Quotients Page 6

  “Ah yes, Professor Wright.”

  “Don’t be cruel,” Wright said. “Be smart.”

  “It doesn’t matter how many wit’s ends you’ve got, it doesn’t make a knot.”

  Wright sucked his cheeks tight to his teeth. “And would it be tied in a pretty enough ribbon for you if I said Lawrence had also personally met with your old colleague Gavin Thomas? That there was some very interesting talk about capital flows from Belfast?”

  “How would you know that?”

  “You asked, Jeremy. You came to me for help with Thomas.”

  “You said he was just another hedgie.”

  “And you convinced me otherwise, Billy.”

  “Jeremy,” someone said.

  He turned, squinted. Two women. One unrecognizable. The other saying his name again. His throat was dry. “Genevieve.”

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “What are you? Decide against the reunion?”

  She put her drink down. The other woman was smiling, looking back and forth between them. She reached to shake Wright’s hand.

  “What reunion?” Genevieve said.

  “Yours.”

  Chapter 13

  The whole way home, all he could think was perhaps his problem had been that he was too quick to surmise. Of a person, action. He would catch the angle of lift in a conversation and take it past the trajectory. He would see the beginning of a pattern and believe it a rule.

  But change was what she’d done, and there had been something odd about Alexandra lately, as when you looked from only one eye and then from both, and what you saw was perceived as the same object, only somehow different.

  At one point in his life, he’d been a listener. The listening had deepened his shadow. He’d heard the world shrink through radio waves that brought distant voices into the close quarters of machines, then learned how to be a man for whom sentences appeared on the tongue, ready-made as text. But he had not heard her lie as a lie. He had heard her words as any given schedule.

  He had forgotten that listening is not alone opening the ears. It is quieting the mind. Jeremy could not quiet his mind.

  Change was what she’d done. He had blamed it on the sleeping pills she’d begun taking, but the change was neither drowsiness nor sleepwalking. Sometimes, he asked if she knew what it was. But she didn’t think anything was different except his imagination. She asked if something, perhaps, was different in him.

  “Is this your way of leaving me?” she said.

  Which was exactly what someone would say who wanted you to believe that you were the one deciding to leave. So that it’s my idea instead of yours. She must think he didn’t know much. Certainly, she didn’t know he knew about the reunion.

  And another thing she didn’t know he knew: sometimes, she prayed. She didn’t kneel or make the sign of the cross, but her hands folded, her eyes closed, and he knew she was asking for things she couldn’t do herself. She did not do it often, perhaps because she didn’t need to. Lately, though, he would see her pause before the closet, gazing onto trousers, and her face was less occluded then, then there was a silent word in a gesture of her mouth, and it was, he believed, please.

  She was sad and lovely in those moments, and he’d need to draw on a sweater, and he didn’t know what the fear was wadding up in his stomach. Sometimes, he was sure she caught him staring too long at the white of her wrists, the petal of her earlobe, that she could see the question in his eyes. But she did not answer, and all he could do was watch her. He watched and knew if Alexandra was a liar, he did not want the truth.

  Perhaps, he thought, it was like the time he’d urged Gunner to accept a prison sentence so he’d not be suspected a rat. The idea had been to cloak him in punitive action, make him the republican martyr, an innocent. The idea had been Gunner would return home decorated by prison, the oglach who gave his freedom for the cause, consummate. But Gunner had wanted Jeremy to assure him there’d be gentleness in lockup.

  “There is nothing I can say to console you that isn’t an empty promise,” Jeremy had said.

  “So lie to me, Allsworth,” Gunner had said, “and learn to mean it.”

  Jeremy would accept Alexandra’s lies. He would accept them as long as one day she meant them.

  PART THREE: DIVISOR

  I said I’m in a hurry for freedom. He told me freedom was coming.

  It was like a boat coming to shore and my rushing into the water would only get me wet, not bring the boat in faster.

  —Kwame Ture, born Stokely Carmichael

  Chapter 1

  On Christmas Eve, Jeremy offered what he could, which was distraction. He offered it when Alexandra’s aunt Irene said she missed Shel, the only of them who’d ever sung carols. And he offered it when Mrs. Chen said that Irene had been held back a grade and couldn’t understand why it had only been once.

  When a song about rushing fools came on the radio, Mrs. Chen put down her cigarette. She caught Alexandra’s face in her hand as she slurred that Mr. Chen loved Elvis, and she wished they could see his hips go. Pelvis Elvis. Mr. Chen would do the Elvis Pelvis because he knew how to make her laugh.

  “Alex,” she said to Jeremy, still gripping her daughter’s chin. “My beauty, always was, look at her. She has that good Oriental skin. Orientals always have that clean look. You can see it in her, can’t you? Just like Mr. Chen.”

  “She is very beautiful.”

  Mrs. Chen’s hand dropped. “He was baby-faced her age too, and then he was dead.”

  Throughout the day, Alexandra whispered to Jeremy about what she couldn’t wait for, which was their departure, but as the evening settled, he told himself he would remember all the awful decorations, things cast poignant by their position in the home where she had been a girl. Irene and Mrs. Chen sat on the striped couch in their pilling bathrobes and graying slippers like old stuffed animals. They sucked striped candies, and beneath the tree, packages were still perfect. Something that Jeremy had never noticed: Alexandra’s hair was the type of black that expressed its environment, red in the Nevada sunlight, but bluish in the living room near the strung garlands. He was still discovering her angles, and yet, he was afraid it would be their last Christmas together, so he tried to encode it all in his memory. Tinsel. Holiday tissue box. She turned on a video of The Nutcracker.

  Alexandra on the floor, chin resting on his thighs, there was quiet amongst them, and Jeremy could see the dancers abstracted on the screen of her face in pink and blue puddles of television light. This was not the Hoffmann Nutcracker with the fever dream of doppelgängers or doubles or deceptions. The dancers looked like pieces of jewelry animated by light, and there were the animals too and the nutcracker prince’s sword cuts arcing in long, benevolent, lovely lines. For some minutes, Jeremy thought maybe they could stay that way forever. Maybe they could always be watching ballerina rats and families articulated in tulle, Alexandra leaning her cheek into him. Then it was over.

  “I haven’t enjoyed something so much without laughing at it in a long time,” Alexandra said as the video ejected.

  The fact of her face was honest but soft. The night was ending. Jeremy fumbled with the lamp as she raised herself from the carpet, the puddle of a long skirt stretching up.

  “You liked those sweets shaped like hamburgers at the gas station.”

  Alexandra shrugged. “Ironic food doesn’t count.”

  “Dancing-in-one’s-head sugar plums aren’t ironic food?” Jeremy said.

  “There’s something you should know,” she said. He could not see her eyes. He wanted one more look within this moment, this night. “I accepted a job in New York.”

  Jeremy stood then, as though it were an answer, though there had never been a question, some soft part of him vandalizing his own mouth. “It’s sudden,” he said finally.

  “Everything is sudde
n,” she said.

  Over, under—every turn of the weave of the blanket expressed itself in his hands. Jeremy set it down beside a heavy green dish of potpourri. He looked at Mrs. Chen with the breast of her shirt crumpled beneath her face. Irene reached for her, and Mrs. Chen slapped her sister’s hand away.

  Nodding, she was nodding. Fingertips thrust white through her hair. “There’s no way around it,” Alexandra said. Alexandra said, “You understand you’ll have to marry me to come.”

  Jeremy moved a stunned hand to his throat. On the sofa, her mother was choking on God, gasping rapid rhythms. There was a queer feeling in his foot as he stepped.

  Alexandra did not blink, said, “Stay in my life.”

  Chapter 2

  Their final night in Nevada, they went to a bar where half the jukebox songs stole quarters and paper snowflakes still bent at the creases hung from taped-up string. They drank beer cold enough frost hugged the bottle. When a slow song drew to the floor by the pool table couples, Alexandra let him lead her, sway. And in the light of cheap lager neons, a drunk man hooting in the back, folded against Jeremy’s wool shirt so his bergamot smell touched her face, there was a private, spacious feeling.

  That night, Alexandra and Jeremy held each other in her thin childhood bed so that neither would fall off, but also because she wanted to remain tight to him in whatever way she could. On a small table beside the bed sat a green glass vase and scratchy fake flowers, always in bloom, touched with clear glue dewdrops.

  She remembered out loud and quietly. Her autobiography returned to her in old jean jackets and corduroy dresses, the edges of which she could see in the closet, in a black backpack drawn over in Wite-Out. They bent around each other in her cartoon sheets, never after grade school replaced. She rubbed on a type of soda pop chapstick she’d not bought since high school, and turned her eyes over a white window panel intimating wild birds in lace.

  The next day at the airport, they discovered their seats had been, without cause, upgraded. She leaned her hip against an information kiosk.

  “But why?” she said.

  Jeremy accepted from her things passed she didn’t have hands for. Holiday pattern bags. A child ran by, rippling blue cape behind. To use her hands, she put on the sunglasses that made everything lavender.

  “When the luck is good,” Jeremy said, pastel and happy, “the answer is not why. It is yes.”

  Chapter 3

  Returned to London, they made calls. To Genevieve, to his parents. Their cheeks pressed together over one phone, and in the telling, the news became sleight.

  “I’ve tricked him,” she said, “into marrying me.”

  Jeremy caught on to the act, would say that he was not a credulous man and enumerate his cynicisms. He declared himself worldly to the work of black cats crossing ladders. He said the only certifiable things were bad British weather and scheming politicians, and no one believed him. They observed he was a dupe, but Alexandra’s dupe, and radiating good fortune.

  In the days that followed, Alexandra involved him in choices that didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The costumes, the place. But one day Mrs. Allsworth was very small and hunched as she showed Alexandra a photograph of her own wedding day, her eyes big with need. She offered, then, an ivory silk dress. And though it would never fit, they pretended for a while, made the motions of tradition.

  Chapter 4

  Alexandra rested on the couch, illuminated by useful machinery, and Jeremy read Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” He had given a vintage copy of the Night Stories to Alexandra for Christmas, and she had given one to him, both knowing he loved it.

  The other phone in the inner pocket of his robe was vibrating. He did not need to glance at it for the name. Instead, he looked at Alexandra, the lean silk of her draped on the couch. It was already the time when she had taken her sleeping pill, began drinking drowsily, when the feeling was that sleep was sinking slowly as through water. These days, she liked to get drunk in front of the computer or television until her arms went swimmy. She’d speak to him with her eyes half-closed until she faded. There was in the flat a sense of the edges bleeding. After-dinner smells ran in from the kitchen: coconut and curry, powdery dish soap, a sandalwood candle.

  Alexandra adjusted a pillow, gave a sigh without resentment. He saw her seeing him rise from his seat, laying the book mnemonically. He turned toward the kitchen, where he took calls from his mother. He switched the phone carefully. In the doorway, he was already saying, “Mum.”

  Alexandra’s eyes ran dreamily over houses in the computer on her lap, gray marble and circle fixtures and windows onto vistas of cement ordered in cluttered grids. “I will not catch cold,” Jeremy said. “I wear a hat and a scarf.” He leaned against the counter, angled such that he could say silent things with his face to Alexandra. She laughed. “Soon,” he said. “We’ll visit very soon. We’ll be thinking about your roast.”

  To her he returned, tall glass of whiskey outstretched. A tinkling of ice on glass announced him. “Am I a psychic or a charlatan?” he said.

  Her upper lip curved over the tumbler’s edge. “Depends,” she said. “Is the future pretty?”

  “I will be in your future, which is the bedroom,” he said.

  Through a doorway, he released music composed fifty years before from a radio. He adjusted the volume so that a dead woman’s voice urged toward the living room. She sang of what a man didn’t need to say, pled to be believed. Drops caught drops in the liquid run down the window. Alexandra came in, lay on their bed. She pushed socks off with her feet: a familiar message.

  Cool fingertips reached through the dry, cottony air. A new old song vibrated against their scalps. Her shirt was in his mouth, then her ear. He looked down at her cheek flushed against a sheet, lavender fragrance turning mineral as the warm moisture came up off swoops of back and the round of thighs. Under sounds beyond language, he searched for the secret folds and wisps of hair lifted up off skin, and the room was shot through with bathroom glow come from the parted door that illuminated the tiny parts of her. A bird feather somehow at the neck, and then her hips rolled upward. Gasp like reaching for life.

  Their chests rose and sank slower and slower. It was the time of night when dark gathered in the corners spread, sleep insinuated. “Love,” she said like a discovery.

  “You do?” he said.

  She was beginning to slur. Her eyes had stopped fighting for real pictures, sleep pill settling. “Sometimes I think about everything we don’t know about each other, and it is more than our life.”

  “We met each other after every time else,” he said. But she was already asleep.

  Jeremy covered her, closed the bathroom door. He waited until the numbers on his watch signaled it was time. Outside, he dialed.

  “Son will not follow Mum at twenty-three hundred,” he said. “Everything is fine, Mum. Everything is great.”

  “Son,” Wright said, “we need to talk.”

  Chapter 5

  In the apartment, Alexandra pursed her lips, tidy, but her pulse was elaborate with wanting to know where he’d been. She was in one of her old college T-shirts, and her legs were moist with lotion applied with the productive fervor of not knowing what to do, where he’d gone. He came to her. Got on the couch. He put his head in her lap, and she didn’t touch him.

  “I just needed to speak to a friend.”

  “You needed to speak to a friend in the middle of the night, outside.”

  “It wouldn’t work to speak in the flat.”

  “Because you can only speak secretly, in secret places?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  In the standing, her knee knocked his chin, and even then, there was a flicker of wanting to reach out, apologize. But she did not apologize. She watched him touch his smarting face.

  “What are you hiding?”

  “I’m not.”r />
  “You’re not hiding as you speak secretly, in secret places?”

  He rounded through the spine, fingers laced. He leaned his forearms against his knees. “Maybe I was nervous,” he said. “Don’t be sore.”

  “Nervous.”

  “We’re getting married,” he said. “It’s normal.”

  She braced her face, swallowed. Holding the doorframe stilled her hand. It was normal, his feeling, and it opened an eerie hole she did not want to peer through.

  She looked at her hands, now wrung smooth. “I thought we were better than that.”

  Chapter 6

  In the days that followed, she reviewed lives, the long scroll of them on Cathexis. Sometimes they were only sentiment without eloquence, but sometimes they were stunning little quadrangles recording seaside champagne occasions or a mother’s recipe produced by her son, and Alexandra’s gestures on the screen expressed her Favor numbly, unstoppably. It was research for the new advertising job or it was a very good excuse for it, the cough syrup haze of minor curiosity softening whatever it was between her and Jeremy. Jeremy had decided to pursue social work in New York, and he would sit working on his graduate school applications, and she could think, across the room from him on the sofa with all these snips of celebration held in an electronic that it was not so difficult to live well, and she would crack open the silence, say, “No one’s told them only celebrities canoodle; everyone else hangs.” He would have something not quite unkind to say that separated them from everyone else, that made her believe that he was not so unsure after all that they would keep on together, clasped.

  There were, too, groups she didn’t Cathect into entirely. She was a lingering eye, a reader. They were people with addicts for daughters or alcoholics, and they would write ragged accounts of their hurt, tell each other they knew how it felt, they did because of their father or son. Better was the outcome sometimes, and she liked these strangers with bettered families best. She was sure she was not so miserable as the rest because she only looked and because, too, though Shel would miss the bugles of stargazer lilies in her hands as she took the aisle, the popcorn fuzz of baby’s breath in her hair, they would be closer in America. They would not be so unredeemed, centrifugal.