Audio: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum reads.
One long winter night, Ezra Washington’s wife walks in on him telling their younger child stories from his rollerblading days. The room is as dark as a coal mine and his voice floats sonorously from somewhere in the vicinity of the trundle bed. He is remembering a time long before the child was born, a time when he was a poor graduate student living in New York City with nothing but his own body and mind for entertainment. Saturdays were spent in the narrow park that runs alongside the Hudson River, blading up and down the path very fast, as if his happiness depended on it.
“She was coming straight at me,” he says. “To the right of me was the river. And to the left a pack of bicyclists. She was coming around the bend with a look of panic in her eyes.”
From the doorway his wife wonders silently if he is speaking about her, the younger self who, on the three or four occasions on which she’d joined him, may have worn this expression.
“She was going fast, too?” their child asks in the dark.
“No, not at all, she was clearly a beginner. Which made the situation that much more dangerous,” Ezra says patiently. He then explains how he called out to her in the instant before they collided. “I’ve got you! ” he cried to the inexperienced skater as he grasped her by the forearms and guided her down between his legs until her bottom gently touched the ground. “By then she was laughing,” he said. “That laugh you’d know anywhere.”
His wife doesn’t recall ever laughing while on Rollerblades. Her first wild thought is that all these years she’s been wrong about herself. But then the child shifts in his bed and sets the comforter to rustling and casts the story in an entirely new light. “She’s the one who plays the mom?” he asks. “With the big teeth and the long brown hair?”
“Well, I’d say it’s more of a reddish brown. An auburn color. But yes, that’s right,” Ezra says to the child. “Julia Roberts.”
“Julia Roberts went right between your legs,” the child confirms.
“Yes, but don’t repeat that,” Ezra says. “Better to say we crashed into each other. Or that Julia Roberts crashed into me.”
The child falls silent, as if committing this to memory.
Ezra adds, “It’s not an exaggeration to say she was the biggest movie star in the world.”
“Back then,” the child clarifies.
Fine, his mother thinks, back then—all children are by nature sticklers—but in fact the poor kid has no idea. Never will he know the stunned sensation of emerging from the darkness of a matinée on Senior Skip Day, speechless at what they’d just seen: Julia Roberts as an adorable streetwalker. It confounded the imagination. Whatever had possessed them to spend their day of mutiny in this ridiculous way? They would never forget it. A whole group of them milling about on the sidewalk outside the theatre, boarding-school students let loose on the world and now at a loss for what to do next, Ezra with his arm resting lightly across the shoulders of his girlfriend, Christina, his serious senior-year girlfriend Christina, and Christina looking shy and triumphant because already more than one person had said, “You know, you kind of look like her. . . .”
Yes, she was there that day, witness to the spectacle of Ezra and Christina, and though she was sandwiched in the middle of the crowd, she saw them as if from a great distance, from a far, chilly point on the periphery. She kept half an eye on Ezra from long habit. She had done so, without quite wanting to, through all the weeks and months of high school that had come before, and maybe he had noticed: when he and Christina broke up, after a run of graduation parties, it was she whom he called. He was miserable but talkative. You still had to pay for long distance in those days. On a Saturday morning in early October, he appeared on the steps of her freshman dorm, despite having enrolled at a college more than three hours away. By the time Ezra got into graduate school, they were an old couple, a familiar sight. She, too, had her tales of New York. The park he spoke of, and its hazardous paths—she once knew them well.
“Tell him,” Ezra urges, his voice turned in her direction. It comes as a surprise: she thought she had gone unnoticed when she glided into the room, wearing socks.
“It’s true,” she says to their child. “Julia was huge. She was everywhere.”
“And I bladed right into her,” Ezra says with satisfaction, the splendor of the story holding all of them in its embrace. For a moment they absorb the fact of being together in the darkened bedroom, just the three of them, the older child probably off somewhere brushing his teeth. Ezra says to his wife, from the low edge of the bed, “You remember that day,” in the sure-sounding voice she’d first liked in history class, and huskily she answers him, “Mm-hmm, I do,” when in fact she has been quickly sifting through her brain only to find that she has no memory of it at all.
This is the second time today that her mind has failed her, but the first instance was so mild that it barely registered. In the late afternoon, drowsily driving the boys to their martial-arts class, she heard on the radio a story about the chain restaurant Medieval Times, where diners can watch live jousting tournaments while eating without utensils. The big news was that the restaurant had decided to replace all of its resident kings with queens. Despite this change in leadership, the radio host remarked dryly, the servers at Medieval Times would still be referred to, going forward, as “wenches.”
She perked right up at the sound of that friendly old word, which carried her instantly to the broken-backed couches and burnt-popcorn smell of their high-school student center. For a brief spell there, “wench” had been the slur of choice—originating with the boys, one had to guess, but soon enough used in good-natured address from girl to girl. To her ears, it summoned not so much a barefoot slut with a tankard as the lanky, lacrosse-playing classmates of her youth, addled on weak hallucinogens and jam bands. The word filled her with sadness and warmth. But she couldn’t for the life of her recall how to use it convincingly in a sentence. “Hey, wench, good game today.” “Stop being such a wench and pass the popcorn.” “Later, wench.” It all sounded wrong.
“Why are you talking to yourself?” her younger child asked from the back seat.
“I’m just trying to remember how to say something,” she told him.
“In English?” he asked, sounding worried.
The problem, she sees now, is that in its heyday she never seized the chance to say the word herself. Nor was it ever said to her. So the failure wasn’t of memory but of another sort. She hadn’t shaped her lips around the word; it hadn’t been lobbed fondly in her direction. Somehow the lacrosse players had known not to say it to her, or for that matter to any of the black girls, few as they were. For them, a tone of collegial respect had been specially reserved. So many pleasant exchanges, straightforward smiles! She might as well have been wearing a pants suit during all those years. Yet dull Christina had been called a wench more times than could be counted. Along with a few humorous observations about the size of her mouth. Which would explain, wouldn’t it, the popular opinion regarding her resemblance to—
“Funny that she didn’t have an entourage in tow,” she says.
“Was she being followed by the paparazzi?” the child asks.
“Nope,” Ezra answers serenely. “She was completely alone. Enjoying the day.”
“Without even a bodyguard?” his wife asks in the dark.
“Not as far as I could see. But, then again, I didn’t see that it was Julia Roberts until I was looking down at her.”
“Between your legs,” the child says.
“I helped her back up to her feet and we each went on our way.” Ezra is straightening out the comforter, by the sound of it. “I wasn’t looking around for bodyguards. I wanted to get home as fast as I could and tell you.”
“We didn’t have cell phones,” she explains.
“You were too poor,” the child says soothingly.
She doesn’t protest. The history of technology is too great an undertaking at this hour.
Also, it’s true: they lived on very little then. Home was a garden-level apartment in a neglected corner of an outer borough, its distance to the nearest subway stop the original inspiration for the Rollerblades. From next door came the incoherent cries of an old man and the smell of decades’ worth of fried meat. They kept the windows open in all seasons, because of both the smell and the furious radiators, controlled by some invisible hand.
A steel-legged café table with a laminate top was where they ate, worked, studied, and wrote thank-you notes. Despite the small checks that occasionally arrived in the mail from relatives living in less expensive places, Ezra still needed to have a part-time job while taking classes. He was descended from two generations of advanced-degree-holding black professionals who loved him unconditionally but regarded the project of “art school” with incredulity. Graduate work in painting? they’d repeat, as if maybe they had misunderstood. As for her, she’d inherited her parents’ immigrant terror of nonfamilial debt, and so had yet to apply for even a credit card, much less to a graduate program. The programs were extortionists preying on directionless people in their mid to late twenties, she thought, and she wasn’t interested. She liked the magic of direct deposit and also the green-bordered Social Security statement that would appear every few years, telling her just how much she had earned so far in her working life. After moving to New York, she promptly found employment, with benefits, in the alumni-relations office at Ezra’s school. Her parents approved of the job but seemed undecided, even after all this time, about Ezra. When she watched television with them, the handsomeness of a young actor might make her mother pensive. “You have to be careful with a man who’s better-looking than you,” she’d been heard to say, to a character onscreen.
Every day his girlfriend set off for the university uncomplainingly, but Ezra wanted to be on campus no more than was required. Instead he got a job at a gym. He had to wear an orange polo shirt with the gym’s logo stitched over his left pectoral. Standing at a counter, he scanned members’ I.D. cards as they entered and then checked on the computer to make sure that their payments were up to date. This was how he first learned her name, Meg Sand. He was familiar with her name long before he noticed her looking at him from the lat machine. Or gazing, maybe. It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way, she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.
“Thanks,” she said, as she turned in her towel.
“Why, hello,” he said jokingly, leaning forward on the counter.
Meg Sand wore a stretchy top that matched her reflective leggings, new sneakers, and a full face of makeup. The makeup wasn’t loud; she looked like a girl who had moved to the city from upstate and, upon the shock of arrival, severely trained herself in how to do things nicely. She clutched a rather elegant brown purse. Her voice was deeper than he’d expected and when she spoke to him she sounded unnatural, as if she were a grownup trying to be pals with a kid. Did he also work out here? Or just work? She laughed lamely at herself. Yet Meg Sand was, according to the computer, practically the same age as him. Not even a full year older. It was her hair, he realized: she wore it short and gently teased, in a mature little pouf, a style chosen, he saw with a pang, to conceal the fact that it was thinning.
Quickly enough he developed the trick of not letting his eyes drift above her forehead. Sitting at the Polish restaurant around the corner from the gym, he would watch her tuck into a plate of cherry blintzes and finish off a big glass of ice water. She seemed to take undue pride in not being the type of gym-goer who only ate healthy. The booth’s seats were sticky and made funny sounds whenever he adjusted himself, which he did often, sucking listlessly at a fountain soda and describing what had happened that week in crit. She would listen with a stolid expression and barely move. To his surprise, she did not share an upsetting story straightaway, as white girls who liked him were in the habit of doing, a story told slowly, as if with reluctance, but always aired fully by the time they were making out. Bulimia and bad parents. Depression. Social pressures, double standards, a sister who had been hospitalized. All offered unconsciously, he guessed, in a nervous spirit of redress. Yet Meg Sand rarely said anything about herself. And “girl,” in her case, didn’t exactly fit.
Without making a big fuss, she’d pay the bill for both of them. Together they would walk to his subway station and after giving her a brisk hug he’d jog downstairs into the clatter and the heat, feeling light of heart. Nothing was going on. Nothing was going on! He sailed into the basement apartment, pulled off his orange polo shirt, and made love to his beautiful girlfriend under the open window. He planned, any day now, to propose to her. But not on his knees: they already spent enough time practically underground as it was. Instead he imagined, absurdly, a wide, empty field, where he would toss the glittering ring in the air and she would catch it with outstretched hands.
It was not only his heart that felt newly light. His legs on the long walk to the subway, his hand as it moved across a thick sheet of paper. His adviser’s caustic sense of humor, which had made him insecure at the start of the semester, was now a source of amusement and private laughter. The gym regulars no longer greeted him with “man” or “dude” but with his real name: “Hey, Ezra, what’s up?” Rearranging the free weights took almost no effort at all. He felt agile and clearheaded. His skin looked good. Out of the depths of her boxy brown purse, Meg Sand produced little tubes and flasks of extravagant ointments made by companies he’d never heard of. She worked on the housewares floor of a large department store, but she claimed to have friends at all the cosmetic counters, and these were samples, she said. They were free.
From inside the humid broom closet they called their bathroom came his girlfriend’s gentle voice. “I have to say, these look regular-sized to me,” she said. He had emptied a shelf in the medicine cabinet so that he could create a display. The little flasks were elegant, and he had nothing to hide. Only a month before, the three of them had gone to the movies and watched a terrible action thriller. His idea—both the movie and Meg Sand and his girlfriend meeting. The whole thing had come together in such a casual way as to feel practically spontaneous.
His girlfriend had met him and Meg Sand at the theatre. She was coming straight from work, from an alumni networking event that she had helped organize, and as she approached them he could tell that one of her high heels had started to hurt her. He could also tell that she immediately took in the problem of Meg Sand’s hair. Her whole face relaxed. The job in retail, the degree from suny Potsdam, now the hair: there truly was no cause for alarm. Meg stumbled backward slightly as his girlfriend went in for a hug. Oh, his girlfriend was a ruthless snob, as only the recently respectable can be. Before she even said hello, he knew that she would speak to Meg in the silvery, childlike voice she used when communicating with maintenance staff or bus drivers, as if making her voice smaller might somehow diminish the existential distance between them.
After the movie, they stood on the street, shivering. He didn’t suggest that they go get a coffee somewhere. His girlfriend had slipped off her shoes in the theatre and, when the credits started to roll, had a difficult time getting them on. Her blouse was softly askew, the long day had loosened her hair, and he wanted to take her home and into bed.
But she persisted in being gracious. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked Meg, who paused, shot a furtive look at the movie poster, and then seemed to remember the risk-free response she had prepared for these occasions. “It wasn’t what I was expecting,” she said slowly. She gave one of her close-lipped, knowing smiles: a precaution she used all the time, he’d noticed, a smile showing that, whatever the joke at hand might be, she was in on it.
“Me neither!” his girlfriend replied. “A lot more blood than I signed up for. And all that gurgling when people died. It was very graphic. Or is that more sound design? They didn’t leave anything to the imagination, did they? Her knife skills were . . . amazing.”
Meg brightened a bit. “Amazing. Yes. I loved the fight sequences. She was so fierce. I think she must have trained for a long time to play the part. I read somewhere that she did most of the stunt work herself.”
“Well, I believe it,” his girlfriend said. “The action looked very real.”
“I must have read that in the Times,” Meg went on. “Yes, that must have been where I read it. In last weekend’s Arts section.”
“Oh! Did you see that piece about Merce Cunningham and the dog?”
Meg shook her head mutely.
“It was funny.” His girlfriend smiled at Meg with almost professional kindness. Then she tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You know, with that jacket on you kind of look like—” She said the forgettable name of the actress. “Especially the whole section when she’s in Budapest. I’m not imagining it.”
He didn’t see the resemblance himself. He told them flatly that he thought the movie was garbage. “You thought so, too,” he said to his girlfriend as they rode the subway home. She shrugged sleepily. “I didn’t want to be judgmental,” she murmured, placing her head on his shoulder. By the time they reached their stop, she was dead to the world. He had to guide her up the stairs and through the empty streets like a parent steering a child toward bed.
As winter dragged on, Meg Sand wore the jacket more often than not. Was it a coincidence that she also bought a pair of tall, zippered boots similar to the ones worn by the female assassin? “I used my employee discount,” she said apologetically from her side of the booth. He’d had to ask for more hours at the gym, in order to recover from the reckless amount he’d spent on a new computer. Also, his girlfriend was preparing to take an unpaid leave from her job at the alumni office; she’d already used up all her vacation days by the time they found out about her mother’s breast cancer. At first she had wept uncontrollably, but then she became very quiet and matter-of-fact, and started researching airfares. It was Stage II, they caught it early, she wouldn’t even need chemo. A lumpectomy, not a mastectomy. These facts he repeated to Meg Sand in their corner of the Polish restaurant, as if to reassure himself. Nothing had prepared him for the secondhand jitters he was feeling. The container ship that had looked toylike on the horizon was now, upon making its way into port, revealing its true dimensions. Since the scheduling of the surgery, he’d been having trouble falling asleep, and though Meg ordered him a Coke, he hardly touched it.
With his girlfriend gone, he was thankful for the company of his new computer, which was much faster than his old one. The enormous monitor, the powerful processor, the highly sensitive keyboard—all necessary now that he had decided to expand his artistic practice into video. The over-all lack of light in the basement apartment was proving to be a plus. He was hypnotized by the way that editing could turn the sloppy footage he’d shot at school into something rich with possible meaning. A sudden cut to black, the amplification of ambient sound. Hours melted away without his realizing it. The first weekend he spent alone, he managed to get groceries and do his laundry, but the second weekend he didn’t leave the apartment at all. When the telephone rang, he had no sense of what day it was, and as he answered, confused, his heart inexplicably racing, the unbearable thought that occurred to him was: She’s dead.
“Ezra? I’m sorry to bother you.” The deep, uninflected voice of Meg Sand was on the other end. He was briefly even more confused, and then strangely comforted that it was only her. “I know I shouldn’t be calling this late. I tried calling two other people before I called you.”
“Is it late?” he asked. “I don’t even know what time it is.”
“It’s 11:47,” she replied. “It’s almost midnight.”
As she was speaking, he saw that the time had been right in front of him all along, tucked away in a corner of his vast computer screen. “Look at that,” he said aloud.
Then he realized: “I think the last meal I ate was breakfast.”
“I’m sorry,” Meg said again, and fell silent before announcing, “But I’ve been robbed.”
He flew across the city in the back of a Lincoln Town Car whose shocks seemed in need of immediate replacement. The traffic lights turned green one after the other, benevolently synchronized, as if wishing him Godspeed as he drew closer to Meg’s apartment. He didn’t know what he would find there. A jimmied lock, a gaping window, stuff spilling out of drawers, strewn across the floor, or . . . ? Darkened blocks scrolled past the smudged glass. With a sense of deliverance he understood that, whatever crisis he encountered, he’d be able to help. And if it turned out that in the end he couldn’t—well, she was just a friend from the gym. Teeth rattling, he hurtled forward, at once weightless and full of purpose.
Her address was on York Avenue, which despite its Manhattan Zip Code appeared to be even more desolate and remote than where he lived. The car jerked to a stop in front of the building; he looked up at its expanse of monotonous mid-century brick and felt depressed for her. She was waiting in the lobby, dressed in her jacket and boots. He almost didn’t notice the doorman sitting wordlessly at his station but then found himself wondering about him as they rose in the elevator. On the seventh floor, she led him down a carpeted corridor to her apartment door, which she unlocked with trembling hands. It swung open into a single room that contained her entire life: stove, bed, clothes rack, television, all laid out plainly before him. On the wall hung a poster-size reproduction of a black-and-white photograph of the Flatiron Building, framed. The bed was piled high with expensive-looking pillows of different shapes and sizes that she must have acquired through her job. She went to the little stove and started boiling water—not in a teakettle but in a saucepan.
“I hope you like chamomile,” she said. “It’s all I have.”
He couldn’t find an obvious place where he was meant to sit. He couldn’t figure out what had been stolen. The room had a slightly tousled look but seemed otherwise intact.
“How did they get in?”
She turned from the stove and looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The . . . robbers.” He corrected himself. “Intruders.” But maybe it had been someone working solo. “Intruder,” he said, finally.
She blinked once, then twice, as if trying to bring him into focus. “It happened on the subway,” she said. “Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t mean anything. You’re the one who said you were robbed.” He glared at the apartment around him, searching for signs of entry. “And I said that I would come right over. Which I did.”
“Thank you,” Meg said. “Thank you for coming over. You didn’t have to. I feel bad that it’s so late.”
“I don’t care what time it is. I’m just not understanding what you—”
“It happened on the subway,” she repeated. “It must have happened when I was on my way home from work. Because then I got back and took a shower and ordered Thai and when I went to pay the delivery guy I reached into my bag and it wasn’t there.”
“Your wallet?”
“Yes. It was gone. The last time I had it was when I pulled out a token.”
“You think someone stole it on the subway,” he said dully. “Hours ago. Like a pickpocket.”
“Yes,” she answered solemnly, and handed him his cup of tea. “I do.”
Before taking the cup, he put down his backpack, heavy with the hammer and nails he had brought. The tea smelled medicinal and was too hot to drink. He had paid thirty-eight dollars for the car service, with tip. He was overcome by the sudden, profound tiredness that comes right after a stupid expenditure of energy. Meg was now sitting on the edge of the bed, still wearing her jacket, as if she, too, were a guest. Without asking, he sank down beside her and placed his cup on the floor. He was too exhausted even to be angry anymore.
“So,” he said. “This is your place.”
“Welcome,” she said, and with a little sigh rested her fragile head of hair on his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”
At least that’s how Ezra’s wife has imagined it, their unpromising start. Some details, such as the poster of the Flatiron Building and the mound of fancy pillows, she is familiar with from the video; some—the lat machine, the good purse, the booths at the Polish restaurant—she knows firsthand; the rest are the result of inference and extrapolation. It is rare for her to think at all of Meg Sand anymore, but the mention of Julia Roberts there in the dark has brought her back.
When Ezra recalls his years in graduate school, his memory has occasionally confused or conflated the two of them—her and Meg. To be fair, the instances have been very few. In one case, she had to remind him that they didn’t watch the Knicks lose to the Spurs in the finals; she was in Florida with her parents. Also, she can say with certainty that she’s never discovered a mouse behind the toaster oven. Or been pickpocketed on the subway. She wonders if the same could be true of the rollerblading event. She believes that it was an experience he enthusiastically recounted at the time, just not to her.
Yet her memory is not without its own shortcomings. She cannot remember, for example, Meg Sand’s last name. Sand is just something she’s made up as a placeholder. Whatever the real name is, she thinks, it must be so ordinary, so unremarkable, as to be mind-numbing in the most literal sense. For a while she thought it might have been Whitman, until she realized that that was the name of the C.E.O. who had run unsuccessfully for governor of California. Because she can’t remember Meg Sand’s real name, she hasn’t been able to repeat it to herself and she hasn’t been able to look her up online.
But she doubts that she would ever type Meg’s name into a search box, even if she could. Her curiosity is nil. There’s nothing more she wants to know. For the nearly twenty years that she’s had the video in her possession, not once has she felt the faintest need to watch it again. The first time was enough, and even then she didn’t watch it all the way through. Very clearly she remembers how surprised she was that she could operate the playback function on the camera in the first place. She’d never used the camera before or been interested in how it worked. But there was something about the way it was resting beneath Ezra’s desk, balanced casually on top of the paper shredder, its little screen popped open, that made her stop.
She put down the box she was carrying. Inside, still in its protective wrapping, was a five-piece place setting of the wedding china that Ezra’s aunts had gently insisted they register for. There was no room or use for china in their basement apartment. With ceremonial care she had been stacking the boxes in the corner of the bedroom not taken up by Ezra’s enormous computer. Though he had gallantly carried her over the threshold, marriage had done little to change their abode other than to make it feel smaller and darker. When she put down the china, the last to arrive, her hands were shaking. This is another detail she recalls with perfect clarity: her hands shaking even before she picked up the camera and turned it on.
A bed piled with tasselled pillows; a framed black-and-white poster, only a corner of which appears in the shot; a long white body, naked except for a pair of knee-high gladiator sandals. The soles of the sandals as flat and beige as pancakes.
And then from offscreen his voice, the voice that she had first heard in history class, telling the body what he’d like it to do.
She couldn’t hit the square of the Stop button quickly enough. Straightaway she ejected the cassette, which was smaller than a tin of breath mints. She wandered back and forth the length of the apartment, holding it carefully in the palm of her hand. She thought about stuffing it down to the bottom of the garbage can, or wrapping it in layers of newspaper and tossing it in a dumpster, or dropping it down the echoing trash chute at work. She also thought about cracking open the plastic shell and plucking out the two black reels inside and melting them over the stove—then wondered about the strands of videotape she sometimes saw tangled in the branches of the borough’s trees. How did they end up there? Meanwhile, a cold little part of her counselled prudence: keep it safe. At which she recoiled: it would poison her. After several minutes of this, she called Ezra at the gym to say that she was leaving him. The word “divorce” she avoided, not wanting to sound operatic. By the time he arrived home, she had already changed her mind ten or eleven times about what she needed to do.
He was breathing very hard. He had run the entire way from the distant subway stop. On his sweating face was the naked look of fear that comes with having loved someone for a long time. “You’re still here,” he panted. The look on his face summoned out of her chaotic feelings the lifelong habit of pragmatism, which caused her to say with formality, “She is not to see or contact us ever again,” a message that she repeated a few days later, when Meg Sand called the apartment, and she was startled to hear herself speak not in her lilting telephone voice but in an unfamiliar and shaky middle register that seemed to emanate directly from her chest. She hung up the receiver before Meg could respond. Her mind was still changing rapidly, hourly. The only thing she knew for certain was that the video had become hers in some permanent, irrefutable way. She buried the cassette in the deep pocket of a shearling coat she no longer wore but that still hung thickly at the back of the closet, and so it remained there undisturbed for many years and through several moves, until the technology required to play it had all but disappeared.
Could the nature of the video be interpreted in a different way? The therapist at the university health center had asked her this question. Your husband is studying art, she said, double-checking the open folder in her lap. Was there anything—the therapist searched for a word—artistic about what you saw?
Grimly, she said no. They had been over this before. Therapy was turning out to deserve the suspicion with which she had always held it, but under her benefits plan the first six sessions were free. The truth is, she was too shy to explain to the therapist why she had instantly recognized the sort of video she was watching. Just as she was too shy to keep her eyes open while making them. Darkness was essential, she couldn’t explain; darkness was key.
The darkness created when he turned on the camera and she closed her eyes—was it the same element that she’s standing in now, listening to him say good night to their child? She likes to think that it is, the dark being the only thing large, comfortable, and cluttered enough to contain all the various bits and pieces of their life together. So many years between them, and from where exactly does one begin to count? The first day of ninth grade, or the short, rainy summer after graduation? The moment they signed a lease and became residents of the basement apartment? There is no single starting point, only the density and shapelessness of experience held in common, the meals prepared and eaten, the assorted haircuts and injuries, elations and malaises, car leases and checking accounts, friends made, trips taken, a pregnancy that failed and two that didn’t. She remembers: the shock of a baby’s cold mouth on her nipple after he spat out an ice pop and chose her breast instead. He remembers: her shout of laughter. Now their younger child kicks experimentally at the comforter, unwilling to go to sleep, while the older one makes his way up the stairs, halting at irregular intervals, absorbed no doubt by the game in his hand, lighting his face from below as he moves slowly toward them.
“Pick up the pace, kid.” Ezra casts his voice toward the door. “We’re all waiting.”
It is the same voice, and also the same darkness: the darkness out of which this voice once floated, low-pitched and warm, patiently unfolding and finding her on the bed, the bed seeming to lift imperceptibly off the floor, set aloft yet lightly tethered, his voice telling her what he saw, what he liked, the things he wished to see more of. At the sound of his voice, she relaxed into the pleasure of being instructed, and then more deeply into the pleasure of being seen, and running beneath it all was a bright, nearly invisible current of thankfulness. To be called such things. In words far worse, or far better, than whatever had been said in high school. Tipping back her head and closing her eyes, she felt capable of doing anything he asked. She saw pictures: a bar of sunlight flaring on a mirror; the square, golden windows of a long motel at night. His steady voice spoke to her in the dark. “Wider,” he said, and she opened farther than she had thought possible. ♦
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