There's Nothing Wrong With Her - Hardcover

Weinberg, Kate

 
9780593717363: There's Nothing Wrong With Her
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593717368 ISBN 13: 9780593717363
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

"Beautiful." —Sarah Jessica Parker

"The best thing you'll read this year." —Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age

A raw, tenderly comic, and perfectly off-kilter novel about a woman who occasionally finds herself in "The Pit”—a delirious state of semiconsciousness—and the improbable, sometimes imagined people who meet her there.

Vita Woods is on the brink. She produces a popular podcast and lives with her successful doctor boyfriend, Max, with whom the sex is great and the future promising. Her brilliant if unreliable sister, Gracie, is her best friend and sparring partner. And her steadfast goldfish, Whitney Houston, brightens even her dimmest days. But as much as things are going right, the days are dark. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, she can barely make it out of bed.

Instead, she spends long, blurred hours falling in and out of The Pit, dead to the world and to herself. For months, Vita has been sick with an illness that no doctor, not even Max, can diagnose. And recently, Luigi, a Renaissance poet nursing a 500-year-old heartbreak, has started showing up at her bedside, bringing snacks and unsolicited romantic advice. He says he’s come to release her. The issue is: he may be a ghost, an apparition of her sickly mind.

Then, when an unexpected mix-up pushes her into the path of her upstairs neighbors, Vita finds friendship—and perhaps more—in the apartment above. But something about her "condition" keeps nagging at her. What if the problem is Vita herself? Because as far as anyone can prove . . . there’s nothing wrong with her.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Weinberg is the author of The Truants and host of the podcast series “Shelf Help.” She lives in London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

a visitor

Let's start with some facts.

On day 126, I moved Whitney Houston up to the end of my bed.

Hold on. Even that's not quite true.

On day 126, I asked Max to move the bowl, filled with water, multicolored gravel, plastic coral, treasure chest, ruined archway, and Whitney Houston herself, swimming in panicked circles, and bring it sloshing up the nine steps to the mezzanine, where he placed it at the end of our bed.

Partly the goldfish move was for company, a cellmate of sorts. I had only moved into Max's basement flat a couple of weeks before I got sick. So I'd barely unpacked before I began to spend long stretches of the day in bed alone. Max's hours at the hospital were relentless and for weeks now I'd stopped wanting visitors.

But the main idea for having Whitney Houston join me upstairs was that when I feel myself getting sucked back into The Pit it would stop me thinking: Something truly catastrophic is happening; the doctors won't tell me, but they think I'm stuck like this forever. Or rather, when I did think that, I'd catch sight of my golden fantail swimming blithely around her bowl and try to remember that this is how it always feels. The fact that I kept forgetting, this violent yo-yoing between thinking I was fine and thinking I was stuck forever; this odd, Etch A Sketch memory: Well, that was part of the sickness too.

Sometimes it worked, sort of. When I felt the clamp tightening at the back of my skull, when I lost feeling in my fingers and toes and the strange, poisoned aches began to flood my system, I'd fix my gaze on Whitney's translucent tail wafting through the water and remind myself that this panic, this sense of doom that kept circling my brain like a fish in a bowl: That was just the illness speaking.

Mostly it didn't work.

Because the dirty secret was that although I joked about seven-second memories and Jewish hypochondria, this whole episode had dragged on way too long to be funny. By now, everyone was frightened. My friends were frightened, my family was frightened. Even my boss sent orchids in an expensive ceramic pot.

I saw it in Max's eyes too. At least I thought I did. And when a doctor is frightened, you know you better start worrying.

That's the problem with this story, so much is guesswork. There aren't enough hard facts. In the end, I did break free, even if I'm still trying to piece together from what. All I knew then was that I had to serve my time, imprisoned by whatever sickness it was. Only thing was, no one would tell me how long. As the weeks gave into months, so much else blurred.

Some days, it felt like only Whitney Houston was really there.


The vortex pulls me down and I thrash around inside a wave of pain. Muscles I didn’t know exist are crawling with fire. A belt is tightening around my chest. There isn’t enough space for my lungs. My brain balls itself up like a frightened bug and everything goes very slow and quiet, like my senses have been plugged. I’m gripped by a powerful loneliness, such a sharp need to touch, hear, or feel the presence of someone else that I’m scared I will not be able to breathe again without it.

Please . . .

Max.

Gracie.

Anyone.

When I surface, gasping for air, Luigi da Porto is sitting at the end of my bed. Lately he's been stalking my night thoughts. I haven't been able to work out quite why, after all these years, but now that he's here it feels strangely natural. Like when the chronology is skewed in a dream and a dead relative or a teacher from your primary school shows up. I don't think: Impossible, sixteenth-century Italian warrior-poet Luigi da Porto pitching up in my basement flat in North West London. I just think, Thank god, there he is.

And just as I think this, the edges around him blur.

I try to focus on his features, try to get purchase on something solid outside my body, but the next wave from The Pit is crashing over me. This time it brings with it a deadening exhaustion that is almost sweet. I slip back into unconsciousness without a fight.

When I wake again, the mezzanine of our apartment seems brighter than usual. Sun is pouring through the half of the window that's above pavement level, striking off Whitney's bowl and Max's favorite painting, which I've been forced to spend rather too much time with: a pair of lovers on a London Bridge, stock-still and lost in each other, as commuters swirl around them.

This time I can see Luigi very clearly. He's lounging on the yellow armchair that Max brought up to our bedroom space for visitors, wearing the same clothes as he was in that oil painting where I first saw and fell for him: a fur-trimmed tunic (cinched rather tight), pantyhose, slip-on leather shoes, and a velvet cloak flicked over one shoulder.

When he sees I'm awake, he leans forward. His broken nose, the thick dark eyebrows, the hollow cheeks and startling fullness of his lips-all the thuggish beauty of his broad features rearranges itself into a picture of concern.

"Oh, my dear, you are having an awful time of it, aren't you?"

The clock by Whitney's bowl, the one which you can't always trust, says 2:36. I must have been down there for a while this time. Two hours, maybe three? The thought of someone watching me while I am thrashing around in The Pit gives me vertigo. I wipe my mouth quickly with the back of my hand to check for dribble.

"How did you get here?" I try to stack the pillows behind me so I can sit up straight but the effort is too much.

"Can I help with that?" Luigi asks, half rising. "I can't tell you how much I feel for you. You know, of course, I was bedridden for several months following the injury. So you don't need to explain to me the crushing effect it has on the spirit as well as the body."

I feel a flicker of guilt. It's true, he's been on my mind. But not because I've been reflecting on his time stuck in bed. Rather, I've been dreaming lately about my life in Verona, that tiny flat a stone's throw from the Arena, so that in the summer months when the opera was in full swing you didn't need to buy tickets, the music came floating over the rooftops. Wondering when it was that I gave up on that younger bit of me: sex in a train, on a boat, and once-a fail-up a tree; the me that believed in poetry (even my own) and got stoned, so very stoned, then pinched warm pastries from the trays outside the bakeries on the way home at three a.m., the me that I feel so fucking far from now.

"Mind you"-he lowers his voice-"I probably shouldn't say this with you feeling so reduced. But you do know your cheekbones have never looked better?"

"Oh." I touch my face, pleased. "Well, thank you. Someone said I was looking gaunt."

It seems disloyal to name Max.

"Nonsense. You look ravishing. Even with the strange bed garments. All edges, angles, and pools of dark eyes. If my heart was not already spoken for . . ."

I glance down at my flimsy gray T-shirt-a favorite, bought in a hipster store in Brooklyn years ago, worn thin with age, now stuck to my back with cold sweat-and a pair of faded black drawstring trousers I've been wearing since yesterday morning. Was that really only yesterday?

Time has collapsed since I got sick. Night and day have lost their seam. Or perhaps that happened a few weeks after, when I realized I wasn't getting any better and the world had moved on without me? Leaving me trapped in this purgatory, a place in which I wake with dread to see which version of myself I will be: a well person who is stalked by sickness, or a sick person who may never get well. The repetition and the solitude are enough to drive you crazy, but seeing people is worse. So you sit with your goldfish and your memories and your boredom and you wait, and wait, and wait.

"How...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593717368
ISBN 13 
9780593717363
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
212
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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USA
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