American Innovations: Stories (7 page)

I bet he just likes old buildings, the daughter said. I like old buildings.

But it was disgusting, the mother said.

Or maybe it was just that it had furniture. Just that someone lived there.

I thought about that. And, you know, later the broker from the first apartment called me and asked me for feedback. She asked me what my client thought. I told her honestly that he hadn’t liked it. But I told her, also honestly, that I thought it was beautiful, and that it was crazy of him not to like it. She asked me what he didn’t like about it, because she was trying to think how she could better market the apartment, because she was having, she said, to be honest, trouble selling it, even though she felt it was well priced. I felt bad for her. She sounded distressed. I told her it’s hard to sell anything right now, even something great. I told her not to worry, that things would turn around.

Did the Swede buy the maid’s apartment? the daughter asked.

Oh, in the end, he didn’t buy anything from me, the mother said. He liked me, though. He said I was honest. He didn’t buy anything at all. Instead, he moved to Dubai.

What?

He moved to Dubai instead of New York.

To Dubai? Or to Abu Dhabi?

I don’t know. Somewhere sunny.

That’s too bad, the daughter said. I think. About the apartment, I mean. But you have to stop confusing things. That’s why you come to the wrong conclusions. Because you start in the wrong place. So then you’re not really even talking about what you’re talking about, the daughter went on, not really sure what she herself was talking about, and realizing that she had lost track of precisely what it was that she was trying to estimate justly, and why she had imagined that she could.

AMERICAN INNOVATIONS

This was in Singapore City, midday in an August. I was visiting my thin, tan, sixty-something non-native-of-Singapore aunt of exceptional math skills who had made her fortune, from near enough to nothing, in spandex and sequin fashions. When I was younger, we had called her Tina Turner because her styling was similar—also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they had nodded knowingly at one another, that was the story—but now my aunt seemed smaller, and tamer, if still disturbingly “hot,” considerably more hot than either of her daughters, both now middle-aged and involved in their own relatively less demanding lives, in more prosaic bodies, in other countries. My aunt still shared her mahogany-interiored seven-bedroom house—it was a sixties construction, with lots of obtuse angles, so that you could make right after right after right after right and still not be facing your original direction—with her husband of all those years, although he left for the beach by 5:00 a.m. most days, and she was a night person, and so it was as if she lived alone. After 11:00 p.m., she liked to play bridge online, often with people “in your sorts of time zones.” My aunt told me that not everyone in the online bridge world was very nice; in fact, it was difficult to believe how rude some people could be; really, it was amazing.

“This guy, we were partners; he opened a heart, and then he rebid two spades over my no-trump—that’s a reverse. Do you understand bidding? It’s like he was going backward. Look, it’s not common. To do that, you’re essentially promising your partner that you have at least sixteen high card points. At least. Are you following? For him to make that bid, he’s saying he’s got long hearts and a really good hand. And then he doesn’t, not at all! We end up in four hearts in a four-two fit. It’s like he’s expecting
me
to have the hearts, it’s crazy. Everyone else is in a normal three no-trump. So I write to him: ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’”

“You said, ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’”

“Yes, you can make chatter in the sidebar of the game. There’s a space. I mean, you don’t even play bridge, but even you can understand that he made a ridiculous bid, right? I’ve read six books on bridge; you can trust me, what he did was really idiotic. That’s why I said what I said. Well, then he called me awful names. Just awful. I can’t say the names. And he was the one who made the mistake! I almost didn’t want to play bridge online ever again. And I have some very nice people that I play bridge with. But I almost gave up playing. See, that’s what happens with the Internet. Some people will be amazingly rude.”

I think I said something about how yes, people could really be people.

She said something about how I must be jet-lagged.

“I’m all right,” I said. The main reason I was in Singapore was that a year-and-a-half-long relationship of mine had recently come to an end, and it had seemed natural to transition by visiting a friend who had moved to Hong Kong, and then, already so far, visiting my aunt, too. I wasn’t devastated, though; it wasn’t that kind of breakup; my serial eighteen-month relationships consistently ended amicably, it was just a weird tic of mine, one with which I was fine. It was like, I had been told, I wasn’t a woman.

“Did I ever tell you,” my aunt asked, “about my September 11th?”

No, she hadn’t.

“It was late here, everyone was asleep, and my God, I was lying in bed, and then I noticed this lump, quite big, right here, on my side. I was sure it was cancer. I was sure I was going to die. How could I have not noticed it before?” She went on to say, “It was right here at these low ribs that aren’t full ribs. Normally I would have called my friend Simona, she’s an excellent doctor, you know, but I didn’t think it was right, ringing her late like that. That’s nighttime thinking for you. I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded. But I told myself I would have to make it on my own until the beginning of the next business day. That’s what I was thinking. I couldn’t rest, of course. I went and turned on the television, just to distract myself, to calm myself down. And what’s there? The towers. Can you believe it? I mean, how awful. And they just kept replaying it. I sat there watching it all alone. Well, it wasn’t cancer, the lump. It was just my breast. I mean, the silicone. The implant. It just fell down. Unbelievable, right? That they would put something in you that could do that. I said to the doctors, Just take it out and never give it back to me. I like small breasts now. I used to hate them, but now I like them.”

“That’s awful,” I said. “I mean, about how scared you must have been.”

Then my Tina asked me, “Are you still working on your physical therapy thing?”

That had been two career interests ago, but it was a thoughtful inquiry, considering that we didn’t see each other very often. “Oh,” I said. “No.”

When we set out to get a bite to eat, I was relieved.

“They have excellent salads at this place,” my aunt said. “The best outfit is a good figure.”

I agreed.

*   *   *

A year and some later, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I awoke from not particularly uneasy dreams. I was sleeping alone and on my stomach. It was not September 11th. I negotiated nine more minutes from the alarm. Then the alarm went off again; I negotiated again; then the alarm again, and then, like so many other mornings, I got out of bed.

In the bathroom, I washed my face with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too
gesamtkunstwerk
-ily. Instead, only in close patches. Only enough to rest reasonably assured that nothing too grotesque has overnight arrived on or departed from my face, and that I have scrubbed away all the applied scrub. It’s important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there’s anything especially wrong with me—just the usual.

However, in the hallway downstairs there’s a mirror you see yourself in even when you don’t intentionally look.

That mirror claimed there was a substantial lump on the right side of my lower back. An anatomically anomalous and yet familiar-seeming lump.

I would have just looked away but it was like seeing a burn victim or a really beautiful person: I couldn’t unstare. My hand moved to the mass. The mass liked being touched. I lifted my shirt. I would say what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn’t need support. It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private. What I saw was really textbook. Save for its location, there on my back. As if to hide from me. Or as if to discreetly maintain an unacknowledged child. Though the discreetness would work only in a world in which we meet one another exclusively head-on, or possibly in three-quarters profile. Because in profile the anatomy really could not be denied.

I pulled my shirt back down. It was fitted but, thankfully, long.

Was this an inheritance?

I made myself sunny-side-up eggs. The newspaper informed me that a young volunteer worker at a large-cat reserve had been killed by a lion. Her parents said their daughter had been doing what she loved, there at the reserve; she had never been happier; protocol had been followed; it was a rare and tragic accident and not the result of carelessness; the parents did not blame the reserve; they listed the large-cat sanctuary as one of the charities to which mourners might elect to donate in lieu of flowers. I’m not saying I didn’t feel disfigured and humiliated. But I know such things are mainly a matter of mind.

*   *   *

Like the girl pounced on and accidentally killed by the large cat, I also was attempting to do something I loved. I was studying Library Sciences. I had always loved libraries. No one looks at you there, and you can look at everyone, so people probably are looking at you, just like you’re looking at them, but it’s all nice and quiet, and everyone can stay inside his or her headspace. But I hadn’t really known what library sciences was, and it turned out to be highly nonoverlapping with what I had deduced from the blurred, squinting assessment I had made of it from a distance with as little information—“information” being a word and concept I both dislike and distrust—as possible. Then it turned out I wasn’t even really in a Library Sciences program, I was in a Library
and Information
Sciences program, the core of which focused on “Humans becoming informed via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records.” I was learning computer skills, basically. I was becoming trained as a searcher of databases. I was taking a metadata course on Indexing and Cataloging and another course on Knowledge Management.

That first day of my supernumeraryness I went to the school library for a timed assignment, done from my pale blue laminated tin carrel. It was a set of twenty query transformations. Query transformations are just what they sound like. A human has a curiosity—something simple, like, What are the seasons like in Mongolia? or less simple, like, How was gender represented in the literature of Heian Japan?—and ideally, the library information scientist will translate that curiosity into intelligently delimited searches in well-chosen databases that then return navigable information.

Whatever. Number twenty-one on the assignment was to generate one’s own query and query results. I chose not to query my body’s recent developments; even more than mirrors, Internet reflections combine the qualia of unflinching and unfaithful. I had once, via the Internet, tried to learn about the anthropologist Margaret Mead. After an hour I was left only with a strong impression that Mead’s primary intellectual contribution had been the adding of an
s
to the term “semiotic.” That, and having taken a female lover for much of her later life. I assumed, and continue to assume, that there are more important things to know about Mead, although how would I know?

At noon I attended a lecture given by Professor Sidwell. The lecture was about the problem of acidification—what to do about the hydrolysis of paper in books, the “slow fires” caused by the low pH levels of the paper commonly used for printing during certain key decades. Professor Sidwell had the same sloping posture my dad had had, and so I felt closer to him than in reality I was. Early on in the term, I’d had a conversation with him in the cafeteria in which he said that American cuisine had gone downhill since the 1940s. His grandmother had been a great cook, but she was the last of the Mohicans. I said, Wasn’t it at least an improvement to know about Chinese food? About soy sauce? No, he said. It wasn’t. Widely available refrigeration? I asked. No, Sidwell answered, refrigeration has been awful. Refrigeration has been absolutely catastrophic.

In the lecture that day Sidwell was saying, among other things, that the new de-acidification processes—there were several of them, and they were all bad—were leaving the treated paper with an unpleasant texture (the wrong texture), depositing powders, sometimes causing colored inks to run, and leaving clamp marks on books’ bodies. De-acidification was hastening destruction, not delaying it.

After the lecture I went up to Professor Sidwell, to see if he’d notice my altered self. Also just to say hello. “Ah, the refrigeration advocate,” he said. He barely looked at me. “Are things well in the land of the young and innovative?”

“I really liked the lecture,” I said. “I guess you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

“No, no, that’s not quite accurate,” he said. He looked me over. His tone softened notably as he said, “I don’t want you to take this in a negative way, I don’t mean it like that, but you remind me of my grandmother.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“I’m going to go ahead and ask you something. Have you become one of those macrobiotic people? Or vegans? I strongly recommend against it.”

I couldn’t tell if this was an acknowledgment of my alteration or just something else he was saying. No one else I saw that day had yet noticed anything. Though I had a five months pregnant classmate who had recently made a similar report: that no one had noticed.

And that was the day. I suppose I might have been more detained or disturbed by the change in my romantic prospects—either I had suffered a bad blow or, it was slimly possible, I’d received a tremendous boon—but I kind of knew where I was in my relationship cycle.