Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,92

when my brother died, and I was the only Blazer left. All right, maybe four times. But anyway, it’s true of any sort of depression—emotional, economic: it occurs only after you’ve been riding too high. We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. As I said: sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s economic, sometimes even a kind of political depression sets in. Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? Anyway, what good will it do, the willful and belated broadening of my imagination? A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this, in its way. About the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It’s a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté. [Laughs softly.] Incidentally, this friend, she was one of the—Well, no. I won’t say that. I won’t say her name. Never mind. There it is. What’s the line? War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

INTERVIEWER: You don’t believe that.

EZRA BLAZER: I think an impressive number of us cannot readily point to Mosul on a map. But I also think God is too busy arranging David Ortiz’s home runs to be much concerned with teaching us geography.

INTERVIEWER: More music.

EZRA BLAZER: How many do I have left?

INTERVIEWER: Two.

EZRA BLAZER: Two. And we’ve only gotten up to my thirties. We’ll be here forever. My next record is from Strauss’s Four Last Songs. I didn’t listen to them in Germany. I couldn’t listen to Wagner, either. Only later did I come to my senses. I love the Four Last Songs, with Kiri Te Kanawa singing. Who doesn’t?

INTERVIEWER: That was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing “Im Abendrot,” with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis. Ezra Blazer, you said earlier that you have no regrets about not having had children, but there have been rumors that you did in fact father a child, in Europe. Is there any truth to those rumors?

EZRA BLAZER: I fathered two children.

INTERVIEWER: You did?

EZRA BLAZER: Twins. Since you asked. Impertinently, I must say. I told you about my friend? With the little black motorbike, who introduced me to Fauré? Well, she became pregnant, just as I was about to leave Paris, and I didn’t know it at the time, and I came back to America. I had to. I had nothing left to live on.

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t keep in touch?

EZRA BLAZER: We corresponded for a while, but then she disappeared. That was 1956. In 1977 I happened to be spending a week in Paris, promoting the French publication of one of my books. I was staying at the Montalembert, near my publishing house, and I was in the bar, talking to my editor, when a young woman came up to me, very pretty, and said, in French: Excuse me, sir, but I believe you’re my father. I thought, Fine, if that’s the way she wants to play it. So I said, Sit down, mademoiselle. And she told me her name, and of course the last name I recognized. My French lover, Geneviève, had been the same age as this girl when I knew her. So I said, Are you the daughter of Geneviève