The Altruists

  “NO!”

  The force of Ethan’s voice stunned Charlie. He froze where he stood.

  “Babe?” called the girl from the bathroom.

  “You don’t get to do this!” Ethan said. “You don’t get to deny me this. You can kick me out but you can’t tell me it didn’t happen!” He was on his feet, though he didn’t remember getting up. Standing, sweating, pointing a rigid finger at Charlie. “You idiot! Don’t you see I’m trying to help you? You’re a—liar! Your life is a lie, and you think that only hurts you but it doesn’t! My god. After all this time . . . Why can’t you admit it? Admit to what you are? God, Charlie. You fucking idiot. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”

  As soon as he finished the question, he knew these were the last words he’d ever speak to Charlie. His fellow man came at him. A burst of static popped in Ethan’s brain. His vision blurred. Lights fireworked around him. His long-sought-after closure came moments later, as he found himself in the hall outside the apartment, a door slamming in his face. He tasted iron. There was shouting on the other side of the door. A bead of blood fell from his nose, staining the carpet.

  He stumbled downstairs and into the sushi restaurant next door. He approached the hostess and asked if he could use the restroom. She recoiled. “Oh my god, what happened to your face?”

  “The restrooms, please.”

  “They’re for customers but—they’re in the back. Jesus Christ. You look like an exception if I’ve ever seen one.”

  In the restroom, Ethan surveyed the damages. The pain at the center of his face was extraordinary. His nose had been knocked into a strange shape. It was purple, and crooked down the middle. The bridge veered off like something that had changed its mind. Blood clogged his nose. He’d never felt anything like it before. Never even broken a bone. His most significant injury before this had been self-inflicted—wasn’t that always the case—when he’d gotten carpal tunnel in his teens. He’d always distanced himself from conflict, kept to the fringes of the fray. And yet here he was with an unceasing, atonal pain across the bridge of his nose. It took all of his resolve not to focus on the knot that throbbed below his eyes, scarcely out of view.

  He brought his finger tentatively toward it, recoiling at the touch.

  Ethan turned under the flickering light, observing his nose at every angle. It was an unsightly, even nauseating rupture. It might turn someone’s stomach, someone who hadn’t expected to see it, someone who expected something aquiline and clean in its place. But Ethan, taking a moment to adjust, thought he kind of liked it. Kind of liked the look of the afflicted.

  Why didn’t he feel worse? The pain, and the rush of confrontation, drowned out his anger. He didn’t have the bandwidth for sadness either. He felt relieved. Unburdened. Buzzing with energy. It seemed to Ethan, composing himself in the restroom, that the lethargy he’d grown so accustomed to in New York was lifting. His heart beat faster than it had in years. Nose inflamed, blood electric, he stepped out of the restroom, out of the restaurant, and into the stunning daylight.

  * * *

  • • •

  According to the Climatron guard in the neon-lime safety vest, Maggie had been out almost two whole minutes. A worryingly long faint. The guard had been standing nearby, said he’d heard her body crumple. “No other sound like it,” he added, with the grizzly wisdom of a man who’d lived, who’d really seen things, his nicotine-stained moustache curling into a smile. A veteran, probably. Maggie, sitting up, tried to guess his age and align it with a war from history. Korea? Vietnam? She was too mixed-up to say.

  “You should eat something,” he told her. “Protein. And water. Lots of water, okay?”

  Maggie nodded.

  The guard escorted her out of the dome and directed her toward the on-site Cafe Flora, where, at his insistence, she ordered two sausage links, three strips of bacon, breakfast potatoes, and two eggs over easy. “That’ll do the trick,” he said, before returning to his post.

  When the food arrived, she stared at her plate. Reflected there, in the greasy glisten of the bacon, the quivering, watery eggs, the sizzling hash, and the fat sausage, was everything she stood in opposition to: factory farming, the consumption of animal flesh, consumption in general . . . She tried to remember when everything changed. When food lost its appeal for her. When she’d stopped looking forward to meals and started skipping them, ballooning with dread when she had to share them with others, the inevitable inquisition—Aren’t you hungry? Not gonna finish that?—a thousand pairs of eyes on her. The awareness of her body. The real estate that these thoughts occupied in her mind, and the energy she expended driving them away. And the shame of it. The shame of not wanting to perform this basic human function, the inevitable response from someone like her father if she came forward (You know who doesn’t have any hang-ups about eating? The rural African poor).

  She thought about her mother. Francine Alter, she of the round breasts and sturdy legs and solid comportment. The woman had substance. She was robust. In an evening dress she was unapologetically herself, irrepressibly female, a body that announced itself, broadcasting maternal authority. But in those last few months, in her bed at Barnes-Jewish, she’d weakened, withered, become small. “Look at me,” Francine said, “I want to see you,” the tears in Maggie’s eyes obscuring the impossible image of her mother in such a diminished state. By then Maggie’s appetite had begun to wane, the stress of her mother’s illness precluding pleasure of any kind, estranging Maggie from her body, from food and sun and sex. Maggie had diminished in solidarity.

  The funeral obliterated whatever control Maggie had left over her life. Her grief squeezed into the rigid strictures of ritual, Arthur a complete mess, Ethan locked up and inaccessible. All was disorder and Maggie was left to cope on her own. What was she to do? How was she to live? But food, the simple question of what she put inside her body—that was Maggie’s. She regulated what she ate like a dictator rationing grain and milk in a time of war. Food was in her control, and no one could take that away.

  Maggie surveyed the café. Diners sat in pairs, stuffing their faces without hesitation or remorse. She spiked a sausage with her fork. The guard had insisted she eat, hadn’t he? Maggie took a deep breath, shuddering on the exhale, and tucked in.

  After her meal she found a shaded bench by the reflecting pool and sat. She could feel the food working through her. She envisioned it dissolving in her stomach into energy. She felt overstuffed and heavy, and could smell the meat on her breath, but the edges of her consciousness had sharpened. Ornamental lily pads of opalescent glass floated on the surface of the pool.

  A few more weeks and it would be May. St. Louis would become unbearable. Maggie, with her pale skin and allergies and frizz-prone hair, had never felt suited to the summers here. She had a high-maintenance body, ill fit for the humidity of Missouri in August.

  A splash; a scream. Maggie looked up from her lap as a boy hit the water. “Help!” cried a woman to Maggie’s right. “Bradley, get out of there! . . . Help!”

  The boy, Bradley, looked to be roughly nine years old and was, by Maggie’s calculation, in no immediate danger. He was playing in the pool, slapping the surface of the water. Laughing. He seemed to be standing on his tiptoes. The water reached only as far as his collarbone.

  His mother continued shouting. Calling out, “Please, someone!” She stood at the edge of the pool, above him.

  It reminded Maggie of something a girl at one of her internships once told her. It was a thought experiment, a famous one, the girl said. It goes like this: You’re walking to class and you pass a shallow pond. You see a kid has fallen in. He’s drowning. You have the choice of rescuing the kid and missing class due to muddy and wet clothes, or else leaving him to die. Obviously you rescue the kid. The question is, what if the drowning kid is far away? Say, half a mile? You’d probably still rush to his aid. But what about two miles? An ocea
n? The other side of the world? Let’s say he’s drowning on the other side of the world. Or, not drowning, but dying of something just as bad—disease, war, famine. And you can still help the kid, save his life by donating money or whatever, at extremely little cost to yourself. Well, guess what, the girl had said. That is happening. That is our reality.

  Now it was playing out before her eyes. A boy was drowning. Except that he wasn’t. This boy was all right. This boy was okay. He was having fun. Splashing and playing. But you wouldn’t know it from the way his mother wailed.

  “It’s not that deep,” Maggie told her. “He’ll be okay.”

  The woman paused to scowl at Maggie before continuing to shout. It was all playacting, Maggie thought. Shameless theater.

  The boy backstroked across the surface of the pool.

  “It’s not that deep,” Maggie said again.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dr. Saad Malouf was the best-looking ob-gyn in Boston. That he was a good doctor was almost, but by no means entirely, beside the point. His hair was thick and neatly parted. His heavy eyelids gave the impression he was squinting, which in turn gave the impression he was smiling. He had flawless teeth beneath a virile, salt-and-pepper mustache.

  Dr. Malouf was a busy man. Patients invariably referred their friends to him. They arrived at his office in lipstick and mascara, hoping to leave a good impression. They usually walked out feeling as though they had. He was attentive, and his warm voice seemed incapable of delivering bad news. Francine was one of those patients, referred by a friend who’d advised her to make herself up before the appointment. This struck Francine as ridiculous, but when Dr. Malouf entered the examination room, she was glad she had taken the tip.

  “Francine Alter?”

  Her cheeks flushed. “That’s me.”

  “A pleasure.” He smiled, dimples framing his moustache like parentheses. “So, listen, I’ve looked at the ultrasounds and I’m going to recommend an elective C-section.”

  Francine bit her lip. “I had a C-section last time and it almost killed me.”

  “I won’t let that happen,” he said, in the confident tone of the very handsome.

  “How can I be sure?”

  “Well,” he said, “last time you didn’t have me.”

  When Francine was pregnant with Ethan, six years earlier, there was so much she’d been unprepared for: her ankles, swollen and dark like burnt puff pastries; her bizarre cravings for strange foods she’d never wanted before, like burnt puff pastries. Her labor was so terrible that when Arthur brought her to the hospital, and the chipper maternity ward nurse asked if she was ready to have a baby, Francine howled, “No! I’m ready to have an epidural!”

  She had not been prepared for the pain. Ethan’s head was large and he was coming out headfirst. All Francine could see was red red red.

  She was in labor all night. She felt like someone was standing behind her with a chisel, hammering the blunt end while the sharp edge split her skull. “Mmmfghthmmtsthmm!” she screamed. The anesthesiologist had botched the epidural. Her face was numb, and Francine was unable to move her lips. The rest of her body, however, was awake to every shock. She could feel it all. She thought, If I survive this, I am never doing it again. She had never considered suicide, no matter how many French novels she’d read and French films she’d seen—the notion had always seemed romantic and distant—but now the darkness was descending. She felt ill. Nauseated. She thought that if she had a knife on hand she would open herself with it. On top of this, the worry that her impulses were corrupting the child. Could one think black thoughts, of suicide by knife, and still preserve the person in one’s belly? Or would death seep from her mind, through her breasts, and contaminate the milk?

  By two a.m., Ethan’s heart began to fail. It took the expertise of the attending, a godsend whose name Francine vowed never to forget—Phil Walsh, Phil Walsh, Phil Walsh!—to properly re-administer the epidural and orchestrate the emergency C-section that saved her and Ethan’s lives. When Francine came to, she was in the NICU. She closed her eyes, and opened them—not dreaming. She felt herself coming into consciousness, sound and light trickling in through the gauzy curtain of the drugs. The first image she registered was Arthur, leaning against the wall opposite her bed, holding their child, rocking him back and forth. Her vision was soft-lit and foggy. Her hands shook. She didn’t have the energy to speak. She closed her eyes again and let herself return to sleep, finding solace in her husband’s handling of their son.

  But when she woke, an hour later, she was struck with fear.

  “Can we stay here?” she asked Phil Walsh, cradling Ethan in her steady hands. Arthur was in the hallway, kicking a vending machine. “One more night. I don’t want to go home yet. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’ll be fine, just fine,” Phil Walsh said.

  “I’m . . .” She had to tell someone. “I’m scared.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t say anything to my husband. He’s probably more terrified than I am. I have to be the brave one. But I’m not, Dr. Walsh. I’m terrified.”

  “You’ll be okay,” said Phil Walsh. “You’re extremely capable.” Francine drew a deep breath. “Listen. If the baby cries, it can only mean one of three things. He needs to eat, he needs his diaper changed, or he needs to be held. You can handle all of that, yes?”

  She nodded as Arthur reentered the room.

  “Then you’re all set.”

  Francine looked at her husband. “Nerves?” he said. She nodded. “We can do it. I know we can.” He extended his hand toward her. “Almond Joy?”

  She was glad to see her husband so confident. After Zimbabwe he’d been depressed for months. The wedding was a disaster, and he was not exactly thrilled about the prospect of child-rearing. But Francine had always wanted kids, and harbored hope that he would rise to the occasion when the day arrived. For once, it seemed as though he might not disappoint her.

  When they got back to their apartment—early in Francine’s pregnancy they’d moved from Kenmore to a brownstone near Jamaica Pond—Francine took Ethan in her lap while Arthur went to brew some coffee on the stovetop. She had expected to feel maternal, and she did. She had expected to feel protective, and she did. But she had not expected to feel as she felt now, staring into her son’s astonished eyes, that they were not only mother and child but friends. That Ethan was a kindred spirit. There was a kind of amity between them. Francine recognized him as a Klein. They were linked, these two. Not a full day old and she could already sense that they had something essential in common. He started to cry, and so did she. When Arthur walked into the living room to see what was the matter, he saw, to his confusion, then relief, that his wife was smiling. Eight days later, colleagues and cousins squeezed into that room, where cantor Arnold Peseroff raised a knife and welcomed Ethan into the vexing world of Jewish men.

  * * *

  • • •

  To call Maggie a mistake would miss the point. Though unplanned, she was conceived in love during a tender weekend at a lodge outside of Hartford, Vermont, where Arthur took Francine for a vacation after six unrelenting months of work and parenting. They left Ethan with the neighbor, a Holocaust survivor Francine trusted implicitly.

  The weekend was everything they’d hoped it would be, all forests and farmhouses and covered bridges. They walked through snow-trimmed woods and poked their heads into antiques shops. At night they slept close to one another under four layers of blankets.

  Before Vermont, the Alters had considered themselves “done” with children. When Francine discovered that she was pregnant a few weeks later, the news rumpled the peace they’d reached on top of the wool comforter in the motel room with the window view of Quechee Gorge.

  “To be honest, I always envisioned myself with two kids,” Francine said back in Boston, setting the pregnancy test on the bathroom sink.

  “I don’t know. We
’ve got our hands full, as far as I’m concerned. Money’s okay now, with one, but just okay. And, you know, he’s going to want to go to college someday.”

  “We’ll make it work.”

  “And the time commitment. We don’t have the time for two kids.”

  “If you chipped in a little more, we’d have plenty of time to—”

  “‘Chipped in’! I’d chip in if I didn’t think you were overparenting him already.”

  “Overparenting?”

  “It’s true. He’s going to grow up soft and mealy.”

  “If I overparent,” she whispered, “it’s because you underparent. I’m only trying to pick up your slack.”

  “I parent plenty!”

  “Shhh.”

  “Oh, he can’t hear us. Even if he could, he wouldn’t understand.”

  “Don’t underestimate him.”

  “He’s five years old!”

  “He’s a good listener. I can tell. Don’t you dare underestimate him.”

  In the five years between Ethan’s birth and Maggie’s conception, Francine had lost a bit of faith in her husband. He still performed his parental duties, albeit the bare minimum, and showed little interest in the boy as a person. Arthur’s engagement with his son declined around year three, as Ethan grew into himself. He seemed to feel as though his job was done once Ethan’s personality achieved some semblance of consistency. He was good with infants, but not developed people. He was equipped to provide food, water, safety, and security to his son, but bowed out as the boy climbed Maslow’s pyramid, unable to assist with the love, esteem, and self-actualization that Ethan came to need as he grew up. These were perhaps not ideal circumstances for the rearing of a second child, but Arthur wasn’t going to press the issue. He had gotten her pregnant, she wanted to keep it, it was her body, she had won. “Fine,” he sighed, but his tone said something else: You owe me.