Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

“Is this relationship a little bit heartbreaking?”

  The glare off the harbor hurt her eyes. “I don’t think so. Maybe around the edges.”

  From the top of the ferry ramp flowed a stream of people laughing, waving, hoisting duffel bags onto their shoulders and shielding their eyes from the sun. A young male couple held hands, while in his free arm the taller man cradled a beribboned houseplant.

  “And do you ever worry about the consequences?”

  “What consequences?”

  Now he looked at her sternly.

  “Are you worried?” asked Alice.

  “No. But that’s because I’m at the end of my life, and you . . .”—he laughed softly, at the neatness of it—“you’re at the beginning of yours.”

  • • •

  Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  “Oh, hello dear. Have you got any toilet paper?”

  “But Anna, you’re holding a roll in your hand!”

  Stumped, the old woman turned back to the hall.

  “Is something wrong, Anna?”

  Turning around again eagerly: “No dear. Nothing’s wrong. Why?”

  “Do you need something?”

  “I don’t think so. Tell me dear. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  • • •

  Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  “Dear . . . What’s your—?”

  “Alice.”

  “Alice. Can you tell me what time it is?”

  “Almost four.”

  “Four what?”

  “Four nothing. It’s almost four, five minutes before four. Anna, why are you carrying that roll of toilet paper around?”

  • • •

  Shave and a haircut—

  It had been fewer than ten minutes since their last conversation, but when Alice opened the door again Anna clutched her bosom and recoiled, as if she hadn’t expected to find anyone at home. “Oh! Dear. Hello. I wonder whether . . . Could you help me . . . change a . . .”

  “. . . bulb?”

  It was in the kitchen, where Alice had not yet been, a room easily accommodating of a large rust-mottled table and six vinyl-padded chairs. A weak, cloudy-afternoon light struggled through the filth-glazed windows, the lower panes of which had been papered over with yellowing pages from the Times. REAGAN NOSTALGIC FOR G.O.P. SENATE. RIFKA ROSENWEIN WED TO BARRY LICHTENBERG. IRMGARD SEEFRIED IS DEAD AT 69. The defunct bulb hung spiderlike from a wire over the stove, whose burners had been unaccountably patched up in places with aluminum foil. Alice pulled a chair out from under the table and stepped onto its seat. When she’d unscrewed the dead bulb and went to step down again for its replacement, she put a hand on the cooktop to steady herself and reflexively snatched it back.

  “Oh! Anna, your stove is hot!”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes! Are you cooking something?”

  “I don’t think so, dear.”

  “But were you just using it? Did you cook something today?”

  “I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.”

  Back in her own apartment Alice dialed the number on her rent slip and paced impatiently waiting for the recorded menu to end. She pressed zero. Then she pressed zero again. “. . . At the tone, please say your name and the number of your unit. Beep.”

  “Mary-Alice Dodge, Two-Oh-Nine West Eighty-Fifth Street, Five-C.”

  “. . . Yeah?”

  “Hi, this is Alice, in Two-Oh-Nine Five-C, and I’m calling because Anna, down the hall, keeps knocking on my door, and she’s been doing it for a while, and I really don’t mind helping her out every now and again, or even keeping her company, because she’s a nice woman and I think sometimes she knocks just because she’s lonely, but today she’s knocked three times already, and I think maybe she doesn’t even remember from one time to the next; first it was something about toilet paper, then she wanted to know the time, then she said she needed help changing a light bulb, which I did, and while I was there I noticed that her stove, which looks really old by the way, was extremely hot. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be like that, but it seemed much too hot to me, even though it wasn’t on. And look, as I said, it’s not that I’m not willing to lend her a hand from time to time, or even to keep an eye on her, in an unofficial sort of way, but there’s only so much that I can do. And if she’s becoming forgetful, or if there’s something wrong with her stove and she doesn’t know it, or if she were to leave it on and go out for a while, or fall asleep—”

  “Okay. Hold on a minute, okay?”

  She waited two minutes at least.

  “Mary-Alice?” His voice was much changed from before—higher-pitched and almost musical in its politeness. “I’ve got Anna’s granddaughter Rachel here on the line with us. Do you want to tell her what you were just telling me?”

  “I’m so sorry, Mary-Alice,” Rachel hurried to put in. “I’m so sorry it’s been a bother. Thank you so much for your help.”

  • • •

  “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2004 has been awarded to Elfriede Jelinek, for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”

  “I’ll have the salmon.”

  “And I’ll have the fusilli salsiccia without the salsiccia.”

  “Twelve pages,” he said gravely, when the waiter walked away.

  “Oh,” said Alice. “I thought—”

  He shook his head. “It wasn’t any good.”

  Alice nodded. “What about your back?”

  “My back is bad, darling. This thing didn’t work.”

  “What thing?”

  “The denervation I had last week.”

  “Oh, I didn’t . . . What’s denervation?”

  He nodded. “Denervation is when they use radio frequency to destroy a nerve so that it no longer sends a pain message to the brain. I’ve had it done before and it worked, but for some reason it didn’t work this time.” Their drinks arrived. “The good news,” he added, removing the wrapper end from his straw, “is that now I can listen to Jonathan Schwartz without having to turn the radio on.”

  Walking back to his apartment they were halted by a young man in a trench coat swerving amiably into their path.

  “Blazer! You were robbed!”

  Wild with excitement, the fan even dared to extend his hand. Warily, Ezra drew his own from his pocket and accepted it. On the shake, the younger man gave a deferential little bow; as he did, the wind lifted a yarmulke from his head, tilting it through the air and setting it down in the middle of Amsterdam. The man put a hand on the back of his head and laughed. Then, pointing at Ezra, as though Ezra had conjured the wind:

  “Next year man! Next year!”

  They walked the rest of the block in silence. In the elevator, Ezra extracted a leaf from Alice’s hair and let it flutter to the floor. “What’s going on with the Sox?”

  “They’re up two games on Anaheim.”

  “Good darling.”

  “What’s going on with your Palestinian?”

  His head jerked back, freshly incredulous. “Nayla? She still hasn’t called.” His gaze down at Alice hardened, as though she might somehow be complicit in this offense. When the elevator pinged and its doors opened, Alice stepped out while Ezra stayed put. “I mean,” he said, lifting a palm, “how are we supposed to get along with these people?”

  Boston beat Anaheim three games to zero. The next night, the Yankees won their series against the Twins three games to one. Alice waited hopefully, but when he called her it was to say, “Sixteen pages.”

  “Wow. How’s your back?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Are you taking something?”

  “Am I taking something. Of course I’m taking something. The problem is, I can only take it every other day. Otherwise, you get hooked, and getting off it is hell.”

  She watched Game One of the ALCS at her bar. The Sox blew it in the ninth
, failing to score off Rivera after the Yankees raised their lead from one run to three.

  CALLER ID BLOCKED.

  “I’m worried about your grandmother.”

  “So am I. She’s been wearing her lucky robe since July.”

  “I suppose you’d like to watch the game here tomorrow night.”

  “I suppose I would.”

  Again, Boston lost. Three nights later, when they lost again, nineteen to eight, he switched off the television and tossed her the phone. “You’d better call her.”

  “Hi, Nana. It’s Alice. . . . I know. . . . I know. . . . It’s terrible. . . . I’m sorry. . . . No, I watched it at a friend’s house actually. . . . No, no one you know. . . . Mm-hmm. . . . Oh really? . . . That’s weird. . . . Was Doreen with him? . . . Yeah, he’s a Shriner, too. . . . Okay. . . . I should go. . . . I should go now, Nana. . . . I love you too. . . . Okay. . . . Good night. . . . Good night.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “That Francona’s in a coma.”

  “That’s good. What else?”

  “That she ran into my father’s brother at the supermarket and he said I gave a nice trilogy at my grandfather’s funeral. I think he meant a eulogy.”

  The following afternoon he left a message on her voice mail asking if she wouldn’t mind stopping in Duane Reade on the way over and picking up one jar of folic acid, one Mylanta cherry flavor with calcium, and ten bottles of Purell, two-ounce size. When she arrived, he was pacing the rug in his socks, hands on his back, grimacing. Alice handed him the bag.

  Peering into it: “Hmm.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing darling. It’s not your fault. Never mind.”

  At midnight, bottom of the ninth, the Yankees were up by one and Boston fans stood in the bleachers and prayed. Feebly, someone raised a sign that read 4 MORE GAMES. Alice watched from between her fingers while Ezra got up and began to do his one hundred things.

  “The party’s over . . .”

  Millar walked. The Sox replaced him with Roberts, who stole second. Then Bill Mueller hit a single straight down the middle and Roberts rounded third and slid home.

  “Yesss!”

  Holding his toothbrush, Ezra came out of the bathroom and sat down.

  The score stayed the same for the next two innings. Alice watched from the floor, a knuckle between her teeth; then Big Papi hit a two-run homer and in an instant she was on her feet, making a running jump onto the bed. “We did it! We won! The Red Sox won! We won we won we won we won we WON!”

  “You did darling. Fair and square.”

  “Now the party’s over!”

  For Game Five she arrived wearing one of her Searle skirts and a cap with a B on it. Ezra intercepted her in the communal hallway and looked both ways before yanking her out of the elevator by the arm. “Are you crazy? In this town?” The television was already on and an industrious desk clearing appeared to be in progress: after handing her her drink and the delivery menu for Pig Heaven he resumed licking envelopes, tearing up faxes, tossing old magazines into the wastepaper basket and stepping over miniature ziggurats of foreign editions accumulated on the floor, whistling as he went.

  “Hey Mealy,” he said, looking up from a bank statement. “Have I ever told you my Glow-Worm story?”

  Alice put a check mark next to Pork Soong. “Nope.”

  “In the 1950s there was a popular song called ‘Glow Worm,’ recorded by the Mills Brothers. And in the early sixties, when I was at Altoona teaching creative writing”—he shook his head—“I advised one of my students that he needed more detail in his fiction. It’s detail, I explained, that brings fiction to life. He’d written a short story whose first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling.’ Then we had this little chat and he went home to revise it and when he came back the following week the first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling “Glow Worm.”’ That was the only thing new in the entire story.”

  Alice giggled.

  “Easiest white girl to laugh there ever was, Mary-Alice.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Who.”

  “Your student!”

  “He won the Nobel Prize.”

  “Come on.”

  “He played for the Washington Senators for a while, actually. Back when there were only eight teams to a league.”

  “There were only eight teams to a league?”

  “Oh, Mary-Alice, this is hopeless! There were eight teams to a league beginning in the Mesozoic Era all the way up to 1961, when they introduced the expansion teams, who got all the guys the other teams didn’t want, like Hobie Landrith and Choo-Choo Coleman—Choo-Choo Coleman! How’d you like that for a name?—and the Mets were so inept that Casey Stengel, the old Yankees manager who’d been dragged out of retirement to manage them, went into the dugout one day and said, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’ ”

  It was still four–four in the bottom of the ninth when he muted a Viagra ad and swiveled brightly to face her. “Darling, in the cooler in the back of the deli here on the corner they have Häagen-Dazs bars. Do you want one?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure. You’ll be right back. But listen. I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. If they don’t have that I want chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. And if they don’t have that I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. Plus whatever you want darling. My wallet’s right on the table there. Go!”

  At the deli they only had raspberry. And in the convenience store one block up they had only chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. Alice picked one up and stared at it for a faintly agonizing moment—it wasn’t even the right brand—before putting it back again and running the long block over to Amsterdam, where, in the narrow all-sorts shop that sold pornography next to Caramel Creams, she found, in the back, a freezer stocked almost exclusively with vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts.

  “Sí!”

  The cashier was eating takeout and watching a television stashed under the counter. “What happened?” Alice asked.

  “Ortiz struck out.” Fork aloft, he continued watching for a moment before lifting his other hand to take Ezra’s money. When at last he looked up and saw the B on Alice’s hat, he inhaled sharply. “Ah, la enemiga.”

  “Where have you been?” Ezra asked her when she got back.

  In the twelfth inning, Ortiz tried to steal second but was called out after Jeter, legs spread, sprung vertically into the air to catch a high throw from Posada. He snagged it and, after seeming to hang in space for an impossibly long moment, returned to the ground and tagged Papi on the back.

  “My God,” said Ezra, pointing his ice-cream stick at the screen. “For a moment I thought I was watching Nijinsky.”

  “Ugh. I can’t stand him. Look how smug he looks.”

  “Remember when we used to have sex, Mary-Alice?”

  “He was safe!”

  “No he wasn’t darling.”

  “Yes he was!”

  In the thirteenth, Varitek dropped three knuckleballs, letting Yankees advance to second and third. Alice groaned. Another sign went up in the stands: BELIEVE.

  “In what?” said Ezra. “The tooth fairy?”

  With two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth, Ortiz fouled right, then left, plus two more fouls up and over the backstop, then hit a fair ball that dropped down in centerfield, driving Johnny Damon home.

  “Hoooraaaaaaaayy!”

  “All right, Choo. That’s it. Time for bed.”

  “Uh, Mary-Alice,” he said to her voice mail the following morning, less than an hour after she’d left. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but before you come over here this evening—I assume you are coming over here this evening—would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up some applesauce? The chunky kind? I’ll pay you back.” His voice sounded flat and irritable, drained of the previous evening’s gar
rulousness, and when Alice arrived after an emergency ebook meeting that had run the full length of the afternoon he was holding his back, pacing and grimacing again, the television on mute and an electric heating pad warming the empty seat of his chair. As quietly as she could Alice put the applesauce into the refrigerator, got a tumbler down from the cupboard, and unwound the wax on a new bottle of Knob Creek. CALL MEL RE: WILL read a Post-it note stuck to the counter. A second note next to it read Q-TIPS!!! Even the way this looked in his incontrovertible hand made her feel a fool for ever thinking she could write. When she looked up again he was in his chair, neck stoically erect, the back of his head like a wax copy of itself if not for its infinitesimal pulsing.

  She carried her drink to the bed and lay across it. In the flickering silence they watched the pregame graphics as intently as if any moment now their own life expectancies would be posted there. GAME 3. LONGEST 9 INN. GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (4:20). GAME 5: LONGEST GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (5:49). 21 HOURS, 46 MINUTES TOTAL OF 1ST 5 GAMES. 1,864 PITCHES. Alice memorized each lineup, briefly contemplated life in the Dominican Republic, and wondered about dinner. Her instinct, if not innate then informed by old childhood fears, was to ride out and perhaps even allay such moods by being as still and quiet as possible. But the bourbon had different ideas.

  “I love that color,” she said when the screen cut to a wide shot of Yankee Stadium with its grass mown into stripes that were actually two slightly different shades of emerald.

  Several seconds later, Ezra replied in a low and even voice: “Yes. Night-game green.”

  When Jon Lieber took to the mound, Alice got up again to refresh her drink. “Would it be all right if we turned the sound on now?”

  It was too loud, as though the night before they’d been watching with a dozen friends all laughing and chatting at once, and one of the announcers had a slight Southern accent that sounded almost stoned in its serenity, the other a rich, reassuring baritone not dissimilar to the one that narrated the Viagra ads. Babbling away about the bullpen, Curt Schilling’s tendon, and the “difficult conditions” presented by the weather, their voices filled the little room like disembodied dinner guests trying to ignore the tension mounting between their hosts. Forecast: Drizzle. Wind speed: 14 mph, left to right. Superimposed against the misty skyline, her and Ezra’s reflections in the yellow glow of his reading lamp had the trapped and inanimate look of dollhouse detainees. Alone together, together alone . . . Except of course they weren’t alone. Ezra’s pain was with them. Ezra, his pain, and Alice, barely tolerable envoy from the enraging world of the healthy.