Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  “Oh,” said Olivia, slumping. “I forgot.”

  “That’s okay, honey,” said Ezra. “You just had a junior moment.”

  Edwin put down FRISBEE. “Sixteen points.”

  “No proper names,” said Eileen.

  Edwin took back FRISBEE and put down RISIBLE. “Good one,” said Alice. “Thirteen points.”

  “What does it say?” asked Kyle.

  “It says ‘risible,’ ” said Eileen.

  “What’s ‘risible’?” asked Olivia.

  “Something funny,” said Alice. “Something silly, or ridiculous, that makes you laugh.” She put down PEONY. “Twelve points.”

  Ezra put down CLIT.

  Alice covered her mouth with the scorepad. Over her wineglass, Eileen widened her eyes.

  Screwing his lips to one side, Ezra consulted his letters again and then shook his head ruefully. “That’s all I got.” Looking up from his BlackBerry, Edwin grinned.

  “What?” said Kyle. “What does it say?”

  “It says ‘clit,’ ” Eileen said clearly.

  “That’s not a word,” said Olivia.

  “Yes it is!” said Kyle. “Clift is a word!”

  “That’s right,” said Ezra, looking relieved. “Clift is a word.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Alice.

  “It’s another word for ‘cliff.’ ”

  “There’s also Montgomery Clift,” said Edwin.

  “No proper names,” Eileen repeated. “Anyway, that’s not what it says.”

  “Never mind,” laughed Alice. “Twelve points for Ezra.”

  Olivia took a finger out of her mouth and turned to stare at her. “Why do you laugh after everything?”

  “Who?” said Alice. “Me?”

  Olivia nodded. “You laugh after everything.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. “I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I have no idea why.”

  “I have a theory,” said Ezra, rearranging his tiles.

  “You do?”

  “I think you laugh to keep things light. To defang the situation.”

  “What’s defang?” asked Olivia.

  “It’s what’s going to happen to you soon,” said Edwin, tickling her in the ribs.

  “It was his idea,” Eileen said the following morning, back down at the pool. “He was raised Catholic and thinks everyone should have some sort of religious education. But when it came time to explain to them how Mary became pregnant with Jesus, I could hardly keep a straight face.”

  “Mom! Mom look!”

  “Olivia, socks!”

  Still wearing her nightgown, Olivia rounded the pumphouse like a wind-filled sail and arrived breathlessly on the flagstone deck, waving a bill. “Look! Look what the tooth fairy brought me!”

  “Wow!” said Ezra. “Fifty smackers.”

  “That’s very generous,” said Eileen.

  “Can I keep it?”

  “Give it to your father please. And put some socks on.” When she’d gone, Eileen looked pointedly at Ezra. “Fifty dollars?”

  “What? It’s nothing compared to what I gave the hot dog guy.”

  Alice looked up from her book. “You gave money to the hot dog guy?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much?”

  He waved a fly away. “Seven hundred.”

  “Seven hundred dollars!”

  “You don’t even like hot dogs,” said Eileen.

  Ezra shrugged. “I wanted to help him out. I wanted to help out a friend. He’d been telling me about how he’s had a tough time lately; the cost of his permit’s going up and his landlord keeps raising the rent on his apartment and he’s got a wife and three kids to take care of. He told me he wasn’t going to be able to pay his bills next month unless he found a way to come up with some extra cash. So the next day I went back to him and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he told me his name, and I got out my checkbook, and he said, ‘Wait! That’s not my real name.’ ”

  Alice groaned.

  “So already I was out of my depth, see. But what the hell. I wrote him a check. I wrote him a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “I thought you said seven hundred,” said Eileen.

  “No darling. Seven hundred and fifty.”

  “You said seven hundred,” said Alice.

  Ezra shook his head. “I’m getting a little forgetful.”

  “Anyway,” said Alice.

  Ezra held up his hands. “I haven’t seen him since.”

  “May I ask,” said Eileen, “the provenance of this hot dog man?”

  “He’s Yemeni, I think.” They watched as Kyle came swaggering down the lawn carrying a pair of flippers and the remote control to his boat. Ezra looked worried. “I probably just gave seven hundred and fifty bucks to al-Qaeda.”

  “En garde!” said Kyle, dropping the flippers and swinging the remote control’s antennae toward them in an arc.

  Like a shot, Ezra flipped backward onto the lawn, plastic deck chair and all, his head barely missing the root of an old spruce stump. Delighted, Kyle dropped the remote control to the ground and joined him on the grass with a bumbling pratfall.

  “I’m serious,” said Ezra, still lying on his back. “My defibrillator just went off.”

  “Oh my God,” said Eileen.

  “Are you okay?” asked Alice.

  “It’s okay. I’m okay. I think I’m okay. It’s just . . . It was just . . . a bit of a shock.” He laughed shakily. “Literally.”

  Eileen picked the remote control up by its antennae and tossed it like a dead animal into the woods. “But we should call a doctor, don’t you think? Just to be sure?”

  When Virgil arrived, it was Olivia who ran to meet him in the driveway, fairy wings flouncing. “Whoa!” she said. “How old are you?”

  • • •

  In Alice’s mailbox when she got home:

  A jury summons.

  An invitation to the Third Annual Fire Island Black Out beach weekend, addressed to the man who’d lived in her apartment before her.

  A notice from the NYC Department of Buildings, a copy of which had also been taped to the lobby door: WORK PERMIT: PLUMBING – ALTERATION TYPE 1 APPLICATION FILED TO PERFORM SUBDIVISION OF EXISTING SIX (6) ROOM RAILROAD ON 5TH FLOOR INTO TWO SEPARATE ONE (1) BEDROOM APARTMENTS. GENERAL CONSTRUCTION, PLUMBING, GAS AND INTERIOR FINISHES AS REQUIRED. EXISTING APARTMENT DOORS TO REMAIN. NO CHANGE TO EGRESS FROM APARTMENT TO HALL.

  • • •

  In the jury assembly room she sat next to a man wearing a T-shirt that read IT’S NOT THAT I’M ANTISOCIAL, I JUST DON’T LIKE YOU. In front of her, another man was eating a blueberry scone and explaining to the woman next to him why some Muslims do their best to avoid most musical genres. He’d been to MoMA the day before, and there had overheard a docent speaking to a group of schoolchildren about the “musicality” of Kandinsky’s work; this had struck him as an especially interesting point of comparison, “because the Muslims you’d expect to prefer Kandinsky over figural artists would almost certainly be the same ones who live in suspicion of music, whose sensuality and purposelessness, they believe, encourage humans’ baser tendencies.”

  “What tendencies?” the woman beside him asked.

  “Promiscuity,” said the man, chewing. “Lust. Immodesty. Violence. To my very conservative uncle, for example”—he brushed some crumbs off his lap and onto the floor—“Britney Spears and Beethoven are the same thing. Music is offensive because it appeals to our more animalistic passions, detracting from our more intelligent pursuits.”

  “So if your uncle were in a restaurant and they started playing classical music, would he put his hands over his ears? Would he get up and leave?”

  “No. But he would probably find the playing of any music at all extremely silly.”

  The more you learn, thought Alice, the more you realize how little you know.

  At 9:20, a short bald man stepped onto a box at the front of the room and introduced himse
lf as Clerk Willoughby. “My fellow Americans. Good morning. Everyone please look at your summons. We want to make sure you’re all in the right place on the right day. Your summons should read July fourteenth, Sixty Centre Street. If anyone is holding a summons that says something different, please take your things down the hall to the main office here and they’ll get it cleared up.”

  A woman behind Alice sighed loudly and began gathering her things.

  “Now. In order to be a juror in this court, you must be a citizen of the United States, you must be over eighteen years old, you must understand English, you must live in Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, or Marble Hill; and you must not be a convicted felon. If anyone does not meet those requirements, you too should pick up your things and take them to the administration office.”

  The man in the antisocial T-shirt got up and walked out.

  “Jury duty hours are from nine a.m. to five p.m. with a lunch break from one to two p.m. Jurors not involved in a trial and thus still here in the assembly room at four thirty will in all likelihood be allowed to leave at that time. If a judge is making use of you, however, it’s out of my hands and you will have to stay until you are dismissed by the judge. The average length of a trial is seven days. Some are longer, some are shorter. At this point we’ll be showing you a short orientation film, and I would be grateful if everyone would please remove your headphones and close your books and newspapers and give it your full attention.”

  The movie began with a fade-in on a lake. Led by a burly guard, a herd of medieval villagers trooped down to the water’s edge.

  In olden times, said a voice-over, in Europe, if you were accused of a crime or misdemeanor, you had to go through what they called trial by ordeal. This was an idea that first surfaced some three thousand years ago, in the time of Hammurabi.

  The herd of villagers parted to make way for a man whose wrists had been bound tightly with rope. Two guards pushed him toward the water.

  One of these ordeals called for you to plunge your hand into boiling water. Three days later, if the hand healed, you were pronounced innocent. Another trial by ordeal was even more extreme. It demanded that you be tightly bound and thrown into the water. If you floated, you were guilty. If you sank, you were innocent.

  Now the guards were tying the prisoner’s feet while a pair of officials stood by, watching impassively. The villagers were hushed, apprehensive. Then the guards heaved the prisoner into the water. The prisoner sank. Bubbles rose in his stead. The officials watched for a moment before signaling to the guards to pull him out. The villagers cheered.

  Was this fair and impartial justice? They thought so. . . .

  Despite her mood, which was restless and premenstrual, Alice enjoyed the film. It reminded her of social studies and in the end did not really ask of her very much—only that she not take her civil liberties for granted, and when had she ever done that? With the credits rolling behind him, Willoughby mounted his wooden box again and, like a magician demonstrating the integrity of his materials, held up a sample summons and instructed everyone to tear off a perforated portion that would have to be handed in. “Not this piece,” he said at least twice, once to each side of the room. “This one.” But each time either his knuckles or his pointing hand had obstructed Alice’s line of vision, so that when it came time for her to turn her own piece in the officer receiving it tutted direly and said, handing it back, “This is the wrong piece.”

  “Oh, sorry. What should I do?”

  Seizing the summons again, the clerk removed a Scotch-tape dispenser from her desk, taped the pieces together and thrust them back. “Sit down.” Then, shaking her head, and already gesturing to the next person in line, she added, “Very poor.”

  At 10:35, Clerk Willoughby began reading names.

  “Patrick Dwyer.”

  “José Cardozo.”

  “Bonnie Slotnick.”

  “Hermann Walz.”

  “Rafael Moreno.”

  “Helen Pincus.”

  “Lauren Unger.”

  “Marcel Lewinski.”

  “Sarah Smith.”

  In front of Alice, the man whose Muslim uncle did not like music for its animalistic passions was reading The Economist. Alice took out her Discman, untangled its cord, and pressed PLAY.

  “Bruce Beck.”

  “Argentina Cabrera.”

  “Donna Krauss.”

  “Mary-Ann Travaglione.”

  “Laura Barth.”

  “Caroline Koo.”

  “William Bialosky.”

  “Craig Koestler.”

  “Clara Pierce.”

  It was a Janáek CD, whose first track she listened to three times, and with each playing felt herself less, rather than more, capable of comprehending its complexity. But violence? Lust? A low-grade, objectless lust seemed to be her default state; perhaps music, like alcohol, could give it a reckless vector . . .

  “Alma Castro.”

  “Sheri Bloomberg.”

  “Jordan Levi.”

  “Sabrina Truong.”

  “Timothy O’Halloran.”

  “Patrick Philpott.”

  “Ryan McGillicuddy.”

  “Adrian Sanchez.”

  “Angela Ng.”

  A little after four those whose names had not been called were dismissed with orders to return in the morning. Alice went back to the pub where she’d spent her lunch hour and ordered a glass of wine, followed by a second glass of wine, then laid her money down next to a section of newspaper containing the headline Baghdad Bomb Kills Up to 27, Most Children, and at the first subway stop she came to descended unsteadily underground. It was rush hour now, and instead of changing via the long airless stampede at Times Square she got out at Fifty-Seventh Street and decided to walk. Her eyes felt overexposed and she wove a faint zigzag down the block, as if unaccustomed to the third dimension. A rumbling blast from a sidewalk grate suggested an underworld riled by her escape. Overhead, the forest of glass and steel swayed vertiginously against the sky. A man following close behind her whistled tunelessly, the sound thin and snatched away from them by the great static city din that was like two giant seashells against the ears: the undulating drone of wind and wheels rushing to make the light, taxis honking, buses groaning and sighing, hoses spraying the pavement, crates being stacked and van doors trundling shut. Wooden heels. A pan flute. Petitioners’ spurious salutations. It was eighty-three degrees, but many of the stores had propped open their doors—you could almost see the expensive air gusting out and withering on the street—from which truncated melodies blared like a radio set to scan: Muzak Bach, Muzak Beatles, “Ipanema,” Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, “What a Wonderful World.” Even from the entrance to the 1/9 there seemed to emanate the muffled bebop of a swing band. . . . But then Alice passed the stairs down into the ground and still the music became louder and clearer, and developed a kind of height, a floating-up quality, the unique reverberation of brass and drums in the open air. Then she saw the dancers.

  It was as if a present-day Rigoletto had overflowed the stage of the opera house and spilled out into the square. Under a wide white sky the sea of bouncing arms and swinging hips rocked metronomically; every now and again a limb was flung with such enthusiasm it looked liable to dislodge. A few bodies moved sluggishly, with concentration, irony, or age, but a gritty determination to keep moving at all costs appeared to be unanimous. Tall men danced with short women, tall women with short men, old men with young women and old ladies with old ladies; near the bag check three children skipped around their maypole of a mother on red-blinking heels. Some dancers danced alone, or with invisible partners, or, in a few rogue cases, in a well-sealed zone of avant-gardist expression. Teenage girls rolled themselves easily under bridges made by their own arms while less elastic bodies snagged halfway and let go in favor of a baggy Charleston. Others ignored the tempo entirely, including an elderly couple who danced so slowly they might as well have been in their own living room. A hot summer night, “Sto
mpin’ at the Savoy,” five thousand civilians gathered peaceably under clouds kindly withholding their rain, and clinging to each other this oblivious pair seemed the key to it all, the sanity that enabled the delirium, the eye of the rapture. The only interruption to their reverie came when a jitterbugger passing by tripped, colliding softly with the old woman’s backside, and her reaction was the merest glance down and behind her, as if to avoid stepping on a dog.

  When “Sing Sing Sing” started up, Alice turned and walked the remaining twenty blocks uptown.

  At Ezra’s, she let herself in and went to the bed. Ezra opened his eyes. “Darling. What’s wrong?”

  Alice shook her head. Ezra observed her concernedly for a moment before lifting a hand to her cheek. “Are you sick?”

  Again Alice shook her head no, and for many seconds sat staring at a book review that lay open on the duvet beside him. Staring back at her was a cheap caricature of him in which his eyes were too close together and his chin resembled a turkey’s wattle. She slid the paper away, undid her sandals, and drew her legs up to lie as close beside him as she could. She put an arm around his chest and hid her face in his ribs. He smelled, as ever, like chlorine, Aveda, and Tide.

  The sky bled pink, then violet. Ezra reached up to turn on the light.

  “Mary-Alice,” he said, with the gentlest forbearance conceivable. “Your silences are very effective. Do you know?”

  Alice rolled onto her back. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time here,” she said finally.

  “Yes,” he replied, after another long moment. “I expect this room will be imprinted on your brain always.”

  Alice closed her eyes.

  • • •

  “Alejandro Juarez.”

  “Kristine Crowley.”

  “Nigel Pugh.”

  “Ajay Kundra.”

  “Robert Thirwell.”

  “Arlene Lester.”

  “Catherine Flaherty.”

  “Brenda Kahn.”

  Alice was not the only one who’d sought out the same seat she’d sat in the day before, as though if they started over elsewhere the long wait of yesterday wouldn’t count. The man with the Muslim uncle had exchanged his Economist for a laptop whose screen saver was a photograph of himself with someone of identical complexion; they also had the same eyebrows, the same angle to their jawlines, the same brand of windbreaker in which they stood with their arms around each other against a dramatically marbled sky. Behind them, brown mountains stretched into the distance, triangular summits intricately veined at the top with snow. Then an Excel document poured up from the bottom of the screen, replacing nature with a blinding blizzard of cells.