Claudia could have helped me. It was the hospital where she worked. But I hoped not to see Claudia there. I wanted her to think of me as a tutor, not a patient. It would only have confused things for each of us to become a client in the other’s eyes.
Finally I was able to see a doctor. His name was Neuenschwander. When he asked in Portuguese what the problem was, I realized I had none of the words I needed. I said there was pain. I used my hands in place of words. I said there was fire inside me. The doctor rubbed his jaw. We muddled on. I stopped making an effort to conjugate verbs; and so when I was describing the past, I could have been describing the present as well, the future.
The doctor went for it in English. It was decent of him; I smiled and let the whole thing be comedy. He asked about pregnancy—obviously, a pregnant woman wouldn’t feel like herself. I told him I knew what I had; I knew my own body. He ordered tests.
After a long interval of waiting, the tests came back, and Neuenschwander received me again. He looked over the pages of readings, tapping each number with the side of his thumb and dipping his nose slightly each time, as if he were adding up a bill. Then he looked up at me and smiled. “Normalíssimo,” he said. I had no infection. My body was giving me false warnings. That sounded like a good thing. But now he was concerned that something else must be wrong. He wanted more tests.
I didn’t want more tests. I wanted to go home. Whatever was wrong with me wasn’t what I thought was wrong with me. Maybe nothing was wrong with me. I felt certain that more tests would tell us nothing. Neuenschwander sought to soothe me into passive acceptance of his plan. Another doctor was brought in, and she looked over my results as well. They huddled. They appeared genuinely worried. I became worried. I tried to say that I didn’t want any more tests. Perhaps this wasn’t rational. I had never been wrong before about what was wrong inside me. Fear systematically invaded my mind: if the pain wasn’t what I thought it was, then it might be anything. Apparently I could no longer read the signals my body was sending.
They insisted on transporting me in a wheelchair. This was ridiculous, but I couldn’t say no. Being handled as if I were infirm made me feel infirm. There were two nurses, two people I hadn’t seen before, driving me toward another exam room. Neuenschwander brought up the rear. I don’t need a wheelchair, I wanted to say, except I had no idea how to say wheelchair in Portuguese, and anyway the decision didn’t seem to be mine to make.
In the exam room, I realized that the test Neuenschwander had in mind was an intravaginal ultrasound. This is as unpleasant as you’d think. The two nurses prepped me. I didn’t understand how people who wanted to help could seem so sinister. I was trapped in the momentum of hospital procedure. I was without my clothes. It was happening without my permission, without my knowing what was to come until it was already in progress. I couldn’t stop it because I couldn’t find the words, any words. I was by now in a state of very high emotion; and the emotion disabled my Portuguese entirely. I was divided between anger at what was being done to me and fear that they would discover something terribly wrong inside.
I was dressed. I’d regained some of my composure. I was in Neuenschwander’s office for the third time. He was telling me that the tests were inconclusive. He said this as if they hadn’t also been upsetting. It didn’t mean that nothing was wrong with me. It meant that if something was wrong with me, they didn’t know what. But maybe nothing was wrong with me. His language went around in circles. He was very cheerful about the whole thing. I still felt the pain, mildly. The pain of a bladder infection is bad enough—the pain of your own body criminalizing sex—without the possibility that the pain might not be what you think it is. I was at a loss.
My husband picked me up. He was surprised when I called and said I was at the hospital, and perhaps also faintly aghast. My husband didn’t like hospitals—I suppose no one does—and to me he seemed uniquely reluctant to visit them; he once allowed an ear infection to render him nearly deaf before seeking treatment. In almost everything, he was a responsible person who managed the problems of life, but to go to a hospital for something he felt he should be able to handle himself offended his sensibility, a core of unarticulated ideas about self-reliance. When he arrived, though, he was the model of concern. He had come directly from work. His tie was askew: I found this detail somehow touching; he looked so much like a husband.
Eventually the pain left, in an inconclusive, unsatisfying way, ebbing out, like a tide. And wheelchair in Portuguese is nothing more than “chair of wheels.”
The Wives—like a sorority, in the sense that you weren’t allowed to choose your friends. Lunch was sometimes twice or even three times a week. I was often reluctant to go; and yet I became anxious if it seemed I had been left off an invitation. Any group, of course, once it grows large enough, begins to form subgroups.
My mother also suffered from bladder infections. She once told me so, and warned me that I might have the same problem. It was a rare instance of direct maternal counsel. She shook her head, almost imperceptibly, whenever a thought came to her that she did not want to share; she contained things. She didn’t point out that the bad odds of genetic inheritance would obtain if I were ever to have a daughter of my own. That a woman’s body is a kind of casino.
Helen wrote:
Once, in college, you referred to the “petit bourgeois fascination with price.” Somebody was back from Mexico and talking about how cheap everything was. Why do I still remember that? I recall, verbatim, the oddest things people have said to me. Specific things, of highly variable significance. I was complaining the other day to my friend David about a woman we both know who uses emoji to excess, and David asked whether it’s really so different from using a written system of hieroglyphics. “Nobody questions the seriousness of the ancient Egyptians,” he said. Now I am forced to withhold judgment, which you know I hate.
It was late, and hot. From outside came the sound of a great splash: a large object falling into water. I looked up. “Somebody’s in a pool,” my husband said.
We met at a party, Manhattan, someone’s apartment. The man who would become my husband wore a herringbone coat and dark jeans and was talking intently with a woman when I arrived. Later he came up to me, introduced himself, and offered to mix me a real drink; others couldn’t trouble themselves beyond lazily stirring vodka into Sprite. He knew where the host kept the good liquor. I never learned who that woman was. I agreed to go on a date only with reluctance—finance guy. But he said Joan Didion, when I asked what he was reading, and later he told me a truly obscene dead baby joke. I knew the joke already, but it impressed me that he would risk that sort of thing with a woman he had just met.
Retrodiction refers to a prediction made about the past. It is a way to test a theory by applying it to known events, existing data sets, rather than events still to come. Einstein provided a famous example of this when his theory of general relativity accounted for the behavior of Mercury in a way Newton’s physics could not. It is a useful method in a variety of fields, especially those seeking to predict events with long time horizons, fields in which you can’t wait for the future. Instead, you imagine yourself into the past, prior to the last known occurrence—ice age, planetary alignment, evolutionary anomaly, financial collapse—and then see if your theory correctly anticipates a future that has already happened.
FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS
This happens earlier, in New York.
I live with another woman, Margo. Margo and I need a new sofa. The previous sofa became untenable following a bedbug scare, as well as too many evenings of carelessness while drinking red wine. Margo and I have agreed to split the cost of the new sofa.
I didn’t know Margo before moving in with her. She put an ad on Craigslist seeking a roommate after her old roommate moved out of the city—financial considerations. Margo’s requirements for a roommate made her a sensible match for me, and I convinced her that I was a sensible match for her. I had incentives for doing so—two bed
rooms in Fort Greene, rent-stabilized.
During the bedbug episode, Margo packed all the clothes she owned into eight black forty-five-gallon trash bags and schlepped them to the laundromat, where she washed everything twice with hot water, using two full bottles of detergent.
Once the clothes were back inside the apartment, she became convinced that the remedy hadn’t worked. Their eggs have ridiculous powers of survival, she said. The symptoms of having bedbugs are virtually identical to the symptoms of merely suspecting you have bedbugs. She said, Do you have any idea how much that cost? Then she started throwing away clothes.
Margo is in all important ways a fine roommate.
Ultimately, we had to hire an exterminator to assess the extent of the problem. He said he’d seen worse. Still, it cost money. I have a second credit card for these things, unforeseen expenses.
I explain the situation to the man who will become my husband. He says he’s going to help. At first he thinks this means going with me to West Elm or IKEA. I laugh at him and start scrolling through advertisements for sofas on Craigslist. We’ve been dating less than a year.
He says, If I were the one who just survived a bedbug scare, I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’d be about buying a used couch.
I think to myself that this is a fair point.
After seventeen straight pages of sofa listings, my mind starts to wobble. People have no idea how to take photographs of their own furniture, and everything looks nauseating.
In the end, though, there are several plausible candidates, and we block off a Saturday for hunting. He suggests renting a van. I tell him that’s unnecessary, and he asks if I plan to bring the sofa home on the subway. We go to the rental place, and he takes out his credit card, and I tell him of course not, and then I don’t actually stop him from paying for the van. He also drives it.
The first used-sofa owner lives in Lefferts Gardens. She explains that she’s moving to San Francisco for work and is selling all her furniture. This strikes me as a convincing non-bedbug explanation for why she no longer wants a perfectly good sofa. Her apartment has bay windows with a view of the park, and I’m tempted to ask her what the rent is, until she mentions offhand that her sister is taking over the lease. The sofa, unfortunately, is beige.
It looked different in the picture on Craigslist, I say to the man who will become my husband as we drive away.
I don’t actually think of him as the man who will become my husband. If someone were to suggest to me that I should think of him that way, I would laugh, or gasp. I am sure I am in love with him, but I am also only twenty-three years old, and these two facts seem to stand in opposition. Love, in my mind, is a present-tense emotion, and has nothing to do with the future.
The next sofa, in Crown Heights, is perfect in every way except that someone beat us to it by twenty minutes and paid cash.
This happens two more times.
He suggests that we take a break for lunch. I say yes. The next used-sofa owner on my list isn’t free for an hour.
You’re worried, he says.
It’s not going well, I say.
If we don’t find one today, we’ll try again next weekend, he says.
The van cost forty dollars.
That doesn’t matter, he says.
I kiss him.
He asks, When is your lease up?
I’m subletting from Margo, I say. It’s her name on the lease. But I suppose we have an understanding that I’ll stay on when she renews.
When does that happen?
In two months.
Here’s an idea, he says.
What?
Move in with me.
You live in Manhattan.
So.
I can’t afford Manhattan.
Well, he says.
Absolutely not.
You sleep there four or five nights a week already, he says. We almost never sleep at your apartment. You work in Manhattan.
I can afford to work in Manhattan, I say.
The man who will become my husband smiles and eats the last of his cheeseburger.
I have three more sofas on my list. The first one we see after lunch looks exactly like it did online but has a faint smell. When the owner steps away for a moment, I ask, sotto voce, if he also notices it.
I wouldn’t call that faint, he says.
When we’re back in the van, he asks if I’ve thought about his suggestion.
That was less than an hour ago, I say.
You’re worried about the rent, he says.
Do you have any idea how much I pay now?
No, he admits.
Seven-sixty a month.
We could find a new place, in Brooklyn.
You wouldn’t move to Brooklyn.
At the next apartment, a cat greets us. Then another cat, and then another, and then another. When the owner finally appears, I see that her clothes are covered in cat hair. I tell her that we just bought a sofa and no longer need to see hers. She asks why I felt it necessary to tell her this in person. I apologize profusely for bothering her as we make our retreat.
I text Margo and tell her it’s not going well. She would have come with us, but she has a deadline the next day and will forfeit ten percent if she’s late on delivery to the client. I’m literally sitting on the floor right now, she replies. If I do what the client wants this site is going to give people epilepsy, she writes. If I don’t do what the client wants the client won’t pay me, she writes. Please find a couch!!!!, she writes.
I tell the man who will become my husband that we shouldn’t even see the last sofa. It was the least appealing of the ones I put on my list, and at this rate I know something will be wrong with it.
We have the van for two more hours, he says. No reason not to.
He exudes reasonableness. He kisses me. We go and see the last sofa.
It’s not bad. It’s pale gray, firm, unstained. I text Margo, and she immediately replies with her approval. The owner knocks off fifty bucks because he’s tired of exchanging e-mails with people about the sofa. He helps the man who will become my husband carry it downstairs to the van.
We all shake hands. The man asks where we live.
Fort Greene, I say.
I love Fort Greene, the man says. My wife used to live there.
But we might move to Manhattan, I say.
The man nods, takes this in.
No one I know lives in Manhattan anymore, he says.
That evening the three of us sit on the new sofa eating Thai food while Margo finishes the project for her client. She hands me ten twenty-dollar bills, her share of the cost, and I hand them to the man who will become my husband.
I’ll pay what I owe you soon, I say to him.
No rush, he says.
BEAUTIFUL WORKS OF ART
GUARANTEE A 100% EXPERIENCE
One night we returned to Maison Monet after another dinner in Jardins with another crowd of Brazilian financiers. Jardins was an old, exclusive neighborhood, and I had eaten a steak of poor quality in a room of gorgeous detail. My husband mentioned more than once how good his Chilean sea bass was. He and I were the only Americans at the dinner; the Brazilians were colleagues of his or clients—I lost track. They only wanted to trade rumors about the finance minister—would he be sacked, would he hang on, did he have any real power, who would replace him? Cardoso wasn’t perfect, but at least he had ideas, someone said. My husband laughed knowingly. I didn’t have enough information to laugh knowingly. As if any of it makes a difference, said one of the Brazilians. He gave a knowing smile. I was surrounded by knowing. The Brazilian winked so often, it seemed out of his control.
I once imagined that marriage would be the opposite of this—not that I wanted to constantly swap trivialities, but I anticipated a sense of union, consciousness not indistinguishable but in contact, contiguous. Two sovereign countries sharing an open border. I was twenty-five years old then and wanted x. Now I was at the edge of thirty and wanted y. By the time I
turned thirty-five, I would want z.
My husband, a little drunk, said: “I was hoping for more.” I asked what he meant. “More from them,” he said. “They didn’t talk about anything tonight.” “Yeah, I had fun, too,” I said.
When the taxi dropped us at our corner, a young woman in horn-rimmed glasses was there, absorbed in some kind of dance. She twirled, vibrated. She could have been a graphic designer or an office assistant, a perfect petit bourgeois type. She pounded her feet on the ground and turned in wild circles. The performance had a crude minimum of choreography, a desperate, sexual oiliness. She rubbed a liquor bottle all over her body as she danced—down her legs, between her breasts—and finally nuzzled it into her crotch. Her face had an expression of ecstatic anguish. She smashed the bottle on the ground and ran across the road to where a sedan with tinted windows was idling. Then the car drove off.
Feast Days Page 5