The Word Exchange Read online

  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.)

  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 tho
ught 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.