IN THE RELUCTANT, MUSTY current of a secondhand Frigidaire:
. . . I didn’t believe we could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word, we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn’t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants. It warn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in and made us drop everything and cut. . . .
In the night, rain fell on the part of her air conditioner that extended into the air shaft with the sound of metal arrowheads shot earthward. Thunderstorms came and went, their patter crescendoing into sharp cracks and lightning that penetrated the eyelids. Water siphoned off gutters like spring water off mountain boulders. When the storm retreated, what was left of it counted out the early-morning minutes in slow, metronomic drips. . . .
I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no show for me; so I laid outside—I didn’t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they warn’t high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway. . . .
With the money left over, she bought a new toilet seat, a teakettle, a screwdriver, and a small wooden dresser from the weekend antiques market over on Columbus. The teakettle was a sleek, all-metal, Scandinavian design. The toilet seat she screwed on with tremendous satisfaction while listening to Jonathan Schwartz.
Her work seemed to her more boring and inconsequential than ever. Fax this, file this, copy this. One evening, when everyone else had left and she was staring at the writer’s number in her boss’s Rolodex, one of her colleagues poked his head into the room and said, “Hey, Alice, à demain.”
“Sorry?”
“À demain.”
Alice shook her head.
“See you tomorrow?”
“Oh. Right.”
It got hotter before it got cooler. Three weekends in a row she spent lying on her bed, bedroom door closed, the Frigidaire whirring and rattling away at its highest setting. She thought about the writer, out on his island, shuttling between his pool and his studio and his nineteenth-century farmhouse with its unobstructed harbor views.
She could wait a very long time, if she had to.
I do not want to conceal in this journal the other reasons which made me a thief, the simplest being the need to eat, though revolt, bitterness, anger, or any familiar sentiment never entered into my choice. With fanatical care, “jealous care,” I prepared for my adventure as one arranges a couch or a room for love; I was hot for crime.
Malan had a Chinese look, with his moon face, a somewhat flattened nose, scarcely any eyebrows, a bowl-cut hairdo, and a big moustache that failed to cover his thick, sensual lips. His soft, rounded body, the fleshy hand with pudgy fingers suggested a mandarin who disapproved of traveling by foot. When he half closed his eyes while eating heartily, you could not help seeing him in a silk robe holding chopsticks between his fingers. But the expression changed all that. The feverish dark-brown eyes, restless or suddenly intent, as if the mind was focused on a very specific point, were the eyes of an Occidental of great sensitivity and culture.
The smell of rancid butter frying is not particularly appetizing, especially when the cooking is done in a room in which there is not the slightest form of ventilation. No sooner than I open the door I feel ill. But Eugene, as soon as he hears me coming, usually opens the shutters and pulls back the bedsheet which is strung up like a fishnet to keep out the sunlight. Poor Eugene! He looks about the room at the few sticks of furniture, at the dirty bedsheets and the wash basin with the dirty water still in it, and he says: “I am a slave!”
Alice picked up her phone.
NOKIA, was all it said.
But about the smell of rancid butter . . .
• • •
There was a party one night, a retirement thing for one of the editors, and afterward she slept with an assistant from the Sub-Rights Department. They did use a condom, but it stayed inside Alice when it should have come out.
“Shit,” said the boy.
“Where did it go?” asked Alice, peering down the shadowy gorge between them. Her voice sounded girlish and gullible, as though this were a magic trick and any moment now he might produce a fresh prophylactic out of her ear.
Instead, it was she who completed the trick—alone in the bathroom, one foot on her new toilet seat, holding her breath. It wasn’t easy, groping around with one hooked finger among the deep slippery swells. Afterward, and although she knew it couldn’t prevent every dreaded outcome, she got into the tub and flushed herself out with the hottest water she could stand.
“Any plans?” she asked the boy in the morning while he belted his corduroys.
“Dunno. Might go into the office for a bit. You?”
“The Red Sox are playing the Blue Jays this afternoon.”
“I hate baseball,” said the boy.
• • •
We appreciate your upcoming visit to RiverMed. The following information is for your benefit. If it fails to answer any of your questions, please present them at the time of your counseling session.
The total time for the procedure is usually 5–10 minutes. Once inside the examination room you will meet your personal nurse, physician, and anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist, who will inject a general anesthesia via an intravenous catheter inserted into an arm or hand vein. You will sit on the exam table, lie back, and place your legs in stirrups. Your physician will perform a bimanual exam (i.e., place two fingers in the vagina and feel your uterus). An instrument (a speculum) will then be placed inside the vagina and adjusted to hold the sides apart so that the doctor may see your cervix (the mouth of your uterus). Opening the cervix is necessary for the doctor to remove the pregnancy.
When the opening has been widened sufficiently using rod- or tube-shaped instruments called dilators, the physician will insert a tube or vacurette into your uterus. This tube is connected to a suctioning machine. When the machine is turned on, the contents of your uterus will be drawn out through the tube and into a bottle. Then the tube will be removed and a long, thin, spoonlike instrument inserted and drawn over the inside surface of the uterus to check that nothing remains.
When the physician has finished, the speculum is removed, your legs are lowered, and you will remain lying on your back as you are wheeled to the recovery room, where your condition will be monitored. After a satisfactory recovery, which usually takes twenty minutes to an hour, you will be transferred into a room where you may rest and dress. You will be individually counseled by a nurse and given final instructions before leaving.
You may bleed off and on for three weeks.
Please let us know if we can make you more comfortable. We hope your time with us will be a positive experience.
• • •
On the second Thursday in October, while she was tugging a brush through her damp tangled hair, she heard on the radio that they’d given the Nobel Prize to Imre Kertész, “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
Breathlessly, as if to outrun her own advice, Alice told him about all of the things she had bought, including the toilet seat and the teakettle and the dresser that the antique dealer had described as “a vintage 1930s piece.”
“Like me,” he said.
“I have my period,” Alice apologized.
Three nights later, as she lay with her bra around her waist and her arms around his head, she marveled at how his brain was right there, under her chin, and so easily contained by the narrow space between her elbows. It began as a playful thought, but suddenly she distrusted herself to resist crushing that head, turning off that brain.
To some extent, the sentiment must have been reciprocal, because a moment later he bit her abruptly through a kiss.
They saw each other less frequently now. He seemed warier of her. Also, his back was giving him trouble.
“Because of something we did?”
“No, sweetheart. You didn’t do anything.”
“Do you want to . . . ?”
“Not tonight darling. Tonight only tendresse.”
Sometimes, when they lay facing each other, or when he sat across his little dining table from her, head pulsing to the side, his expression would settle into a sad sort of bewilderment, as if with the realization that she was life’s greatest pleasure at the moment, and wasn’t that a sorry state of affairs?
“You’re the best girl, you know?”
Alice held her breath.
Sighing: “The best girl.”
“Ezra,” she said, clutching her stomach. “I’m so sorry, but suddenly I don’t feel very well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think maybe there was something wrong with my cookie.”
“Are you going to throw up?”
Alice rolled over, pulled herself up onto her hands and knees, and sank her face into his cool white duvet. She took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” But she didn’t move.
“Darling, let’s go.”
All at once, Alice covered her mouth and ran. Ezra got out of bed and trailed her calmly, quietly, closing the door behind her with a soft dignified click. When she was done, she flushed the toilet and rinsed her face and her mouth and leaned shivering on the vanity. Through the door she could hear him respectfully getting on with his evening—opening the refrigerator, clinking plates in the sink, stepping on the pedal that lifted the lid to the trash. She flushed again. Then she unspooled a bit of toilet paper and wiped the bowl, the seat, the lid, the edge of the bathtub, the toilet-paper dispenser, the floor. There was blackout cookie everywhere. Alice lowered the lid to the toilet seat and sat down. In the wastepaper basket lay a galley of a novel by a boy with whom she’d gone to college, his agent’s letter, requesting a blurb, still paper-clipped to its cover.
When she reappeared, Ezra was in his chair, legs crossed, holding a book about the New Deal. He watched frowning as Alice tiptoed naked across the room and slowly lowered herself onto the floor between the closet and the bed.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing?”
“I’m sorry: I need to lie down, but I don’t want to ruin your duvet.”
“Mary-Alice, get into the bed.”
He came to sit beside her and for many minutes smoothed a hand up and down her back, like her mother used to do. Then he pulled the duvet up to her shoulders and quietly withdrew to begin his one hundred things: silencing ringers, extinguishing lights, segregating pills. In the bathroom, he turned the radio on, softly.
When he emerged, he was wearing a light-blue Calvin Klein T-shirt and shorts. He set a glass of water down on his nightstand. He fetched his book. He rearranged his pillows.
“Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine . . .”
He got into bed and sighed theatrically.
“One hundred!”
Alice lay silent, motionless. He opened his book.
“Sweetheart,” he said finally. Bravely, brightly. “Why don’t you stay here? Just this once. You can’t go home like this. Okay?”
“Okay,” murmured Alice. “Thank you.”
“You’re velcome,” he said.
In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.
The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.
The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.
The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.
“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”
• • •
He left for his island again the following morning. When he’d called to tell her this, Alice hung up, hurled her phone into her hamper, and groaned. The same day, her father called to explain that fluoridated water is an evil propagated by the New World Order; an hour later he called again to declare that man never walked on the moon. Alice fielded such news flashes as she’d done once or twice a week every week for eight years: with an upbeat reticence that postponed her objection to a day when she’d figured out how to express it without hurting anyone’s feelings. Meanwhile, she discovered her beautiful new teakettle to possess an outrageous flaw: its contiguous-metal handle could not sit thirty seconds over a flame without becoming too hot to pick up. What kind of a handle, thought Alice, can’t be handled? Holding her scalded palm under the faucet, she blamed this on her writer, too. But this time, after only three days, he called. He called her from his screenhouse and described the changing trees, and the wild turkeys that hobbled along his driveway, and the tangerine glow of the sun as it sank behind his six acres of woods. Then he called her again, just two days later, and held the phone so that she could hear a crow cawing, and the shiver of leaves ruffled by the wind and then—nothing. “I don’t hear anything,” laughed Alice. “Exactly,” he replied. “It’s quiet. Blissfully quiet.” But it was too cold now to use the pool, and there were some disruptive plumbing repairs on the calendar, so he’d be staying only another week or so and then coming back into the city for good.
He brought with him an old Polaroid SX-70.
“Let’s see,” he said, turning it over in his hands, “if I can remember how to use this thing.”
They took ten shots, including one of him, the only one of him, lying on his side in one of his Calvin Klein T-shirts and his own very sensible wristwatch, otherwise nothing. Fanned beside him on the bed were the nine photographs already taken, arranged for his review in two concentric arcs: murky brown forms surfacing with an edge of opalescence, as though out of a sunlit river. In fact, the more vivid the photographs became, the more the pleasure of taking them faded, and while Alice got up to go to the bathroom Ezra deposited all ten into the pocket of her purse. Then they watched Top Hat, with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and Ezra brushed his teeth lightly humming “Cheek to Cheek.” It was not until she was back in the elevator the following morning, reaching for her keys, that she found them there: a neat square stack of herself bound tightly by one of her own hair bands.
At home, she arranged the Polaroids on her bed in several layered columns, something like the setup for Solitaire. In some, her skin looked like watered-down milk, too thin to conceal the veins running through her arms and chest. In another, a crimson flush spread across her cheeks and into her ears, while over the porcelain slope of her shoulder the Chrysler Building resembled a tiny flame in white gold. In another, her head rested against his thigh, her one visible eye closed, Ezra’s fingers holding aside her hair. In another, her breasts were plumped high and smooth and round, held upward by her own hands. This one he’d taken from beneath her, so that to look at the camera she’d had to gaze down the line of her nose. Her hair, tucked behind her ears, hung forward in heavy blond curtains on either side of her jaw. Her bangs, too long, separated slightly left of center and fell thickly to her eyelashes. It was almost a beautiful photograph. Certainly the most difficult to cut up. The problem, thought Alice, was its Aliceness: that stubbornly juvenile quality that on film never failed to surprise and annoy her.
Tinily, like distant traffic lights, her pupils glowed red.
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Oh, sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to call you.”
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Mary-Alice, I’m still looking forward to seeing you this evening, but would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up a jar of Tiptree preserves, that’s Tiptree preserves—T-I-P-T-R-E-E, preserves, as in jelly—and not just any flavor but Little Scarlet, which is the most expensive one they’ve got. It costs about a hundred dollars a jar and that’s because they make it out of little girls like you. So: one jar of Little Scarlet Tiptree preserves, one jar of the best peanut butter you can find, and one loaf of Russian pumpernickel, unsliced. And you bring them here!”
“Capitana!”
More gifts:
A sheet of thirty-seven-cent stamps, one for each American state, designed to look like vintage “Greetings from” postcards.
A CD of Elgar’s cello concerto, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the London Symphony Orchestra.
A bag of Honeycrisp apples. (“You’ll need a bib.”)
He needed a stent. A tiny mesh tube they’d insert into a narrowing coronary artery to prop it open and restore the full flow of blood. A simple procedure. He’d already had it done seven times. They don’t put you under, just sedate you, anesthetize the area around the point of insertion, wiggle it up on a catheter and pop it in. Then a little balloon is inflated, causing the stent to expand like a badminton birdie, and . . . voilà. Takes about an hour, more or less. A friend would accompany him to the hospital. If she liked, he would ask this friend, when it was over, to give her a call.
“Yes, please.”
For all his assurances, he himself became gloomy. Not without pleasure, Alice felt herself being tested by these dramatic circumstances.
“Of course,” she said, “we all have to worry. I could get cancer. Or tomorrow, in the street, you could be—”
He closed his eyes and held up a hand. “I already know about the bus.”
The day of the procedure she got home from work and put the Elgar CD on. It was terribly beautiful, plaintive and urgent, and, in the beginning anyway, perfectly consonant with her mood. Twenty minutes later, however, still sawing away sublimely, the cello seemed to have moved on without her, indifferent to her suspense. Finally, at 9:40, her cell phone beeped, flashing an unfamiliar number. Businesslike, a man with an unplaceable drawl reassured her that after having been delayed the procedure had gone fine; Ezra would be staying overnight so that they could monitor a few things but otherwise everything was fine, just fine.
“Thank you so much,” said Alice.
“You’re velcome,” said the friend.
• • •
“The Kid,” he’d referred to her. As in: “I called The Kid.” Ezra thought this was pretty funny. Alice shook her head.
For a while, he was in a good mood. The stent had done the job. Paramount was going to make a movie out of one of his books. An award-winning actress had been cast in the leading role and his services had been engaged as an on-set consultant. One morning, he called her a little later than usual—Alice was already out of the shower and dressing for work—and said, “Guess who I had over last night?”
Alice did.
“How did you know?”
“Who else could it be?”
“Anyway, I didn’t fuck her.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t think she was very impressed with my spare change dish.”
“Or your humidifier.”
They took more pictures.
“In this one,” said Alice, “I look like my father.” She laughed. “All I need is a Colt .45.”
“Your father has a gun?”
“He has lots of guns.”
“Why?”
“In case there’s a revolution.”
Ezra frowned.
“Darling,” he said later, while she was slathering a slice of bread with Little Scarlet. “When you visit your father, these guns . . . Are they just lying around?”
Sucking jelly off her thumb, Alice replied, “No, he keeps them in a safe, but every now and again we get one out and practice shooting at a gourd propped up against an old dishwasher in the backyard.”
She was reading some fan mail his agent had forwarded to him when he said something into the closet she couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“I said,” he said, turning around, “don’t you have a warmer coat than this? You can’t go around all winter in this thing. You need something padded, with goose down. And a hood.”
A few nights later, he slid another envelope across the table. “Searle,” he said. “S-E-A-R-L-E. Seventy-Ninth and Madison. They’ve got just the one.”
The nylon made a luxurious swishing sound and the hood framed her face with a black halo of fur. It was like walking around in a sleeping bag trimmed with mink. Waiting for the crosstown bus, Alice felt pampered and invincible—also delirious with this city, which every day was like a mounting jackpot waiting to be won; then, hurrying up the steps to her building, she slipped, flailed for balance, and brought the back of her hand down on the stoop’s iron railing, igniting a searing flash of pain. She went to his apartment anyway and, for the duration of the evening, hid her throbbing paw in her lap, or, when they were in bed, out to the side, as if to protect a coat of nail polish that wasn’t yet dry.
In the morning, her palm was blue.
At home, she waited all day for the swelling to go down, then gave up and went downstairs to hail a cab for the nearest emergency room. The driver took her to Hell’s Kitchen, where for two hours she sat in a waiting room crowded with binge drinkers and homeless people feigning psychosis in order to remain inside where it was warm. Around ten, an intern called Alice’s name and led her to a gurney, where he clipped her great-grandmother’s ring off her swollen middle finger and tapped each of her knuckles to ascertain where it hurt. “There.” Alice hissed. “There!”
When the X-ray came back, the intern held it up and said, pointing: “It’s broken. Your middle metacarpal—”
Alice nodded; her pupils rolled back, and, after teetering for a moment, her body pitched slowly forward and to the side, like a discarded marionette. From here she journeyed many miles to remote countries with barbarous customs and maddening logic; she made and lost companions, spoke languages previously unknown to her, learned and unlearned difficult truths. When she came to some minutes later, struggling against a nauseating undertow that seemed to want to pull her down through the center of the earth, she became remotely aware of machines beeping and tubes scraping the insides of her nostrils and too many seconds elapsing between the asking of questions and her answering them.
“Did you hit your head?”
“Did you bite your tongue?”
“Did you wet yourself?”
There was a damp spot on her sweatpants where she’d spilled the little paper cup of water someone had given her.
“You’ll have to get in touch with a surgeon first thing Monday morning,” the busy intern said. “Is there someone you can call to come and pick you up?”
“Yes,” whispered Alice.
It was nearly midnight when she walked out into a fresh flurry, fat flakes sailing down at an urgent slant. Holding her hand as though it were made of eggshell, Alice walked to the corner and looked up and down and then up again for a cab.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello?!”
“I just wanted you to hear what my humidifier is doing. . . .”
“Ezra, no, I broke my hand!”
“Oh my God. How? Are you in pain?”
“Yes!”
“Where are you?”
“Fifty-Ninth and Columbus.”
“Can you get a cab?”
“I’m trying!”
When she arrived he was wearing black silk long underwear and had a Band-Aid on his head. “What happened?”
“I had a mole taken off. What happened to you?”
“I slipped on my stoop.”
“When?”
“This morning,” she lied.
“Was it icy?”
“Yes.”
“So you could sue.”
Alice shook her head sadly. “I don’t want to sue anyone.”
“Darling, the best hand guy in New York is Ira Obstbaum. O-B-S-T-B-A-U-M. He’s at Mount Sinai, and, if you want, I’ll call him tomorrow and ask him to see you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Meanwhile, you’re going to take this for the pain. Will you be able to sleep?”
“I think so.”
“You’re a brave girl. You’ve had a shock. Just remember: I’m here, I’m fine, I have the warmth and comfort of my bed.”
Alice began to cry.
“Sweetheart, you don’t have to cry.”
“I know.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m sorry. You’re being so nice to me.”
“You’d do the same for me.”
Alice nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Darling, don’t continually say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Next time you feel like saying ‘I’m sorry,’ instead say ‘Fuck you.’ Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Got it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So?”
Alice sniffed. “Fuck you,” she said weakly.
“Good girl.”
After swallowing the pills, Alice sat down on the edge of his bed, still wearing her coat. Ezra sat in his reading chair, legs crossed and head pulsing to the side, watching her darkly. “They take about forty-five minutes to work,” he said, glancing at his watch.
“Do you want me to stay?”
“Sure you can stay. Want something to eat? We’ve got applesauce, bagels, tofu-scallion cream cheese, Tropicana with Lots of Pulp.”
He got up to toast her a bagel and watched her eat it with one hand. Afterward, Alice lay down to face the snow, which in the light of his balcony was falling more calmly now, stealthily and evenly, like an army of parachuting invaders. Ezra returned to his chair and picked up a book. Three times the silence was torn by a page turning; then a balmy effervescence flooded Alice’s insides and her skin began to feel as though it were vibrating.
“Whoa.”
Ezra checked his watch. “Is it working?”
“Mm-hmmmmmm . . .”
He called Obstbaum. He took her in a cab to Mount Sinai. He arranged for Zingone’s to deliver groceries to her apartment twice a week for six weeks.
He took pictures of her in her cast.
“I love you,” purred Alice.
“You love Vicodin is what you love. We’re out of film.” He went to the closet.
“What else have you got in there?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Yes I do.”
“More girls. Tied up.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“What are their names?”
“Katie . . .”
“No,” said Alice. “Let me guess. Katie and . . . Emily? Is Emily in there?”
“Yep.”
“And Miranda?”
“That’s right.”
“Those girls are incorrigible.”
“Incorrigible,” he repeated, as though she had made up the word.
Her cast was heavy. Heavier, it seemed, when she had nothing else on. Alice turned over onto her stomach and stretched like a three-legged cat. Then she pulled herself up, arched her back, her sides, rolled her head around on her neck, and grinned, wickedly.
“What?”
Walking toward him on her knees: “Let’s do something awful.”
It knocked him back a little. “Mary-Alice, that’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said.”
• • •
They sat in the last row, so as not to be conspicuous, also so that he could get up and stretch his back if he needed to, but he didn’t. It was a Saturday matinée, and the movie theater was swarming with small children; when an especially excited one spilled popcorn on Ezra’s sleeve, Alice worried he might be having second thoughts. But then Harpo lit his cigar with a blowtorch, and Groucho passed his hat through the “mirror,” and it was Ezra’s laugh, head-back and unthrottled, that could be heard above everyone else’s. At the end, when Freedonia declares war on Sylvania and the brothers waggle their hips singing “All God’s chillun’ got guns,” Ezra drew a plastic water pistol from his pocket and gave Alice a furtive squirt in the ribs.
“We’re going to war!” they sang, walking back down Broadway, past the colored lights and tempera snowdrifts and Christmas trees bound up tightly to look like cypresses. “Hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey hidey HO!” At the sturgeon shop, crowding with the others up to the sneeze-proof glass, they gazed down on the smoked fish, pickled tongue, and taramasalata as if at newborns in a maternity ward. Alice pointed at a cheese labeled FIRM SMEAR and whistled primly. When it was his turn, Ezra raised a finger and ordered “two pieces of gefilte fish, some horseradish, half a pound of kippered salmon, and—what the hell? Two ounces of your finest paddlefish roe for Miss Eileen here.”
“Oops,” said Alice.
Ezra turned to look at her calmly. Then, tutting and shaking his head: “I’m sorry darling. You’re not Eileen.”
• • •
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“Hello?”
“Good evening. May I speak to Miranda please?”
“Miranda isn’t here.”
“Where is she?”
“In jail.”
“Is Emily there?”
“Emily’s in jail too.”
“What for?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“What about . . . ?”
“Katie?”
“That’s right. Katie. Katharine.”
“She’s here. Want to speak to her?”
“Please.”
. . . “Hallo?”
“Hi, Katie? It’s Mr. Zipperstein, from school.”
“Oh, hiya, Mr. Zipperstein.”
“Hiya. How are you?”
“Fine.”
“Good. Listen. I’m calling to ask whether you’d like to study at my house one night this week.”
“Okay.”
“You’d like that?”
“Sure.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Shoot. I can’t do tomorrow. I have a piano lesson tomorrow.”
“Thursday?”
“Art Club.”
“What about afterward? After Art Club?”
“Thursday’s my night to set the table.”
“I spoke to your mom about that. She said you can set the table twice on Friday instead.”
“Okay.”
“Thursday at six thirty then?”
“Sure.”
“Which one is this again?”
“Katie.”
“Stay outta jail, Katie.”
“I will Mr. Zipperstein.”
“Zipperstein.”
“Zipperstein.”
“Good girl.”
• • •
“ ‘My sweet little whorish Nora I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. . . . Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. . . . You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere.’ ”
“That’s disgusting,” said Alice.
He lowered the book and gave her a dully affronted look. Sweetly, Alice slithered under the covers and scrabbled around there until he came like a weak water bubbler.
They dozed.
When his watch beeped eight, Alice groaned and whispered, “I have to go.” Ezra nodded warmly, softly, not opening his eyes.
Sitting at the table to buckle her shoes:
“You know that homeless man? The one who stands in front of Zabar’s and wears a hundred coats, even in summer?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Did you buy him all those coats?”
“Yep.”
“And do you think he went crazy before he became homeless, or the other way around?”
Ezra thought about this. “Don’t sentimentalize him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t pity him. Don’t overempathize with him. He’s fine.”
In the bathroom, she rinsed her mouth, brushed her hair, and tied a dental-floss bow tie around the dildo standing on the vanity; then she left.
Coming down the steps of her own building:
“Good morning, dear! You look pretty today. Tell me: Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not yet, Anna! Not yet.”