Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,34
consulted his letters again and then shook his head ruefully. “That’s all I got.” Looking up from his BlackBerry, Edwin grinned.
“What?” said Kyle. “What does it say?”
“It says ‘clit,’ ” Eileen said clearly.
“That’s not a word,” said Olivia.
“Yes it is!” said Kyle. “Clift is a word!”
“That’s right,” said Ezra, looking relieved. “Clift is a word.”
“What does it mean?” asked Alice.
“It’s another word for ‘cliff.’ ”
“There’s also Montgomery Clift,” said Edwin.
“No proper names,” Eileen repeated. “Anyway, that’s not what it says.”
“Never mind,” laughed Alice. “Twelve points for Ezra.”
Olivia took a finger out of her mouth and turned to stare at her. “Why do you laugh after everything?”
“Who?” said Alice. “Me?”
Olivia nodded. “You laugh after everything.”
“Oh,” said Alice. “I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I have no idea why.”
“I have a theory,” said Ezra, rearranging his tiles.
“You do?”
“I think you laugh to keep things light. To defang the situation.”
“What’s defang?” asked Olivia.
“It’s what’s going to happen to you soon,” said Edwin, tickling her in the ribs.
“It was his idea,” Eileen said the following morning, back down at the pool. “He was raised Catholic and thinks everyone should have some sort of religious education. But when it came time to explain to them how Mary became pregnant with Jesus, I could hardly keep a straight face.”
“Mom! Mom look!”
“Olivia, socks!”
Still wearing her nightgown, Olivia rounded the pumphouse like a wind-filled sail and arrived breathlessly on the flagstone deck, waving a bill. “Look! Look what the tooth fairy brought me!”
“Wow!” said Ezra. “Fifty smackers.”
“That’s very generous,” said Eileen.
“Can I keep it?”
“Give it to your father please. And put some socks on.” When she’d gone, Eileen looked pointedly at Ezra. “Fifty dollars?”
“What? It’s nothing compared to what I gave the hot dog guy.”
Alice looked up from her book. “You gave money to the hot dog guy?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
He waved a fly away. “Seven hundred.”
“Seven hundred dollars!”
“You don’t even like hot dogs,” said Eileen.
Ezra shrugged. “I wanted to help him out. I wanted to help out a friend. He’d been telling me about how he’s had a tough time lately; the cost of his permit’s going up and his landlord keeps raising the rent on his apartment and he’s got a wife and three kids to take care of. He told me he wasn’t going to be able to pay his bills next month unless he found a way to come up with some extra cash. So the next day I went back to him and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he told me his name, and I got out my checkbook, and he said, ‘Wait! That’s not my real name.’ ”
Alice groaned.
“So already I was out of my depth, see. But what the hell. I wrote him a check. I wrote him a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I thought you said seven hundred,” said Eileen.
“No darling. Seven hundred and fifty.”
“You said seven hundred,” said Alice.
Ezra shook his head. “I’m getting a little forgetful.”
“Anyway,” said Alice.
Ezra held up his hands. “I haven’t seen him since.”
“May I ask,” said Eileen, “the provenance of this hot dog man?”
“He’s Yemeni, I think.” They watched as Kyle came swaggering down the lawn carrying a pair of flippers and the remote control to his boat. Ezra looked worried. “I probably just gave seven hundred and fifty bucks to al-Qaeda.”
“En garde!” said Kyle, dropping the flippers and swinging the remote control’s antennae toward them in an arc.
Like a shot, Ezra flipped backward onto the lawn, plastic deck chair and all, his head barely missing the root of an old spruce stump. Delighted, Kyle dropped the remote control to the ground and joined him on the grass with a bumbling pratfall.
“I’m serious,” said Ezra, still lying on his back. “My defibrillator just went off.”
“Oh my God,” said Eileen.
“Are you okay?” asked Alice.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I think I’m okay. It’s just . . . It was just . . . a bit of a shock.” He laughed shakily. “Literally.”
Eileen picked the remote control up by its antennae and tossed it like a dead animal into the woods. “But we should call a doctor, don’t you think? Just to be sure?”
When Virgil arrived, it was Olivia who ran to meet him in the driveway, fairy wings flouncing. “Whoa!” she said. “How old are you?”
• • •
In Alice’s mailbox when she got home:
A jury summons.
An invitation to the Third Annual Fire Island Black Out beach weekend, addressed to the man who’d lived in her apartment before her.
A notice from the NYC Department of Buildings, a copy