Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,13
or rules of morality. . . . We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and to restore control of that country to its people.
“This man is so stupid,” said Alice, shaking her head.
“This is going to kill me,” said Ezra, forking the tart.
She gave him a cord for his reading glasses. He gave her another thousand dollars to spend at Searle. The following evening a friend was going to throw him a party to which Alice was not invited.
“Is this the same friend who calls me The Kid?”
Ezra tried not to smile.
“Hasn’t he ever heard of a kids’ table?”
“Sweetheart, you don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there. Besides, you’re the one who doesn’t want people to know about us. You’re the one who doesn’t want to wind up on Page Six.”
His back was better. His book was going well. He wanted Chinese food.
“One order of shrimp with lobster sauce, one order of broccoli with cashews, one order of hacked chicken, and—Mary-Alice, do you want a beer?—two bottles of Tsingtao. . . . Yes. Uh, no, I think it was one shrimp, one broccoli, one hacked chicken, and . . . That’s right. Two sing-sow. Sing-tow. Yes. Exactly. Ching-dow.” Helplessly, he clapped a hand to his forehead and laughed. The voice on the other end became indignant. “No!” he said. “I’m laughing at the way I talk!”
He hung up. “Forty minutes. What should we do?”
“Take a Vicodin?”
“We’ve already done that.”
Alice sighed and flopped backward onto the bed. “Oh, if only there were a baseball game on!”
“Ooh, you’re going to pay for that, little bitch. . . .”
He was telling her about a beautiful Palestinian journalist who’d been at the party and wanted to interview him when Alice frowned and lifted her head from his chest.
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“Your heart is doing something funny.”
“What’s funny about it?”
“Shhhh.”
He raised his eyebrows at her and waited. Alice lifted her head again. “It’s doing three beats then a pause, four beats then a pause, three beats then a pause.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“Hmm. Maybe I should call Pransky.”
“Who’s Pransky? The best heart guy in New York?”
“Smartass, would you get me the phone please, and my little black notebook there?”
Pransky agreed to see him the following morning and detected nothing amiss but decided he should be fitted with a defibrillator anyway. This time, while she was waiting to hear, Alice was at work, interviewing her boss’s daughter’s babysitter about an internship.
“So how do you know Roger?”
“He lives next to my uncle in East Hampton.”
“And what does your uncle do?”
“He’s in, like, securities.”
“But you’d rather work in publishing.”
The girl shrugged. “I like to read.”
“Who do you like to read?”
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“. . . Do you want me to go outside?”
“No, no, that’s okay.”
“Okay. Um. Ann Beattie and . . .” CALLER ID BLOCKED. “Are you sure?”
“Don’t worry. Ann Beattie and?”
“Julia Glass. I just finished Three Junes and it was so good.”
“Mm-hmm. Anyone else?”
The girl turned to watch a window washer rappel down the building across the street. Several seconds went by and then she sniffed and lifted an arm laden with bangles to scratch her nose.
Beep.
“Oh!” said the girl, turning back. “And I love Ezra Blazer.”
• • •
“What does it feel like?”
“Like I’ve got a cigarette lighter in my chest.”
“It looks like you’ve got a cigarette lighter in your chest.”
Sitting on the toilet, he watched attentively as she wrung out a washcloth and dabbed at his stitches that ended only an inch from his quintuple-bypass scar. The spiky black thread wound in and out of his skin like barbed wire. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Alice asked. “Getting it wet so—”
“BZZZZZZZZZZT!” he said, making her jump.
On the eve of the first Boston-Yankees game they went to a restaurant called Il Bacio but which Ezra referred to as The Meatball. “The food here is shit,” he said cheerfully, opening his menu. “But we can’t spend all our time in that little room, do you know?” Under the table he passed her a bottle of hand sanitizer.
“I’ll have the salmon,” Alice said to the waiter, still rubbing her hands.
“And I’ll have the spaghetti vongole without the vongole. And a Diet Coke. And—Mary-Alice, would you like a glass of wine? A glass of white wine please, for the lady.”
A woman in a fuchsia pantsuit approached their booth, ecstatically wringing her hands.
“I’m so