Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,8
on to her tightly.
The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.
“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”
• • •
He left for his island again the following morning. When he’d called to tell her this, Alice hung up, hurled her phone into her hamper, and groaned. The same day, her father called to explain that fluoridated water is an evil propagated by the New World Order; an hour later he called again to declare that man never walked on the moon. Alice fielded such news flashes as she’d done once or twice a week every week for eight years: with an upbeat reticence that postponed her objection to a day when she’d figured out how to express it without hurting anyone’s feelings. Meanwhile, she discovered her beautiful new teakettle to possess an outrageous flaw: its contiguous-metal handle could not sit thirty seconds over a flame without becoming too hot to pick up. What kind of a handle, thought Alice, can’t be handled? Holding her scalded palm under the faucet, she blamed this on her writer, too. But this time, after only three days, he called. He called her from his screenhouse and described the changing trees, and the wild turkeys that hobbled along his driveway, and the tangerine glow of the sun as it sank behind his six acres of woods. Then he called her again, just two days later, and held the phone so that she could hear a crow cawing, and the shiver of leaves ruffled by the wind and then—nothing. “I don’t hear anything,” laughed Alice. “Exactly,” he replied. “It’s quiet. Blissfully quiet.” But it was too cold now to use the pool, and there were some disruptive plumbing repairs on the calendar, so he’d be staying only another week or so and then coming back into the city for good.
He brought with him an old Polaroid SX-70.
“Let’s see,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “if I can remember how to use this thing.”
They took ten shots, including one of him, the only one of him, lying on his side in one of his Calvin Klein T-shirts and his own very sensible wristwatch, otherwise nothing. Fanned beside him on the bed were the nine photographs already taken, arranged for his review in two concentric arcs: murky brown forms surfacing with an edge of opalescence, as though out of a sunlit river. In fact, the more vivid the photographs became, the more the pleasure of taking them faded, and while Alice got up to go to the bathroom Ezra deposited all ten into the pocket of her purse. Then they watched Top Hat, with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and Ezra brushed his teeth lightly humming “Cheek to Cheek.” It was not until she was back in the elevator the following morning, reaching for her keys, that she found them there: a neat square stack of herself bound tightly by one of her own hair bands.
At home, she arranged the Polaroids on her bed in several layered columns, something like the setup for Solitaire. In some, her skin looked like watered-down milk, too thin to conceal the veins running through her arms and chest. In another, a crimson flush spread across her cheeks and into her ears, while over the porcelain slope of her shoulder the Chrysler Building resembled a tiny flame in white gold. In another, her head rested against his thigh, her one visible eye closed, Ezra’s fingers holding aside her hair. In another, her breasts were plumped high and smooth and round, held upward by her own hands. This one he’d taken from beneath her, so that to look at the camera she’d had to gaze down the line of her nose. Her hair, tucked behind her ears, hung forward in heavy blond curtains on either side of her jaw. Her bangs, too long, separated slightly left of center and fell thickly to her eyelashes. It was almost a beautiful photograph. Certainly the most difficult to cut up. The problem, thought Alice, was its Aliceness: that stubbornly juvenile quality that on film never failed to surprise and annoy her.
Tinily, like distant traffic lights, her pupils glowed red.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Oh, sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to call you.”
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Mary-Alice, I’m still looking forward to seeing you this evening, but would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up a jar