Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,95

BLAZER: Those are the last books I would take. If I never see those books again I’ll be quite happy.

INTERVIEWER: The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

EZRA BLAZER: Very good.

INTERVIEWER: And one more book of your choosing.

EZRA BLAZER: I’ll come back to that. What else?

INTERVIEWER: A luxury.

EZRA BLAZER: Food.

INTERVIEWER: We’ll take care of food. Don’t worry about food.

EZRA BLAZER: Then I’ll take a woman.

INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, I should have said. You can’t take another person.

EZRA BLAZER: Not even you?

INTERVIEWER: No.

EZRA BLAZER: Then I’ll take a doll. A blow-up doll. Of my own choosing. In whatever color I want.

INTERVIEWER: We’ll give you that. And your record?

EZRA BLAZER: Well, I’ve chosen only ones I truly love, so it’s hard to say what I would like to hear over and over. Some days you’re in a Finian’s Rainbow frame of mind and other days the mood is Debussy. But I think it would have to be one of the great classical pieces, and that I could always appreciate the soaring—that’s S-O-A-R-I-N-G—in Strauss’s Four Last Songs. May I take all four of them with me?

INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry . . .

EZRA BLAZER: You drive a hard bargain.

INTERVIEWER: I didn’t make the rules.

EZRA BLAZER: Who did?

INTERVIEWER: Roy Plomley.

EZRA BLAZER: Is he Scottish?

INTERVIEWER: I’m afraid we’re running out of time.

EZRA BLAZER: Fine. “Im Abendrot.” And with that I think I would have the spirit to get through my island days, me and my blow-up woman. We might even have a nice life together. Very quiet.

INTERVIEWER: And your book?

EZRA BLAZER: Well, certainly not any of my books. I suppose I’d take Ulysses. Which I’ve read twice in my life. So far. It’s endlessly rich and endlessly baffling. However many times you’ve read it, you confront new enigmas. But it yields its pleasures up to steady concentration. And I would have plenty of time, of course, so, yes, Joyce’s Ulysses, with the notes. And I’ll tell you why you need the notes. His genius, his comic genius, keeps you splendidly entertained, the erudition is exciting, and then this city of Dublin, which is the landscape of the book, it is the book, is not my city. I wish I could have done as he did with Pittsburgh. But I could only have done this if I’d stayed in Pittsburgh with my sister and my mother and my father and my aunts and my uncles and my nephews and my nieces. Not that Joyce did that, mind you; as soon as he could get out of Dublin he fled, to Trieste, to Zurich, and then eventually to Paris. I don’t think he ever went back to Dublin, but he was obsessed with the city and its billion particulars all his life. Obsessed with capturing it in a way utterly new in fiction. The erudition, the wit, the richness, the great novelty of it all . . . My God, it’s magnificent! But without the notes I’d be lost. The Homeric analogue doesn’t interest me too much, by the way. In fact, it doesn’t interest me at all. But I suppose on a desert island it would start to, because what else would? You can only spend so much time with your blow-up woman, perfect though she may be. So yes, I’ll go out with Joyce.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Ezra Blazer, for letting us hear your—

EZRA BLAZER: The thing I like best about a blow-up woman, though, is that—and I don’t mean this in the physical sense, I mean it in the emotional sense—there’s no friction. Much as I loved my darling dancers, there was friction constantly. Because they belonged to Mr. Balanchine, not me.

INTERVIEWER: . . . Do you always use the language of possession when talking about love?

EZRA BLAZER: It’s impossible not to! Love is volatile. Recalcitrant. Irrepressible. We do our best to tame it, to name it and plan for it and maybe even to contain it between the hours of six and twelve, or if you’re Parisian five and seven, but like much of what is adorable and irresistible in this world it eventually tears free of you and, yes, sometimes you get scratched up in the process. It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life. Some of us do it by drafting laws, or by painting lines on the road, or by damming rivers or isolating isotopes or building a better bra. Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books.