“Well,” said Lore, shy at the attention this elegant girl was paying to her. She allowed that she probably did help people — children, anyway. She felt good about her work. Julia said that she herself was useless, a painter, which was about the most selfish thing that anyone could be. She dabbed up the last crumbs of her croissant with her finger.
“Do you like it? What do you like about it?” she asked, and Lore, who hadn’t been asked this question since coming to the city (and had rarely been asked it before), found herself speaking about the pleasure of taking a child step by step through the necessary adjustments, the small changes of jaw and teeth and breath, that enabled them to be heard by the world. For every child you had to find the key; the exercises or instructions that helped one did not help another. You had to be intimate with them — to peer inside their mouths, place a finger on their gums. You had to touch their tender throats, test the vibrations at the backs of their necks. These were children who garbled their desires and their protests, and the grown-ups in their world did not listen to them as they should, because you do not listen well to someone who cannot be plain.
“Do you love them?” Julia asked, and this was something people never asked at all. Often they told her she must love children, to work with them so closely. Lore paused. She said she wasn’t sure. She liked them. She thought she’d loved a few of them, over time. She said that people who went on about how adorable children were never spent all day with them. Children were in fact ferocious little animals, sharp and canny and hurt and eager to inflict hurt themselves, who were trying to get what they needed in life. And she helped them to articulate those needs. That was why she did it. That, and because she seemed to have a knack for it.
Julia said: “I wish I could like children. But they scare me. They always seem to want something, and I don’t know what it is.”
It was like that, from the beginning: the way they spoke. Lore had never known anyone who behaved the way Julia did, who went directly to the important thing, and enabled you to talk about it too. So that you never wanted to go back to the ordinary type of conversation, which was all mask, all a way of never figuring out what really wanted to be said.
Lore listens for pain, feels nothing. She can sense, beyond the pale-yellow walls of the corridor, the deepening of late afternoon into dusk. She follows behind an older man in a neat polo shirt and trim slacks, tensing as they pass the desk at the end of Maternity, but the nurse there doesn’t look up fully, just buzzes both her and the man through. A sign tells her she’s in Radiology, and she stops to take in a large framed picture. A shoreline somewhere or other, gray-yellow rocks, pink-blue water. There are little flecks meant to be people at leisure: walking along the sand, wading into the surf. One of the flecks (she moves closer) is a mother bending down to hand a fleck child an ice cream cone. Lore’s mother had a picture much like it, though smaller, which she hung just inside the front door in each of their Hobbes Corners homes. She said if she had all the money in the world she would buy a beach house and lie in the sun all day. (Yet she never learned how to swim, never once went with Lore to the ocean.) Sentimental, Julia would have said of that picture — and of this one, too. Julia had strong opinions about certain kinds of paintings and movies and rooms. She despised easy beauty. Beauty, she said, should always have something ugly and off-kilter in it, something true. The paling sun in the picture is more than halfway down the sky; it is that moment in a long, hot day where the light cools and the sweat on one’s neck and shoulders dries, and one is sated and sleepy from the sun sunk deep into one’s bones. Lore leans in to see the name on the plate by the picture: Thomas Eddington, 1993.
After the cafeteria, Lore got to see the kind of art Julia liked. Not oceans and ice cream cones. Fifth floor, Austrian Expressionism: pictures by George Grosz and Otto Dix and Egon Schiele. A riot of thick paint, weird illumination, clashing colors. Egon Schiele looked out at Lore with the deep-bored, jutting-browed, demonic eyes of his self-portrait; there was something sinister in the tuft of hair just visible at his armpit. He clutched his skull; his white fingernails accused her. Julia was very still as she stood in front of each picture. Lore looked at Julia’s lovely face, her sloe eyes, next to the rabid reds and greens and purples of the canvases, and was visited with the knowledge that this was what Julia looked like inside, smeared and inflamed. She understood. She took Julia’s hand, squeezed it. Julia squeezed back. I have a friend, Lore thought.
“Ahoy!” calls some wag, a white-haired orderly trying to catch her attention; his stretcher needs to come through. Lore steps to the side to let pass a figure so covered up with sheets and scrub cap and tubing that Lore can’t tell whether it is a man or a woman. A woman, she decides. She drops her head in unconscious respect. One long-fingered hand, all knuckles and joints, rests atop the sheet; the rest of the form, glimpsed underneath, is tiny and emaciated. Is the woman alive or dead? Alert or sedated? As a child, Lore was fascinated by the story in a book of Greek myths about a young man who appealed to Hera for eternal life. Hera, malicious, granted his wish literally. He had asked for eternal life, but he had neglected to ask never to grow old. And so the years went by and the man aged; his back became bent, his skin discolored and sagged, his limbs shriveled and eventually gave way. Centuries passed and he became smaller and drier and more withered until finally he was no larger or sturdier than a grasshopper, and Hera brought him to Olympus and put him in a little cage, where he was forced to emit his dry rasps for her entertainment for eternity.
Perhaps the woman under the sheets was once very young and beautiful (at least, she would have been young) and had wished for what the young man had wished for, and now here was her recompense. A quiet muttering rises from beneath the sheet and Lore imagines that the old woman is dreaming of herself with beautiful, lavender-tipped iridescent wings; she is singing all day long for a goddess. It might be lovely if we could have immortality even via hallucination, even the hallucinated immortality of a hallucinated insect.
Sentimental, Julia repeats, of Thomas Eddington’s painting. Okay, okay, Lore replies, rattled, and turns away. Who is she to argue? She is not a maker of things; she does not have that talent. She cannot draw or paint; she plays no instrument; her writing is blunt and practical. Her creative gift, if she has one, is to help children learn how to speak. Into that she pours her patience, her instinct, her ingenuity. That’s all right with you, isn’t it, little one? she asks, touching her belly. Anyway, it’s what you got.
She moves on. There are open rooms with big machines; one is being wiped down by a young man with a face mask hanging loose under his chin. He smiles at her, as if they know each other, and, caught off guard, Lore smiles back. Suppose, she thinks. Suppose it was him I’d sat down next to at the museum … But she is carrying the great weight of a different path and of someone else’s child, and she walks on, her skin warm, her fingers tingling a little.
When Lore and Julia stopped back at the cafeteria for more coffee, putting off parting, Julia told Lore that there was someone she wanted her to meet. “My friend Asa. He needs a girlfriend.”
“And I just happened to show up?”
“No! You would be so right for him. I have the funniest feeling.”
Asa, Julia explained, was her oldest friend. He was handsome and funny and smart and unaccountably unattached. They’d known each other since they were born, their parents had been close at the university. Asa’s and Julia’s fathers were professors of history there; Asa’s mother worked at the university press. Julia’s mother had taught there too before moving to the West. Columbia University! It was very impressive. (Lore’s mother stooped above the gasping lilies. She bent over the stuttering sewing machine.)