Esker is a mess. She’s a mess. What happened? Something’s gone asunder and she can’t forgive herself, she’s been going around the apartment all week with her hands clutching the material at her stomach, as if she’s literally holding pieces of herself together. All these years of unnamed vigilance, and she let it go, suddenly, last Monday, and now she resembles a crazy person, an abstract painting, all the parts of her anatomy fitting crookedly, gapingly together. She’s not eating, eating seems an unlikely proposition, and she has this vague notion that there’s no place for the food to go anyway, no place within to contain it. Catching glimpses of herself in the bathroom mirror and the tarnished oval glass over the coat rack, she is scared by what she sees: doesn’t she actually appear jumbled, undone? Her hair sort of at a canted angle to her head, her eyes at odds with their sockets, her teeth like an ill-advised afterthought.
This has never happened to her before. The last time was different, different circumstances altogether, and she’d had no life of order then to lose; it had been a matter of building one, slowly, where none had existed, drifting through the surreally humid days and nights of that horrible August, in and out of her empty space, with her untethered body, drifting nearly clothesless, mindless, through the vacuous heat. She’d found misfitty bits of furniture people were throwing out; she’d come home from long wanderings sweaty from lugging a broken lamp from Chinatown, a three-legged end table from SoHo, a step stool from Battery Park City. She added these to her milk crates and futon; she bought duct tape and sandpaper and roach poison; she took cooling baths and looked at her iterated snowflake, with its riddle of infinite surface area, taped over the glass. When she thought of Albert, she just dimmed her mind, a good trick; she’d discovered she had a dimmer switch, and she’d turn it down and he would lurk a little, outside the guardrails of her conscious thoughts, like a hopeful ghost, or a surly ghost, or even a hurt and bewildered ghost, but no more than a ghost, which she could dismiss, she could decry, as something aberrant and unrelated to her, something she was not responsible for, and having no legitimate business taking up space inside her mind. In this way she was able to manage it, with him as her incorrigible haunter, and she his unwilling, inconvenienced hauntee.
Then had come September and the beginning of her first semester at The Prospect School. She’d been only four years older than the oldest students, and had for that reason bought two very plain, very conservative skirts, one khaki and one navy, and got her hair cut in what turned out to be a perfectly unflattering style; she’d been going for something reminiscent of Betty Crocker, which, she realized after the fact, happened to be the same general hairdo neighborhood as Miss De Witt. Albert’s ghost, like Mary’s little lamb, followed her to school some days. At first she fought with him, but there was too much energy in sparring, so she learned just to fire off little oblique disparagements and in this way kept him at bay. Her work kept her busier than she had imagined; there was much order to be brought to planning lessons, interacting with faculty and students, grading assignments, and writing evaluations. She took satisfaction in buying three new notebooks for organizing different aspects of her work; a box of expensive colored pencils and one of plastic-coated paper clips; and a bag of gourmet-flavored jelly beans for a statistics project she created with the eleventh-graders. The months revolved obligingly around the calendar; it was November and then February and then May and then August again. She got through the first year with her dimmer switch intact; she could do any number of years now in the same way, she knew, and she had, she had done this for three and then five and then nine years, a breathtaking, terrifying accomplishment.
She hadn’t meant to be shattered when Albert left. As they had both known he would. It would’ve been less confusing if he’d died or hadn’t loved her. That she would have known how to compute. But he didn’t die and he did love her. And still he left to marry somebody named Randy Berkowitz, his old high-school girlfriend, and to start a family with her. This was the plan, this had been the plan always, as long as she’d known him, but it had never seemed very plausible to her; the fact that the plan had been in place when they met had made it seem weaker rather than stronger, and when he left to follow through on it, as he consistently reminded her he would, she couldn’t, could simply not grasp it: it was like trying to picture a finite universe, or a small-minded God. That he could both love her and choose not to be with her—she could not reconcile these two facts. She tried, because loving him, as she believed she did, seemed to require her understanding how these facts could coexist, but the truth is, she was never able to wrap her brain around it. Her failure to do so became her rationale for why he left: she had failed him—in failing to fathom his choice, she’d failed to love him properly. It was her shame, her limping little brain that hadn’t loved him right.
And now, just when she needs him, Albert’s ghost has gone missing. All week he hasn’t shown his face, not even in her dreams, hasn’t so much as smirked knowingly over her shoulder or cleared his silent, transparent throat. She’s tried to conjure him and drawn only a blank. All that comes to mind is Wally—Wally, who’s really real, who’s left two messages on her machine, who makes curry, who kisses, who has a wife. There he is in her mind, like a locket with a faulty latch that keeps springing open. All day his image keeps presenting itself: his solid, unfussy girth; his keen, intelligent mouth; the short, curling wisps around his exposed scalp; his unimpatient eyes. Already, unbidden, a list of things she likes about him has enscripted itself in her mind. She likes the way he keeps silent before responding to something she’s said, even if only for a few seconds; he has a way of helping himself to an entirely self-possessed moment of thoughtfulness before speaking. She likes the way his ability to sense humor and his ability to sense sorrow in a moment are not at odds with each other. She likes being startled by what he chooses to say out loud. She likes his voice, which is itself like a thing, an object, and she has saved it on her machine. It reminds her for some reason of a boat. She likes—it gets worse—she likes that he likes greens; no, it’s not exactly that; it’s that suddenly she likes greens because it’s one of the things they’ve talked about, so that, the last time she went shopping and walked past the collards and spinach and kale, she felt tenderness toward them, toward the stupid actual greens, and she bought some and chopped them and sautéed them in butter and garlic and they were so delicious and she felt ashamed, eating them, and threw the rest away. Last night, on the news, they interviewed somebody from the Department of Health about food poisoning and salad bars, and she felt a rapid lunge of affinity for the awkward-looking bureaucrat in his awkward-looking suit, because Wally had told her a funny story about a visit he once got from the health inspector. Not even a story. Two sentences. It’s not that she likes everything about him. It’s that everything that reminds her of him has suddenly become precious. Horrible, horrible. She is afraid.
Albert, you deserter! She feels bereft without the sour vigil of his ghost. Not bereft, unprotected. Her throat long, exposed, across the temple’s marble block. This was her dream last night, and Wally was in it, with a piece of broken glass from her front door in his hand, and his hand was bound up in the starfish towel, and blood was dripping from it, and she’d begun kissing the blood from his hand, which only made him bleed faster.
School vacation makes things worse, because she is without the order of her usual routine. Since her parents died, she has been in the habit of spending Christmas Day with Francie and Arthur Gluck, old friends of her parents who live in Yonkers, but they are in their eighties now, and two weeks ago Arthur had called to say Francie was recovering from hip surgery, and, sorry, sweetheart, we’re not quite up to hosting Christmas dinner this year, but we’d love to see you that day for tea anyway, if Francie’s feeling a little better by then. Esker had lied and said she’d been invited by someone from work, and when Arthur had said, “Oh, that’s good, honey, you have fun, then,” his relief was palpable, or at least she had imagined it was. So she has had this intense block of sheer solitude, more time spent unrelievedly alone than she’s had since the August she moved in, and the effect of so much solitude is like a metamorphosis; she feels almost as if she’s changing into a different creature altogether, a kind of bird, maybe, hollow-boned and not bound to earth. How many more days before she turns to the mirror and sees plumage, a beak, a beady yellow eye?
Wally leaves a third message on Wednesday. The first message, left the Tuesday immediately after they’d seen each other, had been short; he’d obviously expected it would be followed up soon by a real conversation. The second message, left the following Sunday, had been longer. He’d inquired after her Christmas, updated her on Ann’s heels (casts off next Saturday if the final X-ray looks good), named a movie he’d like to see, mentioned that Alice was flying out that afternoon. Today’s message dwarfs the first: “Is this because I didn’t eat the toast?” Pause. “Bye.” The little joke undercut by a note of sadness in his voice. And finally it gets through to her that she’s being unkind by not calling him back; she hasn’t even been capable of thinking of that for the past week, but his voice sounds sad and she hears it, finally, she gets it that he’s suffering—ohhhhh, what a clod she is—and she’s able to come out of her shmatte-wringing stupor long enough to dial the number. She gets Ann.
“Oh,” says Ann. “I have a present for you.” It sounds like an accusation.
“Really? What?”
“Just something stupid. It took me three days to make it.”
Ann made her something. It took her three days. Esker goes cold. What is she doing? What has happened? Where is her dimmer switch, where is her self-control? Where is her starched white apron and her frilled white cap? Where is her neatness, her hospital corners? “Ann James, Ann James,” she says, sounding as light and pleasant as she can. “You made me something?”
“Well, it’s a stupid thing. I thought I would’ve had a chance to give it to you by now.”
Oh, clod; oh, idiot: Ann is hurt. She’s barely begun to be in their lives and already she’s letting them down; the only sure way is to back out now, to back out smiling, smoothing her white apron. Esker, you idiot: what were you thinking, what were you thinking? She let herself begin to want something. This is old, don’t be fooled, this is where corrosion sets in, a little bit of want and the oxidation begins, obscuring the clean lines beneath it, obscuring her nursely duties, knocking loose the frilled paper cap, the pristine raiment tightly buttoned up the back, without which—the frightening sound of buttons scattering across the floor—she will grow monstrous. For a moment she’s Genie again, looming large, frozen, over the fragile paper houses of her neighborhood, all manner of destruction ready to ensue at her gentlest tread. She wants to grow very small. She presses the heel of her hand against her brow.
“Esker?”
“Just thinking. Do you want to do math this week?”
“Yes.”
They make a date for Saturday, the 2nd. “The second already,” says Esker. “A new year.”
“Not if you’re Chinese,” says Ann.
“Well,” says Esker. “See you then.” And she hangs up and takes off her pilly gray thing and slippers and puts on boots and her coat and her amethyst thistle earrings, which she’d forgotten about but just came across this morning, and she heads uptown, toward the scorpion-tail end of West Fourth, where it starts intersecting other streets.