Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,15
heard someone. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No, no boyfriend, I’m afraid . . .”
In addition to the Walnettos, Alice put a checkmark next to Coconut Watermelon Slices, Mary Janes, Turkish Taffy, and Toy Army Men Gummy Candy (“A Salute to Your Sweet Tooth”). Then she got into bed and fell asleep with the radio on, Camus listing off her knees and the pen she’d been using to underline certain passages blotting her pajama sleeve with ink.
“. . . I love you,” Cormery said quietly.
Malan pulled the bowl of chilled fruit toward him. He said nothing.
“Because,” Cormery went on, “when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone . . . you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.”
• • •
Her back hurt. Her breasts were swollen. At work, she snapped at the new girl for unloading the office dishwasher too slowly.
From under her bathroom sink, she pulled out a pink plastic clamshell graying with dust. TUE read the last blister no longer containing a pill. White tells your body you’re pregnant; blue says just kidding. Three years earlier, six weeks of this had made her weepy and irascible to the point of lunacy, and she’d quit. But she was older now, older and more alert to the probability of hormonal ambush; this time, she’d be ready for the hysterical thoughts, and outthink them.
So: one white pill tonight, one white pill tomorrow, one white pill on Friday, plus a fourth on Saturday, after lunch. That, she reckoned, should get her through the weekend blood-free. . . .
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello?”
“All packed?”
“Just about.”
“What time’s your train?”
“Nine twelve.”
“You won’t believe this, but I’m rereading David Copperfield, for my book, and four lines down on page one hundred and twelve I’ve just come across the word ‘bargeman.’ ”
“No.”
“Yes! Listen to this: ‘He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black-velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the—to me—extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes.’ That’s what I’m going to call you from now on, Mary-Alice. Mealy Potatoes.”
“Good.”
“Can you imagine? That I should read bargeman the night before you come? How often does one see that word?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Hardly ever. That’s right.”
Alice took a sip of Luxardo.
“Fucky fuck?”
“If you want.”
“No, I guess we shouldn’t. It’s late.”
She waited.
“Darling.”
“What.”
“Tell me something.”
“Okay.”
“Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?”
“On the contrary,” Alice said a little too loudly. “I think it’s very good for me.”
Ezra laughed softly. “You’re a funny girl, Mary-Alice.”
“I’m sure there are funnier.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Anyway,” she said. “You make me happy.”
“Oh, sweetheart. You make me happy, too.”
LIGHT SHIMMERED IN THE trees, whose leaves, when the wind ran through them, sighed like the gods after a long and boozy lunch. The air was balmy and brackish and here and there carried a whiff of pinesap bubbling under the sun. Alice dove into water that he kept heated to a temperature approaching that of blood and after torpedoing half a length surfaced to settle into thirty laps of an unhurried breaststroke: legs froglike, hands coming almost together before swiveling away again and again, always the right reaching forward to touch down between the insects that crawled along the flagstone edge, always the left folding close to wipe her nose before the next lap commenced. Some days, it could even seem to her that she was making a kind of progress with this routine—as though the laps she swam were not the selfsame distance traveled and untraveled over and over, but lengths laid like pipe end-to-end and that would someday deliver her to a destination as far away as their great sum. Coming almost together and then pulling apart, her hands looked to her like the hands of someone once tempted by prayer but who had since renounced it for other means of mollifying herself: someone learned, someone liberal, someone literate. Someone enlightened. The pumphouse hummed.
In the evenings, they listened to Music for A Weekend to Remember, which was like Jonathan only cornier, and took their plates out to the screenhouse, or, if there was a game on, into the pink-glowing den. On the mantelpiece, next to a glass pyramid that threw quivering rainbows onto the wall, sat an antique wooden calendar with three windows in its face and dowels that rolled the linen scrolls inside ahead to the correct weekday, date, and month:
SATURDAY
2
AUGUST
The dowels were