A Well-tempered Heart (3 page)

WHY ARE YOU ALONE?

That voice again. No longer a whisper, but still muted. It reverberated throughout my entire body, made me shiver.

Why are you alone?

It sounded closer, more immediate than in the office. As if someone had stepped nearer to me.

Why don’t you answer me?

I felt hot. My heart started to race again. Sweaty palms. The same symptoms as this morning. I couldn’t sit still; I stood up and paced back and forth in my little living room.

Why are you alone?

—Who says I’m alone?

Would she leave me in peace if I answered her?

Where are the others?

—What others?

Your husband.

—I’m not married.

Don’t you have any children?

—No.

Oh.

—What’s “oh” supposed to mean?

Nothing. It’s only … no kids … that’s sad.

—No. Not at all.

Where’s your father?

—He’s dead.

And your mother?

—She lives in San Francisco.

Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?

—Sure, a brother.

Why isn’t he here?

—He lives in San Francisco, too.

Did you stay behind with your aunts and uncles?

— I don’t have any aunts or uncles.

No aunts or uncles?

—No.

So why don’t you live with your family?

—Because it’s actually not a bad thing to have a continent between us.

So you are alone.

—No. I’m not alone. I just live alone.

Why?

—Why? Why? Because I like it better that way.

Why?

—You’re getting on my nerves with that “why” thing.

Why do you live alone?

—Because I hate to be woken in the night by a man’s snoring. Because I’d rather read my morning paper in peace. Because I don’t like whiskers in the sink. Because I don’t want to have to justify myself when I come home from work at midnight. Because I love not having to explain anything to anyone. Can you understand that?

Silence.

—Hello? Can you understand that?

Not a sound.

—Hello? Why aren’t you talking anymore?

I stood there waiting. The sonorous hum of the refrigerator, voices in the hall, a door clicking shut.

—Where are you?

The phone rang. Amy. She could tell by my tone that I was out of joint.

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Sure I am.”

Why are you lying again?

Like a sharp blow from behind. I stumbled and nearly lost my balance.

“It … it’s just that …” I muttered, bewildered.

“Julia, what’s wrong?” she asked, alarmed. “Do you want to meet? Should I come to your place?”

I was dying to get out of my apartment.

“I … I’d rather meet at your place. When would be an okay time?”

“Whenever you want.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

AMY LEE LIVED
in two adjacent studios on the top floor of a three-story building on the Lower East Side. She lived in one of the apartments and used the other for her art. For the past several years there had been no place where I felt better cared for. We spent entire weekends on her couch, watching
Sex and the City
, eating ice cream, drinking red wine, laughing about men or consoling each other when we suffered from heartaches.

Amy and I had met right at the beginning of law school, Columbia, emphasis on corporate law. While filling out some form or other we noticed by chance that we had been born on exactly the same day, she in Hong Kong, I in New York. She had spent the first nineteen years of her life in Hong Kong, until her parents sent her to college in America. Amy claimed that an astrologer back home had predicted she would meet someone with the same birthday who would prove to be a lifelong companion, and so it seemed that we had no choice but to become friends.

I didn’t believe in astrology at the time, but I liked Amy from the start. We complemented each other in a way I had never experienced with a friend.

She was in many ways my exact opposite: a head shorter, stockier. She dyed her black hair bright colors, didn’t like to make plans, loved surprises, was quick on her feet and even-tempered. She meditated, was a Buddhist, and yet regularly consulted astrologers and was so superstitious that it sometimes made me crazy. She always wore something red. Never got out of an elevator on the ninth floor. Refused to take any taxi whose license plate ended in a seven.

She was the only person I had shared my father’s story with. And she believed it. Every word, without question. As if it were the most natural thing in the world for there to be people who could hear heartbeats.

In contrast to my mother and brother, who preferred to be left in the dark about my trip. They wanted to know only whether our father was still alive. When I told them he wasn’t and tried to report what I had experienced in Burma and why he had returned to the land of his birth in order to die, they refused to listen to me. It was the beginning of our estrangement. My search for my father had torn the family in two. My mother and brother on one side, my father and I on the other. Amy was convinced that this split had been there all along, that I was slow to notice it or had previously been in denial about it. She was probably right. Five years ago my mother moved to San Francisco to be closer to my brother, and now we saw each other once, maybe twice a year.

Amy, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of it. When was I finally going to visit U Ba, she always wanted to know. And what of my father’s inheritance: faith in the magical power of love? Had I lost it again in New York? Why had I not looked after it properly? Shouldn’t I be looking for it? Questions I dodged because I had no answers, which only encouraged her to ask them at regular intervals.

Amy’s heart, unlike mine, was not really in her studies. Her real ambition had been to paint, and she had gone into law only under pressure from—or out of love for—her parents, the justification changing according to her mood. Still, she was one of the best in our class. When Amy’s father died in a plane crash four weeks before our last exams, Amy just jetted off to Hong Kong for two months. Back in New York she announced that her studies were over. She wouldn’t spend another day at the university. Life was too short for detours. If you had a dream, you ought to live it.

Since then she’d been making ends meet as a freelance set painter on Broadway, and she refused to so much as show her work to any gallery owners. Neither exhibits nor sales held any interest for her. She was painting for herself, not for anyone else. Amy was the freest person I knew.

The door to her studio stood ajar. She loathed closed doors the same way she abhorred all locks, and she was firmly convinced that people who constantly worried about locking things up or away would eventually lock themselves out. She even refused to chain her bicycle. Curiously, she was the only one of my friends whose bicycle had never been stolen.

She sat on a rolling stool in front of a canvas that she was painting a dark orange. She had put her hair, dyed red, into a ponytail. She wore faded gray sweatpants and an oversized white T-shirt covered with paint flecks. Her work clothes. The room smelled of fresh paint and varnish; the floor was lost beneath splotches of color, paintings rested against the walls or on easels, many of them in varying shades of red. Amy claimed that she had unfortunately gotten mired in her Barnett Newman phase. Instead of stripes she was painting circles, and if she didn’t bust out soon, I might as well start calling her Bernadette Newman. Jack Johnson was playing on her small stereo.

Hearing my footsteps on the wooden floor, she turned to face me. Her dark brown, almost black eyes widened in surprise.

“What’s got you looking like that?”

I collapsed into an old armchair, my hands and feet ice cold. My eyes filled with tears. It was as if in these few seconds all of the stress of the past several hours was slipping away. She looked at me with a worried expression, gave her stool a vigorous push, and came rolling over to me.

“What’s the problem?”

I shrugged helplessly.

“Let me guess: Mulligan gave you the boot.”

I shook my head the slightest bit.

“Your mother died.”

I fought back the first tears.

Amy sighed deeply. “Okay, it’s something serious!”

Maybe it was her sense of humor that I liked best about her.

“Out with it then, what happened?”

“So what am I looking like?” I tried to dodge her question.

“Like a frightened hen.”

I was quiet for a while. Amy waited patiently for my answer.

I found it difficult to say out loud the thought that had been haunting me incessantly for the past hour. “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”

She studied me thoughtfully. “And what is it exactly, if I may ask, that is prompting this fear?”

“I feel as if someone is following me.”

“A stalker? Is he good-looking?”

“Not a stalker. I’m hearing voices.” I cringed at the sound of it. I felt embarrassed telling even Amy.

“Since when?” she asked, soberly now and without a trace of surprise in her voice.

“Since this morning,” I answered, and told her what had happened at the office and back at home.

Amy sat motionless on her stool listening to me. Occasionally she nodded, as if she knew just what I was talking about. When I was through she stood up, put down her brush, and paced up and down between her artworks. It’s what she did when she was thinking hard.

“Is it the first time?” she asked, pausing.

“Yes.”

“Is she threatening you?”

“No, why would she do that?”

“Does she insult you?”

“Insult me?”

“Does she tell you that you’re a useless slut? A lousy lawyer? That it’s only a matter of time before everyone realizes what an idiot you really are?”

I shook my head, confused. “No.”

“Does she order you around?”

I had no idea where she was heading with this line of inquiry.

“Does she tell you to dash a cup of coffee in Mulligan’s face? Or to jump out the window?”

“No. Where are you getting such nonsense?”

Amy was thoughtful. “What does she say, then?”

“Not much. In the office she was warning me about my colleagues. Otherwise she just asks questions.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Who are you? Why do you live alone? Why don’t you have any children?”

A smile of relief crossed her face. “Interesting questions.”

“How so?”

“I know someone else who would take an interest in your answers. Do our voices sound at all similar?”

“Quit making fun of me,” I told her, disappointed. Couldn’t she tell how desperately I needed her reassurance?

“I’m not making fun of you,” she said, coming over to me, crouching beside me, and stroking my hair. “But these
questions don’t sound particularly dire. I feared something worse.”

“How worse?”

“Hearing voices is often a psychotic reaction. It’s a typical symptom of incipient schizophrenia. In that case the outlook is dim. Not easily cured. But in those cases the affected person feels threatened by the voices. The voices boss them around. Jump off a roof, stab your neighbor. Melancholics often hear insults. But none of that applies to you.”

“How is it,” I wondered, “that you know so much about people who hear voices?”

“Didn’t I ever tell you that my father heard voices, too?”

I stared at her in surprise. “No.”

“My mother told me about it a few years after he died. After that I read everything I could find on the subject.”

“Was your father schizophrenic?”

“No. I think that for him it was a relatively harmless phenomenon.”

“What did he do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I suspect that he saw the voice as someone who offered him advice from time to time.” After a short pause she added: “Unfortunately, he didn’t always follow it.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother says the voice told him on the day of the crash that he ought to turn back. That he shouldn’t get on that plane. He even called her from the airport.”

“Why didn’t he listen?” I asked doubtfully.

“If only I knew. Maybe he was afraid to give it too much power over his life. Who wants to be told by a voice which planes to take and which ones not to?”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”

“I thought I had. But maybe I just figured you wouldn’t believe me.”

I wasn’t sure whether I believed her now. It made me think of my brother in Burma. “Not all truths are explicable, and not all explicable things are true,” he once told me. How often had that remark come to mind during the first years after my return? In Kalaw I had at some point understood what he meant. In his world of superstitious people it had made sense to me; back in New York I had my doubts again. Why shouldn’t all explicable things be true? Why shouldn’t one be able to explain all truths? Maybe there were truths in Kalaw that did not hold elsewhere.