Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,24
of Life magazine, FDR 60th Anniversary Edition.
A porn magazine from 1978, the entire issue comprising a story about a tailor named Jordy who the local community believes is a homosexual and thus is trusted to accompany young women into the fitting room. (“The most sexually conservative woman has no qualms about stripping for her doctor—or her tailor. Jordy was, so far as older or less desirable customers were concerned, an inanimate fixture who adjusted the clothes he sold to their bare or relatively bare bodies like an emotionless automaton . . .”)
A souvenir program from the 33rd Annual Allegheny County Fair, featuring The Doodletown Pipers, Arthur Godfrey and His Famous Horse Goldie, and the Banana Splits. On the back, in black marker and his singularly mesmerizing slant, he had written: HEY, DOODLE. I DO LOVE YOU, YOU KNOW.
• • •
In the shallow end she popped up beside him.
He said, “You’re like a little boat.”
Alice shook the water from one ear and pushed off for another lap. When she’d swum back to him, he said, “Remember Nayla?”
“The Palestinian?”
“Yep. She came out to interview me last week, and Mary-Alice, I’m telling you, she has the most beautiful skin you’ve ever seen. It’s like . . .” He smoothed a hand down his cheek. “Chocolate milk.”
“Chocolate soymilk.”
“That’s right.”
“So it went well.” Alice floated onto her back.
“I invited her to have lunch with me when I get back to the city. She said she’d call. Darling, it doesn’t matter to me, not in the slightest, but are your tits getting smaller?”
Alice sank herself bending to look. “I think so. I have this sinus problem, and my doctor prescribed a steroid that I’m supposed to spray up my nostrils, and it works but I think it’s also causing my breasts to shrink.”
Ezra nodded reasonably. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“Are there options?”
“Gin rummy. Or there’s a concert at the Perlman school.”
“Perlman school.”
“Don’t you want to know what they’re playing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Alice, diving under again.
The drive took them past the country club, where golfers loped after balls rolled into the long shadows, and up Sunset Beach, where Ezra slowed for some girls carrying daiquiris over the road and Alice lowered her window to feel the wind with her hand. From here, you could see all the way across the water to the North Fork, where the train from the city came to its slow, inexorable halt—its tracks ending abruptly, surrounded on three sides by grass, as though the men whose job it was to lay them down a century and a half earlier had looked up one day and saw they could go no farther: a bay lay in their way. It gave the land beyond it a wilder feel, uncharted and unreachable by the steel veins of the metropolis—whose relentless intensity had lately seemed increasingly at odds with Alice’s dream of a more contemplative life. A life of seeing, really seeing the world, and of having something novel to say about the view. On the other hand: Could all the rural quietude on earth cure the anxiety of self-doubt? Was she even capable of being alone for as long as it took? Would it make her life any less inconsequential than it was now? And, hadn’t he already said everything she wanted to say?
Ezra parked in a lot facing the water and with the sunset at their backs they headed for a marquee whose scalloped edges snapped and fluttered in the breeze. “Mary-Alice,” he said, as they crossed the lush green grass stride for stride. “I have a proposal for you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I want to pay off your college loans.”
“Oh my gosh. Why?”
“Because you’re a smart girl, a remarkable girl really, and I think it’s time you should be doing whatever it is you want to be doing in life. Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have all that debt hanging over your head?”
“Yes. Although it’s not that much. I’ve already paid off most of it.”
“Even better. What’s left?”
“About six thousand, I think.”
“So I’ll give you six thousand, and you can get rid of the rest of it all at once, and maybe then you’ll be able to see your way in life a little more clearly. More freely. What do you say?”
“May I think about it?”
“Of course you should think about it. Think about it forever if you like. And whatever you decide, we don’t ever have to talk about it again. I’ll just give you the money, or not, and that’ll