The Word Exchange (7 page)

I also saw lots more “snapshots” via Ana’s profile on Life. (N.B.: I didn’t open it; she’d left it up on the sim.) While Ana was making us some ziti, I wandered into the bedroom and scrolled through some of them. Most were of A with her friends—whose names, embarrassingly, I seem somehow to have gleaned. I.e., Ana’s Saint Ann’s friend, Ramona, a balletically thin, milk-skinned brunette who’s maybe a little plain but who comes across as very striking. (After several of her visits to A at the Dictionary, I’ve decided it’s [i] her glaring, strobelike sense of humor, which is borderline frightening, and [ii] her incredible eyes, which burn with a vivid, sort of satyresque fire.)

Her closest friend seems to be Coco. (My sense is that A often stayed at her place when things with Max hit a patch of black ice.) Coco’s more classically beautiful than Ramona—I’m pretty sure she’s half French, half Ethiopian—and like Ana, she’s a visual artist. She appears to be doing quite well for herself. (Apparently she works mostly with lard.) I think it was Ana, in fact, who introduced her to her gallerist and helped her secure an artist visa.

Then there’s Audrey, 2L at NYU. I don’t know much about her, but I do know she has an evocative tattoo: a large prawn, discreetly curled on her tiny upper arm and captioned “Imperial Shrimp.” (Ironic commentary, so Ana has said, on being second-generation Shanghainese, and, more apropos, on the inverse relationship between her physical size and the size of her trust fund.)

I’ve never met the fifth woman in their group. Jesmyn, I think. From the photos, I can see only that she’s tall and pale and sort of gawky, with a prominent jaw and a weird, serrated fringe of reddish black hair. Kind of punk rock. (My type, in other words. Except that Ana is the only type on earth.)

Images of Max are noticeably scarce, which I can’t say breaks my heart. But there are still a few pictures of them together (the ones she hasn’t been able to part with, I guess): side by side on bicycles, going in for a shaky kiss; laughingly flattening each other on an ugly brown couch; waving from an old, mustard-yellow convertible, top down, in
some little New England town. A black-and-white one of them glamorously dressed for a friend’s wedding, looking like the stars of a Godard film.

And the point is this: wandering awestruck through Ana’s apartment, I felt a surprising, enlivening
ease
. Its cramped and cluttered and sane domesticity, its humble, humid
plainness
—its allusive symmetry, i.e., with where I live—had the palpable, heart-palpitating effect of causing my love for her actually to grow (if that’s possible) like a Mylar balloon. And it gave me a grudging new respect for Max, too.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. Because for me, even given everything, the night’s most exciting discovery came in the form of a bulging, broken box. Needless to say, it didn’t look like much. Dusty. Crammed with old trophies and books. (Ana trucked it from under the kitchen table to make a bed for me on the floor.) Naturally I assumed that the things inside belonged to Max and had been scuttled aside for easy dispatch. This inference seemed fair enough; one trophy displayed two figures fighting (or, as I later learned, practicing judo; in the moment, I failed to note their tiny ponytails). It wasn’t until I’d doubled over, bemused, to excise an old
Black Hole
(#2, “Racing Towards Something,” November 1995, Chris’s POV) that my sense of the box and its contents began to change.

I whistled, and delicately balanced the book on my palm. “I can’t believe Max
has
this,” I said, laughing, in what may have sounded like a derisive tone.

Ana instantly appeared at my elbow. Firmly—very firmly—she took the book back.

I felt chastened, afraid she thought I was making fun of Max. (Also a little aggrieved, or disappointed, that she was still so protective of him.) I started to say, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean—I just meant he always gave me so much shit—”

“It’s not Max’s,” she said tersely, her pretty cheeks pinkening.

But still it took me another long moment of staring dumbly at the battered box, which I only then saw was filled with dog-eared collections of amazing early-20th-century comics—
Krazy Kat, Max and Moritz, Little Nemo in Slumberland
—before I got what she meant.

“He gave me shit for it, too,” she said. Then quickly backpedaled: “Well, not really.” Her face had taken an even lovelier shade, approaching scarlet. “He said he thought it was cute. Every time he’d see them on
the shelf, he’d joke about it with me, or any guests who might be over. It was always the first thing he pointed out. The trophies, too. He loved trying to startle me into a judo throw.” She gripped my sleeve and did a sort of dancey hop toward me. My heart fired like a cannon. But then she let go and with a sheepish shrug added, “I almost hurt him really badly that way once, actually.” I shivered.

“Anyway,” she went on, “after a while I just got a little tired of it. I knew it wasn’t malicious—just Max being Max. And I thought if I put everything in here”—she gently kicked the box—“he’d get bored and shut up. And he did, eventually. But I guess I sort of forgot about it all, too. I haven’t looked at this stuff in years.” She shook her head, smiling, and covered half her face with one hand. But nestled in with the extant embarrassment was a note of wistfulness, maybe a little defiance. And I felt a tiny, irrational bubble of hope. Which was further buoyed when, after making this confession, she peeked between her fingers at me and held my eyes for a gratuitous beat.

But now it’s quite late, and Ana has kindly offered to put me up, as I said, and even clothe me in some of Max’s old things. And that’s the sort of offer I’m far too wise, and too weak, to refuse. She’s softly snoring so close to where I’m sitting writing this, at the kitchen table, and I’m really very tired. I’m afraid the lamp might wake her, and that she’ll find me writing, which would discomfit us both. (She might ask certain questions—who am I writing this journal “for,” e.g.—that I’d rather not answer, since I don’t really know.) I’m afraid, too, that this will all end. I’d like, for one moment, to feel the feeling I’m having.

So—adieu.

“Alice,” rasped Dr. Thwaite. “Is that you?”

I was thrown into a tense, cottony confusion. I’d called him not from my Meme but from the pay phone down the block.
¹
My name and photo shouldn’t have come up. Not to mention which name he’d used. It didn’t occur to me that he’d been waiting for my call. When I heard him wield the alias before I’d even said a word, I imagined I was being watched. I scanned the corner of Forty-ninth and Ninth, glancing nervously from the bodega to the lightbulb store, the glass fronts of both shops sparkling in the hard late-morning light. But all I saw was a man in a black overcoat crouched on a curb, clutching a paper bag.

“No?” I said, after a pretty robust pause.

“No?” asked Dr. Thwaite. “Are you sure?”

“Yes?” I said. But without much heart.

My name, though, as I’ve already noted, isn’t Alice. My name, in high Doug style, is extremely obscure. When I’d been in this world for less than a day, he began calling me Anana. I’ve never met another one. And though I’ve come over time to accept it, to think of it as a totem of me, for years I heard a bumpy nasal mountain range where my father saw balance and beauty. Anana: a palindrome—a reflection—a synthesis of
paradoxical extremes.
Masculin féminin
. In Africa it’s used for girls; in India it can be a boy’s name. In Swahili it means “soft,” “gentle,” “mild.” In Sanskrit, the prosaic “face.” Doug claimed it means “lovely” in Inuit, and in Gweno “harmonize.” It also rhymes, with “banana.” Add an
s
to make it many of me and it’s another fruit. My father’s favorite. Ananas, which means “pineapple.”

So what did it mean that Dr. Thwaite had called me Alice? That he’d guessed who was on the phone? Was he a friend of my father’s? Or somehow implicated in what I’d come to think of as Doug’s abduction? Did he know anything about my father’s whereabouts?

“Who are you?” I asked, deferentially clearing my throat.

There was a crinkled silence. Then, as I’d somehow known he would, Dr. Thwaite asked, “Who are you?” And for a moment I was eddied in a cold swirl of déjà vu: twelve years old, posed on a scuffed black stage in stiff blue dress and ruffled pinafore, Doug’s flashbulb firing white lightning from the dark front row of Saint Ann’s theater, Tobey Ringwald plucking the brass pipe of a true hookah from his pudgy, spit-glossed lips. “
Who
are
you
?” he asked, nearly shouting the last word.
I hardly know, sir
, Alice tells the Caterpillar.

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

A bitter gust stirred the man slumped on the nearby curb, and I was grateful for the windbreaker of the booth. “Dr. Thwaite—”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t call me that.”

I waited for him to say something else. Explain. Supply another name. When he didn’t, I was struck by an absurd thought: that I was talking to an unknown man who also imagined I was someone I’m not. I searched my purse for my Meme, to scan the number I’d dialed and confirm the man’s identity. But I realized with an unpleasant jolt that I’d left the Meme in my apartment. That wasn’t like me.

Meanwhile the pause dragged on. And something else strange happened: a woman in red glasses with a steely silver bob trolled past and glared at me in a way that felt very direct. Startled, I shifted my gaze to the man propped on the curb, who’d started drinking from his bag. With a strange squiggle in my gut, I squinted, to make sure it wasn’t Max. But the man was smaller. Skin tinctured gray. When another squall flapped his black hood back, I saw a small skullcap of dark hair. All of which I remembered in a flash when I saw him on the block again later.

“Alice,” Dr. Thwaite said at last. “If that’s who you in fact
are
. I think
you should come here. We need to talk about your father.” That made me shiver. I’d spent the time since I’d discovered my father’s absence trying to take Bart’s advice and not worry. Cajoling myself that I’d been infected with Doug’s paranoia. That everything was fine.

But in fact I’d slept terribly. I kept replaying the conversation I’d had with Doug the previous week in the train, about the strange emails he claimed to have gotten; the surge in Dictionary sales; that name, Alice, which had later turned up on his phone’s display; the bottles of pills he’d given me. My head had started to ache. The blankets felt too hot; just the sheets too cold. I’d wanted to get up.
Do
something. But I’d already tried calling Doug dozens of times. There’d been nothing
to
do in the middle of the night. And I hadn’t wanted to wake Bart, asleep on my floor.

Eventually, around three, I’d put on my Crown, snugly tucking in the Ear Beads, and programmed my Meme to release SomnEase
^®
—strictly verboten by Doug. But I’d streamed the smallest possible dose and slept only five or six hours before getting up again.

And when I woke, there was still no sign of my father. Well before I went out to call Dr. Thwaite, I’d rung Doug’s office and apartment. Talked to both overnight doormen. A few of his friends. Even considered trying my mother.

I hadn’t spoken to Vera in weeks—since before Max had moved out. For most of that time she’d been abroad—in India, China, southern Europe, and South Korea, visiting parks and gardens and doing some shopping for her no-longer-new East Side apartment—and I hadn’t wanted to savage her travels with my broken heart.

Or so I’d told myself. In truth, it was also by design: as much as I loved my mother, she wasn’t often the person I sought for comfort in hard times. She disapproved tacitly of crying. Preferred “helpful advice.” But her advice wasn’t always that helpful for me. I don’t do yoga; don’t have her green thumb; don’t really like window-shopping—especially not in stores where I can’t afford even the candles they burn to make you calm enough to take your wallet out—and am unmotivated, in times of sorrow, to host dinners or attend social events. I
had
been drinking more than usual, sometimes alone, sometimes with Audrey and Ramona, who tried to cheer me up with stories of all the egregious parties I kept not going to with them.

I’d also been trying to force myself to meet Coco on weekends in Greenpoint; her studio was next to mine, and she could almost always
make me feel better, whether I wanted to or not. She sang Bob Dylan and Sylvie Vartan songs across our shared wall and recited e. e. cummings poetry. Sometimes a scrap of paper weighted with an old coin would come sailing over with a note, e.g., “Do you still love me? Check the box: □ Yes □ No.” When it got late, she’d wander in with ramen and beer.

I hated distracting her—she had two shows coming up—but I’d been having trouble making work, which she knew. She often found me curled on my studio couch, streaming B movies through my Ear Beads, and she’d make me scoot over and rest my head in her lap. Then she’d stream the same thing on her own Meme even though she hated aliens and monsters. She also often gently suggested that I call my mom. “I’m just jealous, Nans. You can see her any time you want.” Coco’s own mother lived in Paris.

And there
were
lots of things I really loved to do with Vera. My favorite ways to spend winter weekends were with her. Going down to one of the city’s last movie theaters on Houston to watch all the brassy fall blockbusters that we both so enjoyed. Prowling the Union Square Greenmarket for anything that wasn’t a root vegetable. Taking greedy gulps of air as we wandered through the redolent rows of listing Christmas trees. (Vera didn’t believe in chopping them down to appreciate for just a few weeks, so we’d never had one when I was growing up. But we did both adore the smell.) Discussing my most recent projects or a biography Vera was reading during our volunteer shifts in the park. Taking the Q train all the way to Avenue J for wedges of the greatest pizza on earth, a sojourn we made just once a year. And—maybe the very best—we spent hours together baking: scores of shortbread wheels and linzer hearts,
sablés
, truffles, meringue. Ostensibly they were for friends and family, and we did ship lots of wax-paper-lined tins. But our muse had always been Doug, who was an enormously appreciative audience. (“And growing more enormous daily,” he’d say, slapping his gut.) The thought of melting butter and dusting things with sugar without his constant interruptive “help” seemed inordinately sad. And honestly, I was having a hard time just feeding myself then; after Max left I lost my appetite, which I’d previously disbelieved could happen.