Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Now.

  Good. Now, still keeping your eyes closed, tell me: Does this feel sharp or dull?

  Sharp.

  Dull.

  Sharp.

  Dull.

  Sharp.

  Sharp.

  Dull.

  Dull.

  Sharp.

  Dull.

  Good. Now, still keeping your eyes closed, tell me what each of these objects is, that I place in your hand.

  A paper clip.

  A key.

  A pencil.

  A dime.

  He laughed. It was a five-pence piece. Trick question.

  I watched him ride his swivel chair across the room to collect an ophthalmoscope from a mirrored tray before wheeling back and bringing his face so close to mine we could have kissed. His skin had a clean, rubbery smell. As I listened to the breath whistling in his nostrils my pupils flooded with white.

  I can see the veins pulsing behind your eyes.

  Oh?

  Yes. We like that.

  The last item on his list was a complete abdominal X-ray—something about checking for any foreign objects, which I understood to mean balloons of heroin hiding in my bowels—and while I got dressed he asked:

  So, what do you do?

  I’m an economist.

  Oh? What kind?

  Well, I replied, zipping up my fly, my dissertation was on risk aversion. And now I’m looking for a job.

  Lalwani nodded kindly.

  And then, I suppose because I sensed in him a tolerant man, an intelligent and liberal-minded ally whom in any case I would probably never see again, I added:

  I’m also thinking of running for public office.

  For a moment, Lalwani’s face froze in a kind of cautious delight—as if I’d just mentioned an acquaintance we had in common, but our respective opinions of said acquaintance weren’t yet clear. To be fair, I’d surprised even myself with this announcement—yet I was serious, as serious as my detention was looking to be long, and when it became apparent Lalwani clapped his hands together and fairly shouted: Marvelous! Where?

  In California, I replied. Thirtieth congressional district, I think.

  Lalwani nodded with something like impressed deference now, and when I’d tied my sneakers and straightened up again his eyes had assumed the squinty, professorial gaze of distant recall. ‘I have not the art of divination,’ he said a touch theatrically. ‘In the course of four or five hundred years, who can say how it will work. But this is most certain: Papists may occupy the position, and even Mahometans may take it. I see nothing against it.’ Then, looking pleased with himself, he removed the rubber glove from one hand and extended it. Well, Dr. Jaafari. I think it’s a fine idea. Congressman Jaafari. President Jaafari. Good luck to you. Maybe, one way or another, when you’re done visiting your brother you’ll be able to get us out of this mess.

  Walking back to the holding room, I felt unburdened somehow, lighter and even a little effervescent—as though, in the very process of having its robustness confirmed, I’d shed my body and left it on the floor of the examination room behind me. Are the veins behind Sami’s eyes still pulsing? Are they still behind his eyes? Three summers ago, shortly after my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my father had sent me an email containing a link to a story in The Seattle Times about a two-year-old named Muhammed who’d been shot in the face on the road between Baghdad and Baqubah. He and some family members had been driving home from visiting a relative when militants stopped their SUV and turned AK-47s on four of the five unarmed people inside. Muhammed’s uncle was killed, and his mother badly wounded; only his four-year-old sister had not been harmed. The bullet fired at Muhammed destroyed his right eye and grazed his left, such that after months of hospitalization in Iraq and then Iran he’d been flown by a humanitarian organization to a medical center in Seattle so that his vision might be saved by a cornea transplant there. I’m sorry to be conveying depressing stories, my father had written, as though all our correspondence over the previous month had not been depressing. But I thought you should know that the uncle who died was the same man who came to see us at your grandmother’s last January, the one who sat in the garden saying repeatedly: This will pass eventually.

  I suppose he was right.

  It was nearly midnight now, but overhead the holding room’s fluorescent lights persisted with their colorless buzzing like some sickly polar sun. And it was so cold, surprisingly cold for a room with no windows; I’d been given a thin blanket sticky with static and a miniature pillow encased in disposable gauze, neither of which did much to replicate the warmth or comfort of a bed. Meanwhile, I was no longer alone. A limping woman swept the floor along with my feet while a blonde who looked to be in her late twenties sat on the other side of the room, crying quietly. She was sitting in what many hours earlier had been the black man’s seat, a pillow and blanket like my own left neatly on the chair beside her, her legs crossed and her coat folded over on itself in her lap, the black fur on its hood riffling a little whenever she exhaled or blew her nose. My own coat was in my suitcase, rolled up between a pair of hiking boots and a toy abacus. All I had on me now was the light parka in which I’d departed Los Angeles twenty-three hours earlier, anticipating a tomorrow very different from today. In West Hollywood, it had been fifty-six degrees—not exactly springlike but still mild enough that on my way home from a farewell meeting with my dissertation advisor I’d decided to sit down outside the café at the end of my road and order a plate of eggs. I’d had a book with me, the same book on post-Keynesian price theory I’m not reading now, and after ordering my brunch and checking in for my flight I’d opened it up and read with a highly tenuous concentration until my five dollars of freshly squeezed sanguinello arrived and I drank it down all at once. The juice was pulpy and sweet and the words on the page looked denser and farther away after that. High in the sky an afternoon moon threw back the light of the sun. Then my phone beeped, the screen flashing PARENTS; then it beeped again, and this time Maddie left me a message saying Merry Christmas, inshallah; then it beeped a third time, just as a basket of bread and jam was set down by my elbow, and as I listened to my father tell me what Zahra had told him only half an hour before I laid down my knife and watched the traffic on Beverly Boulevard fleeting west. It was SUVs, mostly, SUVs plus the odd old hatchback or sedan; there was also a white stretch limo, a van painted to look like a shark, and a gleaming red fire truck leisurely trailing an American flag. They’ve asked for a hundred thousand, my father told me, through tears. Hassan’s offered seventy-five. Approaching their own reflections in the open window opposite my chair the vehicles appeared to drive into themselves, to glide eastward and westward at once—their hoods and wheels and windshields to disappear into antimatter, the flag to devour itself.

  III

  EZRA BLAZER’S DESERT ISLAND DISCS

  [recorded at BBC Broadcasting House in London on February 14, 2011]

  INTERVIEWER: My castaway this week is a writer. A clever boy originally from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Allegheny College swiftly into the pages of Playboy, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, where his short stories about postwar working-class Americans earned him a reputation as a fiercely candid and unconventional talent. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had published his first novel, Nine Mile Run, which won him the first of three National Book Awards; since then he’s published twenty more books, and received dozens more awards, including the Pen/Faulkner Award, a Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Medal of Arts, and, just this past December—“for his exuberant ingenuity and exquisite powers of ventriloquism, which with irony and compassion evince the extraordinary heterogeneity of modern American life”—literature’s most coveted honor: the Nobel Prize. Wide
ly admired in the States as well as here in the UK and abroad, he’s been translated into more than thirty languages—and yet, off the page, he remains a recluse, preferring the sanctity of his longtime residence on the eastern end of Long Island to what he calls the “fatal froth and frenzy” of Manhattan literary life. “Be audacious in your writing,” he says, “and conservative in your days.” He is Ezra Blazer.

  Are we to take it from that, Ezra Blazer, that the decidedly unconventional protagonists in your novels are entirely the products of a wild imagination?

  EZRA BLAZER: [Laughs.] If only my imagination were so wild. No. Certainly not. And yet it would be equally wrong to call them autobiographical, or to become caught up in that inane exercise of trying to separate “truth” from “fiction,” as if those boxes weren’t kicked aside by the novelist for good reason to begin with.

  INTERVIEWER: And what reason is that?

  EZRA BLAZER: Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all. But I’m the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what’s “real” versus “imagined” in a novel. Checking for seams, trying to figure out how it’s been done. It’s as old as time, this practice of dishing out advice you don’t always follow yourself. “Be audacious in your hieroglyphs, conservative in your hunting and gathering.”

  INTERVIEWER: Critics have not always been kind to you. Do you mind?

  EZRA BLAZER: I try as best I can not to have any contact with what’s written about my work. I don’t find it does me any good and if it’s laudatory or negative I have to conclude it’s all the same thing. I know my work better than anybody. I know my shortcomings. I know what I can’t do. By this point I certainly know what I can do. In the beginning, of course, I read every word I could find about myself. But what did I get from that? Sure, there are intelligent people who have written about my writing, but I’d rather read these intelligent people on writers other than myself. Maybe praise does something for your confidence, but your confidence has to be able to exist without it. The review of your last book doesn’t help you eighteen months into the new book that’s driving you crazy. Book reviews are for readers, not writers.

  INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your childhood.

  EZRA BLAZER: I think everyone’s heard enough about my childhood.

  INTERVIEWER: You were the youngest of three children—

  EZRA BLAZER: Really, I’d rather talk about how music came into my life. I never heard classical music growing up. In fact I had a kind of ignorant boy’s disdain for it. I thought it was all phony, and especially opera. But my father liked to listen to opera, strangely, although he wasn’t educated—

  INTERVIEWER: He was a steelworker.

  EZRA BLAZER: He was an accountant for Edgewater Steel. But on weekends he’d listen to opera, on the radio, I think it was on Saturday afternoons, and . . . Milton Cross, that was the name of the announcer. He had a deep, mellifluous voice, and the opera was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House, and there’d be my father, on the sofa, with his dog-eared copy of The Story of a Hundred Operas, listening to La Traviata or Der Rosenkavalier on the radio. And, well, I found it all a little strange. We had no phonograph, and no books, so the center of our entertainment was the radio, and on Saturday afternoons my father monopolized it for hours.

  INTERVIEWER: Was he himself a musical man?

  EZRA BLAZER: Sometimes he would sing in the shower, arias, little passages of the arias, and my mother would come out of the kitchen with a dreamy smile on her face and say, “Your father has a beautiful voice.” Unlike my protagonists I’m from a happy family.

  INTERVIEWER: Did he have a beautiful voice?

  EZRA BLAZER: He didn’t have a bad voice. But I was in the thrall of the popular music. I was eight when the war began, in 1941, so I heard all the songs from the war years, and then when I got to be an adolescent it was all that romantic stuff—

  INTERVIEWER: For example?

  EZRA BLAZER: [Pauses, then sings:] “A small café, Mam’selle. A rendezvous, Mam’selle. La-da-da-da-da-da-da—” Or: “How are things in Glocca M-o-o-o-r-r-r-a-a-a-a?” And that song I remember because it was popular just before my older brother went into the army. At dinnertime we were always listening to the radio and whenever “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” came on, my brother would sing along in a not-bad Irish accent that just thrilled me. And then he left for the service and whenever that song was played my mother cried. She’d start to cry and I’d stand up from the table and say, Come on, Ma, let’s dance.

  INTERVIEWER: How old were you?

  EZRA BLAZER: In 1947? Thirteen, fourteen. So that’s my first record. “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” sung by Ella Logan, the Irish Ethel Merman.

  INTERVIEWER: She’s Scottish, actually.

  EZRA BLAZER: Really? Does everyone know that?

  INTERVIEWER: I think so.

  EZRA BLAZER: Ella Logan is Scottish?

  INTERVIEWER: She is.

  INTERVIEWER: That was “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, performed by Ella Logan. But tell me, Ezra Blazer, surely you didn’t dance only with your mother. What were the origins of your romantic life?

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, as you imply, I soon began dancing with girls. At the prom. At parties. One of my friends had a finished basement, for parties. The rest of us didn’t have much money and lived in flats, but his parents had a one-family house and a finished basement and we had our parties there. And the singer who drove us wild at those parties was Billy Eckstine. He had a rich baritone voice, and his blackness, which enchanted us. He wasn’t a jazz singer, though he did sing some jazz songs. [Sings:] “I left my HAT in HAI-ti! In some forgot—” But no. That’s not the one I want. The ones we loved most were the ones we could dance to, very slowly, with the girls, holding them as close to us as we could, because that was the only thing approaching sex that we had, there on the basement dance floor. The girls were virgins and they would remain virginal right through college. But on the dance floor you could press your groin against your girlfriend and if she loved you she would press back, and if she was suspicious of you she would dance with her ass backing away.

  INTERVIEWER: This is a family program.

  EZRA BLAZER: I beg your pardon. With her tuchis backing away.

  INTERVIEWER: And Eckstine?

  EZRA BLAZER: Eckstine used to wear suits called the “one-button roll”: the lapels were long and narrow and held together below the waist with a single button. He wore his tie in a wide Windsor knot and there was a big rolled collar on his shirt—a “Billy Eckstine collar.” Wednesday nights and Saturdays I worked in the Monogramming Shop at Kaufmann’s and what with my employee discount I saved enough money to buy a pearl-gray, one-button-roll suit. My first suit. And when Billy Eckstine came back to Pittsburgh to sing in the Crawford Grill my friend and I sneaked in wearing our suits, and, oh, bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

  INTERVIEWER: Second record?

  EZRA BLAZER: “Somehow.”

  INTERVIEWER: Billy Eckstine singing “Somehow.” After graduating from Allegheny College, Ezra Blazer, you too went into the service. What was that like?

  EZRA BLAZER: I was in the army for two years. I was drafted, in the Korean War draft, and luckily I wasn’t sent to Korea but to Germany, along with something like a quarter million other Americans bracing themselves for World War III. And I was an MP. A military policeman. At Lee Barracks, in Mainz. Before age and illness laid waste to my frame and reduced my proportions to what you see now, I was six feet two and two hundred pounds. A big muscular MP with a pistol and a billy club. And my specialty as an MP was directing traffic. We didn’t have World War III, but we did have traffic. I was taught in MP school that the key to directing traffic is to let the traffic flow through your hips. Would you like to see?

  INTERVIEWER: It sounds like dancing.

  EZRA BLAZER: It sounds like dancing, yes! Do you know that joke?

  INTERVIE
WER: I don’t think I do.

  EZRA BLAZER: A young rabbi-in-training is about to get married and so he goes to the wise old rabbi with a beard down to the ground, and he says, “Rabbi, I’d like to know what’s permissible and what isn’t. I don’t want to do what’s forbidden. Is it all right,” he asks the old rabbi, “if we get into bed together, and I get on top of her, and we have intercourse like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine.” “And is it all right if she rolls over on her stomach and we have intercourse that way? With me on top like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine. Poifect.” “And if we sit on the edge of the bed, and she sits on top of me, facing me, and we do it like that?” “Fine! Absolutely fine.” “And what if we do it facing each other standing up?” “No!” cries the rabbi. “Absolutely NOT! That’s like dancing!”

  INTERVIEWER: Next record.

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, it often happens to young fellows in the army that you meet someone who becomes your teacher, someone who knows worlds unknown to you. In Germany, I was stationed with a guy who’d gone to Yale, and at night—he had a phonograph with him, in the barracks—he’d play Dvořák. Dvořák! I didn’t know how to pronounce it, never mind spell it. I was ignorant of classical music. Ignorant of it and hostile to it, in a coarse kid’s way. Well, one night I heard him playing something that stunned me. It was the cello concerto, of course. I think it was Casals. Later on, I’d hear Jacqueline du Pré play it, marvelously of course, but it was Casals’s that I heard first, so let’s play him. What I liked was the electricity of it, the drama that was like voltage entering your veins . . .

  INTERVIEWER: That was Pablo Casals playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by George Szell. And how was it, Ezra Blazer, being a soldier in Germany?

  EZRA BLAZER: Well, it was not entirely pleasant for me. I liked directing traffic. I liked wearing a uniform, and being a tough-guy MP. But this was 1954. The war had ended only nine years earlier. And it was only in the years after the war that the total destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis had been revealed in all its horror. So I had no love for Germans. I couldn’t stand them, couldn’t bear to hear them speaking in German. That language! And then, alas, what should happen but that I met a girl. A pretty, blond, blue-eyed, strong-jawed, one-hundred-percent Aryan German girl. She was a student at the university, and I saw her in town carrying some books and I asked her what she was reading. She was lovely, and she knew a little English—not a lot, but the way she spoke it I found charming. Her father had been in the war, and this to me was not so charming. I was ashamed to imagine what my family would think of my falling in love with a Nazi’s daughter. So it was a very fraught affair, and I tried to make it the subject of my first book. I couldn’t do it, of course. But yes, the first book I wanted to write was about this love affair with a German girl when I was a soldier, and the war having ended only nine years earlier. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to her house to pick her up because I didn’t want to meet her family, and this was crushing for her. We never fought, but she cried. And I cried. We were young and we were in love and we cried. Life’s first big blow. Katja was her name. I don’t know what became of her, where she is now. I wonder if somewhere in Germany she reads my books in German.