Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,5
caddy, and arranged herself as though she were there primarily for the television mounted high in one corner. New York led Kansas City by four runs in the bottom of the third.
Come on Royals, she thought.
The bartender dropped a napkin down in front of her and asked her what she wanted to drink. Alice considered the wine specials listed on the wall.
“I’ll have a glass of . . .”
“Milk?”
“Actually, do you have any Knob Creek?”
Her tab came to twenty-four dollars. She put her credit card down before picking it up again and taking out one of the writer’s hundreds instead. The bartender returned with three twenties, a ten, and six ones.
“Those are for you,” said Alice, sliding the ones toward him.
The Yankees won.
IN THE RELUCTANT, MUSTY current of a secondhand Frigidaire:
. . . I didn’t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word, we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn’t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants. It warn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in and made us drop everything and cut. . . .
In the night, rain fell on the part of her air conditioner that extended into the air shaft with the sound of metal arrowheads shot earthward. Thunderstorms came and went, their patter crescendoing into sharp cracks and lightning that penetrated the eyelids. Water siphoned off gutters like spring water off mountain boulders. When the storm retreated, what was left of it counted out the early-morning minutes in slow, metronomic drips. . . .
I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no show for me; so I laid outside—I didn’t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they warn’t high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway. . . .
With the money left over, she bought a new toilet seat, a teakettle, a screwdriver, and a small wooden dresser from the weekend antiques market over on Columbus. The teakettle was a sleek, all-metal, Scandinavian design. The toilet seat she screwed on with tremendous satisfaction while listening to Jonathan Schwartz.
Her work seemed to her more boring and inconsequential than ever. Fax this, file this, copy this. One evening, when everyone else had left and she was staring at the writer’s number in her boss’s Rolodex, one of her colleagues poked his head into the room and said, “Hey, Alice, à demain.”
“Sorry?”
“À demain.”
Alice shook her head.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Oh. Right.”
It got hotter before it got cooler. Three weekends in a row she spent lying on her bed, bedroom door closed, the Frigidaire whirring and rattling away at its highest setting. She thought about the writer, out on his island, shuttling between his pool and his studio and his nineteenth-century farmhouse with its unobstructed harbor views.
She could wait a very long time, if she had to.
I do not want to conceal in this journal the other reasons which made me a thief, the simplest being the need to eat, though revolt, bitterness, anger, or any familiar sentiment never entered into my choice. With fanatical care, “jealous care,” I prepared for my adventure as one arranges a couch or a room for love; I was hot for crime.
Malan had a Chinese look, with his moon face, a somewhat flattened nose, scarcely any eyebrows, a bowl-cut hairdo, and a big moustache that failed to cover his thick, sensual lips.