Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,4

heard. “Ooh, Camus!” she said, rhyming it with “Seamus.” A long moment followed in which the writer said nothing and Alice read the copy on the back of The First Man. When she looked up he was still wearing a gently startled expression.

“It’s Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He’s French. Ca-MOO.”

• • •

Her own apartment was on the top floor of an old brownstone, where it caught the sun and stoppered the heat. The only other tenant on her floor was an old lady called Anna, for whom ascending the four steep flights was a twenty-minute ordeal. Step, rest. Step, rest. Once, Alice passed her on her way out to H&H and when she came back the poor thing was still at it. From the shopping bags she carried you would have thought she ate bowling balls for breakfast.

“Anna, may I help?”

“Oh no dear. Been doing it fifty years. Keeps me alive.”

Step, rest.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. Such a pretty girl. Tell me. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Well, don’t wait too long, dear.”

“I won’t,” laughed Alice, running up the stairs.

• • •

“Capitana!”

His doorman greeted her chummily now. He called the writer down and saluted them off as they set out for a walk. Swinging a bag of plums from Zingone’s, the writer asked whether Alice had heard about the city’s plan to rename some of its luxury residences after major-league baseball players: The Posada, The Rivera, The Soriano. “The Garciaparra,” said Alice. “No no,” he said, stopping her importantly. “Only Yankees.” They entered the little park behind the natural history museum, where, biting into one of his plums, Alice pretended to chisel his name under Joseph Stiglitz’s on the monument to American Nobel Laureates. But mostly, they stayed in. He read her what he’d written. She queried the spelling of “keister.” They watched baseball and, on weekend afternoons, listened to Jonathan Schwartz swoon over Tierney Sutton and Nancy LaMott. “Come Rain or Come Shine.” “Just You, Just Me.” Doris Day wistfully warbling “The Party’s Over.” One afternoon, Alice burst out laughing and said, “This guy is such a cornball.”

“ ‘Cornball,’ ” repeated the writer, eating a nectarine. “That’s a good old-fashioned word.”

“I guess you could say,” said Alice, searching the floor for her underpants, “that I’m a good old-fashioned girl.”

“ ‘The party’s over . . . ,’ ” he sang, whenever he wanted her to go home. “ ‘It’s time to call it a d-a-a-a-a-y . . .’ ”

Then, going cheerfully around the room, he would switch off the phone, the fax, the lights, pour himself a glass of chocolate soymilk, and count out a small pile of pills. “The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.”

The party’s over. The air-conditioning’s over. Alice would stagger a little, taking herself home in the heat, her belly full of bourbon and chocolate and her underwear in her pocket. When she had climbed the four increasingly steamy flights up to her apartment, she would do exactly one thing, which was to move her pillows down the hall to her front room, where, on the floor next to the fire escape, there was at least the possibility of a breeze.

“So listen darling. I’m going away for a while.”

Alice put down her cookie and wiped her mouth.

“I’m going back out to the country for a bit. I’ve got to finish this draft.”

“Okay.”

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t speak. We’ll speak regularly, and then when I finish, we can see each other again. Should you want to. All right?”

Alice nodded. “All right.”

“Meanwhile . . .” He slid an envelope across the table. “That’s for you.”

Alice picked it up—Bridgehampton National Bank, it said on the front, next to a logo of a sailboat regatta—and took out six one-hundred-dollar bills.

“For an air conditioner.”

Alice shook her head. “I can’t—”

“Yes you can. It would make me happy.”

It was still light out when she left for home. The sky had a stagnant quality to it—as though a thunderstorm were due, but had gotten lost. The young people drinking on the sidewalk were just beginning their evenings. Alice approached her stoop slowly, reluctantly, one hand on the envelope inside her purse, trying to decide what to do. Her stomach felt as if she were still back in his elevator and someone had cut the suspension.

There was a restaurant one block north with a long wooden bar and a mostly civilized-looking clientele. Alice found a stool at the far end, next to the napkin