“I like to pretend I’m asleep,” she said. She was an actress, so Bernard didn’t ask.
When the phone began its off-the-hook beeping, Bernard thought: Exactly. Sex is an emergency. For Ralph, for Bella, for me. He sometimes thought of his penis as a surgeon’s instrument. Entering somebody else’s body in such a profound way must leave a person changed or more knowledgeable. Here’s the part where you’re full of shit, he heard his ex-wife say. But touching someone else was the only way he kept from floating away these days. Here’s the part where you have an epiphany about your life, his ex-wife would have said. Here’s the part where you look at the wreckage of your life and make something good out of it. She had always hated to watch him wander aimlessly, something she never did. She had been a big narrator of life as it happened. Her life was a movie, and she was the annoying person in the audience who had seen it before.
The phone rang again, and Bernard pulled out of Bella, still pretending to sleep.
Bella turned and looked at him incredulously. “That’s my phone, you know.”
“Yes?” Bernard had heard his ex-wife’s voice so clearly that he expected it to be her on the phone, telling him to leave his daughter’s city if he couldn’t bring himself to visit her. Even though Bernard and his ex-wife could barely be in the same room together when she was alive, he’d always taken comfort in the idea of her out there in the world.
“Ah, man,” the man said. “Fuck.”
“Why’d you call back, Ralph?” Usually people wanted to tell him their sad stories. They hurled them at him like stones from the sinking ships of their lives. After less than twenty-four hours with Bella, she had told him about her wicked parents, her almost-marriage, and the miscarriage that kept her in bed with the shades drawn most days, leaving her apartment only to go to the acting class that she hoped would someday change her life.
“Why don’t you shut up, you big fat asshole. My name’s not even Ralph.”
Here’s the part of my life where I get divorced, Bernard’s ex-wife had said. Here’s the part where I get remarried. And when she died a month ago in a freak avalanche on a ski vacation with her new husband in Italy, she probably thought: Here’s the part of my life where I die a ridiculous, accidental death.
“Don’t call me an asshole.” Bernard hung up the phone and walked through the unfamiliar bedroom in the dark, picking up his clothes on his way to the bathroom. He pulled on his underwear until he realized it was not his but Bella’s. He turned on the bathroom light and looked at himself, a grown man stuffed into women’s underpants. He had become the person other people thought he was. It was his chairman who had suggested Bernard take a leave of absence after the so-called series of events. Allegedly Bernard had flown several paper airplanes during a seminar he co-taught with another professor — a tiny man, hunched like a comma and squinty from too much time spent reading in poorly lit rooms. Bernard remembered the discussion of the Oresteia—but he had no recollection of folding or throwing the airplanes. A student told him later that he’d made a crashing sound as the airplanes hit the walls and fell to the floor. Bernard did remember the day he was attempting to teach Saint Augustine’s City of God and he’d fallen out of his chair, unable to keep his balance. He’d excused himself to go lie on the cool tile of the men’s bathroom, where he was discovered half an hour later by the chairman himself.
The tomato incident occurred soon after. During a meeting with an advisee — another underappreciated beauty with buckteeth and a deliciously raucous laugh — he’d shared fresh tomatoes from his garden. They’d eaten them like apples — the way that he and his once-upon-a-time family had in a house long gone, a house that was still the setting for many of his dreams — the juice dribbling down their chins. There were no napkins handy, and Bernard had started to feel dizzy again, as if he might fall out of yet another chair, so he had leaned over and licked the juice from the student’s face. She seemed flattered by this tender gesture. It was a moment of pure physical connection in a world that had started to feel more and more to Bernard like a place without gravity — but the department secretary had walked in, alarmed. The chairman — a man who had recently been charged with sexual harassment — was happy to ignore Bernard lying on the bathroom floor in the face of something he could understand. He clapped Bernard on the back. “A little R and R will do you good,” he said knowingly. Bernard hadn’t told anyone that his ex-wife had died, that he had only recently become an ex-widower. Not even their daughter knew — why would she? He hadn’t seen her in years.
Bernard walked back into the bedroom, still in Bella’s underwear. Bella was standing in the middle of the room fully dressed, her red hair tied in a knot.
“Cute,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
In the coffee shop they sat in a booth next to two men drinking coffee and eating baklava. “I don’t want to talk about the Knicks,” one of them said. “They’re not talking about me.”
Bernard and Bella ordered coffee and rice pudding.
“Before it comes,” Bella said, “let’s try something.”
Out the window Bernard could see the hospital. “Whatever,” he said.
“Don’t be such a fuck-and-run type,” Bella said. “Humor me a little.”
“All right, all right,” Bernard said, and he touched her crooked nose. Here’s the part where I marry you, his ex-wife had said. Here’s the part where we have a beautiful child filled with the potential of all children who have not lived long in the world. Here’s the part where our child drops out of college and moves from city to city. Here’s the part where our child presses her tender, pulsing veins against my ear to let me hear the blood swirl and rush, begging to be let out. Here’s the part where I tell her it’s supposed to rush and swirl, but she says no, her blood is filling the rooms of her apartment, sloshing against the walls, rushing to drown her.
“Imagine the weight of the mug, the smell of the coffee, the bitter taste,” Bella said.
“But my real coffee is on the way,” Bernard protested. The waitress sloshed two cups of coffee in front of them. “In fact,” Bernard said, “here it is.” He reached for the cream, but Bella swatted his hand away.
“Use your imagination,” Bella said, retying the knot in her hair.
“Imagination was never my strong suit.” Bernard lifted his cup into the air between them, as if she wouldn’t be able to see it otherwise.
“Aren’t you an English professor?”
“Western Civ,” Bernard said. “Was.”
“Give a girl a break,” Bella said. She lifted the cup out of his hands and put it on the table. “If you’d just focus.”
Here’s the part where our child moves from hospital to hospital. Here’s the part of my life where I have to rally alone again, his ex-wife had said. Here’s the part of your life where you have to get off your sorry ass and rally, she told Bernard, but he couldn’t. He’d never set foot in any of the hospitals. Sitting here across the street from the dried-blood building where his daughter was now was as close as he’d ever gotten. There were the middle-of-the-night calls from various cities over the years: Are you really my father? What did you do with my father? Who are you really?
Was it possible he felt too much, that if he saw his daughter with her swirling, rushing blood in the hospital that the tiny birds would beat their way out of his heart? You’re such an asshole, he heard his ex-wife say. There are parts you are leaving out. There are parts of you in her, your blood rushing and swirling in her veins. It was true, Bernard had longed to press the tender, pulsing veins of his own wrist to someone’s ear, to anyone’s ear; he’d pressed his wrist to Bella’s ear last night, but she didn’t wake up, which seemed to him a good sign, a sign that his blood was not yet clamoring to be let out, because this is what he was most afraid of — the possibility that he’d inherited in reverse this rushing and swirling from his daughter.