Excerpt from chapter one of The List,
a novel forthcoming from Scribner, March 2007
She dreams about hearts, when he isn’t there. About one heart, actually, a seemingly average and healthy human heart, cone-shaped and hollow, embraced by a colorful network of arteries and veins. A textbook heart. The typical human heart is fist-sized, she was taught—tuck your right elbow to your side and place your right arm at a diagonal across your breastbone and there you are, your clenched fist roughly the size, shape, and correct placement of the muscular, double-pumping organ of Valentine and black velvet torch song fame: the heart. During the average lifetime the average heart, at seventy-two lubb-dupps per minute, will beat two billion times—Think McDonald’s hamburgers sold, Al said to her, once, Picture two billion patties being pumped out to poison the world—and spurt on its way enough blood to fill one hundred swimming pools. Picture it like that, Al said. One hundred swimming pools of blood, circled by one hundred film executives in lounge chairs, reading screenplays, dipping their toes in from time to time. The heart’s intricate choreography, balancing nerve impulses and muscle contractions—Just picture Martha Graham’s eurhythmics, he said, danced by women in red satin, picture them flowing around in sync. He was trying to help her study and being no help at all, just messing her up with his silly, pointless facts. He thinks visually, she knows, he has to get the image printed, framed. Everything’s a movie in his mind. Eidetic. That “organ of Valentine and black velvet torch song fame” is his silly picture, not her professors’, not hers. Marlene Dietrich’s face, singing “Falling in Love Again” in a throbbing voice, that’s heart, he said. Look at that quivering throat. And look how the shadow under her nose shapes a butterfly, look at the agony bleeding in her eyes. Now, you want to see heart and soul, look at Falconetti’s Joan of Arc. Look at that cinematic face, torn between spirit and flesh, shadow and light. Look.
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