In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  She hung up the phone, and she just lay there for a long time, trying to imagine what Derek’s face might look like.

  Ewell opened the manila envelope and spread its contents on his desk. Well, he thought. That’s that. Success. Of a sort. Quite remarkable success, come to think of it!

  He folded his long bony legs under the chair as his eyes scanned the charts and x-rays for the flaws, the human error that he knew, already, was not there. A half empty bowl of vegetable soup on the corner of the desk tottered uncertainly, then fell with a small thud onto the floor, seeped lazily into the carpet. The darkness blanketed the afternoon outside his office. Long stringy clumps of hair fell in front of his face, and he smoothed them back, his fingers touching, for just a moment, the cold damp skin of his expanding bald spot. The hallways silent; snow outside piled up to the window. His eyes hurt, and he leaned back, shutting them. But then a smile spread across his face. Yesterday, ten patients with no future at all suffered through what they doubtless believed were among the very last moments of their lives, all hope drained; now, on this grimmest and darkest of sub-freezing days, their fate did not seem so hopeless after all. Their bodies had stopped attacking them. Their hearts, their brains, their splintering bones, were healing, or healed. They would, in fact, live. All of them would live, on and on and on. He, Ewell, had saved them.

  Ewell crammed his papers back into the envelop, tucked the envelope under his arm. Dr. Bors, the head of the rheumatology department — the man whose learning had always defined this institute, in a corner of the hospital where Ewell had been born — was holed up in another building, half a mile away, across a deserted street and a frozen courtyard that glittered a lifeless silvery blue under the early afternoon stars. In Ewell’s papers was his translation, on crumpled notebook paper, of the ancient text that originally reported this seemingly impossible cure. Ewell had discovered his cure as a fourteen-year-old boy, translating a copy of an original Chinese history written in the First Century, even the copy of which had been forgotten, practically untouched for hundreds of years, and which told of a rather miraculous cure effected upon the Chinese usurper emperor Wang Mang in 16 A.D. who, one day, in the middle of a meeting of his traitorous royal court, had suddenly and unexpectedly begun to melt, almost to disintegrate. Several years after the miraculous cure, of course, he was overthrown, and he was unluckily doomed to be vilified throughout history by the victorious Han Dynasty, and the emperors who came later, and also Mao, and Deng, and even a professor at Columbia University, and one scholar over at Yale. Nevertheless, Wang had momentarily cheated death and won a few more years of absolute power. And he wasn’t such a bad ruler, after all — in fact, a pretty good ruler, with a lot of potential, as far as those guys went — but he was unluckily blamed for the floods that devastated his empire some years into his reign.

  Ewell took his findings to the doctors at the local university, but to them, this cure was like Jesus touching the lepers — something that couldn’t really work without divine provenance, something in which they all professed belief but on which, they told the young Ewell, doctors could not really rely. They laughed at his precociousness and, while marveling at the little orphan’s ability to translate the ideas of others from one language to another, they doubted his capacity to think for himself. He was like a supercomputer, something that had not yet been but doubtless would be invented sometime early in the next century. To Ewell, all the elements came together in his head; he could see the brittle bones reforming, the half-eaten heart muscles strengthening, the blood vessels multiplying; it took him years of study to put it all into words, and even then, the experts were dubious. Ewell had confirmed the cure in a Korean medical text from 1833 written by a physician who, like Wang Mang’s royal doctor, had been forgotten for many years, and who, also like Wang Mang’s royal doctor, was treated with skepticism or worse by today’s medical experts. Perhaps, Ewell always suspected, because they had not thought of the idea themselves.

  A little dumbfounded smile on Dr. Bors’ fat, clammy-white face. He was wrong, he admitted. Then, he asked, “Do you think the symptoms will reoccur after a brief remission?”

  Ewell was sure that symptoms would never reoccur, and he explained steadily and firmly the evidence in the most recent data that favored his hypothesis. The doctor just nodded, did not argue as he would have even one week ago.

  “I never believed you, you know,” he said.

  “I know that,” Ewell said.

  Ewell was some sort of genius, the doctor insisted.

  Ewell nodded.

  “Not a genius,” he argued. He smiled back. Then he laughed: “But feel free to disagree and to tell everyone that I’m a genius.”

  “I will, I think.”

  “Remember,” Ewell said, “that you wouldn’t free up any of your research money for this. If not for the drug company, this research never would have gone forward. If everyone listened to you, all these patients would have been dead within the next two years. Now, they will live. Always remember the bad thing you could have caused, all by yourself.”

  “I know,” Bors said. True guilt in his voice; years of seemingly justified arrogance gone in a few moments, like smoke. “I’m sorry.”

  Ewell shrugged. “Oh well,” he laughed. No harm done, really. He could gloat, but today, he could be angry at no one.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “With your permission,” Ewell said, “I’m going to meet with my patients. Let them know they’re going to live.”

  Ewell sat on the autobus, near the back. When he’d first stumbled across the cure, he had known, instantly, why it worked; it was the reason he’d pursued medicine, the reason he’d gone into rheumatology. He knew then what everyone else would know tomorrow, or the next day. He had never had any doubt, just touches of frustration that his conclusions, which were so clear to him, were not so clear to anyone else. If not for a propitious grant from a rather large drug company, no funds at all would have flowed to his experiment. So today’s genuine joy was mixed with relief that his two years of frustration were over. In a few weeks or months or years, he knew, would be added a nagging annoyance at the years of fighting he’d gone through on the road to geniushood, but all his vendettas could wait, he supposed, for his autobiography. For now, he savored success: There would be no more auditors seeking an end to his experiment. There would be no more subtly derisive comments, from anyone. Maybe he was a strange man, perhaps he was at times moody, and often inscrutable and inaccessible. Maybe he was a terrible teacher, and a doctor who radiated no warmth. But if he would remain a strange man, he would in the future be a strange, respected man, and from now on, practically nothing could change that.

  He smiled at each new passenger, snow melting on their overcoats as they hit the blast of heat inside the bus. They never smiled back; a friendly smile at this gloomy, deadly, often suicidal time of year was so strange it was threatening. Why is he smiling at me? each passenger thought. I can cure you, Ewell thought, by way of explanation, to each one.

  He stepped off the bus at a stop a few miles outside of town, walked off the road to a little path that led into the forest, over a bridge above a frozen creek, finally passing behind a row of little houses. Ewell walked into his backyard, up a few stone steps, and into Marja’s arms and a room full of music and scattered applause.

  His wife stood beside him. She held up a glass of champagne.

  “To my famous husband,” she said. Then she smiled some more, and her face lit up with pride and some real joy; the words “famous” and “husband” so close together, such a normal thing to say at a moment like this. She didn’t usually look this way; she looked like a different person, someone he had known when he was younger. He couldn’t figure out who. Then he realized: she looked like herself, years ago.

  Around the room: there were some colleagues, some who had openly doubted him at first; some old friends from school, some neighbors. Dr. Bors — there he was in the corner, smi
ling with equal parts pride and sheepishness. A girl he had once slept with — the first girl he’d ever slept with, as a matter of fact, come to think of it — who had left him for another man, gotten married to yet a different man and had a kid, returned to her place of birth and rekindled her childhood friendship with Ewell’s wife if not, exactly, with Ewell himself. A big fleshy mess of smiling exuberance; there she was, smiling and applauding him, clapping and laughing, her big strong arms above her head, clapping louder than the others. Her name was Aila. The room was rather full of people, Ewell noticed now.

  Ewell raised his glass. “Thanks to my Marja,” he said. “Who believed in my crazy ideas. And to all of the rest of you, who didn’t, but it doesn’t matter.” Through the room, there was a rather large outburst of laughter at this. Self-deprecating, ass-kissing laughter. “If you know anything about me,” Ewell continued, “it’s that I’m not easy to know. I’m afraid of people, or something. I don’t know. I take a lot of patience.” He knew he was saying all this in a monotone, but it couldn’t be helped — this was the way he talked. Music blared up around him — some kind of screaming 1930s swing/blues thing, something going through a renaissance in the country right now. “Let me be modest a moment. I’ve discovered maybe a cure to help some small number of people. Probably someone else, someone smarter, could have figured out all this long ago, except that all the very smart people are discovering cures for famous diseases that millions of people have. So for me, there will be this small group of people I’ll make happy, and that will be good.”

  Then he just kept going on and on, droning on in his dull inflectionless voice, trying to remember to smile, then forgetting to smile, then remembering again, thinking to himself that his random blinking smiles must seem to all these doctors like a tic or some disease of the nervous system.

  “When I got my degree, all I wanted was to return home. I’m happy and so grateful and touched in my heart that you’ve all been so loyal through the years. I don’t understand it, maybe, but it makes me feel very nice.” Then, with a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, but instead just a signal to everyone present that he was going to try to make a joke: “Now it’s all paying off for you finally, because soon when you tell everyone that you’re my friend, they’ll be impressed, and respect you.”

  Everyone laughed harder than the little remark warranted.

  Dr. Bors piped up. Ewell would be attending the conference in a few months to speak about his discovery. Most people applauded at this; a few closer friends frowned.

  “No,” Ewell said. “I cannot fly. I mean, I will not fly. You know. You understand. I have to travel by ship. That’s too expensive. Dr. Bors will present my results.”

  Bors shouted, “We’re sending you by ship, Ewell!”

  His wife smiled uncertainly. She paused for a moment, staring down at her feet. Her smile thinned.

  Someone called out: “Free trip, Ewell. You two should see America together!”

  His wife shook her head, began to speak. Then her voice faded away.

  “We don’t want,” Ewell said, “to see America.”

  After the last guests left, they both remained silent until they were under three layers of blankets, wrapped in thick, warm pajamas.

  “I’ll be in New York for just two days,” he said. “Then back, to continue to confirm the research. And to spend many hours in my wife’s arms.”

  “You don’t need to reassure me.”

  “Whenever you hear the word ‘America,’ ” Ewell complained, “you become cross with me.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, sounding not surprised to hear the accusation.

  “Whenever you see the American president on television, too,” Ewell went on.

  “That isn’t true,” she said, with a little sleepy yawn.

  “There’s no reason to be angry with me.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’m not angry. I’m very proud of you.”

  He thought about that for a while.

  “Well,” Ewell said at last, in the darkness. “Have a nice sleep.” He kissed her gently; and he knew she could feel in his absent-minded embrace that he was thinking of other things, curing terrible diseases, or triumphing over a narrow-minded adversary, or his lost, dark-haired love, whose favorite song was Frank Mills.

  As soon as he fell asleep, Ewell felt warmth pounding on his bare skin, and when he looked up he could see Alice rolling over and smiling at him in the bright sunshine. He woke for only a moment or two, then fell asleep again and once more saw Alice stuck forever in that moment of complete Aliceness, that moment that defined her and defined them both and in some sense defined his life; that moment that could never be repeated but would never go away; and he reached out to Alice, that smile like an ocean flooding his head, and as he reached out he awoke, his nose cold in the frozen house. Then he slept again, and Alice smiled at him once more. And so on, through the night. When he awoke the next morning, he did not see his trip to America as his moment of crowning glory — if he ever had — but instead as the monster that would swallow him whole.

  When Blake reached the hotel that night, Harriet thought she knew exactly why he’d come: because Harriet had bullied him into it. Because if he had declined, she would have assumed that he was afraid, or angry, or bitter. If he had said no, she would have laughed at him. And then he would have changed his mind anyway. So here he was, walking into a restaurant filled with businessmen and tourists. An old man in a tux played “As Time Goes By” on the piano, not very well. It was an appropriate song to hear at this precise moment, Harriet figured, and it was also appropriate that it wasn’t played well.

  Harriet was sitting by herself at a big table in the corner, in the brightest spot in the restaurant. She’d done her hair, which was now shorter, and she was wearing a new, bright blue dress that, viewed in the mirror in her hotel room, seemed to flatter her. She was reading a paperback book, drinking a glass of red wine. Maurow walked across the room and sat down across from her. She looked up and smiled, and, suddenly, they were their old selves.

  “I’ve been reading about you,” Maurow said. “There are a few articles, here and there. One says that you used to be married to me. This is what it says: ‘Ironically, she was once married to Blake Maurow.’ Then it describes me — the big capitalist something-or-other. I don’t think our marriage was ironic, exactly.”

  “Neither do I,” Harriet said.

  “These articles — you’re really something, Pointer. When did you become such commie riff-raff? I’m worried about even being seen with you.”

  She took a little sip of her white wine. “My husband. Well, my own head. But my husband let me say what I thought.”

  He nodded. “Your second husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So let’s get down to business,” Maurow said. “What would you like to talk about today? Carly Barrows miniskirts? Sweaters?”

  Harriet shook her head. “I’m treating you to dinner to thank you for retrieving my purse.”

  “Well. You’re welcome.”

  “I had fun,” she said.

  “I didn’t. But it’s all in a day’s work.”

  “I heard how you fished all those lawyers out of the brine,” she said. “Did that really happen?”

  “Yeah,” Maurow said, sounding humble and embarrassed. “Yeah, but it was just a thing that anyone would do. If you can swim, why not save people from drowning?”

  Harriet nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, I’m not kidding about having a great time. I’ve been laughing since I saw your sixty-year-old ass hauling off down the street after that young kid. I just can’t stop laughing. I kept thinking: Dukakis. And, rain forests. I don’t know why.”

  Maurow paused a little bit. “I’m not sixty.”

  “Well,” Harriet said. “Whatever.”

  “What did you tell Alice?” Harriet asked, over their first course.

  “I said I’m having dinner with the lawyer who’s representing the human
rights organization attacking Carly Barrows. She asked why, and I said, to keep the karma good. To avoid any misunderstandings or hard feelings.”

  “Did you lie to me when we were married?”

  “That’s not a lie.”

  “Did you tell half-truths?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “What would Mr. Pointer have thought about this?”

  “Mr. Pointer wouldn’t have cared,” Harriet said. “He would have said, ‘Have a nice time.’ He trusted me absolutely, and with good reason.” She leaned forward. “Jesus, Maurow. I feel like calling Alice myself and letting her know. The only thing bad about your past is that you’ve kept it a secret.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

  For some reason, Harriet was very careful not to mention Pointer’s first name; she didn’t want Blake to know her second husband’s name.

  Maurow spoke a little bit about Alice. His words were full of praise, as though he wanted Harriet to approve of his wife, and to like her. He was trying too hard, as though he were describing a new girlfriend to his mother.

  Over coffee, Harriet smiled as she related a poignant memory — the day she first met her second husband, a few lonely years after she abandoned Blake — and Maurow flushed with a touch of anger. Then he suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. Harriet wondered where it had all gone, the anger. Maybe he had just told himself not to be angry.

  “Do you and Alice have any children?” she asked him.