyebrows at him but kept chewing.

  “Mary-Alice,” he said tenderly, a moment later. “I know what you’re up to.”

  “What?”

  “I know what you do when you’re alone.”

  “What?”

  “You’re writing. Aren’t you?”

  Alice shrugged. “A little.”

  “Do you write about this? About us?”

  “No.”

  “Is that true?”

  Alice shook her head hopelessly. “It’s impossible.”

  He nodded. “Then what do you write about?”

  “Other people. People more interesting than I am.” She laughed softly, lifting her chin toward the street. “Muslim hot dog sellers.”

  Ezra looked skeptical. “Do you write about your father?”

  “No.”

  “You should. It’s a gift.”

  “I know. But writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.”

  “Forget about world affairs. World affairs can take care of themselves.”

  “They’re not doing a very good job of it.”

  A woman from Ezra’s building came down the path wearing a Gore 2000 cap and power walking a shih tzu. “Hello,” Ezra said as she passed. “Hello, Chaucer,” he added to the dog. For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man, when Ezra turned back to her and said: “Don’t worry about importance. Importance comes from doing it well. Just remember what Chekhov said: ‘If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.’ ”

  Alice wiped her hands and stood to throw her napkin away. “If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?”

  When she’d returned to him, Gabriela was there, holding his scarf and helping him to his feet; the sun had disappeared behind the high-rises on Columbus and all around them paces quickened in the sudden shade. Back to the wind, Ezra lodged his cane in the groin of his corduroys and struggled with his jacket’s zipper. “No no,” he said quietly, when Gabriela moved to help. “I can do it.” Dwarfed by the plane trees, he looked smaller and frailer than he did in the close refuge of his apartment, and for a moment Alice saw what she supposed other people would see: a healthy young woman losing time with a decrepit old man. Or were other people more imaginative and sympathetic than she thought? Might they acknowledge that everything was still more interesting with him than without, and perhaps even that her gameness and devotion were qualities the world needed more of, not less? Behind them, the planetarium came aglow in violet. The halal hot dog seller began shuttering his truck. While Ezra adjusted his gloves, Gabriela gave Alice a sisterly wink and came to stand beside her, bouncing in the cold. “Samantha!” she said in a stage whisper. “Francine says freeze an egg.”

  • • •

  With a change at Ronkonkoma, the train took a little under three hours. Alice passed the journey drinking a bottle of hard lemonade and watching the rusted chicken wire and psychedelic graffiti of Queens give way to daffodils and doghouses, dogwoods and vines. At Yaphank, there was a smattering of chicory flowers along the tracks, quivering like tiny well-wishers. At the other end of her car sat an old woman who rested her hands on her purse and her purse in her lap, staring out the window at the scenery spooling by while a group of teenagers whooped and hollered all around her. Every now and again their horseplay spilled into the aisle, or bumped into the woman’s seat, or, in one instant, sent a baseball cap sailing into the arm of her periwinkle blazer. Even with the conductor bearing down on them, the kids carried on—hurling bananas, snatching phones—until, standing over them, the conductor cleared his throat and said:

  “Excuse me. Is this lady bothering you?”

  Like gophers into holes, the teenagers dropped into their seats and remained there for the rest of the ride, communicating in monkish whispers.

  “Hi Samantha.”

  “Hi Clete. How’s it goin’?”

  “Not bad. Nice weather for a visit to the country.”

  “It sure is.”

  When they pulled into the driveway, Ezra was just emerging from his studio. “Sorry, miss!” he called out across the lawn. “Your reservation isn’t until tomorrow.” He came closer. “How are you, Mary-Alice?”

  Alice widened her eyes.

  “I mean Samantha-Mary. Samantha Mary-Alice. Mary-Alice is your middle name, isn’t it? But you prefer Samantha, don’t you, Samantha Mary-Alice?”

  “That’s right,” said Alice.

  “Anyhow.” Clete grinned. “See you Sunday, boss.”

  As they approached the house, Ezra put an arm around her. “Ninety-three pages.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I don’t know if it’s any good.”

  The cleaning lady worked around them while they ate lunch. Alice began to tell him about the old woman on the train, but as soon as she said “periwinkle” Ezra lowered his ginger ale and shook his head.

  “Don’t sentimentalize her.”

  “You always say that. Don’t sentimentalize people. As though I have a choice.”

  “Sentiments are okay. Not sentimentality.”

  The cleaning lady winked. “He is so funny.”

  “Who?”

  “You, Mister Blazer.”

  “He certainly is,” said Alice, getting up. “Hey, the Yankees are playing the Red Sox tonight.”

  “Hey, I’m going to take a nap. And then I’ll be in my studio. I’ve got some boxes to go through.”

  “What boxes?”

  “For my biographer.”

  “What biographer?”

  “My eventual biographer.” In the living room there was a thump. “Janice,” Ezra called over his shoulder. “Is everything all right?”

  “I just killed the biggest wasp.”

  “I thought George Plimpton was the biggest wasp.”

  “I’m going for a swim,” said Alice.

  “Wait, darling. What time’s your train?”

  Alice looked at him.

  “I mean,” he said, shaking his head, “what time’s the baseball on?”

  It was cool for June; steam rose from the water as though a river of magma flowed only a fathom below. Rustling trees cast trembling shadows on the basin, whose layers had chipped away over the years to leave swirls of old grays, greens, and aquamarines, like an antique sea chart. Beneath the surface, Alice’s hands, still coming together and swiveling apart, began to look less like instruments of propulsion than like confused magnets, or hands trying to find their way out of a dark room. But still, she swam. She swam until the wind whistled and the sun sank pink behind the redbuds. She swam until her lips turned blue and her nipples knotted. She swam until a series of lights came on in the house and Ezra’s silhouette could be seen at the kitchen door, calling for her with the worried singsong of any homesteader calling for his dog.

  Still dripping, she found on the bed:

  A commemorative issue of Life magazine, FDR 60th Anniversary Edition.

 
; A porn magazine from 1978, the entire issue comprising a story about a tailor named Jordy who the local community believes is a homosexual and thus is trusted to accompany young women into the fitting room. (“The most sexually conservative woman has no qualms about stripping for her doctor—or her tailor. Jordy was, so far as older or less desirable customers were concerned, an inanimate fixture who adjusted the clothes he sold to their bare or relatively bare bodies like an emotionless automaton . . .”)

  A souvenir program from the 33rd Annual Allegheny County Fair, featuring The Doodletown Pipers, Arthur Godfrey and His Famous Horse Goldie, and the Banana Splits. On the back, in black marker and his singularly mesmerizing slant, he had written: HEY, DOODLE. I DO LOVE YOU, YOU KNOW.

  • • •

  In the shallow end she popped up beside him.

  He said, “You’re like a little boat.”

  Alice shook the water from one ear and pushed off for another lap. When she’d swum back to him, he said, “Remember Nayla?”

  “The Palestinian?”

  “Yep. She came out to interview me last week, and Mary-Alice, I’m telling you, she has the most beautiful skin you’ve ever seen. It’s like . . .” He smoothed a hand down his cheek. “Chocolate milk.”

  “Chocolate soymilk.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So it went well.” Alice floated onto her back.

  “I invited her to have lunch with me when I get back to the city. She said she’d call. Darling, it doesn’t matter to me, not in the slightest, but are your tits getting smaller?”

  Alice sank herself bending to look. “I think so. I have this sinus problem, and my doctor prescribed a steroid that I’m supposed to spray up my nostrils, and it works but I think it’s also causing my breasts to shrink.”

  Ezra nodded reasonably. “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “Are there options?”

  “Gin rummy. Or there’s a concert at the Perlman school.”

  “Perlman school.”

  “Don’t you want to know what they’re playing?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Alice, diving under again.

  The drive took them past the country club, where golfers loped after balls rolled into the long shadows, and up Sunset Beach, where Ezra slowed for some girls carrying daiquiris over the road and Alice lowered her window to feel the wind with her hand. From here, you could see all the way across the water to the North Fork, where the train from the city came to its slow, inexorable halt—its tracks ending abruptly, surrounded on three sides by grass, as though the men whose job it was to lay them down a century and a half earlier had looked up one day and saw they could go no farther: a bay lay in their way. It gave the land beyond it a wilder feel, uncharted and unreachable by the steel veins of the metropolis—whose relentless intensity had lately seemed increasingly at odds with Alice’s dream of a more contemplative life. A life of seeing, really seeing the world, and of having something novel to say about the view. On the other hand: Could all the rural quietude on earth cure the anxiety of self-doubt? Was she even capable of being alone for as long as it took? Would it make her life any less inconsequential than it was now? And, hadn’t he already said everything she wanted to say?

  Ezra parked in a lot facing the water and with the sunset at their backs they headed for a marquee whose scalloped edges snapped and fluttered in the breeze. “Mary-Alice,” he said, as they crossed the lush green grass stride for stride. “I have a proposal for you.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I want to pay off your college loans.”

  “Oh my gosh. Why?”

  “Because you’re a smart girl, a remarkable girl really, and I think it’s time you should be doing whatever it is you want to be doing in life. Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have all that debt hanging over your head?”

  “Yes. Although it’s not that much. I’ve already paid off most of it.”

  “Even better. What’s left?”

  “About six thousand, I think.”

  “So I’ll give you six thousand, and you can get rid of the rest of it all at once, and maybe then you’ll be able to see your way in life a little more clearly. More freely. What do you say?”

  “May I think about it?”

  “Of course you should think about it. Think about it forever if you like. And whatever you decide, we don’t ever have to talk about it again. I’ll just give you the money, or not, and that’ll be the end of it. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thank you, Ezra.”

  “You’re velcome,” they said simultaneously.

  The concert was a special guest piano performance by a young Japanese woman who’d already played auditoriums in London, Paris, Vienna, and Milan—although from where they sat now she looked like a child of nine approaching an instrument large enough to be a baby giraffe’s coffin. The first three notes sounded like day dawning, day or time itself; then the music exploded into the battering wind and rain of a violent squall, the girl’s fingers darting and leaping and trilling at implausible speeds even as her face remained smooth and neutral as a mask. This was followed by two brief Stockhausen pieces, which by contrast sounded to Alice like a cat walking around on the keyboard; between them, during the stern lull in which everyone knows not to clap, a spate of coughs rippled through the audience, as though the dissonant tones still hanging in the air were not what remained of the music but an irritating gas.

  During intermission, Ezra was greeted by a friend, a man with white leonine hair and a turquoise handkerchief sprouting from his seersucker pocket. “Ezra my dear. What do you think?”

  “She’s wonderful. Though perhaps a little aloof.”

  “Stockhausen is aloof. How’s your book?”

  Alice hung back, sipping white wine and gazing coolly out toward the bay; behind her, two female students were discussing triads, and fermatas, and then, a touch more cagily, who might be chosen to solo in the benefit concert the following month. Alice finished her wine and was about to move off altogether when Ezra touched her elbow and said, “Cal, this is Mary-Alice.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. “Hi.”

  “Hello.”

  “I was just telling Cal about how I heard Maurizio Pollini play The Tempest a hundred years ago, at the Louvre. His tails were as long as a freight train. Darling, you really must try to see Pollini one day.”

  “You like music?” Cal asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Alice.

  “Mary-Alice is an editor,” said Ezra.

  “Well,” said Alice, “an associate editor.”

  “How fine,” said Cal. “For which house?”

  “Excuse me,” said Ezra. “I’m just going to get a Diet Coke.”

  “Gryphon,” said Alice, stepping closer to make room for the people filing behind her.

  “You must be very clever then. Roger doesn’t hire dummies.”

  “You know Roger?”

  “Of course. Brilliant man. Brilliant editor. Is that what you want to do? Edit?”

  A woman carrying a baby excused herself to squeeze between them. Recognizing her, Cal leaned in for a kiss. “Felicity! This is Mary-Alice. Ezra’s friend. And this?”

  “Justine.”

  “Justine . . .”

  Alice found Ezra outside, sitting on a bench under a maple’s canopy, his freshly shaven face looking drawn and gray in the dying light. “Sorry honey. I suddenly felt a little light-headed.”

  “Do you want to go home?”

  “No, I’ll be all right. I want us to have a nice night out together. We can stay.”

  Sitting beside him, Alice said, “Cal knows Roger. My boss.”

  “Oops. Oh well.”

  Alice nodded. “Oh well.”

  A few yards away an elegantly dressed couple passed a cigarette between them. The woman said something in French that made Ezra look over and the man smoking with her laugh.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Alice.

  Ezra turned back to her, surprised.
“I was thinking about my book. About a scene I haven’t got right. Not that you ever get them right, mind you. You might as well write about the Hutus for all you’re going to get right about them.”

  When they’d thrown their plastic cups away and pushed politely past the others back to their seats, the pianist returned to her bench and stared at the keys reflected there in the high ebony gloss with what seemed a superhuman concentration. Then she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage: a great rumbling rigorous pounding that was anything but aloof; on the contrary, the woman’s shoulders rocked forward and back, her foot pumped the damper pedal so emphatically that even her heel cleared the floor, and her head jerked wincingly up and to the side as if sparks were flying off the keyboard and threatening to enter her eyes. The effect, on Alice, was dazzling and demoralizing all at once: reverberating in her sternum, the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another? At a certain point the pianist was leaning back slightly, hands working opposite ends of the keyboard as though one had to be kept from popping up while the other was held down, and here Alice turned to look at Ezra, who was watching with his mouth open; beyond him the fermata girls sat frozen in their own poses of wonder and humility: whatever they could do, it wasn’t this, would never be this, or would only become this once a great many more hours had been sacrificed to the ambition. Meanwhile, their hourglasses were running down. Everyone’s hourglass was running down. Everyone’s but Beethoven’s. As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again. Alice took Ezra’s long cool fingers into her own hand and squeezed. This time, between movements, no one coughed.

  • • •

  The following afternoon, he drove her to the ferry himself. They were early, and while they sat in the car watching the barge turn ponderously into its berth, he said, without looking at her: