The Word Exchange (6 page)

“Do you know where he is?” said Ana. “Did something happen?”

From the twangy tension in her voice, I guessed she’d been crying. The sick feeling redoubled, punched up by a feeling of panic. For some reason I don’t really understand—had he come up earlier?—I thought she was talking about Doug. It took me, evidently, too long to reply, because she whispered, “Oh, God,” and then she did start to cry, and I knew those were Max tears, always kept on reserve, and I wanted to die.

“No, no,” I said, waving agitatedly. My skinny companion raised a skinny eyebrow and took a long, challenging sip of her sloe gin fizz. Scissoring off my stool, its duct tape sticking to my slacks, I exited the bar almost at a run, then breached the pocket of smokers loitering near the door to reach a quietish bubble down the block.

“Sorry about that,” I said, sounding, I thought, cartoonishly sober. “I was just passing a very loud bar. I was at the office late”—I looked at my watch and discovered with an ulcery pain that it was three—“and, you know, the trains at this hour.” Then I thought, morosely, about the trains at that hour. It would be four-thirty at least before I got home.

“So you haven’t heard from him, I guess.” Her voice then was so Ana, so quavering, conjured her so perfectly, that I imagined it as an audible strand of her DNA. If I could only capture it somehow as it passed through the tiny holes of my phone and make it manifest, I could re-create her whole there on the sidewalk, probably wearing a leather vest or a silk kimono or a pair of vintage orange velvet hot pants (not that I’ve been keeping track), something else impractically fashionable for the July night, and I would kiss her.

Instead I said, “He’s here. We were working on something—I’ve been helping him with a project—and he just decided to stay.”

“Can I talk to him? For a second?” The relief in her voice made my elbow weak. I didn’t want to go back in that bar, guide the phone into the hand of Max’s not cupping some other girl’s breast. Watch while he lied to her. Like
I
was lying to her. My dulcarnon status became painfully acute. “Oh.” I coughed. “You know Max.”

After a pause, during which I pondered what this meant (and worried that she might, too), she said, “Comatose? Snoring?” She tried to sound cheerfully rather than neurotically proprietary. It was hard to tell whether she was pretending for my sake or hers.

“Like a rhinoceros,” I said, not sure if rhinos even make noise, just thinking of sleep apnea and rhinoplasty and working up a sweat, a little resentful of Ana for reminding me of my place in the moral universe. “I’m sure he’ll call first thing. And I’m pretty tired myself.”

“Of course,” she said, sounding a bit peeved. “I’m so sorry. I was worried. Couldn’t sleep. He’s been, you know, disappearing a lot lately. I just wanted to make sure he’s still alive.”

I found it odd, bordering on disturbing, that she didn’t know Max was out celebrating Hermes’s sale. Was it remotely conceivable that she hadn’t yet heard the news? But what I said was, “You worry too much,” trying to imagine for a moment it was true, that her worry was unfounded. (If she were in love with me, it would be.) “Goodnight, Girl Friday,” I (apparently) added. “I never even knew what you were wearing.”

And as she asked, “Bart, are you drunk?” I closed the phone, delicately and of course sadly, waiting on the pitching curb for the world to stop slow-dancing with me.

But that’s not really where I want to end. If we’re talking about love, it seems only right to return now to the very strange story Ana told me earlier tonight after waking me from my Ana-soaked reverie. Ana, who seems so very alone these days, and who, until this evening, has resisted my solicitous (though perhaps silent) offers of aid: an ear, a shoulder, etc.

We sat thigh-to-thigh in my dark office, the door locked, her whispering. In other words, I was finding it somewhat difficult to concentrate on the actual sounds she was forming rather than on the warm, breathy sensation of them exiting her mouth and entering, so sweetly, my very vivified ear. And I admit that I didn’t really start to listen until she said, “Bart, are you listening?”

“No,” I said, prudently.

For a moment she looked like she might cry, which was a very terrible thing, but then she touched my knee, which was a wonderful thing, and said, “That’s why I like you, Bart. Honesty is a virtue.”

This declaration made me think back to, e.g., the Night of Slow-Dancing on the Curb, and I temporarily felt very terrible again, but she resumed talking shortly after that, and we got to do the whole thing over from the top, so I had to quickly swap my terrible feelings for something like focus. When she showed me the
J
page in Dr. D’s Aleph, I assured her that there must be some simple explanation.

“Like what?” Ana asked in a tone of hopeful skepticism.

“Remember, there’s a reason Synchronic recalled these things,” I ad-libbed. That seemed to have a slightly ameliorating effect. “Or maybe he finally made that ‘correction,’ like he always threatened.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. (I was a little curious about that myself.)

The pneumatic messages were similarly easy to dismiss. Dr. Thwaite, I told her, was almost certainly crazy, but also harmless. And the fake definition was probably a prank.

“A prank?” she said. “But it’s not funny.”

“Define ‘funny,’ ” I said. She didn’t laugh. “Get it? Define?”

“I get it,” she said.

The Alice thing was harder to refute. I proposed we go together to look at Doug’s phone, but she refused. Even when I offered (bravely, I thought) to go alone, she said no, which I found kind of flattering. When she said, “Bart, let’s get out of here,” I was feeling so emboldened that I offered to escort her to Dr. D’s apartment. And she agreed.

In the lobby Rodney unwittingly undid a lot of my good work when he said, “Y’all find him, then?” Ana, looking panicked, turned to me, and I invented a story (which I happen to believe) about how Doug must have slipped out while Rodney was on break. “Haven’t taken a break since five,” said Rodney, looking at me oddly. (Maybe he was offended? Thought I meant he’d been shirking? Or maybe he just wondered how I’d gotten Ana alone on a Friday night.) But somehow, through a combination of chuckling, making expressive gestures with my arms, and wishing Rodney a good night, I managed to keep Ana calm and (crucially) get her out the door. (And I have to admit, I liked taking charge.)

When we got to Doug’s and didn’t find him in, I barely remember what I said to hold back the storm. I think I may have promised to call
the police if he didn’t turn up by morning. (That could be awkward. Especially when D confronts me about letting things get out of hand. But tonight is tonight. The morning’s not until the morning.)

When Ana and I stepped back outside, I had no time even to hope: a cab passed; she hailed it with her Meme and said, “Come with me?” I was so overwhelmed that I got in first, before it even finished braking. Then she also clambered aboard, almost into my lap, and suddenly there we were—here we are—a few short blocks later, at her apartment, alone together. (“Alone together” is a phrase I once had no appreciation for.)

Before tonight I’d never been inside. This only really struck me as strange during my ascent of the fourth and final flight, at which point my heart (maybe just taxed from the climb, or maybe in thrall to the bewildering thought that I was about to enter Ana’s apartment) began to beat violently. After we summited the stairs, I had to grip the wall for a second.

Until fairly recently I wouldn’t have found the ongoing noninvitation to what was formerly Max and Ana’s place in any way surprising. But as Ana finally led me, somewhat apologetically, inside (to insinuate that I’m judging
at all
would essentially be a crime, but the myriad mounds of clothes and other breakup detritus piled pretty much everywhere actually made it hard just to open the door wide), I realized, with a mild sense of astonishment, that Max has already had me over to his new house twice. Once in the summer, right after he bought it (I’m not sure Ana knows he’s had it so long; I certainly don’t intend to apprise her), and then again a few weeks ago, for a putative “housewarming” (an event so ennui-inspiring that I’d barely unzipped my coat before deciding to leave).

Tonight, standing in the middle of Ana’s living room–cum–dining room–cum–study, I couldn’t have been more shocked by the contrast between their living quarters if I’d licked an electric socket.

Max’s place isn’t without charm. I mean, it’s a 19th-century carriage house in Red Hook’s beating heart, mere blocks from the water. (And hence, alas, that monstrous new Koons sculpture, theoretically meant to keep the water back.) From Max’s roof deck there’s a view of the bay and that great, insensate goddess whose green-patinaed majesty has heartened New World comelings for ages. He also has: two working fireplaces, a small home sauna, a manicured backyard, a regulation-sized billiards table, etc. The master bath boasts a large mural on a crumbly
chunk of wall, allegedly painted by Banksy back before we knew who that was. Beneath one set of stairs is an enchanting, antediluvian film-screening nook. (Of course in his office Max also has a CubeYMax 3D printer, a glyph projector, a simulator, and an eerie, “immersive” gaming booth that hooks up to the Meme.) In other words, Max resides in an advertisement from some heirloom men’s magazine.

But the apartment he shared with Ana for more than three years? The place she still calls home? Stepping across the threshold left me more or less dumb. For one thing, it’s
very
small. (Conceivably smaller than my apartment.) There’s the room you step into, referred to above; the tiny kitchen, off to the left; and past that, a bathroom. Then, to the right, and not even shielded by a door, is the bedroom. (A room it gives me jitters just to think about.) But that’s it. Le tout. You can see almost the whole thing from the welcome mat.

Also, though, and maybe even more amazing, it’s kind of full of crap. I mean
not
crap—so much of it is irresistibly
great
—but
stuff
: light fixtures with weird, wattled textures whose referents on the flora-fauna spectrum are fairly ambiguous; mismatched dishes (many on display in the sink); lovely little glasses ringed in old, worn-off gold; plants in varying stages of vitality; a dusty vacuum bent with scoliosis; a small ceramic rhino head mounted to one wall; ancient musical instruments (dinged French horn, dulcimer [?] lute [??]). In a corner, a scary scissor mobile hangs, sword-of-Damocles-like, over an “easy” chair. (Ha.)

All the chairs—and the number beggars plausibility (seven, maybe?)—are mounded with throws and faded tapestries and pretty flattened pillows dense with flowers and ladies and fleurs-de-lis. There are hooks dripping with scarves—plaid, tasseled, silk—alongside coats and towels. Shelves crammed with sweaters, sheets, tennis rackets. A messy shrine to boots and shoes. A veritable explosion of hats spilling off a rack on the back of the door (pillbox, cowboy, bike helmet, fedora). Dresses from every decade loll on a clothing rack with wheels. (The shivery fabrics feel almost animate, as if they could slither from their hangers.) In the kitchen, skull-shaped salt and pepper shakers grimace beside a fat ceramic man with the word “COOKIE” on his stomach. (If one squints, he bears a slight resemblance to Doug.) Even the windowsill has tenants: a wind-up robot, a plastic archer, a tin ziggurat, a rabbit eating a carrot, an empty flower vase, a bourbon bottle (also empty).

On one of the overflowing shelves I was astonished to see some old
CDs, and even more dumbfounded by which ones: mixed in with a few I assumed to be Max’s were many I knew were not: Joan Jett, The Avengers (!), Kim Gordon, Bikini Kill, and a bunch of jaw-droppingly great old country and blues vocalists, too—Wanda Jackson, Loretta Lynn, Rose Maddox, Lefty Frizzell, Nina Simone, Robert Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I was agog. (Ana saw me looking at the music and laughed a little self-consciously. “I know—who still has CDs?” she said, misinterpreting my scrutiny. “Getting rid of stuff is sort of hard for me. I bought all those in high school.”)

But I was even more amazed by the art—
her
art—which is everywhere, and nearly all on paper. I always thought Ana worked mostly with glyphs—I could swear that’s what she told me once—and there is, in fact, a big glyph projector in the bedroom, beneath the sim’s massive screen. But there are also scrupulous, photo-realistic drawings in black and white: of thunderheads curdled over spent, empty fields; of the burned-out chassis of old cars; of giant, silent glaciers, calving ice; of thin women in slips, ecstatically dancing, the whites of their eyes almost seeming to shine. Excruciating drawings. Stunning. Almost paralytic. (I actually wobbled on the edge of a worry that I might lacrimate.)

And the paintings were just as fucking good. Richly saturated hues, stylized and bare. Strange angles that implied occlusion. A fixation with words in bygone form: newspaper headlines, shredded phonebook pages, haunting half-bare billboards. When I made some observation about linguistic affinity and heredity and Freud—so obvious, I worried that I sounded like a philistine—Ana gave a startled, gargled laugh. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider. And I was immediately engulfed in a warm, prickly compunction.

It was the photos from her past, though, that totally clobbered me. Some were actual snapshots, patchworking the walls. (Those were old, of course, mainly family tableaux; there’s no such thing as candid photos anymore.) One—of Vera, Doug, and a young Ana chasing each other with pies, Ana with a whipped-cream beard and Vera wiping laugh-tears from her eyes—caused my hand to rise unbidden to my chest. And not only because they all looked so
happy
then, but because I found myself searching the frame for other kids, and I realized with a cold, jagged jolt that Ana’s childhood must have been extremely lonely. I literally can’t imagine growing up—turning into a person—without little Emma bumping constantly along behind me, like a blond tetherball, trailing her
tattered blue blankie and calling “Hossy! Wait for me!” Or, for that matter, without Tobias’s ongoing barrage of minor physical assaults, which kept me adorned with purple hearts. (And which my gentle parents rendered still more painful, and confusing, by penalizing with a tepid, paradoxical form of corporal punishment on us both.)