Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,11
was torn by a page turning; then a balmy effervescence flooded Alice’s insides and her skin began to feel as though it were vibrating.
“Whoa.”
Ezra checked his watch. “Is it working?”
“Mm-hmmmmmm . . .”
He called Obstbaum. He took her in a cab to Mount Sinai. He arranged for Zingone’s to deliver groceries to her apartment twice a week for six weeks.
He took pictures of her in her cast.
“I love you,” purred Alice.
“You love Vicodin is what you love. We’re out of film.” He went to the closet.
“What else have you got in there?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Yes I do.”
“More girls. Tied up.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“What are their names?”
“Katie . . .”
“No,” said Alice. “Let me guess. Katie and . . . Emily? Is Emily in there?”
“Yep.”
“And Miranda?”
“That’s right.”
“Those girls are incorrigible.”
“Incorrigible,” he repeated, as though she had made up the word.
Her cast was heavy. Heavier, it seemed, when she had nothing else on. Alice turned over onto her stomach and stretched like a three-legged cat. Then she pulled herself up, arched her back, her sides, rolled her head around on her neck, and grinned, wickedly.
“What?”
Walking toward him on her knees: “Let’s do something awful.”
It knocked him back a little. “Mary-Alice, that’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said.”
• • •
They sat in the last row, so as not to be conspicuous, also so that he could get up and stretch his back if he needed to, but he didn’t. It was a Saturday matinée, and the movie theater was swarming with small children; when an especially excited one spilled popcorn on Ezra’s sleeve, Alice worried he might be having second thoughts. But then Harpo lit his cigar with a blowtorch, and Groucho passed his hat through the “mirror,” and it was Ezra’s laugh, head-back and unthrottled, that could be heard above everyone else’s. At the end, when Freedonia declares war on Sylvania and the brothers waggle their hips singing “All God’s chillun’ got guns,” Ezra drew a plastic water pistol from his pocket and gave Alice a furtive squirt in the ribs.
“We’re going to war!” they sang, walking back down Broadway, past the colored lights and tempera snowdrifts and Christmas trees bound up tightly to look like cypresses. “Hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey HO!” At the sturgeon shop, crowding with the others up to the sneeze-proof glass, they gazed down on the smoked fish, pickled tongue, and taramasalata as if at newborns in a maternity ward. Alice pointed at a cheese labeled FIRM SMEAR and whistled primly. When it was his turn, Ezra raised a finger and ordered “two pieces of gefilte fish, some horseradish, half a pound of kippered salmon, and—what the hell? Two ounces of your finest paddlefish roe for Miss Eileen here.”
“Oops,” said Alice.
Ezra turned to look at her calmly. Then, tutting and shaking his head: “I’m sorry darling. You’re not Eileen.”
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello?”
“Good evening. May I speak to Miranda please?”
“Miranda isn’t here.”
“Where is she?”
“In jail.”
“Is Emily there?”
“Emily’s in jail too.”
“What for?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“What about . . . ?”
“Katie?”
“That’s right. Katie. Katharine.”
“She’s here. Want to speak to her?”
“Please.”
. . . “Hallo?”
“Hi, Katie? It’s Mr. Zipperstein, from school.”
“Oh, hiya, Mr. Zipperstein.”
“Hiya. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Listen. I’m calling to ask whether you’d like to study at my house one night this week.”
“Okay.”
“You’d like that?”
“Sure.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Shoot. I can’t do tomorrow. I have a piano lesson tomorrow.”
“Thursday?”
“Art Club.”
“What about afterward? After Art Club?”
“Thursday’s my night to set the table.”
“I spoke to your mom about that. She said you can set the table twice on Friday instead.”
“Okay.”
“Thursday at six thirty then?”
“Sure.”
“Which one is this again?”
“Katie.”
“Stay outta jail, Katie.”
“I will Mr. Zipperstein.”
“Zipperstein.”
“Zipperstein.”
“Good girl.”
• • •
“ ‘My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. . . . Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. . . . You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere.’ ”
“That’s disgusting,” said Alice.
He lowered the book and gave her a dully affronted look. Sweetly, Alice slithered under the covers and scrabbled around there until he came like a weak water bubbler.
They dozed.
When his watch beeped eight, Alice