by E. J. Levy
“How do you mean?” Gretchen asks.
Lisa can hear Gretchen chewing, tart little toothy sounds. “What are you eating?” Lisa asks.
“Sorry,” Gretchen says through a mumble of food. “Rice cake. I didn’t think it’d be so loud.” There is a hollow swallowing sound. “So what makes sense?” Gretchen asks.
“My father was a philanderer,” Lisa says. “I appreciate their charms.”
Alone on the couch that afternoon and dazed with hunger, Lisa considers what Gretchen has told her of Rat Choice. According to the theory, developed in the 1950s from neoclassical economics, people are predictable. The theory assumes that humans are rational beings, and that given a set of exogenously given preferences (assumed to be universal, unchanging, and self-serving), a person’s behavior can be predicted. Everyone, according to the rats, has a set of definable interests that can be ranked hierarchically, and everyone can be depended on to act so as to maximize these. Sometimes the theory worked. According to the article in the New Republic, rational choice could tell you why drivers join AAA—because the organization offers member perks. But it is at a loss to explain idealism—why, for instance, comfortable, middle-class, white kids from New England joined the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. The theory cannot account for this. The rats know nothing about it. Self-sacrifice. Hope. Altruism. Crazy love. This is precisely what the theory cannot account for. The model would call them irrelevant, inexplicable as hope, love, fidelity. In the theory, interests are simply given and are assumed to remain constant over time. Nothing, it seems to Lisa, could be farther from the truth.
Lisa has forgotten to eat, for a day at least, she thinks, or maybe two. Her fridge is empty save for mayonnaise, old eggs, expired milk, and capers. At times like this, the body is a total pain. Like a pet, it demands its feedings. So she’s forced out into the world to get some groceries. It tires her to have to eat; the need seems unending. Each day, her body makes the same demands anew.
She grabs her coat, walks out the door. The sky is a quilted gray. It looks like snow. As she walks the two blocks to the grocery store, Lisa thinks about her visit with her mom. She cannot help but note how radiant her mother has become—toned, vibrant, luminous in her misery, alive with pain and desire. At seventy-two, Lisa’s mother is having more sex than she is.
Lisa first learned about the body from her mother, as she learned from her the plays of Beckett and Brecht, learned etymology and ants. The body, when they considered it, was discussed as if it were a car one must keep well tuned. Her mother spoke of exercise, of calories, and fat; she spoke of folic acid, zinc; the latest from JAMA. When, as a child, Lisa had asked questions about sex, her mother answered her with a cold and clinical accuracy. She never spoke of passion, and Lisa had not imagined her parents in the clench of a strong desire. Even when Lisa grew up and came to love, kissed the girls and blew the boys, desire remained for her abstract, remote as a rumor.
Across the street from her childhood house, her best friend’s parents fought. The father slapped the mother’s ass as he passed her where she tended the barbecue grill. He kept a mildewed archive of Playboy in a room off the laundry room—a room empty but for the stacks of slick magazines, which Lisa and her best friend perused till desire became, in Lisa’s mind, linked with the smell of mold, the cold damp of a small white room, a cement floor, exposed pipes. Something chilled and damp.
At the grocery store she hauls things off the shelf, indiscriminate. Apple juice, potato chips, Milano mint cookies, ground chuck, and wheat bread. She throws them all into her cart. Tangelos, marshmallow fluff. Stuff she has never considered eating, never even considered food, she takes.
The check-out line at the grocery store is long, and her thoughts are unruly. She keeps wondering how it started between Richard and the Smell. Where did literary criticism turn to love? She wonders if they might have taken up doing something as simple as shopping. She was, he’d said, a former student; outside the classroom, where was it that they met? Beside her are racks of Seventeen, the busty images of Cosmo. She wants the details now. Specifics, she thinks, will give her satisfaction, peace. Contain it for the moment, at least. Without them, it bleeds into everything. In every café grocery store classroom bus stop she imagines them meeting here. In every street. Was it here, was it here? A madwoman’s mantra.
She pulls out the index cards to distract herself from thinking. And then they spill. Pouring into the Cosmo rack and across the gum-rubbed carpeting. “Fuck,” she says, and squats to pick them up. The guy behind her squats to help, and she tells him it’s okay, she’s got it thanks, but still he tries. When she straightens up, recovered now, he holds out several cards to her, face up, their writing plain as day. I am afraid … I regret … My secret is … He glances at the cards he holds, returns them to her with an air of stifled interest. The smile he gives her looks like a smirk.
He is a short Semitic guy, with a buzz cut and wire-rims, a gray tweed coat, chapped lips that are trademark grad student, a dry flakiness around his eyes, excessively long lashes. She guesses from his pallor that he’s in the sciences, or a student of some Slavic language or other—Russian lit, maybe the classics. He has the desiccated smug affect of the grandiosely studious.
He chats her up in line. Asks if she’s at the university. About her field, the focus of her research. She wants to tell him her field is love, her focus infidelity. Instead she tells him she’s not very focused these days. He offers her his hand to shake and gives his name as Matt. She doesn’t offer hers.
In the parking lot, he rattles up behind her with his cart, and asks, not facing her but more as if he’s asking the whole lot, if she’d like to get a cup of coffee? Despite herself, she’s touched.
“Thanks,” she says, “but I have errands.”
“Forget it,” he says, bitterly, as if she’d led him on. As if he’d known for years that she would fail him. His eyes are on the tar of the parking lot as he walks away. His shoulders bunched up like shrubbery around his throat. A tweedy hump of resentment, moving off.
Richard used to say she was reliable. That with her, he always knew what to expect. At first this was a compliment; later it was not. She thinks about Rat Choice, which makes her think now not of Swedes but of a maze. The rational choice model posits interests as given and unchanging. The things the theory can’t account for are the things that count: altruism, love, grief, irrational hope.
“Wait,” she yells at Matt’s resentful back. “Wait up.” She takes long running steps to catch him. “Sure,” she says. “Coffee sounds just great.” She feels so sorry for them both. And for a moment, seeing his expression, she is almost hopeful. A whole new theory starting here, she thinks:
Irrational Choice.
Matt is not an attractive man, not by a long shot, but she feels a certain kinship that might approximate attraction in a pinch. His hurt is so obvious. She feels a keen longing to alleviate it, the way she imagines nuns must feel, a selfless desire to relieve another’s suffering. She decides that if he asks to sleep with her, she will say yes, though she feels no desire for him. When he opens the car door for her, he asks, “What is your name, anyway?” She lies to him and tells him: “Beatrice.”
Sunday would have been their anniversary, and Richard calls her, drunk. His voice is sad and felty through the phone. He asks if she remembered; she tells him, yes, she did. He says he doesn’t ever expect to feel that way again, the way he felt about Lisa. “I can’t imagine feeling that way about anyone ever again,” he says. “I can’t imagine feeling that in love.” Talking to him, she feels time lurch, resume its unsteady trot. He sounds so familiar. “Not even with me?” she asks. “Not even with you,” he says. He tells her he has concrete around his heart. It hurt so much to leave. “But you left me,” she says. “It still was hard.” The girl and he have broken up. And Lisa, trying to disguise her glee, asks, “How old was that chick anyway?” “Twenty-nine,” he says, “but she seemed much younger. Or maybe I’m just feel
ing old,” he says. “You’ll never be a child prodigy,” she says, quoting back to him what he had said to her when she turned thirty. He laughs. And suddenly they are relaxed, familiar again. They tell each other jokes. He says the local bus company has a new slogan, has she heard? In an affected German accent, he says, “Vee have vays of making you valk.” She laughs. “That’s good,” she says. She tells him her latest idea for a New Yorker cartoon: a man showing trophy fish points to one and says, “I caught that one in the stream of consciousness.” He laughs. Then Lisa tells him the one about the parrot that started to curse a blue streak. His owner threw him in the freezer as punishment. First he heard a frantic fluttering, then silence. The owner opened the freezer door, peeked inside. The parrot was sitting inside, contrite, legs crossed, wings folded. “Are you ready to come out?” the owner asked. The bird nodded. “No more cursing?” The bird nodded. “Okay,” the owner said and replaced the bird on its perch. “Just one thing,” the parrot asked. “Tell me: what did the chicken do?” They strangle on their laughter. For the first time in weeks, she sleeps.
On Monday morning Lisa’s mother calls, and Lisa unthinkingly picks up the phone. She asks Lisa how she is, then she tells her that she has begun reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Lisa’s fave. She likes them enormously, her mother says, “all that she suffered, blow on blow.” It seems a bizarre reason to like Woolf. For a moment Lisa is offended, the way she always is when she hears art explained away as the by-product of suffering, not work. Years ago Lisa gave her mother To the Lighthouse to read, and now she asks her mother if she liked it, if she ever read it. Her mother says she liked it, but that now she appreciates it more, knowing it was based on autobiography, knowing that she suffered so.
Lisa can hear her father shouting cheerfully in the background. “Tell her I say hello,” he says.
“Did you hear that?” her mother asks. “Your father says hi.”
“The bastard,” Lisa says.
Her mother laughs.
“Is Dad being nice to you?” Lisa asks.
“Oh,” she says, airily, “we’re working things out.”
Her hopeful mother.
She has read too many Russian novels to believe in happy endings, but still she does. She thinks they will get back together. She thinks they will meet on a bus, or in a bed. She is a stupid with hope. Umberto Eco is reading at a local church, and so she goes, thinking maybe she will run into Richard there. The room, when she arrives, is full of men who are not him. She scans the pews. Eco looks like an egg with a beard. Eco says he usually appears with his translator, Will Weaver, and that it is strange to appear alone. Eco reads two pages from The Island of the Day Before in Italian, “to prove I can read Italian,” he says. Afterward he reads in English about jealousy and about hell. Hell, one tormented character says, is not what we have been told. It is not unremitting despair but unending, useless hope.
After the reading, Lisa drives uptown to KinhDo to get some take-out Vietnamese. She gives her order to the guy at the cash register, pays, then stands there waiting for her food, scanning the room, when she sees them. She doesn’t know if it is the Smell or someone new, the speed with which we move on dizzies her. All her imaginings, she sees now, have been wrong. She has never seen this girl before. She has never seen Richard so happy. The two of them are tender, unreserved—bodied—as they never were. Their lips are wet and smiling; they snap the heads off shrimp. Their fingers glisten with oil.
It is nothing rational that prompts Lisa to start toward them, but more like reflex, like the day she’d pitched the plate at Richard’s chest; choosing what her mother hadn’t chosen all those years—to make a scene, make a fuss, make a mess of things but try, to love this man who once loved her. When Richard raises his eyes to her, they seem filled with happiness, and for a moment she thinks he’s glad to see her, as if they’d intended to rendezvous, that maybe this is not a date.
But when Richard says her name, it’s not in welcome but in warning: “Lisa.” He slides from the booth and stands like a bodyguard between her and the dark-haired girl, but nonetheless it reaches her, the faint scent of avocado. Her skin aches with what might be anger or grief.
“I didn’t expect to run into you here,” he says, hands on hips; it’s a new gesture, unflattering; she wonders if he’s picked it up from her.
“That makes two of us,” Lisa says. “Or rather, three.” Lisa stretches out a hand to the girl, stepping around Richard as she does. The girl is not what she’d imagined: black hair to her shoulders, freckles, black-rimmed glasses; thoughtful, bookish. Such confrontation is more suitable for daytime TV dramas than for life; the books Lisa loves avoid it, but she’s tired of avoiding things. Of rational choices.
When Richard moves to intercept her, he is fast but clumsy and a little off balance: his left arm swings back toward the booth and collides with a water glass, a soup bowl, and liquid is everywhere—hot broth, iced water.
“Fuck,” says the girl, jumping up and colliding with Richard.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his arm protectively encircling her. A waiter races over with a rag.
“No worry,” the waiter says. “Clean up fast.”
“You okay?” he asks the girl again—and suddenly there’s nothing more to say. He’s said it all. By reaching for someone other than her.
“God, I’m so sorry,” the girl says, reaching for Lisa with napkins in her hand. When Lisa doesn’t take them, the girl takes his hand instead and says, gently, smiling, “I’m Becky,” clearly clueless that there was ever anyone but her.
Lisa walks out without waiting for her order.
Outside on the street, the sky is inky black beyond the orange sodium glare of the street lamps and Lisa is disoriented. Every direction she looks in seems like the wrong one, every street a dead end. Cars race past in front of her on Hennepin Avenue and her heart throbs in her chest. There is a buzz in her throat, a pressure behind her eyes that makes her think she might cry. She walks to the parking lot at the side of the building and goes to her car, which—like herself—looks worse for wear, but still it runs. She gets in and shoves the key in the ignition. She hesitates before starting it up. She hasn’t the slightest idea where to go from here.
She leans her head on the steering wheel and tries to cry. She sits there, willing the tears to come, dry-eyed and ridiculous, forehead to the wheel. To help herself along, she tries to remember “telling details,” as she coaches her students to do. She recalls how she and Richard had nearly driven off a cliff on their way to see Mount Rushmore in a January snowstorm last year during their Kitsch Tour of the Midwest. She remembers how Richard phoned her, after her kitty disappeared, and meowed to the tune of the “Internationale” to cheer her up, insisting it was a collect call from France. She recalls how they used to eat fat California burgers and drink cold beers in a dark neighborhood bar around the corner from their place and did not need to talk; the sex they had on his office desk and once in the elevator on the way up to their department; how she once saw him pick up a rubber duck in a bath shop (where she’d come to buy a gift) and turn it over and over in his hands, scowling at it from every angle, as if even this merited serious consideration; she remembers things they have eaten, bottles of wine they tried, positions in sex, the taste of the biscotti they made together and his wine-poached pears—simple physical things.
But it’s no use. She cannot cry. Her body and mind are not on speaking terms. So she starts the car, shoves it in gear, and drives. She’ll go to Gretchen’s or to her mom’s. Or she could pull over at a pay phone and call up Matt, the guy from the grocery who gave her his number after coffee and asked her to call. Her heart is pounding; her throat is tight. Panic, she recalls, was named for the god of wilderness. She heads for home.
She takes the parkway fast, rounds a lake and then another and then she is in the woods. Passing Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary, it occurs to Lisa to stop, but she has spent too much time already in this da
rk wood; she is ready to be done with it. She’ll find no Virgil there to guide her; she’s going to have to make her way alone for now and maybe for years to come, alone, and the thought of this—of herself alone, without Richard, in the vast stretch of time that is her future—makes her, finally, cry. She sobs big, ridiculous, hiccupping tears. Her vision blurs, and she reaches for her bag, fumbles inside for a Kleenex, and finds the cards instead. She pulls them out and drops them in her lap, and slows.
The curves of the parkway are gentle, and when she rolls down her window, the cold autumn air feels good against her wet face as she drops her speed from 45 to 35 to 25 to 20 to 15 to 10 miles per hour. Then 5. At this speed, when she holds the stack of cards out the window, those accumulated sorrows in her hands now, they do not slice away from her and scatter like buckshot, but rise gently from her palm, lifting away, fluttering briefly, before they begin their inevitable descent. In the rearview mirror, they look like enormous moths, or like a flock of birdless wings, like some strange new creature making its way, awkwardly, hesitantly, for the very first time, into the terrible beautiful bodied world.
SMALL BRIGHT THING
ON CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE, JUNE KIM’S MOTHER IS COLlecting Oriental rugs. When June calls to discuss her upcoming visit home, her mother tells her about her latest: a garnet-and-green flat-woven kilim from a small mountain village in Turkey. Her mother describes the care she will give it, how she will spend the morning rearranging furniture to make room—a thing she never does on the occasions when her children visit. June has to wedge herself into her mother’s new life like a splinter.
When the conversation turns to flight times and specific dates, June detects a note of anxiety in her mother’s voice. “That is if you still want me to come,” June says. “Of course. Of course, I do,” her mother says, and then—in one of her motherly reversals—she grows eager, almost conspiratorial, as if she has a secret to impart, but if she has, she doesn’t reveal it by phone, and as the weeks pass and the date of June’s visit approaches, June begins to hope her mother won’t.
