“Between you and her mother.” “No, between them.” “That’s different.” Valerie had spoken.
“A floppy hat she wanted her to have. She was…”
Valerie reached out a book from the bookcase, female and professional in her single motion, so collected and expecting credit for it. “Your wife (?).” “Yes, she was graceful.” “And long after,” said the young woman, whatever that meant.
“I might sit us down and ask what was going on,” he said.
“You?”
“I felt cursed.”
“You believe in such things?”
“Saying them.”
Dismissing a city for Africa, was it Xides she meant? Would she know such a thing?
But “down the street”—who was that? Some small-scale chore he’d also undertaken once. What had he told her? She had said he had good teeth.
She put the book aside.
“Your own partner ignores your work, your acupuncture, and it wouldn’t matter to you? Your goddamn life.”
“Any more than you have to like the patient,” she said.
“You’re trying to impress me. Have you ever fired—?”
“It’d be me I fired.”
“—one here in your little home.”
“I like the windows. I look out into the street when I’m on the phone (?).”
It was always a lesson, he said.
“Like the rent,” said the young woman, at his side again. “You people want too much,” she said.
Well that was something, he said.
“No.” She laid her hand upon his forehead. Did she smooth his hair back? He couldn’t believe her. “Do you breathe?” she said, and as if she weren’t mad at him: “The gods have laid on him a restless heart that will not sleep,” was what she said.
It chilled him, it was pretty silly. Or was she, an unprotected tenant he happened to know (and maybe high-rent), meditating some parting of the ways? It was a mistake to think of her belonging to him for this hour twice a week, and he actually had not made that mistake. He was adjustable, even if his daughter knew his schedule and when he went to acupuncture. He breathed a droll breath out. He was real anyhow. Had Valerie changed the subject?
She asked his view of the Twin Towers. His view? He had been unable to think about them: that they were two was probably the thing, he said. Neither one worked by itself. Did they together? He’d never set foot inside. Had been invited to Windows on the World once, the restaurant, but couldn’t make it. Knew the part-time theater guy Jim Moore, who helped the French high-wire guy with the famous walk. He and the acupuncturist thought about this. “Travel light,” she said.
“Friday could you come at seven?” she asked presently, it was what she’d had in mind all along, a wavy needle going back into the white cardboard box unused, P.M. of course. Why the change? he asked. It was like her not to answer for a moment. The desk, the table in the other room, black maple structure, why had she sat him down there and then skipped this change and brought him into the treatment room. OK, seven. “Thank you,” she said, a frankness covering more than their next appointment. He had done something for her. What?
He would do his Friday errand in her neighborhood this time before seeing her. “Maybe I’ll come a different way,” he said. “Let’s see,” she said, “the bike path exits right over here, doesn’t it?” He could always stop seeing her.
“How is the back?” The actor pulled up a chair from the next table arriving after the show Wednesday night, needing a drink and the menu, which he knew by heart.
“Hearing’s improved,” said Xides. Everyone laughed. “That’s a beginning,” said the web designer, who was smart, had been in rehab, knew more about the war sometimes than the correspondent (who was out of the country), more about everything than anyone but was likable and somehow dark. The actor reached across for her hand. “He’s got a habit but you can’t see the needle marks,” Eva said. A painter of realistic animals, she had drawn on the tablecloth a picture of the notorious lower back. “Guy who recommended her called her a great little terrorist, according to Sam,” said Xides. The philosopher liked it. “He knows something.” “Whoever he is,” said Xides. “Didn’t have his name tag on.”
“Well he knows her.”
“She doesn’t know it but she’s getting me ready for my trip,” said Xides taking the whole thing lightly for his own reasons. “You should bring her here,” said the philosopher. “Why do you go?” said Eva, meaning China. The web girl made a sound. She knew a great acupuncturist in Chinatown, she could get his number. This was received in silence. “But he lost his odometer on the way up to see her,” said Eva. “How do you do that?” said the philosopher. “How do you know you lost it?” the detective raised his untrimmed Irish eyebrows, “maybe it was stolen.”
“On the bike path?” The actor bit into the last of someone’s baguette as the waiter brought his drink, and, his mouth full, had a good laugh with the philosopher, who said it was not the mileage.
“She only knows what she’s doing,” said the website girl then. Xides thought she was improving. He wondered why she came here. She felt at home. “Well, she’s holistic,” he said, dripping wine on Eva’s picture as he gave himself some more. “She’s professional,” said the girl offering her glass against his in a curious one-on-one.
Valerie had come back into the treatment room from the call she didn’t take. “Your regular’s after you,” he said, but she had spoken of Xides’ work. It was acute. It struck him. It was Leonardo she cited whose ideas got picked up. Xides had said that himself. He’d said these things more than once. Where? Like the matter with energy. Like Corbu at nineteen beginning with the rib-cage and maybe modular heart and see what cities became. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. Was it something she had said? Maybe not.
What is pain? the philosopher was asking, but now said he’d heard Xides would be getting back to pure math. Xides joked that he still had that two-hole doughnut in mind he once cared to know could stretch into a sphere with two handles. The philosopher was nodding seriously. But Xides wondered what he carried around with him these days. Missing his friend the correspondent here at Caesar’s who knew his thinking but they would soon meet. Something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Night streets came to mind, like a cloud of gas swarms of citizenry spread between high-rises. Yesterday pausing halfway down the catwalk of a suspension bridge cable he saw not the city he was thinking about but, dizzyingly, his daughter in her stroller, her mere life. And bicycling the river path, he could see through the surviving trees, the neighborhoods all the way up to the sweatshirted picnickers in long basketball shorts one night on the riverside, aiming the red barrel of a telescope at, he could have sworn, the Palisades.
The odometer he let go, a clip-on, and replaced it erasing with it the proof — the credit in city miles for exercise and all that he’d glimpsed — all his regret about time, which you need not seek but will stretch at the expense of others.
It came to him later with Eva burning moxa close to his skin, close as he could stand, acrid, truthful, a pungency to get used to, that the calls thirty minutes — he said it out loud: “These calls she gets at thirty minutes into the appointment—”
“What about them?”
“I don’t hear them, the machine takes them, but I feel they’re—”
“From the same person?” Eva withdrew the moxa.
“That’s right.”
“Is this stuff doing you any earthly good?” She stretched to drop it in the ash tray (in the shape of a life preserver that had hardly been used in twenty years), and her dressing gown fell open. In her face fine shadows, in her eyes the acupuncturist perhaps, in her habits always prepared, semper paratus from her Navy days, Marines, Coast Guard, he didn’t have it quite right, semper was right. She was gone. Was that true, “Valerie” was just trying to fix him up for his next trip? he heard her ask, No, not true; long-term care. A laugh from the bedroom. “She better take care, a caller like that.”