NOW THAT HIS BOOK was done, a number of deferred medical matters could be addressed, including a colonoscopy, a prostate screening, and some tests a pulmonologist had recommended to investigate a recent shortness of breath. He didn’t have cancer, and a steroid inhaler did away with the wheezing inside an afternoon, but it was also decided, at the urging of a new orthopedic surgeon, that his spinal stenosis be treated with a laminectomy. The surgery was scheduled for late March and a rotation of private nurses arranged to be on hand for two weeks, which stretched into three. One Saturday, shortly after he’d started another novel and gotten back on his feet, he and Alice and Gabriela, the day nurse, went out for a walk.
“Four pages,” he announced.
“Already?” said Alice. “Wow.”
Ezra shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s any good.”
They sat down to rest on a stoop on Eighty-Fourth Street and watched as a man with a toddler leashed to his wrist paused to frown at his phone.
“You want children, Samantha?” asked Gabriela, who was Romanian.
“I don’t know. One day maybe. Not now.”
“That’s okay. You have time.”
Alice nodded.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. You look sixteen.”
“She gets that a lot,” said Ezra.
“Anyway, you still have time.”
“Thanks.”
“. . . It’s when you are thirty-five, thirty-six, you need to worry.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So when do you want to have children?”
“Well, as I said, Gabriela, I’m not sure I do want to have them, but if it were up to me I’d wait until the last possible moment. Like when I’m forty.”
Gabriela frowned. “Forty is too old. Forty things don’t work right. Forty you are too tired.”
“When do you think I should do it?”
“Thirty.”
“No way.”
“Thirty-two?”
Alice shook her head.
“Thirty-seven. You can’t wait longer than thirty-seven.”
“I’ll think about it.”
A long-legged redhead in spandex jogged past. Ezra watched her all the way to the corner.
“I know,” said Gabriela. “Let’s ask Francine.”
“Who’s Francine?”
“The night nurse,” said Ezra. “She doesn’t have kids.”
On Columbus, they stopped again so that Ezra could chat with the hot dog vendor. “How’s business, my friend?” The vendor made an exasperated gesture up and down the block, as though his truck were parked in a ghost town. “Terrible. No one want hot dog. Everyone want smoothie.”
“Is that right?”
The vendor nodded glumly.
Ezra turned to Alice. “Want a hot dog?”
“Okay.”
“Gabriela?”
“I like hot dogs.”
“Two hot dogs, sir.”
“What does ‘halal’ mean?” asked Gabriela.
“Good for Muslims!” the vendor called down proudly.
While Gabriela took a call on her phone, Alice and Ezra sat on the bench where they’d met. They rested quietly for a moment, until Ezra said something about the plane trees that Alice didn’t hear for her thoughts—about where she’d been in her life, where she was going, and how she might get there without too much difficulty from here. Considerations complicated by this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else. Then a pigeon swooped in and Ezra shooed it away with his cane; the way he did this, with a debonair little flick, reminded Alice of Fred Astaire.
“Sweetheart,” he said, watching her eat. “This summer, why don’t you take two weeks off and come out to visit me? Would you be bored?”
“Not at all. I’d love that.”
He nodded. Licking mustard off her palm, Alice asked, “What did Adam say about your book?”
“ ‘Ezra, I—I don’t know what to say. It’s genius. A masterpiece. I mean, Jesus Christ it’s good. Every word . . . Every single fucking word . . .’ ”
“Is spelled correctly.”
Ezra blew his nose. “Is spelled correctly.”
“When’s he going to submit it?”
“He’s going to wait until the fall. Have you finished?”
“I’m up to page one sixty-three.”
“And?”
“I like it.”
“What.”
“What?”
“What’s that tone?”
“Well . . . Who’s speaking? Who’s telling the story?”
“What do you mean? The narrator’s telling the story.”
“I know but—”
“Finish it first. Then we can talk about point of view. Anything else?”
“The girl in the bagel shop. Who talks like that, these days? So carefully? So formally?”
“You do.”
“I know but I’m—”
“What? Special?”
Alice raised her eyebrows at him but kept chewing.
“Mary-Alice,” he said tenderly, a moment later. “I know what you’re up to.”
“What?”
“I know what you do when you’re alone.”
“What?”
“You’re writing. Aren’t you?”
Alice shrugged. “A little.”
“Do you write about this? About us?”
“No.”
“Is that true?”
Alice shook her head hopelessly. “It’s impossible.”
He nodded. “Then what do you write about?”
“Other people. People more interesting than I am.” She laughed softly, lifting her chin toward the street. “Muslim hot dog sellers.”
Ezra looked skeptical. “Do you write about your father?”
“No.”
“You should. It’s a gift.”
“I know. But writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.”
“As opposed to?”
“War. Dictatorships. World affairs.”
“Forget about world affairs. World affairs can take care of themselves.”
“They’re not doing a very good job of it.”
A woman from Ezra’s building came down the path wearing a Gore 2000 cap and power walking a shih tzu. “Hello,” Ezra said as she passed. “Hello, Chaucer,” he added to the dog. For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man, when Ezra turned back to her and said: “Don’t worry about importance. Importance comes from doing it well. Just remember what Chekhov said: ‘If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.’ ”
Alice wiped her hands and stood to throw her napkin away. “If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?”
When she’d returned to him, Gabriela was there, holding his scarf and helping him to his feet; the sun had disappeared behind the high-rises on Columbus and all around them paces quickened in the sudden shade. Back to the wind, Ezra lodged his cane in the groin of his corduroys and struggled with his jacket’s zipper. “No no,” he said quietly, when Gabriela moved to help. “I can do it.” Dwarfed by the plane trees, he looked smaller and frailer than he did in the close refuge of his apartment, and for a moment Alice saw what she supposed other people would see: a healthy young woman losing time with a decrepit old man. Or were other people more imaginative and sympathetic than she thought? Might they acknowledge that everything was still more interesting with him than without, and perhaps even that her gameness and devotion were qualities the world needed more of, not less? Behind them, the planetarium came aglow in violet. The halal hot dog seller began shuttering his truck. While Ezra adjusted his gloves, Gabriela gave Alice a sisterly wink and came to stand beside her, bouncing in the cold. “Samantha!” she said in a stage whisper. “Francine says freeze an egg.”
• • •
With a change at Ronkonkoma, the train took a little under three hours. Alice passed the journey drinking a bottle of hard lemonade and watching the rusted chicken wire and psychedelic graffiti of Queens give way to daffodils and doghouses, dogwoods and vines. At Yaphank, there was a smattering of chicory flowers along the tracks, quivering like tiny well-wishers. At the other end of her car sat an old woman who rested her hands on her purse and her purse in her lap, staring out the window at the scenery spooling by while a group of teenagers whooped and hollered all around her. Every now and again their horseplay spilled into the aisle, or bumped into the woman’s seat, or, in one instant, sent a baseball cap sailing into the arm of her periwinkle blazer. Even with the conductor bearing down on them, the kids carried on—hurling bananas, snatching phones—until, standing over them, the conductor cleared his throat and said:
“Excuse me. Is this lady bothering you?”
Like gophers into holes, the teenagers dropped into their seats and remained there for the rest of the ride, communicating in monkish whispers.
“Hi Samantha.”
“Hi Clete. How’s it goin’?”
“Not bad. Nice weather for a visit to the country.”
“It sure is.”
When they pulled into the driveway, Ezra was just emerging from his studio. “Sorry, miss!” he called out across the lawn. “Your reservation isn’t until tomorrow.” He came closer. “How are you, Mary-Alice?”
Alice widened her eyes.
“I mean Samantha-Mary. Samantha Mary-Alice. Mary-Alice is your middle name, isn’t it? But you prefer Samantha, don’t you, Samantha Mary-Alice?”
“That’s right,” said Alice.
“Anyhow.” Clete grinned. “See you Sunday, boss.”
As they approached the house, Ezra put an arm around her. “Ninety-three pages.”
“That’s great.”
“I don’t know if it’s any good.”
The cleaning lady worked around them while they ate lunch. Alice began to tell him about the old woman on the train, but as soon as she said “periwinkle” Ezra lowered his ginger ale and shook his head.
“Don’t sentimentalize her.”
“You always say that. Don’t sentimentalize people. As though I have a choice.”
“Sentiments are okay. Not sentimentality.”
The cleaning lady winked. “He is so funny.”
“Who?”
“You, Mister Blazer.”
“He certainly is,” said Alice, getting up. “Hey, the Yankees are playing the Red Sox tonight.”
“Hey, I’m going to take a nap. And then I’ll be in my studio. I’ve got some boxes to go through.”
“What boxes?”
“For my biographer.”
“What biographer?”
“My eventual biographer.” In the living room there was a thump. “Janice,” Ezra called over his shoulder. “Is everything all right?”
“I just killed the biggest wasp.”
“I thought George Plimpton was the biggest wasp.”
“I’m going for a swim,” said Alice.
“Wait, darling. What time’s your train?”
Alice looked at him.
“I mean,” he said, shaking his head, “what time’s the baseball on?”
It was cool for June; steam rose from the water as though a river of magma flowed only a fathom below. Rustling trees cast trembling shadows on the basin, whose layers had chipped away over the years to leave swirls of old grays, greens, and aquamarines, like an antique sea chart. Beneath the surface, Alice’s hands, still coming together and swiveling apart, began to look less like instruments of propulsion than like confused magnets, or hands trying to find their way out of a dark room. But still, she swam. She swam until the wind whistled and the sun sank pink behind the redbuds. She swam until her lips turned blue and her nipples knotted. She swam until a series of lights came on in the house and Ezra’s silhouette could be seen at the kitchen door, calling for her with the worried singsong of any homesteader calling for his dog.
Still dripping, she found on the bed:
A commemorative issue of Life magazine, FDR 60th Anniversary Edition.
A porn magazine from 1978, the entire issue comprising a story about a tailor named Jordy who the local community believes is a homosexual and thus is trusted to accompany young women into the fitting room. (“The most sexually conservative woman has no qualms about stripping for her doctor—or her tailor. Jordy was, so far as older or less desirable customers were concerned, an inanimate fixture who adjusted the clothes he sold to their bare or relatively bare bodies like an emotionless automaton . . .”)
A souvenir program from the 33rd Annual Allegheny County Fair, featuring The Doodletown Pipers, Arthur Godfrey and His Famous Horse Goldie, and the Banana Splits. On the back, in black marker and his singularly mesmerizing slant, he had written: HEY, DOODLE. I DO LOVE YOU, YOU KNOW.
• • •
In the shallow end she popped up beside him.
He said, “You’re like a little boat.”
Alice shook the water from one ear and pushed off for another lap. When she’d swum back to him, he said, “Remember Nayla?”
“The Palestinian?”
“Yep. She came out to interview me last week, and Mary-Alice, I’m telling you, she has the most beautiful skin you’ve ever seen. It’s like . . .” He smoothed a hand down his cheek. “Chocolate milk.”
“Chocolate soymilk.”
“That’s right.”
“So it went well.” Alice floated onto her back.
“I invited her to have lunch with me when I get back to the city. She said she’d call. Darling, it doesn’t matter to me, not in the slightest, but are your tits getting smaller?”
Alice sank herself bending to look. “I think so. I have this sinus problem, and my doctor prescribed a steroid that I’m supposed to spray up my nostrils, and it works but I think it’s also causing my breasts to shrink.”
Ezra nodded reasonably. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“Are there options?”
“Gin rummy. Or there’s a concert at the Perlman school.”
“Perlman school.”
“Don’t you want to know what they’re playing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Alice, diving under again.
The drive took them past the country club, where golfers loped after balls rolled into the long shadows, and up Sunset Beach, where Ezra slowed for some girls carrying daiquiris over the road and Alice lowered her window to feel the wind with her hand. From here, you could see all the way across the water to the North Fork, where the train from the city came to its slow, inexorable halt—its tracks ending abruptly, surrounded on three sides by grass, as though the men whose job it was to lay them down a century and a half earlier had looked up one day and saw they could go no farther: a bay lay in their way. It gave the land beyond it a wilder feel, uncharted and unreachable by the steel veins of the metropolis—whose relentless intensity had lately seemed increasingly at odds with Alice’s dream of a more contemplative life. A life of seeing, really seeing the world, and of having something novel to say about the view. On the other hand: Could all the rural quietude on earth cure the anxiety of self-doubt? Was she even capable of being alone for as long as it took? Would it make her life any less inconsequential than it was now? And, hadn’t he already said everything she wanted to say?
Ezra parked in a lot facing the water and with the sunset at their backs they headed for a marquee whose scalloped edges snapped and fluttered in the breeze. “Mary-Alice,” he said, as they crossed the lush green grass stride for stride. “I have a proposal for you.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I want to pay off your college loans.”
“Oh my gosh. Why?”
“Because you’re a smart girl, a remarkable girl really, and I think it’s time you should be doing whatever it is you want to be doing in life. Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have all that debt hanging over your head?”
“Yes. Although it’s not that much. I’ve already paid off most of it.”
“Even better. What’s left?”
“About six thousand, I think.”
“So I’ll give you six thousand, and you can get rid of the rest of it all at once, and maybe then you’ll be able to see your way in life a little more clearly. More freely. What do you say?”
“May I think about it?”
“Of course you should think about it. Think about it forever if you like. And whatever you decide, we don’t ever have to talk about it again. I’ll just give you the money, or not, and that’ll be the end of it. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you, Ezra.”
“You’re velcome,” they said simultaneously.
The concert was a special guest piano performance by a young Japanese woman who’d already played auditoriums in London, Paris, Vienna, and Milan—although from where they sat now she looked like a child of nine approaching an instrument large enough to be a baby giraffe’s coffin. The first three notes sounded like day dawning, day or time itself; then the music exploded into the battering wind and rain of a violent squall, the girl’s fingers darting and leaping and trilling at implausible speeds even as her face remained smooth and neutral as a mask. This was followed by two brief Stockhausen pieces, which by contrast sounded to Alice like a cat walking around on the keyboard; between them, during the stern lull in which everyone knows not to clap, a spate of coughs rippled through the audience, as though the dissonant tones still hanging in the air were not what remained of the music but an irritating gas.
During intermission, Ezra was greeted by a friend, a man with white leonine hair and a turquoise handkerchief sprouting from his seersucker pocket. “Ezra my dear. What do you think?”
“She’s wonderful. Though perhaps a little aloof.”
“Stockhausen is aloof. How’s your book?”
Alice hung back, sipping white wine and gazing coolly out toward the bay; behind her, two female students were discussing triads, and fermatas, and then, a touch more cagily, who might be chosen to solo in the benefit concert the following month. Alice finished her wine and was about to move off altogether when Ezra touched her elbow and said, “Cal, this is Mary-Alice.”
“Oh,” said Alice. “Hi.”
“Hello.”
“I was just telling Cal about how I heard Maurizio Pollini play The Tempest a hundred years ago, at the Louvre. His tails were as long as a freight train. Darling, you really must try to see Pollini one day.”
“You like music?” Cal asked.
“Oh yes,” said Alice.
“Mary-Alice is an editor,” said Ezra.
“Well,” said Alice, “an associate editor.”
“How fine,” said Cal. “For which house?”
“Excuse me,” said Ezra. “I’m just going to get a Diet Coke.”
“Gryphon,” said Alice, stepping closer to make room for the people filing behind her.
“You must be very clever then. Roger doesn’t hire dummies.”
“You know Roger?”
“Of course. Brilliant man. Brilliant editor. Is that what you want to do? Edit?”
A woman carrying a baby excused herself to squeeze between them. Recognizing her, Cal leaned in for a kiss. “Felicity! This is Mary-Alice. Ezra’s friend. And this?”
“Justine.”
“Justine . . .”
Alice found Ezra outside, sitting on a bench under a maple’s canopy, his freshly shaven face looking drawn and gray in the dying light. “Sorry honey. I suddenly felt a little light-headed.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“No, I’ll be all right. I want us to have a nice night out together. We can stay.”
Sitting beside him, Alice said, “Cal knows Roger. My boss.”
“Oops. Oh well.”
Alice nodded. “Oh well.”
A few yards away an elegantly dressed couple passed a cigarette between them. The woman said something in French that made Ezra look over and the man smoking with her laugh.
“What are you thinking?” asked Alice.
Ezra turned back to her, surprised. “I was thinking about my book. About a scene I haven’t got right. Not that you ever get them right, mind you. You might as well write about the Hutus for all you’re going to get right about them.”
When they’d thrown their plastic cups away and pushed politely past the others back to their seats, the pianist returned to her bench and stared at the keys reflected there in the high ebony gloss with what seemed a superhuman concentration. Then she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage: a great rumbling rigorous pounding that was anything but aloof; on the contrary, the woman’s shoulders rocked forward and back, her foot pumped the damper pedal so emphatically that even her heel cleared the floor, and her head jerked wincingly up and to the side as if sparks were flying off the keyboard and threatening to enter her eyes. The effect, on Alice, was dazzling and demoralizing all at once: reverberating in her sternum, the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another? At a certain point the pianist was leaning back slightly, hands working opposite ends of the keyboard as though one had to be kept from popping up while the other was held down, and here Alice turned to look at Ezra, who was watching with his mouth open; beyond him the fermata girls sat frozen in their own poses of wonder and humility: whatever they could do, it wasn’t this, would never be this, or would only become this once a great many more hours had been sacrificed to the ambition. Meanwhile, their hourglasses were running down. Everyone’s hourglass was running down. Everyone’s but Beethoven’s. As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again. Alice took Ezra’s long cool fingers into her own hand and squeezed. This time, between movements, no one coughed.
• • •
The following afternoon, he drove her to the ferry himself. They were early, and while they sat in the car watching the barge turn ponderously into its berth, he said, without looking at her:
“Is this relationship a little bit heartbreaking?”
The glare off the harbor hurt her eyes. “I don’t think so. Maybe around the edges.”
From the top of the ferry ramp flowed a stream of people laughing, waving, hoisting duffel bags onto their shoulders and shielding their eyes from the sun. A young male couple held hands, while in his free arm the taller man cradled a beribboned houseplant.
“And do you ever worry about the consequences?”
“What consequences?”
Now he looked at her sternly.
“Are you worried?” asked Alice.
“No. But that’s because I’m at the end of my life, and you . . .”—he laughed softly, at the neatness of it—“you’re at the beginning of yours.”
• • •
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“Oh, hello dear. Have you got any toilet paper?”
“But Anna, you’re holding a roll in your hand!”
Stumped, the old woman turned back to the hall.
“Is something wrong, Anna?”
Turning around again eagerly: “No dear. Nothing’s wrong. Why?”
“Do you need something?”
“I don’t think so. Tell me dear. Do you have a boyfriend?”
• • •
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
“Dear . . . What’s your—?”
“Alice.”
“Alice. Can you tell me what time it is?”
“Almost four.”
“Four what?”
“Four nothing. It’s almost four, five minutes before four. Anna, why are you carrying that roll of toilet paper around?”
• • •
Shave and a haircut—
It had been fewer than ten minutes since their last conversation, but when Alice opened the door again Anna clutched her bosom and recoiled, as if she hadn’t expected to find anyone at home. “Oh! Dear. Hello. I wonder whether . . . Could you help me . . . change a . . .”
“. . . bulb?”
It was in the kitchen, where Alice had not yet been, a room easily accommodating of a large rust-mottled table and six vinyl-padded chairs. A weak, cloudy-afternoon light struggled through the filth-glazed windows, the lower panes of which had been papered over with yellowing pages from the Times. REAGAN NOSTALGIC FOR G.O.P. SENATE. RIFKA ROSENWEIN WED TO BARRY LICHTENBERG. IRMGARD SEEFRIED IS DEAD AT 69. The defunct bulb hung spiderlike from a wire over the stove, whose burners had been unaccountably patched up in places with aluminum foil. Alice pulled a chair out from under the table and stepped onto its seat. When she’d unscrewed the dead bulb and went to step down again for its replacement, she put a hand on the cooktop to steady herself and reflexively snatched it back.
“Oh! Anna, your stove is hot!”
“Is it?”
“Yes! Are you cooking something?”
“I don’t think so, dear.”
“But were you just using it? Did you cook something today?”
“I don’t know, dear. I don’t know.”
Back in her own apartment Alice dialed the number on her rent slip and paced impatiently waiting for the recorded menu to end. She pressed zero. Then she pressed zero again. “. . . At the tone, please say your name and the number of your unit. Beep.”
“Mary-Alice Dodge, Two-Oh-Nine West Eighty-Fifth Street, Five-C.”
“. . . Yeah?”
“Hi, this is Alice, in Two-Oh-Nine Five-C, and I’m calling because Anna, down the hall, keeps knocking on my door, and she’s been doing it for a while, and I really don’t mind helping her out every now and again, or even keeping her company, because she’s a nice woman and I think sometimes she knocks just because she’s lonely, but today she’s knocked three times already, and I think maybe she doesn’t even remember from one time to the next; first it was something about toilet paper, then she wanted to know the time, then she said she needed help changing a light bulb, which I did, and while I was there I noticed that her stove, which looks really old by the way, was extremely hot. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be like that, but it seemed much too hot to me, even though it wasn’t on. And look, as I said, it’s not that I’m not willing to lend her a hand from time to time, or even to keep an eye on her, in an unofficial sort of way, but there’s only so much that I can do. And if she’s becoming forgetful, or if there’s something wrong with her stove and she doesn’t know it, or if she were to leave it on and go out for a while, or fall asleep—”
“Okay. Hold on a minute, okay?”
She waited two minutes at least.
“Mary-Alice?” His voice was much changed from before—higher-pitched and almost musical in its politeness. “I’ve got Anna’s granddaughter Rachel here on the line with us. Do you want to tell her what you were just telling me?”
“I’m so sorry, Mary-Alice,” Rachel hurried to put in. “I’m so sorry it’s been a bother. Thank you so much for your help.”
• • •
“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2004 has been awarded to Elfriede Jelinek, for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”
“I’ll have the salmon.”
“And I’ll have the fusilli salsiccia without the salsiccia.”
“Twelve pages,” he said gravely, when the waiter walked away.
“Oh,” said Alice. “I thought—”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t any good.”
Alice nodded. “What about your back?”
“My back is bad, darling. This thing didn’t work.”
“What thing?”
“The denervation I had last week.”
“Oh, I didn’t . . . What’s denervation?”
He nodded. “Denervation is when they use radio frequency to destroy a nerve so that it no longer sends a pain message to the brain. I’ve had it done before and it worked, but for some reason it didn’t work this time.” Their drinks arrived. “The good news,” he added, removing the wrapper end from his straw, “is that now I can listen to Jonathan Schwartz without having to turn the radio on.”
Walking back to his apartment they were halted by a young man in a trench coat swerving amiably into their path.
“Blazer! You were robbed!”
Wild with excitement, the fan even dared to extend his hand. Warily, Ezra drew his own from his pocket and accepted it. On the shake, the younger man gave a deferential little bow; as he did, the wind lifted a yarmulke from his head, tilting it through the air and setting it down in the middle of Amsterdam. The man put a hand on the back of his head and laughed. Then, pointing at Ezra, as though Ezra had conjured the wind:
“Next year man! Next year!”
They walked the rest of the block in silence. In the elevator, Ezra extracted a leaf from Alice’s hair and let it flutter to the floor. “What’s going on with the Sox?”
“They’re up two games on Anaheim.”
“Good darling.”
“What’s going on with your Palestinian?”
His head jerked back, freshly incredulous. “Nayla? She still hasn’t called.” His gaze down at Alice hardened, as though she might somehow be complicit in this offense. When the elevator pinged and its doors opened, Alice stepped out while Ezra stayed put. “I mean,” he said, lifting a palm, “how are we supposed to get along with these people?”
Boston beat Anaheim three games to zero. The next night, the Yankees won their series against the Twins three games to one. Alice waited hopefully, but when he called her it was to say, “Sixteen pages.”
“Wow. How’s your back?”
“It hurts.”
“Are you taking something?”
“Am I taking something. Of course I’m taking something. The problem is, I can only take it every other day. Otherwise, you get hooked, and getting off it is hell.”
She watched Game One of the ALCS at her bar. The Sox blew it in the ninth, failing to score off Rivera after the Yankees raised their lead from one run to three.
CALLER ID BLOCKED.
“I’m worried about your grandmother.”
“So am I. She’s been wearing her lucky robe since July.”
“I suppose you’d like to watch the game here tomorrow night.”
“I suppose I would.”
Again, Boston lost. Three nights later, when they lost again, nineteen to eight, he switched off the television and tossed her the phone. “You’d better call her.”
“Hi, Nana. It’s Alice. . . . I know. . . . I know. . . . It’s terrible. . . . I’m sorry. . . . No, I watched it at a friend’s house actually. . . . No, no one you know. . . . Mm-hmm. . . . Oh really? . . . That’s weird. . . . Was Doreen with him? . . . Yeah, he’s a Shriner, too. . . . Okay. . . . I should go. . . . I should go now, Nana. . . . I love you too. . . . Okay. . . . Good night. . . . Good night.”
“What’d she say?”
“That Francona’s in a coma.”
“That’s good. What else?”
“That she ran into my father’s brother at the supermarket and he said I gave a nice trilogy at my grandfather’s funeral. I think he meant a eulogy.”
The following afternoon he left a message on her voice mail asking if she wouldn’t mind stopping in Duane Reade on the way over and picking up one jar of folic acid, one Mylanta cherry flavor with calcium, and ten bottles of Purell, two-ounce size. When she arrived, he was pacing the rug in his socks, hands on his back, grimacing. Alice handed him the bag.
Peering into it: “Hmm.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing darling. It’s not your fault. Never mind.”
At midnight, bottom of the ninth, the Yankees were up by one and Boston fans stood in the bleachers and prayed. Feebly, someone raised a sign that read 4 MORE GAMES. Alice watched from between her fingers while Ezra got up and began to do his one hundred things.
“The party’s over . . .”
Millar walked. The Sox replaced him with Roberts, who stole second. Then Bill Mueller hit a single straight down the middle and Roberts rounded third and slid home.
“Yesss!”
Holding his toothbrush, Ezra came out of the bathroom and sat down.
The score stayed the same for the next two innings. Alice watched from the floor, a knuckle between her teeth; then Big Papi hit a two-run homer and in an instant she was on her feet, making a running jump onto the bed. “We did it! We won! The Red Sox won! We won we won we won we won we WON!”
“You did darling. Fair and square.”
“Now the party’s over!”
For Game Five she arrived wearing one of her Searle skirts and a cap with a B on it. Ezra intercepted her in the communal hallway and looked both ways before yanking her out of the elevator by the arm. “Are you crazy? In this town?” The television was already on and an industrious desk clearing appeared to be in progress: after handing her her drink and the delivery menu for Pig Heaven he resumed licking envelopes, tearing up faxes, tossing old magazines into the wastepaper basket and stepping over miniature ziggurats of foreign editions accumulated on the floor, whistling as he went.
“Hey Mealy,” he said, looking up from a bank statement. “Have I ever told you my Glow-Worm story?”
Alice put a check mark next to Pork Soong. “Nope.”
“In the 1950s there was a popular song called ‘Glow Worm,’ recorded by the Mills Brothers. And in the early sixties, when I was at Altoona teaching creative writing”—he shook his head—“I advised one of my students that he needed more detail in his fiction. It’s detail, I explained, that brings fiction to life. He’d written a short story whose first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling.’ Then we had this little chat and he went home to revise it and when he came back the following week the first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling “Glow Worm.”’ That was the only thing new in the entire story.”
Alice giggled.
“Easiest white girl to laugh there ever was, Mary-Alice.”
“What happened to him?”
“Who.”
“Your student!”
“He won the Nobel Prize.”
“Come on.”
“He played for the Washington Senators for a while, actually. Back when there were only eight teams to a league.”
“There were only eight teams to a league?”
“Oh, Mary-Alice, this is hopeless! There were eight teams to a league beginning in the Mesozoic Era all the way up to 1961, when they introduced the expansion teams, who got all the guys the other teams didn’t want, like Hobie Landrith and Choo-Choo Coleman—Choo-Choo Coleman! How’d you like that for a name?—and the Mets were so inept that Casey Stengel, the old Yankees manager who’d been dragged out of retirement to manage them, went into the dugout one day and said, ‘Can’t anybody here play this game?’ ”
It was still four–four in the bottom of the ninth when he muted a Viagra ad and swiveled brightly to face her. “Darling, in the cooler in the back of the deli here on the corner they have Häagen-Dazs bars. Do you want one?”
“Now?”
“Sure. You’ll be right back. But listen. I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. If they don’t have that I want chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. And if they don’t have that I want vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, no nuts. Plus whatever you want darling. My wallet’s right on the table there. Go!”
At the deli they only had raspberry. And in the convenience store one block up they had only chocolate on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts. Alice picked one up and stared at it for a faintly agonizing moment—it wasn’t even the right brand—before putting it back again and running the long block over to Amsterdam, where, in the narrow all-sorts shop that sold pornography next to Caramel Creams, she found, in the back, a freezer stocked almost exclusively with vanilla on the inside, chocolate on the outside, nuts.
“Sí!”
The cashier was eating takeout and watching a television stashed under the counter. “What happened?” Alice asked.
“Ortiz struck out.” Fork aloft, he continued watching for a moment before lifting his other hand to take Ezra’s money. When at last he looked up and saw the B on Alice’s hat, he inhaled sharply. “Ah, la enemiga.”
“Where have you been?” Ezra asked her when she got back.
In the twelfth inning, Ortiz tried to steal second but was called out after Jeter, legs spread, sprung vertically into the air to catch a high throw from Posada. He snagged it and, after seeming to hang in space for an impossibly long moment, returned to the ground and tagged Papi on the back.
“My God,” said Ezra, pointing his ice-cream stick at the screen. “For a moment I thought I was watching Nijinsky.”
“Ugh. I can’t stand him. Look how smug he looks.”
“Remember when we used to have sex, Mary-Alice?”
“He was safe!”
“No he wasn’t darling.”
“Yes he was!”
In the thirteenth, Varitek dropped three knuckleballs, letting Yankees advance to second and third. Alice groaned. Another sign went up in the stands: BELIEVE.
“In what?” said Ezra. “The tooth fairy?”
With two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth, Ortiz fouled right, then left, plus two more fouls up and over the backstop, then hit a fair ball that dropped down in centerfield, driving Johnny Damon home.
“Hoooraaaaaaaayy!”
“All right, Choo. That’s it. Time for bed.”
“Uh, Mary-Alice,” he said to her voice mail the following morning, less than an hour after she’d left. “I’m sorry to ask you this, but before you come over here this evening—I assume you are coming over here this evening—would you mind first going to Zabar’s and picking up some applesauce? The chunky kind? I’ll pay you back.” His voice sounded flat and irritable, drained of the previous evening’s garrulousness, and when Alice arrived after an emergency ebook meeting that had run the full length of the afternoon he was holding his back, pacing and grimacing again, the television on mute and an electric heating pad warming the empty seat of his chair. As quietly as she could Alice put the applesauce into the refrigerator, got a tumbler down from the cupboard, and unwound the wax on a new bottle of Knob Creek. CALL MEL RE: WILL read a Post-it note stuck to the counter. A second note next to it read Q-TIPS!!! Even the way this looked in his incontrovertible hand made her feel a fool for ever thinking she could write. When she looked up again he was in his chair, neck stoically erect, the back of his head like a wax copy of itself if not for its infinitesimal pulsing.
She carried her drink to the bed and lay across it. In the flickering silence they watched the pregame graphics as intently as if any moment now their own life expectancies would be posted there. GAME 3. LONGEST 9 INN. GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (4:20). GAME 5: LONGEST GAME IN POSTSEASON HISTORY (5:49). 21 HOURS, 46 MINUTES TOTAL OF 1ST 5 GAMES. 1,864 PITCHES. Alice memorized each lineup, briefly contemplated life in the Dominican Republic, and wondered about dinner. Her instinct, if not innate then informed by old childhood fears, was to ride out and perhaps even allay such moods by being as still and quiet as possible. But the bourbon had different ideas.
“I love that color,” she said when the screen cut to a wide shot of Yankee Stadium with its grass mown into stripes that were actually two slightly different shades of emerald.
Several seconds later, Ezra replied in a low and even voice: “Yes. Night-game green.”
When Jon Lieber took to the mound, Alice got up again to refresh her drink. “Would it be all right if we turned the sound on now?”
It was too loud, as though the night before they’d been watching with a dozen friends all laughing and chatting at once, and one of the announcers had a slight Southern accent that sounded almost stoned in its serenity, the other a rich, reassuring baritone not dissimilar to the one that narrated the Viagra ads. Babbling away about the bullpen, Curt Schilling’s tendon, and the “difficult conditions” presented by the weather, their voices filled the little room like disembodied dinner guests trying to ignore the tension mounting between their hosts. Forecast: Drizzle. Wind speed: 14 mph, left to right. Superimposed against the misty skyline, her and Ezra’s reflections in the yellow glow of his reading lamp had the trapped and inanimate look of dollhouse detainees. Alone together, together alone . . . Except of course they weren’t alone. Ezra’s pain was with them. Ezra, his pain, and Alice, barely tolerable envoy from the enraging world of the healthy.
“Red Sox on top here, four–nothing, and due to a technical error tonight’s game is being brought to you by AFN: the American Forces Network. Our friends at AFN are delivering coverage to the US Armed Forces serving in one hundred seventy-six countries and US territories and of course aboard navy ships at sea. We say welcome to our men and women in uniform, serving so far from our shores, and thank you for everything you do.”
In the stands, three men with their hoods pulled up against the rain juggled plastic cups of beer and hand-painted signs: ON LEAVE FROM IRAQ. 31 ST CSH HOLLA: GO YANKS!
“Not a city in this country,” the Southern voice mused, “that reminds me more of the sacrifice and freedom that we enjoy because of our men and women . . .” Jason Varitek adjusted his chest protector. “. . . What a—What a guy. What a leader, man. He hit that fly ball . . . Take a look at this. Look at this guy, if you think of all the innings he’s caught, all that he’s done . . . Now watch what happens: he continues to hustle, into the dugout, so that he can get the gear on, and get back out, and catch as many pitches from Curt Schilling as he can, to get him comfortable for the bottom of the sixth . . .”
“On very tired legs . . .”
“Just makes you think he mighta made a pretty good soldier . . .”
Ezra pressed mute.
Alice stared at the screen a moment longer before finishing what was left in her glass. “Are you hungry? Do you want to order something?”
“No, darling.”
“I’ll get you some Q-tips tomorrow if you want.”
He leaned over to look for something on the floor. “Thank you, dear.”
“I wish they would stop showing that.”
“What.”
“His sock. It’s making me queasy.”
Ezra took a pill.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to take it every day.”
“Thank you, Little Miss Elephant Brain.”
“Whoa! Did you see that?”
“What?”
“A-Rod slapped him!”
They watched as the ball dribbled over the foul line and Jeter sprinted home. “He was running to first and Arroyo went to tag him and A-Rod slapped the ball out of his glove!”
Francona came out to complain. The umpires huddled. When they reversed the call, New York fans booed and pelted the grass with trash.
“I can’t believe it,” said Alice. “That was incredibly childish.” She looked at Ezra, but Ezra was looking at the screen. “If I were a Yankee I’d be ashamed, trying to get ahead like that.”
“If you were a Yankee,” Ezra said quietly, “they wouldn’t be in the playoffs.”
Alice laughed. “Can we turn the sound back on now?”
Slowly, he rotated to face her. “Mary-Alice . . .”
“What?”
“I hurt.”
“I know you do. But what am I—”
Ezra flinched. “But what are you supposed to do about it?”
Uncertainly, Alice nodded.
“Wait a minute,” she said then. “I do a lot actually. I go to Zabar’s for you, and to Duane Reade, and to the deli to get you Häagen-Dazs during extra innings—”
“Darling, you offered to do those things. Remember? You offered to help me out when I’m unwell. You said, ‘Whatever you need, I’m right around the corner.’ I would not have asked you otherwise.”
“I know, but—”
“Do you think I like being like this? Do you think I enjoy being old and crippled by pain and dependent on other people?” His head was pulsing more obviously now, as though it might explode.
“Fuck you,” said Alice.
For a while the only sound was the changing frequency of the static on the television screen as it flickered from dark to light and back again. Alice covered her face with her hands and left them there for a long moment, as if to be transported—or as if she were counting, giving one or both of them a chance to hide—but when at last she took them away again Ezra was still there, exactly as he’d been: legs crossed, eyes black with anguish, waiting. His face blurred through the glaze of her tears.
“What should I do with you, Mary-Alice? What would you like me to do? What would you do, if you were me?”
Alice covered her face again. “Treat me like shit,” she said into her hands.
When she got home, there was a letter from the Harvard Student Loan Office in her mailbox, thanking her for paying off her Federal Perkins debt in full.
The Red Sox won.
• • •
Without being asked, the bartender poured what remained of the bottle into Alice’s glass.
Alice moved the glass one inch to the side, then replaced her hand in her lap.
“Do you play chess?” the man beside her asked, in a British accent.
Alice turned to him. “I have a board.”
“Do you speak French?”
“No. Why?”
“There’s an expression chess players use to clarify that a piece is only being adjusted in its place, not yet moved to another square.”
“Oh really? What’s that?”
“J’adoube.”
Alice nodded and, looking up at the television, lifted her glass and this time drank from it.
• • •
“Hi,” she said, knocking on her boss’s door. “Here’s that—”
He slammed down the phone.
“Sorry,” said Alice, “I didn’t—”
“Fucking Blazer is staying with Hilly.”
Furiously he massaged his forehead with his fingers. Alice laid the file on his desk and left.
• • •
“The thing is,” she said to the British man, whose name was Julian, “they haven’t been in the World Series since 1986. And they haven’t won a World Series since 1918. And some people attribute this to the Curse of the Bambino: they think the Red Sox are being punished for selling Babe Ruth to New York.”
“To the Yankees.”
“Yes. Although these days there are also the Mets, but they didn’t exist until the sixties.” Alice took a sip. “Before that there were only eight teams to a league.”
• • •
Pujols took second on ball one inside.
When Renteria hit it back to Foulke, Foulke threw him out at first, and the dugout emptied onto the field, where the men ran to join a celebratory huddle, leaping onto one another’s backs and into one another’s arms and punching the air and pointing gratefully to the heavens. In the stands, camera flashes pop-pop-popped like muzzle fire. There was a brief satellite image of soldiers in Baghdad celebrating in their sand fatigues and then the picture cut back to the Bank of America Postgame Show and Bud Selig handed Manny Ramirez the MVP trophy. A reporter asked him how it felt.
“First, you know, it was a lot of negative stuff, you know, I was gonna get traded, but, you know, I keep my confidence on myself and I believe in me and I did it, you know, I’m just blessed, and, you know, I prove a lot of people wrong, you know, I knew I could do this and thanks God I did it.”
“Do you believe in curses, sir?”
“I don’t believe in curse. I think you make your own destination, and we did it, you know, we believe in each other. We went out there, we play relaxed, and we ground it out and we did it.”
Alice looked at her phone. The bartender bought them a round.
“Every man makes his own destination,” Alice said wryly, putting her phone back into her purse.
“He’s right,” said Julian, pulling her toward him for a kiss.
• • •
Shave and a haircut, two bits.
She stood in Alice’s doorway holding a bottle of wine, which was dusty and had no name except for a dense parade of Hebrew lettering, the old woman’s head wobbling faintly as if attached to the rest of her by a spring. “Can you open this for me, dear?”
The cork came out black.
“Here you go,” said Alice.
“Would you like some?”
Alice returned to her counter, filled two jam jars halfway, and brought them back to where Anna continued to stand faintly quivering just inside her door. Her robe, made of a faded daisy print, had a brown stain shaped like Florida on its lapel. Anna accepted the glass of wine warily, with both hands, suggesting it had been some time since she’d drunk anything standing up.
“My nephew killed himself today.”
Alice lowered her glass.
“. . . So I needed some wine.”
“I don’t blame you,” Alice said softly. “How old was he?”
“What?”
“How—”
“Fifty.”
“Was he sick?”
“No.”
“Did he have any children?”
“What?”
“Did he have any—”
“No.”
Neither of them had taken a sip, but even so Anna was looking down at her drink as if wondering when it was going to work.
“Did you vote today?” Alice asked.
“What?”
“Did you vote? For the president?”
“Did I float?”
Alice shook her head.
“Tell me . . . ,” Anna began.
“Alice.”
“I know. Do you live here alone?”
Alice nodded.
“And you don’t get lonely?”
Alice shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Anna peered past her now, down the hall to where Alice’s reading light was on and The Fall of Baghdad lay facedown on her bed. The radio on her dresser could be heard quietly calling New York for Kerry and Nebraska for Bush. “But you have a boyfriend, don’t you dear? Someone special in your life?” Her jam jar of wine, which she continued to hold in two hands like a priest’s chalice, tipped another degree toward the floor.
Alice smiled a little sadly. “I might.”
CALLER ID BLOCKED.