Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

Book - 2018

"Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly," tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, "Folly" also suggests an aspiring novelist's coming-of-age. By contrast, "Madness" is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration ...officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda. A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself. A debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art, from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday" --

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Published
New York, NY : Simon and Schuster 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Lisa Halliday (author)
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition
Physical Description
275 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781501166761
9781501166785
  • Folly
  • Madness
  • Ezra Blazer's desert island discs.
Review by New York Times Review

In "Asymmetry," two seemingly unrelated sections are connected by a shocking coda. The first, "Folly," is the story of a love affair. It narrates the relationship between Alice, a book editor and aspiring writer in her mid-20s, and Ezra Blazer, a brilliant, geriatric novelist who is partly modeled on Philip Roth. The second section - "Madness" - belongs to Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi- American economist who is being detained at Heathrow. Halliday's prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald. This is a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years, and it manages to be, all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction. THE GREAT BELIEVERS By Rebecca Makkai Viking. $27. Set in the Chicago of the mid-80s and Paris at the time of the 2015 terrorist attacks, Makkai's deeply affecting novel uses the AIDS epidemic and a mother's search for her estranged daughter to explore the effects of senseless loss and our efforts to overcome it. Her portrait of a group of friends, most of them gay men, conveys the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic's early years and follows its repercussions over decades. Empathetic without being sentimental, her novel amply earned its place among the contenders for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. THE PERFECT NANNY By Leila Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor Penguin Books. Paper, $16. We know from the outset of this unnerving cautionary tale (winner of the Goncourt Prize) that a beloved nanny has murdered the two children in her care; but what's even more remarkable about this unconventional domestic thriller is the author's intimate analysis of the special relationship between a mother and the person she hires to care for her offspring. Slimani writes devastating character studies, and she also raises painful themes: the forbidden desires parents project onto their nannies, racial and class tensions. In this mesmerizingly twisted novel, only one thing is clear: Loneliness can drive you crazy. THERE THERE By Tommy Orange Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. Orange's debut is an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life. Its many short chapters are told through a loosely connected group of Native Americans living in Oakland, Calif., as they travel to a powwow. They are all, as in Chaucer, pilgrims on their way to a shrine, or, as in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," an extended family crossing the landscape. The novel is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now. WASHINGTON BLACK By Esi Edugyan Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. This transcendent work of empathy and imagination, the 2018 winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize, opens on a sugar plantation in British Barbados in the waning days of slavery and, against that backdrop of unconscionable brutality, quickly tips us into a new world of possibility: one in which men take to the skies in hot-air balloons, dive to mysterious ocean depths and cross the Arctic on foot. Most daringly, it is a world in which a white slave master's brother and a young black slave can forge an indelible bond. With subtlety and eloquence, Edugyan unfolds a wondrous tale of exploration and discovery. Nonfiction AMERICAN PRISON A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment By Shane Bauer Penguin Press. $28. Bauer moved to rural Louisiana in 2014 to work undercover as a guard at the Winn Correctional Center, a privately run prison. He lasted four months before his deception was discovered, but that turned out to be more than sufficient to write a searing exposé for Mother Jones, which earned him a National Magazine Award and an invitation to speak to officials in Washington about problems in for-profit prisons. With this book, Bauer has expanded his article into a comprehensive analysis impossible to ignore. His book is a meticulous catalog of horrors, from the historical precursors - the practice of convict-leasing at Southern prisons after the Civil War, in which inmates were rented out to companies as a captive work force - to the rampant violence, neglect and incompetence that pervade a multibillion-dollar industry. EDUCATED A Memoir By Tara Westover Random House. $28. Westover's extraordinary memoir is an act of courage and self-invention. The youngest of seven children, she grew up in Idaho, in a survivalist family who lived so far offthe grid that she lacked even a birth certificate and did not attend school until she went to college. Getting in wasn't obvious: At home, reading meant studying the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and much of her childhood was spent helping her mother, an unlicensed midwife, and her father, a paranoid man who maintained a scrapmetal junkyard. In recounting her upbringing and her triumph over it - she would earn a Ph.D. in history at Cambridge - Westover took great risks and alienated family members. The reward is a book that testifies to an irrepressible thirst to learn. FREDERICK DOUGLASS Prophet of Freedom By David W. Blight Simon & Schuster. $37.50. A monumental work about a monumental figure. The charismatic Douglass was Abraham Lincoln's conscience, so to speak, and Blight's detailed, cinematic biography is the result of a lifetime of engagement with his subject. Douglass wrote three autobiographies himself, describing his rise from slavery to a role as one of the greatest figures of the 19th century, but Blight's work is fuller than any of those, relating both the public and private life in a way that Douglass either could not or would not undertake. The result is a portrait that is likely to stand as the definitive account for years to come. HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence By Michael Pollan Penguin Press. $28. Best known for his work on the ethics of eating, Pollan delivers his most personal book yet, one that demanded he drop acid in full view of the reader. Exploring the history and science of psychedelics, he tells of the rise and fall and rise again of our societal interest in these drugs, which are now thought to have many benefits, from helping with addiction to easing the terror of the terminally ill. The book hits its high point when he examines the mysticism and spirituality of the psychedelic experience. What can we learn about ourselves when the part of our mind controlling the ego drops away? What is this older, more primitive part of the brain, which connects us to how a child sees the world? It's a trip that leads him to wonder about how, ultimately, we can get the most out of our existences as conscious beings in the world. SMALL FRY By Lisa Brennan-Jobs Grove Press. $26. Brennan-Jobs grew up shuttling between two starkly different worlds: the bohemian, peripatetic world of her mother, an unstable and impoverished artist, and the luxurious world of her cruel and increasingly wealthy father, Steve Jobs. She provides indelible portraits of both parents, recreating the fraught landscape of her childhood in Palo Alto through the careful accretion of exquisitely granular detail. Her memoir is a work of uncanny intimacy, the debut of a singular literary sensibility. Ultimately, though, it is her portrayal of Jobs as a man prone to mind-boggling acts of emotional negligence and abuse that gives this book its overlay of devastation.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Halliday's beautiful debut novel is written in three distinct parts. In the first, Alice, a young editor in New York, embarks on a relationship with Ezra, a much older, multi-Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Though they are decades apart, the two find commonality in their love of literature, music, and baseball, and their relationship steadily grows stronger and more loving as the old millennium gives way to the new. In the novel's second part, readers meet Amar, an Iraqi American who is being detained at Heathrow Airport en route to his brother in Kurdistan. Amar's story is told mostly in flashbacks, illuminating both the joys of his family and also the tragedies of a war-torn country and its people. Amar's and Alice's stories are, at first glance, completely unrelated and can easily be enjoyed as such. Halliday moves from sparse, purposeful prose in the first to an almost brooding narration in the second, and only the lightest touches seem to link them, until one final moment. The third and final section is an interview with Ezra, and it is here that Halliday deftly and subtly intersects the two disparate stories, resulting in a deep rumination on the relation of art to life and death.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Halliday, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award, crafts a stellar and inventive debut, a puzzle of seemingly incongruous pieces that, in the end, fit together perfectly. In the early aughts, young NYC book editor Alice embarks on an affair with Ezra, a surprisingly kind older novelist. As the American military conflict in Iraq escalates, Alice and Ezra flit into and out of each other lives, bonding over the Red Sox, Scrabble, and Ezra's failure to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After a health scare lands Ezra in the hospital, Alice must decide the future of their relationship. The second, decidedly different section follows Amar, an Iraqi-American of complicated provenance who has been detained at Heathrow Airport on his way to Iraq. Alternating between the customs official's curt interrogation of Amar and flashbacks to his life in America, the sequence draws the background violence of the earlier section violently into the foreground without sacrificing any of the former's momentum or humor. A singular collision of forms, tones, and arguments, the novel provides frequent delights and never explains too much. Any reader who values innovative fiction should treasure this. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Company. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT In the first of two stories making up this debut novel, a young woman named Alice becomes involved with a famous, much older, literary prize-winning author. As their relationship deepens, the questions relevant to a seasoned man of the world in later life contrast with those of his naïve, inexperienced paramour. The second story concerns Iraqi American Amar, who is detained at Heathrow while traveling to see his brother in Kurdistan via London and eventually denied entry to the UK. During his 36 hours in detention, he recalls his childhood and why he chose to be American while his brother chose to be Iraqi. The story ends abruptly in disaster, and the book circles back to Ezra years after his affair with Alice, the single thread connecting the two equally well-told stories. While the first story may have readers wondering about the characters' motivations (does Ezra think he is fooling anybody by calling Alice his assistant?), the second builds a picture of life as a dual national, the eventual need to pick a side, and the consequences. VERDICT Full of choices and of opposites-young/old, seasoned/novice, American/Iraqi-this thought-provoking book is evocative of the world we live in today. Highly recommended for readers of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/17.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two seemingly unrelated novellas form one delicately joined whole in this observant debut.Halliday writes first, in Folly, of Alice, an editor in New York during the second Bush presidency, and her relationship with Ezra, a well-known and much older author. Alice struggles to establish her own identity at a time when Ezra's health concerns focus his attention on mortality. Through their occupations and their relationship, the lovers examine the nature of story. "Who knows if it's any good," Ezra says of his manuscript at one point. "It's a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things." Alice's roles as both a literary gatekeeper and a much younger companion are an important, related dichotomy. Art is omnipresent; music and baseball, too, become the rhythm that runs beneath the melody of the couple's interaction. Alice wants to write about herself, but she "doesn't seem important enough." The lovers' age difference adds gravity to their relationship and the stories they each tell. The second part of the book, Madness, initially appears to be wholly unrelated to the first: Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, is detained at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan in 2008. Halliday hints at her strategy, though: "Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything," says Amar as he's detained, quoting Bellow. Amar's story is darker, filled with grief, and alternates between flashbacks and the present day. Though nothing is obvious about the connection of Amar's story to Alice's, the author gently highlights notes from the first story, and the juxtaposition of the two tales is further complicatedand illuminatedby the addition of a third and final section that brings them together.A singularly conceived graft of one narrative upon another; what grows out of these conjoined stories is a beautiful reflection of life and art. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Asymmetry ALICE WAS BEGINNING TO get very tired of all this sitting by herself with nothing to do: every so often she tried again to read the book in her lap, but it was made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever, and what is the point of a book, thought Alice, that does not have any quotation marks? She was considering (somewhat foolishly, for she was not very good at finishing things) whether one day she might even write a book herself, when a man with pewter-colored curls and an ice-cream cone from the Mister Softee on the corner sat down beside her. "What are you reading?" Alice showed it to him. "Is that the one with the watermelons?" Alice had not yet read anything about watermelons, but she nodded anyway. "What else do you read?" "Oh, old stuff, mostly." They sat without speaking for a while, the man eating his ice cream and Alice pretending to read her book. Two joggers in a row gave them a second glance as they passed. 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 a studious little garden gnome, at the impassable pages that lay open in her lap. They might as well have been made of concrete. "So," said the man, rising. "What's your name?" "Alice." "Who likes old stuff. See you around." *  *  * The next Sunday, she was sitting in the same spot, trying to read another book, this one about an angry volcano and a flatulent king. "You," he said. "Alice." "Alice. What are you reading that for? I thought you wanted to be a writer." "Who said that?" "Didn't you?" His hand shook a little as he broke off a square of chocolate and held it out. "Thank you," said Alice. "You're velcome," he replied. Biting into her chocolate, Alice gave him a quizzical look. "Don't you know that joke? A man flying into Honolulu says to the guy in the seat next to him, 'Excuse me, how do you pronounce it? Hawaii or Havaii?' 'Havaii,' says the other guy. 'Thank you,' says the first guy. And the other guy says, 'You're velcome.' " Still chewing, Alice laughed. "Is that a Jewish joke?" The writer crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. "What do you think?" *  *  * The third Sunday, he bought two cones from Mister Softee and offered her one. Alice accepted it, as she had done with the chocolate, because it was beginning to drip and in any case multiple-Pulitzer Prize winners don't go around poisoning people. They ate their ice cream and watched a pair of pigeons peck at a straw. Alice, whose blue sandals matched the zigzags on her dress, flexed a foot idly in the sun. "So. Miss Alice. Are you game?" She looked at him. He looked at her. Alice laughed. "Are you game?" he repeated. Turning back to her cone: "Well, no reason not to be, I guess." The writer got up to throw his napkin away and came back to her. "There are plenty of reasons not to be." Alice squinted up at him and smiled. "How old are you?" "Twenty-five." "Boyfriend?" She shook her head. "Job?" "I'm an editorial assistant. At Gryphon." Hands in his pockets, he lifted his chin slightly and seemed to conclude this made sense. "All right. Shall we take a walk together next Saturday?" Alice nodded. "Here at four?" She nodded again. "I should take your number. In case something comes up." While another jogger slowed to look at him, Alice wrote it down on the bookmark that had come with her book. "You've lost your place," said the writer. "That's okay," said Alice. *  *  * On Saturday, it rained. Alice was sitting on the checkered floor of her bathroom, trying to screw tight her broken toilet seat with a butter knife, when her cell phone beeped: CALLER ID BLOCKED. "Hello Alice? It's Mister Softee. Where are you?" "At home." "Where is that?" "Eighty-Fifth and Broadway." "Oh, right around the corner. We could string up a couple of tin cans." Alice pictured a string, bowing like a giant jump rope over Amsterdam, trembling between them whenever they spoke. "So, Miss Alice. What should we do? Would you like to come here, and talk a while? Or should we take a walk together another day?" "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?" *  *  * The rain flooded the crosswalks and soaked her feet. The cabs churning a spray up Amsterdam seemed to be traveling much faster than they did when it was dry. While his doorman made room for her by pressing himself into a cruciform position, Alice entered purposefully: long strides, blowing out her cheeks, shaking out her umbrella. The elevator was plated top to bottom with warped brass. Either the floors it climbed were very tall or the 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. When the elevator doors opened, there was a hallway containing six more gray doors. She was about to knock on the first door she came to when 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. Alice took a sip. The next time the door opened, it seemed to swing wide on its own. Alice hesitated before carrying her water down a short hallway that ended in a bright white room containing, among other things, a draughtsman's desk and an unusually wide bed. "Show me your purse," he said from behind her. She did. "Now open it please. For security reasons." Alice set her purse down on the little glass table between them and unlatched it. She took out her wallet: a brown leather men's wallet that was badly worn and torn. A scratch card, purchased for a dollar and worth the same. A ChapStick. A comb. A key ring. A barrette. A mechanical pencil. A few loose coins and, finally, three portable tampons, which she held in her palm like bullets. Fuzz. Grit. "No phone?" "I left it at home." He picked up the wallet, fingering a bit of stitching that had come undone. "This is a disgrace, Alice." "I know." He opened the wallet and removed her debit card, her credit card, an expired Dunkin' Donuts gift card, her driver's license, her college ID, and twenty-three dollars in bills. Holding up one of the cards: "Mary-Alice." Alice wrinkled her nose. "You don't like the Mary part." "Do you?" For a moment, he alternated between looking at her and at the card, as though trying to decide which version of her he preferred. Then he nodded, tapped the cards into alignment, snapped a rubber band from his desk around them and the bills, and dropped the stack back into her purse. The wallet he lobbed into a mesh-wire wastepaper basket already lined with a white cone of discarded typescript. The sight of this seemed to irritate him briefly. "So, Mary-Alice . . ." He sat down, gesturing for her to do the same. The seat of his reading chair was black leather and low to the ground, like a Porsche. "What else can I do for you?" Alice looked around. On the draughtsman's desk a fresh manuscript awaited his attention. Beyond it a pair of sliding glass doors gave onto a small balcony sheltered by the one above it from the rain. Behind her the enormous bed was made up so neatly as to look aloof. "Do you want to go outside?" "Okay." "No one throws the other one over. Deal?" Alice smiled and, still sitting five feet from him, extended a hand. The writer lowered his eyes to look at it for a long, doubtful moment, as though listed there on her palm were the pros and cons of every handshake he'd ever made. "On second thought," he said then. "Come here." *  *  * 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 name framed on the lobby wall. The second time, when she knocked, several seconds went by with no answer. "It's me," Alice said to the door. The door opened a crack and a hand came through, holding a box. Alice took the box. The door closed. Lincoln Stationers, it said on the box, tooled smartly in gold. Inside, under a single sheet of white tissue paper, lay a burgundy wallet with a coin purse and a clutch clasp. "Oh my goodness!" said Alice. "It's so pretty. Thank you." "You're velcome," said the door. Again, she was given a glass of water. Again, they did what they did without disturbing the bed. Over her sweater, he put a hand on each breast, as if to silence her. "This one's bigger." "Oh," said Alice, looking down unhappily. "No no; it's not an imperfection. There's no such thing as a matching pair." "Like snowflakes?" suggested Alice. "Like snowflakes," he agreed. *  *  * From his stomach all the way up to his sternum ran a pink, zipperlike scar. Another scar bisected his leg from groin to ankle. Two more made a faint circumflex above his hip. And that was just the front. "Who did this to you?" "Norman Mailer." While she was tugging up her tights, he got up to turn the Yankees game on. "Ooh, I love baseball," said Alice. "Do you? Which team?" "The Red Sox. When I was little, my grandmother used to take me to Fenway every year." "Is she still alive, your grandmother?" "Yep. Would you like her number? You're about the same age." "It's a little early in our relationship for you to be satirizing me, Mary-Alice." "I know," laughed Alice. "I'm sorry." They watched as Jason Giambi slugged a three-two pitch into left center. "Oh!" said the writer, getting up. "I almost forgot. I bought you a cookie." *  *  * When they sat looking at each other, across his little glass dining table or she on the bed and he in his chair, she noticed that his head pulsed sideways ever so slightly, as though with the beating of his heart. And, he'd had three operations on his spine, which meant there were certain things they could and couldn't do. Shouldn't do. "I don't want you to get hurt," said Alice, frowning. "It's a little late for that." They used the bed now. His mattress was made of a special orthopedic material that made her feel as though she were slowly sinking into a giant slab of fudge. Turning her head to the side, she could see, through his double-height windows, the midtown skyline, looking huddled and solemn in the rain. "Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ. Oh Jesus Christ. What are you doing? Do you know . . . what . . . you're doing?" Afterward, while she was eating another cookie: "Who taught you that, Mary-Alice? Who have you been with?" "No one," she said, picking a crumb off her lap and eating it. "I just imagine what would feel good and I do it." "Well, you have quite an imagination." *  *  * He called her a mermaid. She didn't know why. Propped beside his keyboard was a tent of white paper on which he had typed: You are an empty vessel for a long time, then something grows that you don't want, something creeps into it that you actually cannot do. The God of Chance creates in us. . . . Endeavours in art require a lot of patience. And below that: An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways . . . When she opened the refrigerator, his gold medal from the White House, tied to its handle, clanked loudly against the door. Alice went back to the bed. "Sweetheart," he said. "I can't wear a condom. Nobody can." "Okay." "So what are we going to do about diseases?" "Well, I trust you, if you--" "You shouldn't trust anyone. What if you become pregnant?" "Oh, don't worry about that. I'd have an abortion." Later, while she was washing up in the bathroom, he handed through to her a glass of white wine. *  *  * Blackout cookies, they were called, and they came from the Columbus Bakery, which he passed every day on his walk. He tried not to eat them himself. Nor did he drink; alcohol didn't mix with one of the medications he was taking. But for Alice he bought bottles of Sancerre or Pouilly-Fuissé and, after pouring her what she wanted, put the cork back in the bottle and the bottle on the floor next to the door for her to take home. One evening, a few bites into her cookie, Alice took a sip and made a daintily revolted face. "What?" "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to seem ungrateful. It's just that, you know, they don't really go." He thought for a moment and then got up and went into the kitchen for a tumbler and a bottle of Knob Creek. "Try this." He watched hungrily as she took a bite, then a sip. The bourbon went down like a flame. Alice coughed. "It's heaven," she said. *  *  * Other gifts: An extremely sensible, analog, waterproof watch. Allure Chanel eau de parfum. A sheet of thirty-two-cent stamps from the Legends of American Music series, commemorating Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, and Hoagy Carmichael. A New York Post cover from March 1992 with the headline "Weird Sex Act in Bullpen (Late City Final)." *  *  * The eighth time, while they were doing one of the things he wasn't supposed to do, he said: "I love you. I love you for this." Afterward, while she sat at the table eating her cookie, he watched her in silence. The following morning: CALLER ID BLOCKED. "I just wanted to say that it must have been strange, hearing that from me; you must have been reeling--that's R-E-E-L-I-N-G, not R-E-A-L-I-N-G, which isn't a bad word, either. What I'm saying is that it was meant in the moment, but it doesn't mean anything should change between us. I don't want anything to change. You do what you want and I do what I want." "Of course." "Good girl." When Alice hung up, she was smiling. Then she thought about it a little longer, and she frowned. She was reading the instructions that had come with her watch when her father called to inform her, for the second time that week, that not a single Jew had reported to work in the towers on the day they came down. But the writer did not call her again for many days. Alice slept with her phone next to her pillow and when she wasn't in bed carried it around with her everywhere--to the kitchen when she got herself a drink, to the bathroom when she went to the bathroom. Also making her crazy was her toilet seat, the way it slid to the side every time she sat on it. She thought of going back to their bench in the park, but decided on a walk instead. It was Memorial Day weekend and Broadway was closed for a street fair. Already at eleven the neighborhood was smoky and the air sizzling with falafel, fajitas, French fries, Sloppy Joes, corn on the cob, fennel sausages, funnel cake, and fried dough the diameter of a Frisbee. Ice-cold lemonade. Free spinal health exams. "We the People" legal document administration--Divorce $399, Bankruptcy $199. At one of the stalls peddling brandless bohemian fashion, there was a pretty poppy-colored sundress lolling on the breeze. It was only ten dollars. The Indian stallholder got it down so that Alice could try it on in the back of his van, where a watery-eyed German shepherd watched her with his chin on his paws. That night, when she was already in her pajamas: CALLER ID BLOCKED. "Hello?" "Hello, Mary-Alice. Did you see the game?" "What game?" "The Red Sox-Yankees game. The Yankees won fourteen to five." "I don't have a television. Who pitched?" "Who pitched. Everyone pitched. Your grandmother pitched a few innings. What are you doing?" "Nothing." "Do you want to come over?" Alice took off her pajamas and put on her new dress. Already a thread needed biting off. When she got to his apartment, only the lamp on his nightstand was lit and he was propped up in bed with a book and a glass of chocolate soymilk. "It's spring!" cried Alice, pulling the dress over her head. "It's spring," he said, sighing wearily. Alice crawled lynxlike toward him across the snow-white duvet. "Mary-Alice, sometimes you really do look sixteen." "Cradlerobber." "Graverobber. Careful of my back." Sometimes, it could feel like playing Operation--as if his nose would flash and his circuitry buzz if she failed to extract his Funny Bone cleanly. "Oh, Mary-Alice. You're crazy, do you know? You're crazy and you get it and I love you for it." Alice smiled. When she got home, it had been only an hour and forty minutes since he'd called, and everything was exactly as she'd left it, but her bedroom looked too bright and unfamiliar somehow, as though it now belonged to someone else. *  *  * CALLER ID BLOCKED. CALLER ID BLOCKED. CALLER ID BLOCKED. He left a message. "Who takes the greatest pleasure in leading the other one astray?" *  *  * Another message: "Does anyone smell mermaid in here?" *  *  * CALLER ID BLOCKED. "Mary-Alice?" "Yes?" "Is that you?" "Yes." "How are you?" "Fine." "What are you doing?" "Reading." "What are you reading?" "Oh, nothing interesting." "Do you have air-conditioning?" "No." "You must be hot." "I am." "It's going to get even hotter this weekend." "I know." "What'll you do?" "I don't know. Melt." "I'm coming back into the city on Saturday. Would you like to see me then?" "Yes." "Six o'clock?" "Yep." "I'm sorry. Six thirty?" "Okay." "I might even have some dinner for you." "That would be nice." He forgot about dinner, or decided against it. Instead, when she arrived he sat her down on the edge of his bed and presented her with two large Barnes & Noble bags filled to the handles with books. 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 . . . Alice picked up one by a writer whose name she had seen but never heard. "Ooh, Camus!" she said, rhyming it with "Seamus." A long moment followed in which the writer said nothing and Alice read the copy on the back of The First Man. When she looked up he was still wearing a gently startled expression. "It's Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He's French. Ca-MOO." *  *  * Her own apartment was on the top floor of an old brownstone, where it caught the sun and stoppered the heat. The only other tenant on her floor was an old lady called Anna, for whom ascending the four steep flights was a twenty-minute ordeal. Step, rest. Step, rest. Once, Alice passed her on her way out to H&H and when she came back the poor thing was still at it. From the shopping bags she carried you would have thought she ate bowling balls for breakfast. "Anna, may I help?" "Oh no dear. Been doing it fifty years. Keeps me alive." Step, rest. "Are you sure?" "Oh yes. Such a pretty girl. Tell me. Do you have a boyfriend?" "Not at the moment." "Well, don't wait too long, dear." "I won't," laughed Alice, running up the stairs. *  *  * "Capitana!" His doorman greeted her chummily now. He called the writer down and saluted them off as they set out for a walk. Swinging a bag of plums from Zingone's, the writer asked whether Alice had heard about the city's plan to rename some of its luxury residences after major-league baseball players: The Posada, The Rivera, The Soriano. "The Garciaparra," said Alice. "No no," he said, stopping her importantly. "Only Yankees." They entered the little park behind the natural history museum, where, biting into one of his plums, Alice pretended to chisel his name under Joseph Stiglitz's on the monument to American Nobel Laureates. But mostly, they stayed in. He read her what he'd written. She queried the spelling of "keister." They watched baseball and, on weekend afternoons, listened to Jonathan Schwartz swoon over Tierney Sutton and Nancy LaMott. "Come Rain or Come Shine." "Just You, Just Me." Doris Day wistfully warbling "The Party's Over." One afternoon, Alice burst out laughing and said, "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 . . .' " Then, going cheerfully around the room, he would switch off the phone, the fax, the lights, pour himself a glass of chocolate soymilk, and count out a small pile of pills. "The older you get," he explained, "the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I'm up to a hundred things." The party's over. The air-conditioning's over. Alice would stagger a little, taking herself home in the heat, her belly full of bourbon and chocolate and her underwear in her pocket. When she had climbed the four increasingly steamy flights up to her apartment, she would do exactly one thing, which was to move her pillows down the hall to her front room, where, on the floor next to the fire escape, there was at least the possibility of a breeze. "So listen darling. I'm going away for a while." Alice put down her cookie and wiped her mouth. "I'm going back out to the country for a bit. I've got to finish this draft." "Okay." "But that doesn't mean we can't speak. We'll speak regularly, and then when I finish, we can see each other again. Should you want to. All right?" Alice nodded. "All right." "Meanwhile . . ." 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." Alice shook her head. "I can't--" "Yes you can. It would make me happy." It was still light out when she left for home. The sky had a stagnant quality to it--as though a thunderstorm were due, but had gotten lost. The young people drinking on the sidewalk were just beginning their evenings. Alice approached her stoop slowly, reluctantly, one hand on the envelope inside her purse, trying to decide what to do. Her stomach felt as if she were still back in his elevator and someone had cut the suspension. There was a restaurant one block north with a long wooden bar and a mostly civilized-looking clientele. Alice found a stool at the far end, next to the napkin caddy, and arranged herself as though she were there primarily for the television mounted high in one corner. New York led Kansas City by four runs in the bottom of the third. Come on Royals, she thought. The bartender dropped a napkin down in front of her and asked her what she wanted to drink. Alice considered the wine specials listed on the wall. "I'll have a glass of . . ." "Milk?" "Actually, do you have any Knob Creek?" Her tab came to twenty-four dollars. She put her credit card down before picking it up again and taking out one of the writer's hundreds instead. The bartender returned with three twenties, a ten, and six ones. "Those are for you," said Alice, sliding the ones toward him. The Yankees won. Excerpted from Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.