Esker takes the A to Jay Street–Borough Hall holding wobbling tiger lilies in dun-gloved fists. She’s in a terrible mood. The flowers, for one thing: it’s completely unlike her to arrive bearing flowers. Her stomach feels all peppery, alive with a curiosity and hope she’d rather be done with. Oh, she is disgusted with her hope. These inane blooms shedding rust on her coat. The lipstick—lipstick!—she put on before she left and now purposefully chews off. The quaky intestinal heat.
She knows what this is. She is not an idiot.
There have been two phone calls since Saturday morning, when Wally bloodied his knuckles knocking on her door.
Saturday evening, him to her: “You’re not allergic to anything, are you?” “Ragweed,” she’d replied, a moment before she realized he was talking about the menu for Monday night. A beat. “I’ll leave that out, then,” he’d said, his dry humor singing like an arrow through her slippery heart.
Sunday, her to him: “What you said, about worrying about Ann, what did you mean?”
She had called him at Game, having looked the number up. In the pause she could hear restaurant sounds: music, cutlery, low murmuring crosshatched with high laughter and clinking glass. She’d felt voyeuristic listening, almost prurient. She fancied she could hear, too, the fullness of Wally’s indrawn breath as he thought before replying. When he did speak, his voice seemed stripped, immediate, flat with candor.
“I meant, I think, that I don’t understand how she hurt herself.”
And there was another pause as Esker thought. She was sitting in her kitchen touching the starfish dish towel, which was hung over the back of a chair. “Me, too. Me, neither. I was thinking about that, too. I don’t have any information about it.”
“It’s nothing I can put my finger on, but . . .”
“Yeah.”
Cutlery, gaiety. “I can’t talk here.”
“Right. I’m sorry. I just wanted to say that I heard what you said the other day and I didn’t say back to you that I’d been worrying a little, too. If that gives you anything.”
“Thanks for calling.”
“She’s my favorite student,” Esker had blurted then. “I mean ever.” And later she’d berated herself for saying that. It didn’t matter that she thought it was true; to what end had she said it? What had she been hoping to create between them with those words?
Now, Monday night, Esker emerges from the subway and it’s all pretty, in the magical way that moneyed neighborhoods are at Christmastime: lights everywhere, in every single tasteful color, and plenty of tiny whites plotted starrily through the branches of well-tended sidewalk trees. The cold moves quickly through her layers of clothing. She strides down Pierrepont enjoying it, enjoying not resisting the clean force of the wind, but letting it race down her collar and up her sleeves and through her thinnish wool pants. It is already the shortest day of the year, a thought which leaves her feeling oddly bereft.
The doorman knows her. They smile hesitantly at each other. While he phones up, Esker fidgets around the small lobby, embarrassed by the flowers, by the hour. Her awkwardness springs from concerns about neither privacy nor propriety, but from what she believes to be the baldness of this transition, the effortful shift from A to B—in this case, from daughter’s tutor to father’s dinner guest, so tritely heralded by the bouquet. She brushes at her coat, a fact from childhood registering blandly in her mind: nothing removes pollen stains.
Peering back through the glass doors which just admitted her, Esker sees the decorated street with her own reflection fit over it. The lights that fall within the boundaries of her image make a partial constellation of her body: The Limbless Maiden, it would be called. Right there, next to Orion, see? All fiery head and breast, all thought and feeling, no body, the body nothing but black ether. She finds herself checking for Albert in the glass.
She realizes that when she says “Albert” she doesn’t mean Albert; she doesn’t even know Albert really, not having been in contact with the man in nine years; Albert’s ghost is really her ghost: the version of Albert that she has invented. Or not her: her brain, some part of her brain she’s barely on speaking terms with. But this ghost is derived from a real person; he really existed; they existed, Esker and Albert, and the rest of her brain insists on inserting, preserving, as many real details as it can. So the ghost is endowed with a multitude of characteristics not typical of phantasms: body temperature, for instance, and odor (Esker thinks of his scent as Basketball, a fresh, rubbery smell), and a small, persistent sniffle. Often he wears a knit cap, and sometimes he has the pale little beard he’d flirted with that last summer. He is not infrequently humorous, although he rarely speaks, just intimates things with his looks and silences, his appearances and disappearances. Sometimes he yawns; sometimes he rolls his eyes; sometimes he ignores her so coldly and completely that Esker wonders why he bothers to haunt her at all. Or why her brain bothers engineering the haunting; she understands this is really the question.
If he were dead instead of gone, she might have to believe in ghosts, so assertive is his presence, and so seemingly independent, as if generated from a source beyond her own despotic mind. She wishes he were dead instead of gone, instead of missing in action. His ghost must be fueled by her latent belief that he will resurface. Those words he’d said, leaving—“I don’t know about this.” As though it were a question they’d have to get back to. Which she’s been waiting to do ever since. Like Penelope at her weaving for seven years, eight years, nine years, ten, only Esker hasn’t even been weaving; she’s been waiting for Albert so that the pattern may resume itself. As it is supposed to do.
But tonight in the glass there is only her reflection, her and those showy tiger lilies, all lit up green and red and gold by the trick of superimposition. Her and a Cantor dust of lights: growing infinitely more sparse without disappearing altogether. The elevator comes and she boards, heaves shut the old-fashioned gate, and begins to rise at a glacial rate. More pollen shakes loose from the long stamens, as though her hands were shaking, but it’s only the vibrations of the motor, of course. Immediately upon stepping out on the fifth floor, she smells the subtle weave of the homemade curry and hopes it’s not coming from behind the Jameses’ door. “Don’t have cooked for me,” she thinks, and immediately berates herself, “Idiot. You’re invited for supper,” which is so pitiful she can’t help laughing and is therefore still smiling helplessly when Ann opens the door.
Ann has apparently dressed for the occasion, in battleship-gray velour bellbottoms, a silvery-gray ribbed turtleneck, and tiny silver earrings in the shape of Tenniel’s hookah-smoking caterpillar. The air casts, a little garish amid the rest of her palette, stick out from her cuffs. “Hey,” she says, wheeling backward to make room. Dark silver, like residue of tumultuous weather, stroked across each eyelid tonight.
Wally comes out from the kitchen area in a heathered maroon sweater. It reminds Esker of the way jam would be drawn in a children’s book. He smiles at Esker with the quiet, complicit gravity of an old friend, which of course he is not. The hairless top of his head gleams as he takes the flowers from her arms. He has a dish towel slung over one shoulder, and it looks ridiculously nice up there, sort of forgotten, untroubled about. Esker can’t get her smile to go away, and in a moment it turns into a laugh.
“What?” says Ann.
She shakes her head. “Nothing. Glad tidings. You look nice.”
“It’s my mount.” Ann pats the wheelchair’s metal side as if it were the flank of a horse. “Old Betsy.” She neighs.
“What can I get you to drink?” asks Wally, and they all waltz along then, for a bit, to the tune of conventional hospitality, over to the kitchen area for cider and crackers and caponata. Esker bristles, instinctively, at the loveliness of this last item, which she adores—she is determined not to be affected by the idea of anyone’s preparing food for her. But she sits on a high stool and finds herself dipping cracker after cracker into the eggplant spread. She can’t think of anything she wants to say, and Wally is making peanut salad-dressing, which leaves Ann to talk. This proves no difficulty.
Ann is in rare form tonight, entertaining them with wicked imitations of Prospect School teachers. First she does Buddy, with his bad back, crouched awkwardly as he accompanied her in the ambulance. With little else besides a few words, winces, smiles, and moans, she captures precisely the duality of his extreme niceness and what Esker would never have quite called his hypochondria.
“Here’s Rhada,” Ann announces next, and suddenly her features go all Clara Bow and her voice all deadpan-droll as, in heavily dentalized Brooklynese, she intones, “So we’re gonna let x equal this sawlt shakah”—which she picks up from the table and shakes vigorously, scattering crystals—“and let m equal the ratio of the radius to the diametah of the peppah. Wit’ the absolute value of m nevah to exceed yuh nose. Plawt it. Go.”
Then she does Florence, the headmistress: cultured, cultured, cultured, always touching her collarbone, playing vaguely with the vaguely ethnic beads she favors, caressing each syllable, drawing them out nasally, “As I was saying, ladaladalada . . . really a scathingly brilliant article I read the other ladaladalada . . . on the principal capital endowment funds ladaladalada . . . according to the NASDAQ IQ BMW—” At which point Ann manages to indicate that Florence has inadvertently gotten her fingers stuck fast within her now-tangled strand of beads and cannot yank them loose.
Wally, acquainted with this particular talent of Ann’s, is appreciative, but Esker is in fits. “You’re a demon,” she says, recovering herself. Ann beams. “Oh God, Florence!” Esker smacks her brow. “I was supposed to get back to her about some development-committee thing before the holiday!” Laughing has made her all hot and light, and she fans herself at the collar of her plain white blouse. Then, as if she were at home, she slides off her shoes and folds her legs under her on the stool, a child’s pose. It makes her lean forward, and she helps herself to another cracker.
“She gets it from her mother,” says Wally, genially, from the stove. There follows an instant stiffening, an almost audible crackling freeze, over in the vicinity of the wheelchair. Ann has gone rigid with terrible composure. All of a sudden: cheekbones. And a neck like a marble column. Oh! She’s going to be a beauty, Esker realizes with a start.
“Being a demon?” Ann inquires coolly.
“Being a mimic,” Wally clarifies, squeezing a lemon half over a pot. He seems unaware of or unconcerned about Ann’s mood shift.
Esker looks from one to the other, trying to gauge what has just happened. Has Ann been humiliated? Clod, she thinks, experimentally, of Wally.
“Did you ever see her do Willette? A friend of ours,” he explains over his shoulder to Esker. “Gorgeous. Jamaican. Set designer. Like six feet.” He squeezes the other half and shoots the spent rind into the garbage. “Or Nuncio? You’ve seen her Nuncio, I’m sure.”
“Not that I recall.” Ann sounds exquisitely bored.
“Who’s Nuncio?”
“My maître d’,” says Wally. “A character. You do him, Ann.”
“I think you’re confusing us. Different repertoires.”
“Oh, you could do a good Nuncio.”
“Oh, not as good as Alice’s.” Matching his intonation note for note. Really snotty, actually. Given they have company. Esker is getting irritated with both of them.
“You don’t do me, I hope?” she asks.
“No.” Ann studies her simply. “You’d be hard.”
Esker feels relieved and slighted. “Hard,” she assumes, means too nebulous a source material, too lacking in qualities that might be played up.
“Want to go outside with me?” asks Ann.
“What?” Visions of maneuvering the wheelchair into the rickety old elevator, taking off just as they’re about to eat.
“Out on the balcony. You can see Governors Island.”
Esker glances at Wally, who looks up from bean sprouts to meet her gaze with a complicated brow. He gives her a nod that is almost contained in his eyes. Not a clod.
“We’ll eat in five minutes,” he says lightly.
Ann, gliding around posts, leads the way to the French doors.
Esker has been feeling, since yesterday’s phone call, like a bit of a spy, or a double agent, for, although Wally hasn’t asked her to, now she feels responsible for observing Ann more particularly. And Esker, who would make a disastrous spy, follows Ann into the frozen block of night like a tracking shot in a James Bond film, and she thinks Ann must sense it, and at that moment Ann turns and looks at her and Esker bursts out laughing—what on earth is wrong with her tonight? all this uncontrollable laughter—and Ann just looks at her, one of those marvelously impassive faces wise-ass kids know how to level on their elders, and it dissolves Esker all the more; she wants to cup Ann’s fine cold chin in her hand and kiss her on the hair.
“I’m sorry. Nothing.” Esker whacks herself heartily on the chest a few times.
“You’re giddy,” says Ann.
“This is an unbelievable view,” says Esker, facing riverward. The cold cuts through her blouse and waters her eyes, so the lights of lower Manhattan shimmer and tremble roundly.
“He likes you, incidentally,” says Ann.
Esker smiles politely back over her shoulder.
“I’m sorry he brought up my mother. He’s very . . . magnanimous about her.”
By the careful pronunciation, Esker recognizes it as an SAT word.
“It makes him feel good that he can share her with everybody.”
“Share her?”
“Especially now that she’s a public figure.”
An error in the verb tense, thinks Esker. “Now?”
“Well, with her latest movie, especially.”
“What?”
Ann cocks her head. “You didn’t know? You’ve never heard of Alice Evers?”
Esker is literally dumbfounded. She’s been walking by movie posters featuring Alice Evers every day for the past month; they’ve been posted on scaffolding down on Chambers Street, same face after same face after same face. But the image is grainy, and black and white, and she never connected it to the color-drenched, pulsing portrait in the Jameses’ living room, nor did she ever connect the name Alice Evers to Ann James; why would she? Especially since she’s assumed Ann’s mother was dead. Who hangs a portrait of a divorced spouse over the mantel?
“I thought your mother was dead,” she admits.
Ann laughs shortly. “Don’t you guys have access to all that stuff anyway?”
“What stuff?”
“You know, student records?”
“They’re confidential.”
Ann scoffs. “It’s not like they’re under lock and key.”
“Actually, I think they are.”
“I hate to tell you.”
“You mean you’ve . . . ?”
“It’s totally common knowledge. We sneak in the office all the time and read stuff we’re not supposed to.”
“Like what?”
Ann shrugs. “You know, like if you have a crush on someone.”
“What, you have a crush on someone, so you sneak in and read their grades?”
“Whatever you can find. Stuff.”
Esker feels she ought to be chiding Ann, but the whole situation is too ridiculous, and Ann’s bearing so self-assured. Is it common knowledge? Maybe she alone has been in the dark. Here she is supposed to be on reconnaissance, and all she’s learning is how little she knows. It occurs to her Ann may know more about her than she does about Ann. “You’re completely shivering,” says Esker, brusquely. “Is that your teeth?” She means the jackhammery noise emanating from Ann’s direction. “It’s very pretty out here; now let’s go back in.”
They do, and the warmth and the smell of curry envelop them like shawls, and Wally has lit the candles on the table. Then Esker, still trying to adjust to what feels like a sudden drop in oxygen level, hears, “No fucking way,” from Ann and looks up to see a living woman, freckled and honey-maned and handsome in a peacock sweater and blue jeans, standing in front of the bricked fireplace directly beneath her likeness.