Eleven Hours (10 page)

“Do you like it? What do you like about it?” she asked, and Lore, who hadn't been asked this question since coming to the city (and had rarely been asked it before), found herself speaking about the pleasure of taking a child step by step through the necessary adjustments, the small changes of jaw and teeth and breath, that enabled them to be heard by the world. For every child you had to find the key; the exercises or instructions that helped one did not help another. You had to be intimate with them—to peer inside their mouths, place a finger on their gums. You had to touch their tender throats, test the vibrations at the backs of their necks. These were children who garbled their desires and their protests, and the grown-ups in their world did not listen to them as they should, because you do not listen well to someone who cannot be plain.

“Do you love them?” Julia asked, and this was something people never asked at all. Often they told her she
must
love children, to work with them so closely. Lore paused. She said she wasn't sure. She
liked
them. She thought she'd loved a few of them, over time. She said that people who went on about how adorable children were never spent all day with them. Children were in fact ferocious little animals, sharp and canny and hurt and eager to inflict hurt themselves, who were trying to get what they needed in life. And she helped them to articulate those needs. That was why she did it. That, and because she seemed to have a knack for it.

Julia said: “I wish I could like children. But they scare me. They always seem to want something, and I don't know what it is.”

It was like that, from the beginning: the way they spoke. Lore had never known anyone who behaved the way Julia did, who went directly to the important thing, and enabled you to talk about it too. So that you never wanted to go back to the ordinary type of conversation, which was all mask, all a way of never figuring out what really wanted to be said.

Lore listens for pain, feels nothing. She can sense, beyond the pale-yellow walls of the corridor, the deepening of late afternoon into dusk. She follows behind an older man in a neat polo shirt and trim slacks, tensing as they pass the desk at the end of Maternity, but the nurse there doesn't look up fully, just buzzes both her and the man through. A sign tells her she's in Radiology, and she stops to take in a large framed picture. A shoreline somewhere or other, gray-yellow rocks, pink-blue water. There are little flecks meant to be people at leisure: walking along the sand, wading into the surf. One of the flecks (she moves closer) is a mother bending down to hand a fleck child an ice cream cone. Lore's mother had a picture much like it, though smaller, which she hung just inside the front door in each of their Hobbes Corners homes. She said if she had all the money in the world she would buy a beach house and lie in the sun all day. (Yet she never learned how to swim, never once went with Lore to the ocean.)
Sentimental
, Julia would have said of that picture—and of this one, too. Julia had strong opinions about certain kinds of paintings and movies and rooms. She despised easy beauty. Beauty, she said, should always have something ugly and off-kilter in it, something true. The paling sun in the picture is more than halfway down the sky; it is that moment in a long, hot day where the light cools and the sweat on one's neck and shoulders dries, and one is sated and sleepy from the sun sunk deep into one's bones. Lore leans in to see the name on the plate by the picture: Thomas Eddington, 1993.

After the cafeteria, Lore got to see the kind of art Julia liked. Not oceans and ice cream cones. Fifth floor, Austrian Expressionism: pictures by George Grosz and Otto Dix and Egon Schiele. A riot of thick paint, weird illumination, clashing colors. Egon Schiele looked out at Lore with the deep-bored, jutting-browed, demonic eyes of his self-portrait; there was something sinister in the tuft of hair just visible at his armpit. He clutched his skull; his white fingernails accused her. Julia was very still as she stood in front of each picture. Lore looked at Julia's lovely face, her sloe eyes, next to the rabid reds and greens and purples of the canvases, and was visited with the knowledge that this was what Julia looked like inside, smeared and inflamed. She understood. She took Julia's hand, squeezed it. Julia squeezed back. I have a friend, Lore thought.

“Ahoy!” calls some wag, a white-haired orderly trying to catch her attention; his stretcher needs to come through. Lore steps to the side to let pass a figure so covered up with sheets and scrub cap and tubing that Lore can't tell whether it is a man or a woman. A woman, she decides. She drops her head in unconscious respect. One long-fingered hand, all knuckles and joints, rests atop the sheet; the rest of the form, glimpsed underneath, is tiny and emaciated. Is the woman alive or dead? Alert or sedated? As a child, Lore was fascinated by the story in a book of Greek myths about a young man who appealed to Hera for eternal life. Hera, malicious, granted his wish literally. He had asked for eternal life, but he had neglected to ask never to grow old. And so the years went by and the man aged; his back became bent, his skin discolored and sagged, his limbs shriveled and eventually gave way. Centuries passed and he became smaller and drier and more withered until finally he was no larger or sturdier than a grasshopper, and Hera brought him to Olympus and put him in a little cage, where he was forced to emit his dry rasps for her entertainment for eternity.

Perhaps the woman under the sheets was once very young and beautiful (at least, she would have been young) and had wished for what the young man had wished for, and now here was her recompense. A quiet muttering rises from beneath the sheet and Lore imagines that the old woman is dreaming of herself with beautiful, lavender-tipped iridescent wings; she is singing all day long for a goddess. It might be lovely if we could have immortality even via hallucination, even the hallucinated immortality of a hallucinated insect.

Sentimental
, Julia repeats, of Thomas Eddington's painting.
Okay, okay
, Lore replies, rattled, and turns away. Who is she to argue? She is not a maker of things; she does not have that talent. She cannot draw or paint; she plays no instrument; her writing is blunt and practical. Her creative gift, if she has one, is to help children learn how to speak. Into that she pours her patience, her instinct, her ingenuity.
That's all right with you, isn't it, little one?
she asks, touching her belly.
Anyway, it's what you got
.

She moves on. There are open rooms with big machines; one is being wiped down by a young man with a face mask hanging loose under his chin. He smiles at her, as if they know each other, and, caught off guard, Lore smiles back.
Suppose
, she thinks.
Suppose it was him I'd sat down next to at the museum
… But she is carrying the great weight of a different path and of someone else's child, and she walks on, her skin warm, her fingers tingling a little.

When Lore and Julia stopped back at the cafeteria for more coffee, putting off parting, Julia told Lore that there was someone she wanted her to meet. “My friend Asa. He needs a girlfriend.”

“And I just happened to show up?”

“No! You would be so right for him. I have the funniest feeling.”

Asa, Julia explained, was her oldest friend. He was handsome and funny and smart and unaccountably unattached. They'd known each other since they were born, their parents had been close at the university. Asa's and Julia's fathers were professors of history there; Asa's mother worked at the university press. Julia's mother had taught there too before moving to the West. Columbia University! It was very impressive. (Lore's mother stooped above the gasping lilies. She bent over the stuttering sewing machine.)

Full disclosure
, Julia said: She and Asa had been lovers, on and off over the years. They'd lost their virginity to each other. They'd shared their first kiss in kindergarten! But that was all over now. A youthful dependency they'd grown out of. They'd been unhealthily close at times. (Their mothers had carried them side by side in their wombs. Their birthdays, a mere three weeks apart.) The last, disastrous time that they had been lovers was two years ago now; the depression they'd moved in then, the sense of staleness and being unable to make things right, proved that they were meant, for the long term, to be merely the best of friends. And Julia intended to find Asa the perfect match, the person
right
for him, she repeated. (She herself was in a dreamy romance with Simon, an up-and-comer at his design firm.) Had she mentioned that Asa was devilishly handsome and funny and smart? And a good, good, good person—he worked for the Environmental Defense Fund, saving the air and the oceans.

“The air and the oceans,” repeated Lore. “That sounds like a lot.” But Julia didn't smile. She was in earnest—Asa was some sort of saint.

Door after door:
DO NOT ENTER: TEST IN PROGRESS
. Lore wonders what precisely is going on behind these right now, what dark masses are being sought, what ugly secrets explored. Four closed doors in a row. Lore believes she can feel the humming of waves penetrating her skin, jostling and disrupting cells. It might not be good for the baby; she hurries on.

All right, all right, Lore said—she would meet Asa. (But she did not think a saint would be the right person for her at all.) For weeks she put off their get-together. She was in love with her new friend; this Asa was superfluous. But eventually she agreed to meet him at an inexpensive Greek place, his recommendation. She saw at once that he would expect to split the bill, and this pleased her. It suggested that he would not feel entitled to anything in particular. His physicality appealed to her: his disorderly curls and dark eyes and Roman nose, the broadness of his shoulders. He was three inches taller than she was, bearish and with a slow, delighted smile. He had the city quickness, its self-assertion, in his speech and in the movements of his hands. It was true that he wanted to save the air and the oceans, and he began to bore her somewhat with the details. There were so many dilemmas. We had to stop relying so much on foreign oil, and farmers upstate were struggling to get by, you couldn't begrudge them a chance to make an easier living—but the companies starting to buy drilling rights would eventually tear up the land and poison the waters. The Chinese needed to grow their economy, just as we in the West had had our turn, but their coal plants might be death to the chance to put a brake on global warming. Those were just examples of the big picture; now he got down to details: mercury and triclosan, lobbyists and building codes. He went on too long, in his worrying and his enthusiasm, and then he caught himself and turned the conversation to her. How many kids in her caseload? How do you teach a child to make the
sh
sound? She showed him, and he practiced in earnest as if he really were a six-year-old who had to do it from scratch, laughing at his own trouble.
A man
, she thought, not a cocksure boy. The few lovers she'd had were generally able to keep only one opinion in their minds at a time, and believed the definition of being a man was to make you hold that opinion, too. The city had a softening influence on men, Lore observed, without taking away their masculinity. Asa had a deep, hoarse voice that spoke of imperfection, of vulnerability. When he kissed her at her door, his hand, which lightly held her cheek, was tender, but he did not shift to conceal the tight pulse of his erection, and she gave over then; she chose:
Yes
.

Asa had his own version of the Story of Asa and Julia. Well, Julia, he said, a bit wearily. The longest, longest story. Always Julia had sent him away and called him back. She wanted no one else by her during the year after the rape. He must be near her all the time. And he—he owed her everything; he wished he had died rather than left her to walk that last half block to her apartment (the man had struck her in the head three times before dragging her into the corner of the crumbling Beaux Arts lobby, where she lay, disoriented, until a couple returning from after-theater drinks heard her moaning). There was so little he could do. He brought her gifts constantly—candy, books, flowers, funny little handmade cards announcing his love. He walked her to her therapy appointments, because she cried desperately before them, saying she didn't want to be made to talk about it anymore, but he, coached by her father, gentled her along, saying it would help her in the end. (In truth, he feared the therapist would drive a wedge between them, push Julia to blame him, awaken her rage.) They began, carefully, to make love again. Then Julia abruptly decided that she was going to Germany to study painting and this had to be goodbye; she might in fact never return. Six months later she was back and they took up where they'd left off—until Julia decided she preferred to be with a goateed fellow who worked in a bicycle repair shop in Brooklyn. It was like that always, at nineteen and twenty-one and twenty-four. Asa would leave docilely when she sent him away, come back when she wanted him again. Like a monk (an exaggeration: he had his affairs; but nearly, nearly) he went into retreat during the hiatuses. Just as she couldn't seem to fault him in any way for the rape, he couldn't seem to be angry with her for leaving. She was just—Julia. He loved her. He had always loved her.

“But not like
that
anymore, of course,” he told Lore. When had this been? Four months after the Greek restaurant and the kiss at the door? Six? Perhaps it was not even a lie then. “Besides,” he said, “now there's
you
—” and he kissed her throat so gently that it sent tremors down her thighs and into her toes.

She did not in fact believe that he did not still want Julia
like that
. He was a man, after all. But she believed—she thought she saw, in his behavior toward her, and toward Julia when they were all together—that they had long ago put an end to it. His ardor left nothing to be desired. In bed he was frank and appreciative. It was hard at times to believe that he and Julia had ever been lovers at all. Julia was so fragile, so brittle even (when she was not well she did not eat much, and became quite thin and wan); how could robust Asa ever have made love to her without breaking her?