Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,57

told me that she too wanted to become a doctor, I laughed. I laughed with the haughtiness of a ballet mistress informing a dwarf that she will never be a prima ballerina. But twenty-four hours later Maddie was sitting across from her academic advisor discussing the logistics of changing her major from theater studies to anthropology and applying to postbaccalaureate conversion courses at many of the same medical schools to which I had applied. My reaction to this was febrile indignation. And I suppose, I said, that next month you’ll want to be an astronaut. Or a Wimbledon champion. Or a clarinetist with the New York Philharmonic. No, Maddie said quietly. I’ll want to be a doctor. I’ll want to be a doctor because I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams and I’ve decided his is an exemplary life. Oh I see, I said contemptuously, even though I hadn’t ever read any William Carlos Williams. So you’re going to become an overrated poet as well. And in the middle of a downpour Maddie left my room and we did not speak for three days. What I decided during this enforced period of reflection was that my girlfriend would make a truly terrible doctor. I did not doubt her intelligence. Nor had I observed her to be unusually squeamish about blood or pain. But her being! The clamorous, dizzying way she inhabited the world—never on time, cardigan inside out, Amar where are my glasses, my ID; has anyone seen my keys? On a good day, the chaos was barely containable. But Maddie onstage was something else. Acting organized her. It sorted her out. Like a laned highway, it regulated her speeds and, for the most part, prevented her emotions from colliding. She was good at acting, but also, and this was the elegance of the fit, acting was good for her. It made sense of her. It made sense of us. Maddie was the artist; I was the empiricist. Together we had an impressive and mutually enriching range of humanity’s disciplines covered. Or so I believed. And so it seemed to me a perverse and even ungrateful surge of whimsy that she should want to be something else, anything else, but especially something so workaday, so unglamorous. A doctor! Maddie! It seemed, if you will, not unlike a prima ballerina wanting to become a dwarf.

Undoubtedly, I felt this way in part because I did not want to become a doctor. And maybe Maddie figured this out, and perhaps even felt sorry for her poor boyfriend and his repressed condition, because she tacitly forgave me my tantrum and went about recalibrating her life’s path with little regard for the cynical glances I dealt her along the way. Meanwhile, of the eight medical schools contemplating my candidacy, only one said yes. Curiously, it was the one I most wanted to attend, yet after opening the deceptively thin envelope I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour and a half. Then I walked to the Office of Career Services, feeling, I suppose, like a man slinking off to a strip club even as his beautiful wife awaits him in lingerie at home. Most of the application deadlines in the binder labeled RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS had already passed. Of those that hadn’t I narrowed the choice down to two: an assistant position in a cancer lab in Seattle and publications coordinator for a bioethics think tank in London. The latter was described as a nine-month post that came with free airfare and a stipend of one hundred pounds a week. I applied. Three weeks later, a man unforgettably named Colin Cabbagestalk phoned to say that if indeed I was still interested the position was mine. Something in his voice, hasty yet cagey, led me to think I had been selected from a candidate pool of one.

That summer, of 1998, I lived with Maddie in Morningside Heights. We subleased a studio on Broadway and spent eight weeks doing very little other than exactly what we wanted to do, which is to say a lot of drinking coffee, eating waffles, taking long walks around the reservoir or up and down Riverside Park and reading magazines cover to cover in the bath. Never have I felt so free, so unfettered by obligation. Also buoying our time together was something of the thrill of a clandestine affair, for Maddie had not told her parents about our living together and nor had I been altogether honest with