Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,37
liable to dislodge. A few bodies moved sluggishly, with concentration, irony, or age, but a gritty determination to keep moving at all costs appeared to be unanimous. Tall men danced with short women, tall women with short men, old men with young women and old ladies with old ladies; near the bag check three children skipped around their maypole of a mother on red-blinking heels. Some dancers danced alone, or with invisible partners, or, in a few rogue cases, in a well-sealed zone of avant-gardist expression. Teenage girls rolled themselves easily under bridges made by their own arms while less elastic bodies snagged halfway and let go in favor of a baggy Charleston. Others ignored the tempo entirely, including an elderly couple who danced so slowly they might as well have been in their own living room. A hot summer night, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” five thousand civilians gathered peaceably under clouds kindly withholding their rain, and clinging to each other this oblivious pair seemed the key to it all, the sanity that enabled the delirium, the eye of the rapture. The only interruption to their reverie came when a jitterbugger passing by tripped, colliding softly with the old woman’s backside, and her reaction was the merest glance down and behind her, as if to avoid stepping on a dog.
When “Sing Sing Sing” started up, Alice turned and walked the remaining twenty blocks uptown.
At Ezra’s, she let herself in and went to the bed. Ezra opened his eyes. “Darling. What’s wrong?”
Alice shook her head. Ezra observed her concernedly for a moment before lifting a hand to her cheek. “Are you sick?”
Again Alice shook her head no, and for many seconds sat staring at a book review that lay open on the duvet beside him. Staring back at her was a cheap caricature of him in which his eyes were too close together and his chin resembled a turkey’s wattle. She slid the paper away, undid her sandals, and drew her legs up to lie as close beside him as she could. She put an arm around his chest and hid her face in his ribs. He smelled, as ever, like chlorine, Aveda, and Tide.
The sky bled pink, then violet. Ezra reached up to turn on the light.
“Mary-Alice,” he said, with the gentlest forbearance conceivable. “Your silences are very effective. Do you know?”
Alice rolled onto her back. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I’ve spent a lot of time here,” she said finally.
“Yes,” he replied, after another long moment. “I expect this room will be imprinted on your brain always.”
Alice closed her eyes.
• • •
“Alejandro Juarez.”
“Kristine Crowley.”
“Nigel Pugh.”
“Ajay Kundra.”
“Robert Thirwell.”
“Arlene Lester.”
“Catherine Flaherty.”
“Brenda Kahn.”
Alice was not the only one who’d sought out the same seat she’d sat in the day before, as though if they started over elsewhere the long wait of yesterday wouldn’t count. The man with the Muslim uncle had exchanged his Economist for a laptop whose screen saver was a photograph of himself with someone of identical complexion; they also had the same eyebrows, the same angle to their jawlines, the same brand of windbreaker in which they stood with their arms around each other against a dramatically marbled sky. Behind them, brown mountains stretched into the distance, triangular summits intricately veined at the top with snow. Then an Excel document poured up from the bottom of the screen, replacing nature with a blinding blizzard of cells.
“Devon Flowers.”
“Elizabeth Hamersley.”
“Kanchan Khemhandani.”
“Cynthia Wolf.”
“Orlanda Olsen.”
“Natasha Stowe.”
“Ashley Brownstein.”
“Hannah Filkins.”
“Zachary Jump.”
Sometimes, a name had to be repeated, and its owner discovered to have been in the men’s room, or stretching his legs in the atrium, or asleep. Only once did someone fail to materialize at all, and the effect on the room was a kind of jarring collective consternation. Who was this AWOL Amar Jamali and what reason could he have for standing up the American judiciary? And yet, Alice envied Amar Jamali a little, desperate as she was to be somewhere else herself. Someone else herself.
“Emanuel Gat.”
“Conor Fleming.”
“Pilar Brown.”
“Michael Firestone.”
“Kiril Dobrovolsky.”
“Abigail Cohen.”
“Jennifer Vanderhoven.”
“Lottie Simms.”
“Samantha Bargeman.”
Alice looked up. The woman beside her yawned.
“Samantha Bargeman?”
A few others lifted their heads and looked around. Alice turned her summons over in her lap and frowned.
“Samantha Bargeman . . .”
The man in front of her, recently reappeared, rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. Willoughby scanned the room witheringly, then shook his head and wrote something down.
“. . . Purva Singh.”
“Barry Featherman.”
“Felicia Porges.”
“Leonard Yates.”
“Kendra Fitzpatrick.”
“Mary-Alice Dodge.”
Still stunned, Alice stood and followed the others down a windowless corridor into