Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,39
moaned. Another couple, in matching Mets sweatshirts, prayed in tandem, their hands clasped to their foreheads with such assiduous concentration that even Clarence stumbling to within an inch of their toes failed to break the spell. “Jesus!” said the man, laying his hands on his partner’s abdomen. “Let this pain cease and desist!” Ezra watched spellbound, eyes bright and jaw slack; he could never get enough of humanity, so long as it slept in another room.
“Your mouth is open,” said Alice.
He shut it, shaking his head. “I hate that. My brother started doing it about a year before he died. It looks terrible. Whenever you catch me doing it, darling, tell me to stop.”
“No!”
“You don’t have to make a big deal of it. Just say ‘Mouth.’ ”
Alice got up and went to the parting in the curtain. Ezra checked his watch.
“Did I tell you the apartment next to mine is for sale?” he asked.
“How much?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know. Four hundred thousand?”
Ezra shook his head. “A million.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“For a studio?”
“It’s a small two-bedroom. But still.”
Alice nodded and turned back to the curtain. She looked both ways.
“I’ve never seen you wear jeans before.”
“Oh? What do you think?”
“Walk a little.”
Alice slid the curtain to one side and went as far as a cart of bedpans before turning around. Clarence appeared outside his own cubicle and clapped. “Doesn’t she look great?” Ezra called. When Alice had got back, he said, reaching for her arm, “So what should I do?”
“About what?”
“The apartment.”
“What about the apartment?”
“Should I buy it?”
“Why?”
“So someone with a baby doesn’t move in. And so I could knock down that middle wall and turn it into one big room, and then we’d have so much more space here, darling. We need more space in the city, we really do.”
The man in the Mets sweatshirt pointed at something in the Post. The woman beside him laughed. “Don’t,” she said, holding her stomach. “It hurts.”
“Mouth,” said Alice.
Ezra snapped it shut, like a ventriloquist’s doll, and a moment later squeezed Alice’s hand. “Sweetheart, I hate asking you this, but I’ve just remembered something. I’m going to need my pills.”
• • •
At 125th, a pair of black men with saxophones boarded the car and faced off in the aisle. Their duet began slowly, with the men tiptoeing toward and away from each other like a lone man in a mirror; then it accelerated, becoming louder and more chaotic, and the other people in the car began to nod and clap, whoop and whistle; a man with a bleeding-rose tattoo on his bicep sprung to his feet and started to dance. There are some men who buy diverting talk to lead astray from the word of God, cautioned a pamphlet by Alice’s foot. On the other hand: Who takes the greatest pleasure in leading the other one astray? In his bathtub the night before a clot of her own blood had escaped and unfurled like watercolor. Ezra had put a Bach partita on—its case still lay open on the ottoman—and brought her a glass of Knob Creek. Applying a new fentanyl patch to the skin just above his defibrillator he’d left his hand in place long enough to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Alice watched him shave. His ophthalmologist had prescribed some drops to regulate the pressure in his eyes but he’d developed an allergy to them and the skin around his lashes had turned papery and chapped. In bed, they’d read, Ezra Keats and Alice an article about the previous week’s Tube bombings in the Times; by 11:10 the light was off, the elevator still, the glittering skyline dimmed by a scrim he’d had installed to temper the morning sun. To mitigate his back pain, he slept with a foam pillow under his knees. To dull cramps that by four in the morning had become severe to the point of nauseating her, Alice got up and went into the bathroom to take one of his pills. ONE TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY 4–6 HOURS OR AS NEEDED FOR PAIN read the cylinder in her palm. WATSON 387 a machine had imprinted on the smooth oval tablet swallowed a moment before. If there were a pill that would make her a writer living in Europe and another that would keep him alive and in love with her until the day she died, which would she choose? She had once counted twenty-seven different pill dispensers in that bathroom, vials with science-fiction names from Atropine to Zantac and a barrage of exclamatory