Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,38
a room where copies of a questionnaire were passed around and filled out in a near silence syncopated by sneaker squeaks, sniffs, throat clearings and coughs. A clerk rubbed his chin as he read over everyone’s answers; then a couple of unsuitables were dismissed and those remaining led into an adjacent room for questioning by an attorney alone.
“Have you ever been sued?”
“No.”
“Have you ever sued anyone?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been a victim of a crime?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Malpractice?”
“No.”
“Rape?”
“No.”
“Theft?”
“Well, maybe. But nothing important.”
“It says here you’re an editor.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of an editor?”
“Fiction mainly. But I’m planning to give my notice next week.”
The attorney glanced at his watch. “This is a drug case. Do you use drugs?”
“No.”
“Does anyone you know use drugs?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Alice shifted in her seat. “My stepfather did cocaine when I was little.”
The attorney looked up. “He did?”
Alice nodded.
“At home?”
She nodded again.
“Was he ever violent with you?”
“Not with me, no.”
“But with someone else?”
Alice blinked at the attorney for a moment and then replied, “He’s not a bad person. He’s just had a hard life.”
“And what about your father?”
“What about my father?”
“Did he use drugs?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. We didn’t live with him.” Her voice wavered. “I couldn’t say.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know. You didn’t. It’s not—It’s not that. I’m just . . . tired. And sort of going through a difficult time.”
• • •
“Choo?”
“Mmm?”
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was sleeping. Are you all right?”
“I’m having chest pains.”
“Oh, no. Did you call Pransky?”
“He’s in Saint Lucia. His secretary said I should go up to Presbyterian.”
“She’s right.”
“Darling, you can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious!”
“You want me to go to an emergency room in Washington Heights at eight o’clock on a Saturday night?”
Through the taxicab’s windows the Upper West Side became Harlem and Harlem a neighborhood whose name she didn’t know, a wide-avenued wasteland of delis and beauty salons, dollar stores and African hair braiding, iglesias and a sky almost Midwestern in its sweeping pastel striations. At 153rd their driver braked suddenly to avoid a plastic bag swirling in the road between Trinity Cemetery and Jenkins Funeral Chapel. When they’d recovered from the jolt, Ezra leaned forward politely while Alice righted his cane. “Excuse me, sir! Would you mind slowing down a little please? I’d like to get to the hospital and then die.”
They sat for over an hour in the lobby watching two girls color butterflies on the floor while a third slumped motionless against a heavily pregnant woman’s arm. Then a young Korean woman in green clogs and burgundy scrubs summoned Ezra for an EKG and afterward stationed him to wait in a long room with too few partitions for the dozens of men and women lying on gurneys or sitting in wheelchairs, most of them old and black or old and Hispanic and still dressed in their pajamas or robes and slippers from home. Some were asleep, and in this position looked as though they were trying to decide whether death might be preferable to another hour in this fluorescent beeping limbo. Others watched the young orderlies to-ing and fro-ing with a dazed, even wondrous expression that suggested it was not the worst Saturday night they’d ever had. A few feet away from where Ezra had been moored to an IV dripping liquid sugar into his arm an odorous man with soiled trousers and bloodshot eyes wandered sociably up and down the aisle. “Sit down Clarence,” a nurse said to him as she passed.
“I knew this would happen,” said Ezra.
A little after ten, their nurse returned to say that she’d spoken with Pransky’s office and his EKG had indicated nothing out of the ordinary but they wanted to keep him overnight anyway just to be sure. Previously perfunctory, her manner had become girlish, flirty even; clutching her clipboard to her chest she fluttered her eyelashes and said, “By the way, my mother is a huge fan. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell you The Running Gag is her favorite book.”
“Good.”
“How are you feeling now? Any pain?”
“Yep.”
“The same? Worse?”
“Same.”
“What does it feel like?”
Ezra levitated a hand.
“It’s radiating?” said Alice.
“That’s right. Radiating. Into my neck.”
The nurse frowned. “Okay. Let me see if I can get you something for that. Anything else?”
“Can I have my own room?”
“You’d have to pay.”
“That’s fine.”
In the cubicle across from theirs a woman produced a rosary from her purse and began working her fingers along it while the man lying beside her squirmed and