Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,54
some general inquiries.
INITIALLY, I HAD MY eye on someone else. Then I went to see a performance of Three Sisters in which one of my roommates was playing Lieutenant Tuzenbach and Maddie was playing Olga, and now I can’t even remember the other girl’s name. Like many Ivy League student productions, this one had an overwrought quality that gave you the impression the twenty-year-old at the helm could now cross direct a play off his list of things to do before winning a Rhodes scholarship. The night I attended, the girl playing Anfisa had taken a morning-after pill at lunchtime and at the moment of her entrance at the top of Act 3 was in the bathroom retching into a toilet. Consequently, Maddie opened the act alone, accounting for both actresses’ lines, the most crucial information being distilled into a riveting monologue premised upon (a) Anfisa having been too tired to complete the walk from town, where (b) a great fire was raging, traumatizing Olga such that she was hearing voices and talking to people who were not actually there. What if he is burnt! cried Maddie/Olga/Anfisa. What an idea . . . all undressed, too! [Opening a closet and flinging clothes to the floor.] We must take this gray dress, Anfisa . . . and this one . . . and this blouse, too . . . Oh, you’re right, of course you’re right, Nanny, you can’t carry them all! . . . I’d better call Ferapont. By the time the imperious Natasha had come on, Maddie was huddled on a divan with a lace tablecloth over her head, trembling deliriously. Uh, Anfisa? Natasha ventured. What are you . . . ? Twisting under her hood, Maddie threw Natasha a meaningful look. Anfisa! said Natasha, when the penny dropped. Don’t you dare to sit down in my presence! At which point Maddie stood, removed the improvised shawl from her head, and—playing Olga again—fixed her castmate with a withering stare. Excuse me, Natasha, but how rude you were to Nanny just now!
Well, I thought that was some of the best acting I’d ever seen. Were it not for the scandalized traditionalists whispering behind me, I would not have suspected anything amiss. That night, when Lieutenant Tuzenbach returned to our suite with a bit of pumpkin-colored makeup still collaring his neck, I learned that Maddalena Monti had had her pick of the semester’s leading roles and was already hobnobbing with the seniors bound for graduate school in Los Angeles and New York. After that, like a word you come across for the first time and then it’s everywhere, she began to appear in my path or periphery several times a week: reading in the dining hall, smoking a cigarette outside the language lab, legs outstretched in the library, roaring a silent yawn. I thought she was beautiful in the way some girls are beautiful despite having bypassed pretty entirely. It was a fickle beauty, undermined in an instant by her sardonic mouth, or by her eyebrows arching to angles of cartoonish depravity. A moment later, these same features that made her an electrifying Olga, or Sonya, or Lady Macbeth, would rearrange themselves into the radiant symmetry of a Yelena or Salomé. At first, I was wary of this inconsistency, which was reflected in her moods. I suspected it was deliberate, calculated to manipulate and seduce, and, worse, that Maddie possessed little awareness of the motives and consequences of her behavior. But in time I came to think that in fact Maddie more than anyone suffered her tendencies toward the mercurial, and moreover that this was probably the reason she was attracted to me: I was an antidote to what she liked least about herself. And contrary to the impression that she was not cognizant of her psyche’s causes and effects, she was capable of startlingly articulate admissions of self-awareness. When we’d been having lunch together every Friday for a month, I asked her why she wasn’t closer to her roommates. Oh, I’m not good with other women, Maddie replied simply. They make me feel inessential.
The night before Christmas break during our freshman year, she came to my room chewing on a thumb and consulted the calendar hanging on the back of my closet door. She was pregnant—by a graduate student in the Classics Department, though I never did learn his name nor how they’d wound up in bed—and someone at the campus health center had informed her that one must be