The Word Exchange

by Alena Graedon

  So—adieu.

  C

  com•mu•ni•ca•tion kƏ-myü-nƏ-′kā-shƏn n 1 : the successful bridging of subjectivities 2 : the act of spreading disease 3 : something foolhardy, to be avoided

  “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 w
ax-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.

  There was another, more salient reason I hadn’t been in touch with my mom: she’d never much liked Max. (“It’s not that I don’t like him,” she’d say, unconvincingly. “I just worry that he doesn’t really make you happy.”) I hadn’t told her yet that he’d moved out—I wasn’t quite ready for her commentary—and the thought of keeping up a front seemed very tough.

  But maybe even more than that, I also didn’t much like the man she’d been seeing, Laird Sharpe. Before he’d shacked up with Vera, Laird had long been one of Doug’s best friends. They’d been freshman roommates: Hollis Hall, Harvard class of ’72. They’d formed a trio with a man named Fergus Hedstrom, who was soon to resurface in all our lives. (I’d never met Ferg; he didn’t spend much time in New York. But all through my girlhood I’d heard filigreed stories of adventures he and Doug had taken—and occasionally still took—in places as far-flung as Norse Lake, Ontario; Barra de Navidad, Jalisco; and Angkor Wat: catching walleye, surfing, visiting shrines, drinking insalubrious amounts. For whatever reason, Laird never went along.)

  I was confounded by Laird and Doug’s ongoing friendship. And I likewise didn’t get why Laird was beloved by the audiences of PI News, the station he anchored. Before he’d found his calling, reporting small and large tragedies to the public, he’d done a stint for several years as an investment banker; he still often covered financial stories. And watching him, I always felt like he was still selling something (beyond what was required). I didn’t really enjoy the thought of him and Vera on their jaunt overseas, pitying my fate in some Beijing teahouse or Jaipur gem boutique.

  On the morning after Doug went missing, though, it wasn’t so much my pride that kept me from calling my mom; a slightly battered ego seemed like a fair trade for her advice. What welled up instead, swallowing everything—rationality, a desire for comfort, consideration of Vera’s feelings—was a powerful wave of protectiveness. I didn’t want Laird to have the satisfaction of knowing that Doug was gone, or wondering if it had anything to do with him and my mom.

  And to be candid, strung out as I felt from sleeplessness and worry—even before I talked to Dr. Thwaite—the person whose voice I wanted to hear most that morning was Max’s, despite everything. Despite a month of embarrassed crying in the stairwell when attacks of sadness would hit on my breathless ascent, picturing the poor neighbors rolling their eyes as they lifted pasta lids, wiped kids’ noses, turned up the volume on things. A month of rashly commanding my Meme to erase his number and most of his photos, texts, beams, only to bitterly regret it later and try to get them back—an operation the Meme claimed was “not actionable.” A month of inane incantations—“I can’t believe this is happening,” “I don’t understand”—to each of my (also progressively less understanding) friends.

  Despite everything, and of course knowing better, I still wanted to feel Max’s massive arms around me. His pointy chin jutting into my head. “Such a cute, cute nutjob,” I could almost hear him say. “I’ll bring you lots of nice chocolates at Bellevue.” Right away I reprimanded myself; even in my fantasies Max was an ass.

  Doug, the teasing king, had always disapproved of Max’s brand of it. When I pointed out that I teased Max, too, and noted Doug’s own affinities, Doug would shake his shaggy head, face drooping in sad folds, and say, quietly emphatic, “It’s not the same, Nins. His isn’t generous. He tries to discredit you.” I usually thought that Doug was missing the point, or that I’d misrepresented things. I tried to explain that the difference between my own blithe imitations of Max’s lumbering, athletic stride, the halting way he often talked, and his relentless befriendment of nearly everyone we met (bartenders, dry cleaners, lots of girls on the street) was a difference only in method from the way Max teased me. But Doug didn’t miss many points. And I’d been revisiting this theory.

  In recent evidence to the contrary, for instance: after Max was done breaking up with me, he tried to shake my hand, as if we were business associates. That had upset me (obviously). In part because I blamed his work for our estrangement. And there was no denying that things got worse after Hermes was sold in July. He’d had a lot more nights out and coming home trashed, or not at all. He started traveling all the time—Shanghai, Rio, L.A.—and spending money like he’d won a game show. He could waste $16K on dinner, including guests he’d just met. Soon he had a motorcycle and a car. He bought himself one of John Lennon’s guitars, a fur coat, a gold-plated toilet. (That was a joke, allegedly.)

  He naturally began to resent “my” tiny apartment and started looking at listings. “You wouldn’t get it,” he snapped when I asked, bewildered, what was happening. “You’ve always had money.” (Which wasn’t totally fair—I remembered lots of successive nights of beans and rice as a child when my parents hadn’t felt like going begging to my grandparents. But the underlying point was sound.) Max bought things for me, too, of course. Perfume. Spiky jewelry. Electronics. I gave most of them back. Faster than I knew what was happening, he’d turned into a person I didn’t know, or like. Our life became a never-ending fight. But it was because of Hermes’s sale, I told myself. I just had to wait. For how long, I wasn’t sure—he didn’t like to talk about work.

  In truth, we’d had only two really good years. But the first had been transcendent. We’d been together barely two weeks when Max asked, over glasses of rum, if I’d ever been to Barbados; he had to go for business, he claimed, and the thought of a beautiful, secluded beach without me was “just too sad.” Flattered and flustered and caught off-guard, I opined in a bad British accent that my favorite former island colony was Dominica. (I’d been exactly once.) It was a stupid quip, and kind of mean. (I’d assumed at first, like nearly everyone Max met, that he came from money; I thought I was calling him out.) But I wasn’t self-conscious; with Max, I felt completely at ease. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “We’ll go there instead.” But when he sent me a hotel reservation later that night, I was shocked. Thrilled and nervous and a little offended. But mostly gripped by a fit of excitement so intense I almost thought I was coming down with something. When I next saw Max, I could tell he felt the same way: his eyes were ragged with agitation and amazement and disbelief. (I didn’t know that his anxiety was at least as much about money: he was broke.)

  From then on we couldn’t stand to be apart. We moved in together after just three months. “You need to get a life,” I’d say, laughing as I tried to tear myself from our bed to visit the studio, or have dinner with Coco, or ferry Ramona through her latest crisis. “You are my life,” he’d say. And even though I knew it was mostly a joke, it worried me. It didn’t seem smart, letting him give me so much of his time. But I couldn’t help it; it was the happiest I’d ever been.

  Ineluctably, though, things began disintegrating. He did start to feel trapped, did often resent me, sometimes for good reason, and there were times I resented him. We’d both done stupid things. Yet despite the many reckless ways we’d alienated and betrayed each other, I still loved him. And none of our previous attempts to break up had stuck. I’d known right away, though, that this one would. But I’d always believed, even to the end, that he loved me, too. I nearly convinced myself that the final split itself had been a gift: his callousness crafted so I could stop loving him. It just didn’t work.

  But on the morning after I discovered my father missing, I managed not to call Max, thanks largely to Bart.

  It was just after nine a.m., and I hadn’t yet gone to the pay phone to try calling Dr. Thwaite. I was balanced on one leg in the bedroom, frowning at my Meme, wondering how to override its “not actionable” settin
g, when a groggy voice floated up from the floor in the other room. “Very graceful,” it croaked, startling me so badly I lost my balance and nearly dropped the Meme.

  “Sorry,” Bart mumbled, sounding still snared in the nets of sleep. “I wasn’t watching. Just opened my eyes. And there you were.”

  The back of my neck petaled with heat. I wasn’t quite sure why. I wasn’t attracted to Bart; he wasn’t my type. (“Bastards?” Audrey would say. Which wasn’t totally inaccurate, unfortunately. Historically I’d fallen for men with a little more … audacity.) I also knew Bart wasn’t interested. Shortly after I met Max, Doug dropped hints about how Bart made the better catch, and I wondered, with the placid detachment of someone newly in love, if Doug had been told (or imagined) that Bart had a crush on me. But then I heard Bart was in love with our colleague Svetlana, and that made more sense. She’s more beautiful than I am, and far smarter. And if there’s one thing that ever made me insecure around kind, funny, slightly odd Bart, it was my intellect. Several Dictionary staffers could read at least three languages; Bart could read eight; Svetlana: five. I struggled to read Spanish even with the Word Exchange. Bart also read lots of philosophy, which he discussed with Svetlana. Next to them I felt like what I was: a genius’s relatively average daughter, hired out of family loyalty.

  Speaking of filial ties, part of the reason I was so aware of Bart was because of his friendship with my dad. They ate lunch together most days—at the Fancy, or the weird sandwich place down the block—talking constantly about work. Doug solicited Bart’s opinions on nearly everything. I knew because Doug often cited Bart’s stellar insights. They also occasionally played squash on weekends when Doug’s regular partner couldn’t get away. I think they even went fishing once, upstate.