Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,2
he agreed.
• • •
From his stomach all the way up to his sternum ran a pink, zipperlike scar. Another scar bisected his leg from groin to ankle. Two more made a faint circumflex above his hip. And that was just the front.
“Who did this to you?”
“Norman Mailer.”
While she was tugging up her tights, he got up to turn the Yankees game on. “Ooh, I love baseball,” said Alice.
“Do you? Which team?”
“The Red Sox. When I was little, my grandmother used to take me to Fenway every year.”
“Is she still alive, your grandmother?”
“Yep. Would you like her number? You’re about the same age.”
“It’s a little early in our relationship for you to be satirizing me, Mary-Alice.”
“I know,” laughed Alice. “I’m sorry.”
They watched as Jason Giambi slugged a three-two pitch into left center.
“Oh!” said the writer, getting up. “I almost forgot. I bought you a cookie.”
• • •
When they sat looking at each other, across his little glass dining table or she on the bed and he in his chair, she noticed that his head pulsed sideways ever so slightly, as though with the beating of his heart.
And, he’d had three operations on his spine, which meant there were certain things they could and couldn’t do. Shouldn’t do.
“I don’t want you to get hurt,” said Alice, frowning.
“It’s a little late for that.”
They used the bed now. His mattress was made of a special orthopedic material that made her feel as though she were slowly sinking into a giant slab of fudge. Turning her head to the side, she could see, through his double-height windows, the midtown skyline, looking huddled and solemn in the rain.
“Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ. Oh Jesus Christ. What are you doing? Do you know . . . what . . . you’re doing?”
Afterward, while she was eating another cookie:
“Who taught you that, Mary-Alice? Who have you been with?”
“No one,” she said, picking a crumb off her lap and eating it. “I just imagine what would feel good and I do it.”
“Well, you have quite an imagination.”
• • •
He called her a mermaid. She didn’t know why.
Propped beside his keyboard was a tent of white paper on which he had typed:
You are an empty vessel for a long time, then something grows that you don’t want, something creeps into it that you actually cannot do. The God of Chance creates in us. . . . Endeavours in art require a lot of patience.
And below that:
An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways . . .
When she opened the refrigerator, his gold medal from the White House, tied to its handle, clanked loudly against the door. Alice went back to the bed.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “I can’t wear a condom. Nobody can.”
“Okay.”
“So what are we going to do about diseases?”
“Well, I trust you, if you—”
“You shouldn’t trust anyone. What if you become pregnant?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’d have an abortion.”
Later, while she was washing up in the bathroom, he handed through to her a glass of white wine.
• • •
Blackout cookies, they were called, and they came from the Columbus Bakery, which he passed every day on his walk. He tried not to eat them himself. Nor did he drink; alcohol didn’t mix with one of the medications he was taking. But for Alice he bought bottles of Sancerre or Pouilly-Fuissé and, after pouring her what she wanted, put the cork back in the bottle and the bottle on the floor next to the door for her to take home.
One evening, a few bites into her cookie, Alice took a sip and made a daintily revolted face.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. It’s just that, you know, they don’t really go.”
He thought for a moment and then got up and went into the kitchen for a tumbler and a bottle of Knob Creek.
“Try this.”
He watched hungrily as she took a bite, then a sip. The bourbon went down like a flame.
Alice coughed. “It’s heaven,” she said.
• • •
Other gifts:
An extremely sensible, analog, waterproof watch.
Allure Chanel eau de parfum.
A sheet of thirty-two-cent stamps from the Legends of American Music series, commemorating Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, and Hoagy Carmichael.
A New York Post cover from March 1992 with the headline “Weird Sex Act in Bullpen (Late City Final).”
• • •
The eighth time, while they were doing one of the things he wasn’t supposed to do, he said:
“I love you. I love you for this.”
Afterward,