Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death . . . —MARTIN GARDNER,

pewter-colored curls and an ice-cream cone

Philip Roth had such curls

Alice knew who he was—she’d known the moment he sat down, turning her cheeks watermelon pink—but in her astonishment she could only continue staring, like

Still chewing, Alice laughed. “Is that a Jewish joke?”

Uh...

“So. Miss Alice. Are you game?”

Nice come on...

“I’ll come there.” “You’ll come here. Very good. Four thirty?” Alice wrote the address down on a piece of junk mail. Then she put a hand over her mouth and waited. “Actually, let’s say five. See you here at five?”

elevator was moving very slowly, because she had plenty of time to frown at her infinite funhouse reflections and to worry more than a little about what was going to happen next.

another door, on the other side of the elevator, opened a crack and a hand came through, holding a glass. Alice accepted the glass, which was full of water. The door closed.

“Show me your purse,” he said from behind her. She did. “Now open it please. For security reasons.”

dollars in bills. Holding up one of the cards: “Mary-Alice.” Alice wrinkled her nose. “You don’t like the Mary part.” “Do you?”

His skin was lined and cool.

His lips were soft—but then his teeth were behind them.

At her office, there were no fewer than three National Book Award certificates in his nam...

The door opened a crack and a hand came through, holding a box.

a burgundy wallet with a coin purse and a clutch clasp.

From his stomach all the way up to his sternum ran a pink, zipperlike scar.

Another scar bisected his leg from groin to ankle. Two more made a faint circumflex above his hip.

“Is she still alive, your grandmother?” “Yep. Would you like her number? You’re about the same age.” “It’s a little early in our relationship for you to be satirizing me, Mary-Alice.”

“Who taught you that, Mary-Alice? Who have you been with?” “No one,” she said, picking a crumb off her lap and eating it. “I just imagine what would feel good and I do it.”

“Well, you have quite an imagination.”

Propped beside his keyboard was a tent of white paper on which he had typed:

You are an empty vessel for a long time, then something grows that you don’t want, something creeps into it that you actually cannot do. The God of Chance creates in us. . . . Endeavours in art require a lot of patience. And below that: An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways . . .

Both Stephen Crane?

Blackout cookies, they were called, and they came from the Columbus Bakery, which he passed every day on his walk.

“I love you. I love you for this.”

CALLER ID BLOCKED. “I just wanted to say that it must have been strange, hearing that from me; you must have been reeling—

I don’t want anything to change. You do what you want and I do what I want.”

Huckleberry Finn. Tender Is the Night. Journey to the End of the Night. The Thief’s Journal. July’s People. Tropic of Cancer. Axel’s Castle. The Garden of Eden. The Joke. The Lover. Death in Venice and Other Stories. First Love and Other Stories. Enemies, A Love Story

Ezra's "must reads"

Alice picked up one by a writer whose name she had seen but never heard. “Ooh, Camus!” she said, rhyming it with “Seamus.”

“It’s Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He’s French. Ca-MOO.”

Jonathan Schwartz

“This guy is such a cornball.” “ ‘Cornball,’ ” repeated the writer, eating a nectarine. “That’s a good old-fashioned word.” “I guess you could say,” said Alice, searching the floor for her underpants, “that I’m a good old-fashioned girl.” “ ‘The party’s over . . . ,’ ” he sang, whenever he wanted her to go home. “ ‘It’s time to call it a d-a-a-a-a-y . . .’ ”

He slid an envelope across the table. “That’s for you.” Alice picked it up—Bridgehampton National Bank, it said on the front, next to a logo of a sailboat regatta—and took out six one-hundred-dollar bills. “For an air conditioner.”

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;

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.

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,

Alice gets either an abortion or a very thorough scrubbing out, with the sequence of procedures thoroughly detailed

as “a vintage 1930s piece.” “Like me,” he said. “I have my period,” Alice apologized.

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.”

“Ezra,”

Ezra Blazer. I guess that's an okay name. This is where we finally see he has a name. "Blazer" comes later. I would have gone for "Glazer."

There was blackout cookie everywhere.

Yes. Alice literally blew her cookies.

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.

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.

He brought with him an old Polaroid SX-70.

Ezra deposited all ten into the pocket of her purse.

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.

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

“The Kid,” he’d referred to her.

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.

In the morning, her palm was blue.

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

“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!”