SATURDAY
21
MAY
SATURDAY
18
JUNE
SATURDAY
2
JULY
A car door slammed.
“Sorry folks!” he called out from the kitchen window. “Your reservation is for tomorrow!”
Ignoring him, the children hopped jauntily up the flagstone path, the boy weaving a toy police boat through the air and the girl trailing fairy wings that glittered amethyst under the high summer sun. Holding the screen door open for them, Ezra resembled a butler to elves. “Olivia! You’ve grown wings!” Kyle’s hopping continued all the way up the steps and into the living room, where he collapsed upside down on Ezra’s ottoman and, hair sweeping the floorboards, announced, “Olivia has a loose tooth!”
“Is that right, Olivia?”
Sitting on the very edge of the sofa cushion so as not to crush her wings, Olivia nodded.
“How loose?”
“Weally loose!” said Kyle.
Sneaking a look at Ezra, Olivia blushed.
Over lunch:
“Ezra?”
“Yes sweetheart.”
“How’d you get to be so sophisticated?”
Ezra lowered his pickle. “How am I sophisticated?”
Olivia shrugged. “You wear nice shirts. And you know the president.”
A grape rolled off Kyle’s plate toward the edge of the table. “Uh-oh!” said Alice, lunging to catch it. “Runaway grape.”
“Wunaway gwape!”
“I’m not that sophisticated,” concluded Ezra.
“Ezra works hard,” said Edwin, pulling a shard of potato chip out of his daughter’s hair. “If you work hard and do well in school then maybe one day you’ll be able to afford nice shirts, too.”
“And meet the president?”
“And become the president,” said Eileen.
“That’s right,” said Ezra. “President Wu. Madam President Wu. You’d already be better than the one we’ve got now.”
Olivia spooned mint-chocolate-chip ice cream into her mouth and worked her jaw slowly, meditatively, as though it contained a foreign object. Sitting on Alice’s lap, Kyle farted.
“Whoops,” said Alice.
“Whoops,” said Kyle, giggling into his spoon.
In the pool, he wore lobster-print swimming trunks and his sister a too-big one-piece that drooped to reveal her pale, penny-flat nipples. “Look,” Olivia commanded, while her mother vigorously rubbed sunblock into her arms; flanked by four chocolate-filled molars, the loose tooth teetered steeply back and forth under her finger like a drunk.
“Wow,” said Alice. “That is loose.”
It was a warm day, cloudy but close, yet Ezra sat in his deck chair wearing trousers, a long-sleeved button-down shirt, and laced-up Oxfords tied in double bows. The Perpetual Orgy lay bookmarked in his lap and his Penn State Altoona cap was perched so lightly on his head its letters caved in a little. “Now, remember, boys and girls. I have this chemical I put in the pool that makes urine turn red. Bright red! The second someone pees in the pool, it’s going to turn bright red.” Kyle shot a furtive, furrowed glance to his wake.
“Marco,” said Alice.
“Polo!” screamed the children.
“Marco.”
“Polo!”
“Marco!”
“POLO!”
“MARCO!”
“POLOAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!”
Ezra put up a hand. “Excuse me, but does anyone here actually know who Marco Polo was?”
Kyle and Olivia halted, bobbing in place and blowing water from their noses and lips; then Olivia turned to Alice and asked sweetly, “Will you take me to the deep end?”
Alice crouched while the little girl half climbed, half floated onto her hip; then she waded until she could no longer touch the pool’s bottom and had to pull one hand over the other on the long side of its flagstone edge. The deeper she went, the tighter Olivia clung, peering over her shoulder and shuddering as though having caught sight of a grisly shipwreck below. “Mayday, Mayday!” laughed Alice when Kyle’s remote-control police boat caught up with them and butted her in the breast.
“Don’t let go Olivia,” her mother called.
When they reached the far corner, the girl’s limbs were as tight around Alice as a vise. “How’s this?” Alice asked.
“Good,” Olivia murmured, teeth chattering.
Bouncing his foot and looking a little bored, Ezra asked if anyone knew any jokes.
Edwin lowered his BlackBerry. “What do you call twins before they’re born?”
“Wombmates!” Olivia shrieked in Alice’s ear.
“That’s good,” said Ezra. “What else?”
Kyle tried to stand on a kickboard. “What do you get when you cwoss a Tywannosauwus wex with a . . . with uh . . .”
“With a what?”
The kickboard popped up. “I forget.”
Ezra shook his head. “Needs work.”
“Why did the cookie go to the hospital?” said Olivia.
“Why?”
“Because he felt crummy!”
Kyle cackled; Ezra groaned. Still barnacled to Alice, Olivia turned to her and wrinkled her nose. “Needs work?”
“I’ve got one,” said Ezra. “A guy flying into Honolulu turns to the guy sitting next to him and says, ‘Say, how do you pronounce it? Hawaii or Havaii?’ ‘Havaii,’ says the other guy. ‘Thanks,’ says the first guy. And the other guy says, ‘You’re velcome.’ ”
The little ones stared at him.
“I don’t get it,” said Kyle.
“He talks funny,” said Olivia. “Right?”
“Right.”
“But what’s funny about it?” said Kyle.
“Nothing,” said Ezra. “Never mind.”
“Needs verk,” suggested Eileen.
The wind picked up, shuffling the leaves. Undeterred, the children taught Alice Sharks and Minnows, then Monkey in the Middle, then a made-up game that involved one and then the other of them climbing onto her back and pretending to whip her hindquarters with a foam-noodle riding crop.
“Do you want children, Mary-Alice?” Eileen asked.
Kyle waved the noodle above his head like a lasso, flicking water into her eyes. “Maybe,” said Alice. “When I’m forty.”
Lifting her sunglasses, Eileen shook her head. “Forty’s too old.”
“So I’ve heard. But I’m afraid to do it sooner. I’m afraid it will . . . consume me.”
“Mary-Alice is a very tender person,” explained Ezra.
Eileen nodded, squinting at the sky. “I take it back. Forty isn’t too old to have a child. Fifty is too old to have a ten-year-old child.”
When a light rain began to stipple the flagstones, Ezra pushed himself up and clapped his hands. “Who vants a jelly doughnut?” While Alice and Eileen helped them into socks that in theory would keep the ticks at bay, the children shivered, whined, whimpered, cajoled, and threw tragic glances over their shoulders at the departed water, still oscillating and densely pockmarked now with rain. The remote-control police boat bumped up against the aluminum ladder. Foam noodles lay on the surface like snakes sprung from a can. When all the remaining towels, tote bags, tubes of Coppertone and miniature goggles had been gathered up, Alice fell in line behind the others trudging in the manner of weary seafarers up the lawn: Ezra, making his long solitary strides past the redbuds no longer in bloom; Edwin and Kyle, pointing scientifically at something in the harbor; and Olivia and Eileen, on legs identically proportioned and knock-kneed. “See those trees?” Eileen was saying to her daughter, while all around them the rain made a racket like oil frying. “When Mommy was a little girl she helped Ezra plant those trees . . .”
• • •
After dinner they played Scrabble.
Kneeling on her chair, wearing a nightgown that had the Little Mermaid on it, Olivia considered her options for a long, tooth-worrying moment before at last extending an arm across the table and laying out, with maximum suspense: BURD.
“No sweetie,” said Edwin. “It’s B-I-R-D.”
“Oh,” said Olivia, slumping. “I forgot.”
“That’s okay, honey,” said Ezra. “You just had a junior moment.”
Edwin put down FRISBEE. “Sixteen points.”
“No proper names,” said Eileen.
Edwin took back FRISBEE and put down RISIBLE. “Good one,” said Alice. “Thirteen points.”
“What does it say?” asked Kyle.
“It says ‘risible,’ ” said Eileen.
“What’s ‘risible’?” asked Olivia.
“Something funny,” said Alice. “Something silly, or ridiculous, that makes you laugh.” She put down PEONY. “Twelve points.”
Ezra put down CLIT.
Alice covered her mouth with the scorepad. Over her wineglass, Eileen widened her eyes.
Screwing his lips to one side, Ezra consulted his letters again and then shook his head ruefully. “That’s all I got.” Looking up from his BlackBerry, Edwin grinned.
“What?” said Kyle. “What does it say?”
“It says ‘clit,’ ” Eileen said clearly.
“That’s not a word,” said Olivia.
“Yes it is!” said Kyle. “Clift is a word!”
“That’s right,” said Ezra, looking relieved. “Clift is a word.”
“What does it mean?” asked Alice.
“It’s another word for ‘cliff.’ ”
“There’s also Montgomery Clift,” said Edwin.
“No proper names,” Eileen repeated. “Anyway, that’s not what it says.”
“Never mind,” laughed Alice. “Twelve points for Ezra.”
Olivia took a finger out of her mouth and turned to stare at her. “Why do you laugh after everything?”
“Who?” said Alice. “Me?”
Olivia nodded. “You laugh after everything.”
“Oh,” said Alice. “I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I have no idea why.”
“I have a theory,” said Ezra, rearranging his tiles.
“You do?”
“I think you laugh to keep things light. To defang the situation.”
“What’s defang?” asked Olivia.
“It’s what’s going to happen to you soon,” said Edwin, tickling her in the ribs.
“It was his idea,” Eileen said the following morning, back down at the pool. “He was raised Catholic and thinks everyone should have some sort of religious education. But when it came time to explain to them how Mary became pregnant with Jesus, I could hardly keep a straight face.”
“Mom! Mom look!”
“Olivia, socks!”
Still wearing her nightgown, Olivia rounded the pumphouse like a wind-filled sail and arrived breathlessly on the flagstone deck, waving a bill. “Look! Look what the tooth fairy brought me!”
“Wow!” said Ezra. “Fifty smackers.”
“That’s very generous,” said Eileen.
“Can I keep it?”
“Give it to your father please. And put some socks on.” When she’d gone, Eileen looked pointedly at Ezra. “Fifty dollars?”
“What? It’s nothing compared to what I gave the hot dog guy.”
Alice looked up from her book. “You gave money to the hot dog guy?”
“Sure.”
“How much?”
He waved a fly away. “Seven hundred.”
“Seven hundred dollars!”
“You don’t even like hot dogs,” said Eileen.
Ezra shrugged. “I wanted to help him out. I wanted to help out a friend. He’d been telling me about how he’s had a tough time lately; the cost of his permit’s going up and his landlord keeps raising the rent on his apartment and he’s got a wife and three kids to take care of. He told me he wasn’t going to be able to pay his bills next month unless he found a way to come up with some extra cash. So the next day I went back to him and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ And he told me his name, and I got out my checkbook, and he said, ‘Wait! That’s not my real name.’ ”
Alice groaned.
“So already I was out of my depth, see. But what the hell. I wrote him a check. I wrote him a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I thought you said seven hundred,” said Eileen.
“No darling. Seven hundred and fifty.”
“You said seven hundred,” said Alice.
Ezra shook his head. “I’m getting a little forgetful.”
“Anyway,” said Alice.
Ezra held up his hands. “I haven’t seen him since.”
“May I ask,” said Eileen, “the provenance of this hot dog man?”
“He’s Yemeni, I think.” They watched as Kyle came swaggering down the lawn carrying a pair of flippers and the remote control to his boat. Ezra looked worried. “I probably just gave seven hundred and fifty bucks to al-Qaeda.”
“En garde!” said Kyle, dropping the flippers and swinging the remote control’s antennae toward them in an arc.
Like a shot, Ezra flipped backward onto the lawn, plastic deck chair and all, his head barely missing the root of an old spruce stump. Delighted, Kyle dropped the remote control to the ground and joined him on the grass with a bumbling pratfall.
“I’m serious,” said Ezra, still lying on his back. “My defibrillator just went off.”
“Oh my God,” said Eileen.
“Are you okay?” asked Alice.
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I think I’m okay. It’s just . . . It was just . . . a bit of a shock.” He laughed shakily. “Literally.”
Eileen picked the remote control up by its antennae and tossed it like a dead animal into the woods. “But we should call a doctor, don’t you think? Just to be sure?”
When Virgil arrived, it was Olivia who ran to meet him in the driveway, fairy wings flouncing. “Whoa!” she said. “How old are you?”
• • •
In Alice’s mailbox when she got home:
A jury summons.
An invitation to the Third Annual Fire Island Black Out beach weekend, addressed to the man who’d lived in her apartment before her.
A notice from the NYC Department of Buildings, a copy of which had also been taped to the lobby door: WORK PERMIT: PLUMBING – ALTERATION TYPE 1 APPLICATION FILED TO PERFORM SUBDIVISION OF EXISTING SIX (6) ROOM RAILROAD ON 5TH FLOOR INTO TWO SEPARATE ONE (1) BEDROOM APARTMENTS. GENERAL CONSTRUCTION, PLUMBING, GAS AND INTERIOR FINISHES AS REQUIRED. EXISTING APARTMENT DOORS TO REMAIN. NO CHANGE TO EGRESS FROM APARTMENT TO HALL.
• • •
In the jury assembly room she sat next to a man wearing a T-shirt that read IT’S NOT THAT I’M ANTISOCIAL, I JUST DON’T LIKE YOU. In front of her, another man was eating a blueberry scone and explaining to the woman next to him why some Muslims do their best to avoid most musical genres. He’d been to MoMA the day before, and there had overheard a docent speaking to a group of schoolchildren about the “musicality” of Kandinsky’s work; this had struck him as an especially interesting point of comparison, “because the Muslims you’d expect to prefer Kandinsky over figural artists would almost certainly be the same ones who live in suspicion of music, whose sensuality and purposelessness, they believe, encourage humans’ baser tendencies.”
“What tendencies?” the woman beside him asked.
“Promiscuity,” said the man, chewing. “Lust. Immodesty. Violence. To my very conservative uncle, for example”—he brushed some crumbs off his lap and onto the floor—“Britney Spears and Beethoven are the same thing. Music is offensive because it appeals to our more animalistic passions, detracting from our more intelligent pursuits.”
“So if your uncle were in a restaurant and they started playing classical music, would he put his hands over his ears? Would he get up and leave?”
“No. But he would probably find the playing of any music at all extremely silly.”
The more you learn, thought Alice, the more you realize how little you know.
At 9:20, a short bald man stepped onto a box at the front of the room and introduced himself as Clerk Willoughby. “My fellow Americans. Good morning. Everyone please look at your summons. We want to make sure you’re all in the right place on the right day. Your summons should read July fourteenth, Sixty Centre Street. If anyone is holding a summons that says something different, please take your things down the hall to the main office here and they’ll get it cleared up.”
A woman behind Alice sighed loudly and began gathering her things.
“Now. In order to be a juror in this court, you must be a citizen of the United States, you must be over eighteen years old, you must understand English, you must live in Manhattan, Roosevelt Island, or Marble Hill; and you must not be a convicted felon. If anyone does not meet those requirements, you too should pick up your things and take them to the administration office.”
The man in the antisocial T-shirt got up and walked out.
“Jury duty hours are from nine a.m. to five p.m. with a lunch break from one to two p.m. Jurors not involved in a trial and thus still here in the assembly room at four thirty will in all likelihood be allowed to leave at that time. If a judge is making use of you, however, it’s out of my hands and you will have to stay until you are dismissed by the judge. The average length of a trial is seven days. Some are longer, some are shorter. At this point we’ll be showing you a short orientation film, and I would be grateful if everyone would please remove your headphones and close your books and newspapers and give it your full attention.”
The movie began with a fade-in on a lake. Led by a burly guard, a herd of medieval villagers trooped down to the water’s edge.
In olden times, said a voice-over, in Europe, if you were accused of a crime or misdemeanor, you had to go through what they called trial by ordeal. This was an idea that first surfaced some three thousand years ago, in the time of Hammurabi.
The herd of villagers parted to make way for a man whose wrists had been bound tightly with rope. Two guards pushed him toward the water.
One of these ordeals called for you to plunge your hand into boiling water. Three days later, if the hand healed, you were pronounced innocent. Another trial by ordeal was even more extreme. It demanded that you be tightly bound and thrown into the water. If you floated, you were guilty. If you sank, you were innocent.
Now the guards were tying the prisoner’s feet while a pair of officials stood by, watching impassively. The villagers were hushed, apprehensive. Then the guards heaved the prisoner into the water. The prisoner sank. Bubbles rose in his stead. The officials watched for a moment before signaling to the guards to pull him out. The villagers cheered.
Was this fair and impartial justice? They thought so. . . .
Despite her mood, which was restless and premenstrual, Alice enjoyed the film. It reminded her of social studies and in the end did not really ask of her very much—only that she not take her civil liberties for granted, and when had she ever done that? With the credits rolling behind him, Willoughby mounted his wooden box again and, like a magician demonstrating the integrity of his materials, held up a sample summons and instructed everyone to tear off a perforated portion that would have to be handed in. “Not this piece,” he said at least twice, once to each side of the room. “This one.” But each time either his knuckles or his pointing hand had obstructed Alice’s line of vision, so that when it came time for her to turn her own piece in the officer receiving it tutted direly and said, handing it back, “This is the wrong piece.”
“Oh, sorry. What should I do?”
Seizing the summons again, the clerk removed a Scotch-tape dispenser from her desk, taped the pieces together and thrust them back. “Sit down.” Then, shaking her head, and already gesturing to the next person in line, she added, “Very poor.”
At 10:35, Clerk Willoughby began reading names.
“Patrick Dwyer.”
“José Cardozo.”
“Bonnie Slotnick.”
“Hermann Walz.”
“Rafael Moreno.”
“Helen Pincus.”
“Lauren Unger.”
“Marcel Lewinski.”
“Sarah Smith.”
In front of Alice, the man whose Muslim uncle did not like music for its animalistic passions was reading The Economist. Alice took out her Discman, untangled its cord, and pressed PLAY.
“Bruce Beck.”
“Argentina Cabrera.”
“Donna Krauss.”
“Mary-Ann Travaglione.”
“Laura Barth.”
“Caroline Koo.”
“William Bialosky.”
“Craig Koestler.”
“Clara Pierce.”
It was a Janáek CD, whose first track she listened to three times, and with each playing felt herself less, rather than more, capable of comprehending its complexity. But violence? Lust? A low-grade, objectless lust seemed to be her default state; perhaps music, like alcohol, could give it a reckless vector . . .
“Alma Castro.”
“Sheri Bloomberg.”
“Jordan Levi.”
“Sabrina Truong.”
“Timothy O’Halloran.”
“Patrick Philpott.”
“Ryan McGillicuddy.”
“Adrian Sanchez.”
“Angela Ng.”
A little after four those whose names had not been called were dismissed with orders to return in the morning. Alice went back to the pub where she’d spent her lunch hour and ordered a glass of wine, followed by a second glass of wine, then laid her money down next to a section of newspaper containing the headline Baghdad Bomb Kills Up to 27, Most Children, and at the first subway stop she came to descended unsteadily underground. It was rush hour now, and instead of changing via the long airless stampede at Times Square she got out at Fifty-Seventh Street and decided to walk. Her eyes felt overexposed and she wove a faint zigzag down the block, as if unaccustomed to the third dimension. A rumbling blast from a sidewalk grate suggested an underworld riled by her escape. Overhead, the forest of glass and steel swayed vertiginously against the sky. A man following close behind her whistled tunelessly, the sound thin and snatched away from them by the great static city din that was like two giant seashells against the ears: the undulating drone of wind and wheels rushing to make the light, taxis honking, buses groaning and sighing, hoses spraying the pavement, crates being stacked and van doors trundling shut. Wooden heels. A pan flute. Petitioners’ spurious salutations. It was eighty-three degrees, but many of the stores had propped open their doors—you could almost see the expensive air gusting out and withering on the street—from which truncated melodies blared like a radio set to scan: Muzak Bach, Muzak Beatles, “Ipanema,” Billy Joel, Joni Mitchell, “What a Wonderful World.” Even from the entrance to the 1/9 there seemed to emanate the muffled bebop of a swing band. . . . But then Alice passed the stairs down into the ground and still the music became louder and clearer, and developed a kind of height, a floating-up quality, the unique reverberation of brass and drums in the open air. Then she saw the dancers.
It was as if a present-day Rigoletto had overflowed the stage of the opera house and spilled out into the square. Under a wide white sky the sea of bouncing arms and swinging hips rocked metronomically; every now and again a limb was flung with such enthusiasm it looked liable to dislodge. A few bodies moved sluggishly, with concentration, irony, or age, but a gritty determination to keep moving at all costs appeared to be unanimous. Tall men danced with short women, tall women with short men, old men with young women and old ladies with old ladies; near the bag check three children skipped around their maypole of a mother on red-blinking heels. Some dancers danced alone, or with invisible partners, or, in a few rogue cases, in a well-sealed zone of avant-gardist expression. Teenage girls rolled themselves easily under bridges made by their own arms while less elastic bodies snagged halfway and let go in favor of a baggy Charleston. Others ignored the tempo entirely, including an elderly couple who danced so slowly they might as well have been in their own living room. A hot summer night, “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” five thousand civilians gathered peaceably under clouds kindly withholding their rain, and clinging to each other this oblivious pair seemed the key to it all, the sanity that enabled the delirium, the eye of the rapture. The only interruption to their reverie came when a jitterbugger passing by tripped, colliding softly with the old woman’s backside, and her reaction was the merest glance down and behind her, as if to avoid stepping on a dog.
When “Sing Sing Sing” started up, Alice turned and walked the remaining twenty blocks uptown.
At Ezra’s, she let herself in and went to the bed. Ezra opened his eyes. “Darling. What’s wrong?”
Alice shook her head. Ezra observed her concernedly for a moment before lifting a hand to her cheek. “Are you sick?”
Again Alice shook her head no, and for many seconds sat staring at a book review that lay open on the duvet beside him. Staring back at her was a cheap caricature of him in which his eyes were too close together and his chin resembled a turkey’s wattle. She slid the paper away, undid her sandals, and drew her legs up to lie as close beside him as she could. She put an arm around his chest and hid her face in his ribs. He smelled, as ever, like chlorine, Aveda, and Tide.
The sky bled pink, then violet. Ezra reached up to turn on the light.
“Mary-Alice,” he said, with the gentlest forbearance conceivable. “Your silences are very effective. Do you know?”
Alice rolled onto her back. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I’ve spent a lot of time here,” she said finally.
“Yes,” he replied, after another long moment. “I expect this room will be imprinted on your brain always.”
Alice closed her eyes.
• • •
“Alejandro Juarez.”
“Kristine Crowley.”
“Nigel Pugh.”
“Ajay Kundra.”
“Robert Thirwell.”
“Arlene Lester.”
“Catherine Flaherty.”
“Brenda Kahn.”
Alice was not the only one who’d sought out the same seat she’d sat in the day before, as though if they started over elsewhere the long wait of yesterday wouldn’t count. The man with the Muslim uncle had exchanged his Economist for a laptop whose screen saver was a photograph of himself with someone of identical complexion; they also had the same eyebrows, the same angle to their jawlines, the same brand of windbreaker in which they stood with their arms around each other against a dramatically marbled sky. Behind them, brown mountains stretched into the distance, triangular summits intricately veined at the top with snow. Then an Excel document poured up from the bottom of the screen, replacing nature with a blinding blizzard of cells.
“Devon Flowers.”
“Elizabeth Hamersley.”
“Kanchan Khemhandani.”
“Cynthia Wolf.”
“Orlanda Olsen.”
“Natasha Stowe.”
“Ashley Brownstein.”
“Hannah Filkins.”
“Zachary Jump.”
Sometimes, a name had to be repeated, and its owner discovered to have been in the men’s room, or stretching his legs in the atrium, or asleep. Only once did someone fail to materialize at all, and the effect on the room was a kind of jarring collective consternation. Who was this AWOL Amar Jamali and what reason could he have for standing up the American judiciary? And yet, Alice envied Amar Jamali a little, desperate as she was to be somewhere else herself. Someone else herself.
“Emanuel Gat.”
“Conor Fleming.”
“Pilar Brown.”
“Michael Firestone.”
“Kiril Dobrovolsky.”
“Abigail Cohen.”
“Jennifer Vanderhoven.”
“Lottie Simms.”
“Samantha Bargeman.”
Alice looked up. The woman beside her yawned.
“Samantha Bargeman?”
A few others lifted their heads and looked around. Alice turned her summons over in her lap and frowned.
“Samantha Bargeman . . .”
The man in front of her, recently reappeared, rubbed an eye with the heel of his hand. Willoughby scanned the room witheringly, then shook his head and wrote something down.
“. . . Purva Singh.”
“Barry Featherman.”
“Felicia Porges.”
“Leonard Yates.”
“Kendra Fitzpatrick.”
“Mary-Alice Dodge.”
Still stunned, Alice stood and followed the others down a windowless corridor into a room where copies of a questionnaire were passed around and filled out in a near silence syncopated by sneaker squeaks, sniffs, throat clearings and coughs. A clerk rubbed his chin as he read over everyone’s answers; then a couple of unsuitables were dismissed and those remaining led into an adjacent room for questioning by an attorney alone.
“Have you ever been sued?”
“No.”
“Have you ever sued anyone?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been a victim of a crime?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Malpractice?”
“No.”
“Rape?”
“No.”
“Theft?”
“Well, maybe. But nothing important.”
“It says here you’re an editor.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of an editor?”
“Fiction mainly. But I’m planning to give my notice next week.”
The attorney glanced at his watch. “This is a drug case. Do you use drugs?”
“No.”
“Does anyone you know use drugs?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Alice shifted in her seat. “My stepfather did cocaine when I was little.”
The attorney looked up. “He did?”
Alice nodded.
“At home?”
She nodded again.
“Was he ever violent with you?”
“Not with me, no.”
“But with someone else?”
Alice blinked at the attorney for a moment and then replied, “He’s not a bad person. He’s just had a hard life.”
“And what about your father?”
“What about my father?”
“Did he use drugs?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. We didn’t live with him.” Her voice wavered. “I couldn’t say.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know. You didn’t. It’s not—It’s not that. I’m just . . . tired. And sort of going through a difficult time.”
• • •
“Choo?”
“Mmm?”
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was sleeping. Are you all right?”
“I’m having chest pains.”
“Oh, no. Did you call Pransky?”
“He’s in Saint Lucia. His secretary said I should go up to Presbyterian.”
“She’s right.”
“Darling, you can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious!”
“You want me to go to an emergency room in Washington Heights at eight o’clock on a Saturday night?”
Through the taxicab’s windows the Upper West Side became Harlem and Harlem a neighborhood whose name she didn’t know, a wide-avenued wasteland of delis and beauty salons, dollar stores and African hair braiding, iglesias and a sky almost Midwestern in its sweeping pastel striations. At 153rd their driver braked suddenly to avoid a plastic bag swirling in the road between Trinity Cemetery and Jenkins Funeral Chapel. When they’d recovered from the jolt, Ezra leaned forward politely while Alice righted his cane. “Excuse me, sir! Would you mind slowing down a little please? I’d like to get to the hospital and then die.”
They sat for over an hour in the lobby watching two girls color butterflies on the floor while a third slumped motionless against a heavily pregnant woman’s arm. Then a young Korean woman in green clogs and burgundy scrubs summoned Ezra for an EKG and afterward stationed him to wait in a long room with too few partitions for the dozens of men and women lying on gurneys or sitting in wheelchairs, most of them old and black or old and Hispanic and still dressed in their pajamas or robes and slippers from home. Some were asleep, and in this position looked as though they were trying to decide whether death might be preferable to another hour in this fluorescent beeping limbo. Others watched the young orderlies to-ing and fro-ing with a dazed, even wondrous expression that suggested it was not the worst Saturday night they’d ever had. A few feet away from where Ezra had been moored to an IV dripping liquid sugar into his arm an odorous man with soiled trousers and bloodshot eyes wandered sociably up and down the aisle. “Sit down Clarence,” a nurse said to him as she passed.
“I knew this would happen,” said Ezra.
A little after ten, their nurse returned to say that she’d spoken with Pransky’s office and his EKG had indicated nothing out of the ordinary but they wanted to keep him overnight anyway just to be sure. Previously perfunctory, her manner had become girlish, flirty even; clutching her clipboard to her chest she fluttered her eyelashes and said, “By the way, my mother is a huge fan. She’d kill me if I didn’t tell you The Running Gag is her favorite book.”
“Good.”
“How are you feeling now? Any pain?”
“Yep.”
“The same? Worse?”
“Same.”
“What does it feel like?”
Ezra levitated a hand.
“It’s radiating?” said Alice.
“That’s right. Radiating. Into my neck.”
The nurse frowned. “Okay. Let me see if I can get you something for that. Anything else?”
“Can I have my own room?”
“You’d have to pay.”
“That’s fine.”
In the cubicle across from theirs a woman produced a rosary from her purse and began working her fingers along it while the man lying beside her squirmed and moaned. Another couple, in matching Mets sweatshirts, prayed in tandem, their hands clasped to their foreheads with such assiduous concentration that even Clarence stumbling to within an inch of their toes failed to break the spell. “Jesus!” said the man, laying his hands on his partner’s abdomen. “Let this pain cease and desist!” Ezra watched spellbound, eyes bright and jaw slack; he could never get enough of humanity, so long as it slept in another room.
“Your mouth is open,” said Alice.
He shut it, shaking his head. “I hate that. My brother started doing it about a year before he died. It looks terrible. Whenever you catch me doing it, darling, tell me to stop.”
“No!”
“You don’t have to make a big deal of it. Just say ‘Mouth.’ ”
Alice got up and went to the parting in the curtain. Ezra checked his watch.
“Did I tell you the apartment next to mine is for sale?” he asked.
“How much?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t know. Four hundred thousand?”
Ezra shook his head. “A million.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“For a studio?”
“It’s a small two-bedroom. But still.”
Alice nodded and turned back to the curtain. She looked both ways.
“I’ve never seen you wear jeans before.”
“Oh? What do you think?”
“Walk a little.”
Alice slid the curtain to one side and went as far as a cart of bedpans before turning around. Clarence appeared outside his own cubicle and clapped. “Doesn’t she look great?” Ezra called. When Alice had got back, he said, reaching for her arm, “So what should I do?”
“About what?”
“The apartment.”
“What about the apartment?”
“Should I buy it?”
“Why?”
“So someone with a baby doesn’t move in. And so I could knock down that middle wall and turn it into one big room, and then we’d have so much more space here, darling. We need more space in the city, we really do.”
The man in the Mets sweatshirt pointed at something in the Post. The woman beside him laughed. “Don’t,” she said, holding her stomach. “It hurts.”
“Mouth,” said Alice.
Ezra snapped it shut, like a ventriloquist’s doll, and a moment later squeezed Alice’s hand. “Sweetheart, I hate asking you this, but I’ve just remembered something. I’m going to need my pills.”
• • •
At 125th, a pair of black men with saxophones boarded the car and faced off in the aisle. Their duet began slowly, with the men tiptoeing toward and away from each other like a lone man in a mirror; then it accelerated, becoming louder and more chaotic, and the other people in the car began to nod and clap, whoop and whistle; a man with a bleeding-rose tattoo on his bicep sprung to his feet and started to dance. There are some men who buy diverting talk to lead astray from the word of God, cautioned a pamphlet by Alice’s foot. On the other hand: Who takes the greatest pleasure in leading the other one astray? In his bathtub the night before a clot of her own blood had escaped and unfurled like watercolor. Ezra had put a Bach partita on—its case still lay open on the ottoman—and brought her a glass of Knob Creek. Applying a new fentanyl patch to the skin just above his defibrillator he’d left his hand in place long enough to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Alice watched him shave. His ophthalmologist had prescribed some drops to regulate the pressure in his eyes but he’d developed an allergy to them and the skin around his lashes had turned papery and chapped. In bed, they’d read, Ezra Keats and Alice an article about the previous week’s Tube bombings in the Times; by 11:10 the light was off, the elevator still, the glittering skyline dimmed by a scrim he’d had installed to temper the morning sun. To mitigate his back pain, he slept with a foam pillow under his knees. To dull cramps that by four in the morning had become severe to the point of nauseating her, Alice got up and went into the bathroom to take one of his pills. ONE TABLET BY MOUTH EVERY 4–6 HOURS OR AS NEEDED FOR PAIN read the cylinder in her palm. WATSON 387 a machine had imprinted on the smooth oval tablet swallowed a moment before. If there were a pill that would make her a writer living in Europe and another that would keep him alive and in love with her until the day she died, which would she choose? She had once counted twenty-seven different pill dispensers in that bathroom, vials with science-fiction names from Atropine to Zantac and a barrage of exclamatory imperatives: TAKE ONE TABLET DAILY OR EVERY SIX TO EIGHT HOURS AS NEEDED. TAKE 1 TABLET BY MOUTH AT BEDTIME FOR ONE MONTH THEN INCREASE BY 1 TABLET EACH MONTH UNTIL TAKING 4 TABLETS. TAKE 2 CA P S ULES NOW THEN 1 CAPSULE EVERY 8 HOURS TILL GONE. ONE TABLET WITH A GLASS OF WATER ONCE A DAY. TAKE WITH FOOD. AVOID EATING GRAPEFRUIT OR DRINKING GRAPEFRUIT JUICE WITH THIS MEDICINE. DO NOT TAKE ASPIRIN OR PRODUCTS CONTAINING ASPIRIN WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE AND CONSENT OF YOUR PHYSICIAN. KEEP IN THE REFRIGERATOR AND SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING. USE CAUTION WHEN OPERATING A CAR. AVOID THE USE OF A SUNLAMP. DO NOT FREEZE. PROTECT FROM LIGHT. PROTECT FROM LIGHT AND MOISTURE. DISPENSE IN A TIGHT, LIGHT-RESISTANT CONTAINER. DRINK PLENTY OF WATER. SWALLOW WHOLE. DO NOT SHARE WITH ANYONE FOR WHOM THIS MEDICINE IS NOT PRESCRIBED. DO NOT CHEW OR CRUSH . . . and so on, ad nauseam, especially if you contemplated the mounting sum of so many laboratory-spun chemicals commingling in your gut—words reducing a not insignificant portion of life’s remainder to standing in pharmacy lines and looking at your watch and pouring glasses of water and waiting and counting and eating pills.
An old woman lay where she’d left him, muttering Spanglish. A receptionist directed Alice up to the inpatient unit, where she found Ezra reclining in a softly lit room with a twinkling river view, his clothes folded into a pile on the radiator and the strings of a crisp baby-blue hospital gown tied in a bow behind his neck. His hands were clasped on the turned-down edge of the bedsheet and his eyebrows were raised delightedly at a woman with a white lab coat and a platinum ponytail running down the length of her back. His chest pain, she was reassuring him, was probably just a bit of gas. But his blood pressure was up and she was glad he was staying the night anyway, so that they could keep an eye on him. Ezra beamed.
“Mary-Alice! Genevieve here is going to order me some chicken. Would you like something to eat?”
When Genevieve had gone, Alice put his pill bag on the bed and sat in a chair by the window while he inventoried its contents. The light of a plane entered the lower left-hand corner of the window’s frame and climbed its flight path slowly, steadily, like a rollercoaster ascending. Alice watched until it had exited the top-right corner of the window; as soon as it did another winking beacon appeared bottom left and began its identical climb along the same invisible track.
Ezra swallowed a pill. “Go, little Uroxatral, far and near, to all my friends I hold so dear . . .”
When a third plane appeared, Alice turned away from the window. “Your eye is bleeding.”
“That’s okay. The ophthalmologist said this would happen. Don’t worry darling. It’s getting better, not worse.”
A small Chinese woman entered holding a clipboard. “I have some questions for you.”
“Shoot.”
“When did you last urinate?”
“About half an hour ago.”
“Last bowel movement?”
Ezra nodded. “This morning.”
“Defibrillator?”
“Medtronic.”
“Allergies?”
“Yes.”
“To what?”
“Morphine.”
“What happens?”
“I have paranoid hallucinations.”
“Diseases?”
“Heart disease. Degenerative joint disease of the spine. Glaucoma. Osteoporosis.”
“Is that it?”
Ezra smiled. “For now.”
“Your eye is bleeding.”
“I know; don’t worry about that.”
“Emergency contact?”
“Dick Hillier.”
“Health-care proxy?”
“Also Dick Hillier.”
“Who’s this?”
“Mary-Alice. My goddaughter.”
“Will she be staying with you tonight?”
“That’s right.”
“Religion?”
“None.”
The nurse looked up. “Religion?” she repeated.
“No religion,” said Ezra. “Atheist.”
The nurse studied him for a moment before turning to Alice. “Is he serious?”
Alice nodded. “I think so.”
Turning back to Ezra: “Are you sure?”
Ezra flexed his toes under the covers. “Yep.”
“Okaaaaay,” said the nurse, cocking her head and writing it down, this terrible mistake. When she’d left, Alice asked, “Why do they ask that?”
“Well, if you say you’re Catholic and it looks like you’re getting close to the end, they send a priest around. If you’re Jewish, they send a rabbi around.”
“And if you’re atheist?”
“They send Christopher Hitchens around.”
Alice covered her face with her hands.
“Easiest white girl—”
“Ezra!”
“What!”
“I can’t . . .”
“You can’t what?”
She took her hands away. “This!”
“I don’t follow you, darling.”
“It’s just . . . so . . . hard.”
“And you’re telling me this now?”
“No! I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t leave you here. I love you.” That much was true. “You’ve taught me so much, and you’re the best friend I have. I just can’t . . . It’s so not . . . normal.”
“Who wants to be normal? Not you.”
“No, I don’t mean normal. I mean . . . good for me. Right now.” She took a deep breath. “If I’m with you . . .”
Ezra shook his head neatly, as if she’d been misinformed about who he was. “Sweetheart, you’re tired.”
Alice nodded. “I know.”
“And shaken up I think. But we’re going to be fine.”
Sniffling, Alice nodded again and said, “I know. I know.”
He watched her thoughtfully for a moment, the spot of blood under his eye like a stopped tear. Then he grimaced good-naturedly and leaned forward a little to adjust his pillows. Wiping her cheeks, Alice hurried to help, and in the process extracted a handset from where it had slipped down behind his shoulder. “Oh!” Ezra said brightly, taking the control. “There’s a television.” Turning the handset around, he aimed it at the screen, switched the power on, and surfed until he came to highlights of the game. New York was up by three in the bottom of the ninth.
They watched as Renteria struck out.
“Mouth.”
When Ortiz popped one up to Jeter, Ezra turned a hand over on the bed, inviting Alice to rest her own in his palm. He was still looking at the screen. “Alice,” he said rationally. “Don’t leave me. Don’t go. I want a partner in life. Do you know? We’re just getting started. No one could love you as much as I do. Choose this. Choose the adventure, Alice. This is the adventure. This is the misadventure. This is living.”
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
The nurse came in with their hospital chicken.