Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,94

That’s good. Because monogamy is against nature.

INTERVIEWER: So is writing novels.

EZRA BLAZER: Agreed.

INTERVIEWER: But certainly you’ve experienced benefits, pleasures, from monogamy.

EZRA BLAZER: When I’ve been monogamous, yes. But now I’m celibate, and have been, for some years. And to my astonishment celibacy is the greatest pleasure. Wasn’t it Socrates, or one of his ilk, who said that the celibacy of old age is like finally being unstrapped from the back of a wild horse?

INTERVIEWER: Surely celibacy is against nature.

EZRA BLAZER: Not in the old. Nature loves celibacy in the old. Anyway, I contributed my twins to the longevity of the species. They’ve contributed their children. I did my job.

INTERVIEWER: Unwittingly.

EZRA BLAZER: Which is perhaps the best way. I’ve enjoyed being a tool of evolution. Usually it’s when you’re young, young and charging, that Evolution says, “I want YOU.”

INTERVIEWER: Like Uncle Sam.

EZRA BLAZER: Yes, like Uncle Sam. Not bad for a Scot. Evolution dons his top hat and tugs on his goatee and he points at you and he says, I. WANT. YOU. It is in the unwitting service of evolution that people are crazed by sex.

INTERVIEWER: Which I suppose makes you a highly decorated soldier.

EZRA BLAZER: I saw some action. I have a Purple Heart. I hit the beaches. Long before the sexual revolution began in the sixties I was one of the generation who hit the beaches in the fifties and struggled under fire up the shore. We valiantly fought our way up the beaches against heavy opposition and then the flower children traipsed right over our bloody corpses having their multiple orgasms along the way. But you asked about decrepitude. What it’s like to be so old. The short answer is that you go about your business reminding yourself to look at everything as though you’re looking at it for the last time. Probably you are.

INTERVIEWER: Do you worry about the end?

EZRA BLAZER: I am cognizant of the end. Maybe I have three, five, seven years, at most nine or ten years. After that, you’re beyond decrepit. [Laughs.] Unless you’re Casals. Casals, who also played the piano, by the way, once told a reporter when he was in his nineties that he had played the same Bach piano piece every day for the past eighty-five years. When the reporter asked whether this didn’t get boring, Casals said, No, on the contrary, each playing was a new experience, a new act of discovery. So maybe Casals never became decrepit. Maybe he took his last breath playing a bourrée. But I’m not Casals. I didn’t draw the Mediterranean-diet straw. What do I think about the end? I don’t think about the end. I think about the totality, my whole life.

INTERVIEWER: And are you happy with what you’ve accomplished over your whole life?

EZRA BLAZER: I’m satisfied that I couldn’t have done any better. I never shirked my duty to my work. I worked hard. I did the best I could. I never let anything out into the world that I didn’t think I had taken as far as I could. Do I regret the publication of certain lesser books? Not really. You only get to book three by writing books one and two. You’re not writing one long book; that’s too poetic a way of looking at it. But it’s a single career. And each piece is, after the fact, necessary to going on.

INTERVIEWER: Are you working on something now?

EZRA BLAZER: I’ve just begun a massive trilogy. In fact I wrote the first page earlier today.

INTERVIEWER: Oh?

EZRA BLAZER: Yep. Each volume is going to be 352 pages. The significance of the number I needn’t go into. And I’m writing the end first, so it’ll be end, beginning, middle. The first two books will be middle, beginning, end. The last will be only beginnings. And this is a scheme that I think will prove to the world that I don’t know what I’m doing, and never have.

INTERVIEWER: How long do you think it will take you?

EZRA BLAZER: Oh, a month or two.

INTERVIEWER: And tell me, Ezra Blazer, if the waves were to crash upon the shore, threatening to wash all of the discs off your desert island, which one would you run to save?

EZRA BLAZER: Oh my. Only one? Where is this island?

INTERVIEWER: Very far away.

EZRA BLAZER: Very far away. Is there nobody else around?

INTERVIEWER: No.

EZRA BLAZER: Just me on a desert island.

INTERVIEWER: That’s right.

EZRA BLAZER: What else can I take?

INTERVIEWER: The Bible. Or the Torah, if you prefer. Or the Koran.

EZRA