The Sydney Opera House
by Jessica Treadway
Insufficient sleep. A virus. An infection. Tiny crystals of calcium floating around in her ear canal. Stress.
These are the possible reasons the doctor gives for why Trish is dizzy.
“What about a brain tumor?” She knows from her Internet search that this is unlikely, but it’s the explanation she feels most attached to. If someone asked her to say why, she’d be embarrassed to tell the truth: She wouldn’t mind the attention. As long as the tumor could be operated on and removed, she wouldn’t mind people asking her how she was, and then actually giving a shit about the answer. She wouldn’t mind missing a few weeks of work, either. Or, for that matter, a few months…
But the doctor does not suggest, as Trish had hoped he would, a brain scan. Instead he sends her home with a printout from the Internet of the maneuver she is supposed to perform while lying on her bed, detailed movements of her head in a certain order, and for a certain length of time, designed to dislodge the crystals from the wrong place they have floated to, if they are indeed there.
Before she leaves the office, the doctor offers to walk her through the maneuver on his examining table. Trish declines, thinking maybe he is some kind of perv, and because from the diagrams on the printout she can’t really picture what he is talking about doing. Later she finds out that the treatment he prescribes is pretty standard procedure when a person has what she probably has, and she feels like an idiot. But she forgets about this when the dizziness goes away after she follows the instructions at home, and for a few days she thinks she is in the clear. Then, on the fourth day, it returns worse than before.
When antibiotics don’t help, the doctor agrees, reluctantly, to a scan. Everything comes out fine. She lets him manipulate her on his table, thinking maybe she’d done it wrong at home, but this doesn’t help, either. When they seem to have exhausted all of the medical options, the doctor suggests that her vertigo may be psychogenic, which means caused by anxiety or depression or some other condition of her mind. She drops the doctor then and there — not that he knows, not that she tells him this in his office, but the minute she gets home she starts searching for primary care physicians who are taking new patients, and signs up for a woman close to her own age. This doctor is nice enough, but she can’t locate the source of Trish’s dizziness, either. Trish leaves the office feeling despair, and resigns herself to just live with it.
At least she can live with — she knows she’s relatively lucky, from the stories she’s read online about people who can’t drive, or even sit as a passenger in anything that moves, without vomiting. People who can’t leave their houses, or work at their jobs. Trish can do all of these things. She just can’t lie flat or sleep on her left (preferred) side; she needs to avoid bright or flashing lights; and she has trouble at the hairdresser and the dentist, when they want to tilt back her head. Sometimes, too, the odd movement of her head at a sudden sound or sight will set her off.
It’s an inopportune time to suffer from dizziness, and to never know, from one day to the next, how bad it’s going to be. Trish’s in one of her dating phases, during which she corresponds with men through an online site, then takes the subsequent, progressive steps (if the light appears green on both sides) of phone call, coffee, and dinner. So far this time around, she hasn’t gotten to a second dinner, but she keeps telling herself it’ll happen, she just needs to keep her head up — or is it down? Well, one shouldn’t invoke maxims that refer to the head when suffering from vertigo, anyway — and fate will reward her. It’ll be her turn soon, it’s about time.
I forgot to mention that Trish isn’t young anymore, that’s important to know.
One day at work when she is scrolling through the site instead of doing what she’s supposed to be doing, a new profile catches her eye. “DWM (Dizzy Wry Male) seeks understanding female companion to share my tilted world.” Intrigued, not exactly sure what she might be getting into, and without letting on that her world is tilted, too, Trish agrees to coffee, via the site’s chat function, without the intermediate step of a phone conversation.
Calvin’s waiting for her when she arrives. Though she knows it is shallow and doesn’t matter, he’s better-looking than she allowed herself to imagine — she figured that like most people, he’d uploaded a photo that made him appear more handsome than he was — and when he looks up as she approaches, she can tell he’s thinking the same thing about her. She gets her coffee and sits down across from him, and they begin to talk. Oh, it’s been so long since she had this! The spark of a connection. Excitement. Hope. He started feeling dizzy seven years ago, he tells her, and Trish’s shock at the thought that her condition might also last that long is almost entirely obscured by the exhilaration of flirting.
His is a worse case than hers, she recognizes this right away. He tells her he was diagnosed thirteen years ago, on his thirty-fifth birthday, with a particular vestibular disorder that doesn’t respond to the usual treatments. His dizziness is often accompanied by migraines that force him to lie on the couch all day, with the curtains drawn. He sleeps with an emesis basin next to his bed because he sometimes wakes up with sudden and violent nausea. He tends to shy away from social engagements, not because he doesn’t enjoy them, but because it’s so disappointing for him if the vertigo interrupts or interferes. When he does venture into the company of others for any length of time, he often takes medication, which he calls his “people pills.”
He took them before coming to meet her, he tells Trish, then admits that given how they’re getting along, he probably didn’t have to. “For a long time I fought it — allowing my world to shrink. Until one day I remembered that old saying about quality over quantity. If I can meet the one right person, I thought, it won’t matter if there aren’t any others. Two people can make a very cozy life together, if they approach it the right way.”
Sitting there listening to him, it sounds so good to Trish! She marvels at the irony of it: If she hadn’t been suffering from vertigo herself, she would never have clicked on Calvin’s peculiar profile. How many times has she heard the phrase “blessing in disguise,” without really paying attention, without really understanding what it might mean? Now, she understands.
They’re exactly the same age, they discover — only three months apart. Calvin’s had a few good relationships — one with a woman he calls his soul mate, who dumped him, and another he actually married, who asked him for a divorce once it became apparent that his vertigo might be permanent. Trish says That’s terrible, but Calvin shakes his head. “No, she was a good woman. Is a good woman. I can understand it — she married a different person. It’s not her fault I became this guy.” He points both thumbs back at himself.
“It’s not your fault, either.” Trish feels her face flush before adding recklessly that she’d never behave that way toward anybody she loved. “For better or for worse,” she says, then fears she’s gone too far. But Calvin looks pleased to hear it. What’s her romantic history? he asks, and she recites the selective response she’s devised over time for just this inquiry: a few long-term relationships that “ended up not panning out.” Calvin seems less disturbed by the vagueness of this answer than some other men have. He and Trish finish their coffees and decide to move on, right then, to dinner. By the time she gets back home, she’s been gone six hours.
To make a long story short — although actually it isn’t really all that long at all, it’s just that you can probably fill in the blanks yourself, or nearly enough that it doesn’t make a difference whether you’ve got it exactly right — five months after they meet in the coffeeshop, Trish and Calvin marry, not in some big, nerve-wracking affair with attendants and guests, but a simple ceremony in front of a judge. (She has to discard the prototype invitation she designed and printed at work, excited at the notion of sending invitations out, but never mind; she knows it’s probably true what everyone says, that the wedding isn’t the important thing, what matters is the marriage.) She moves into his place and they go about making their cozy life, he continuing to work from home and she at the same job she’s had for years, in a cubicle in a building in the city. In bed, they are quite the pair; neither of them can get on top without feeling dizzy, so they find a sideways progression of moves and positions that satisfies them both, even though it precludes variety and improvisation. At night they watch TV, and on weekends they take long walks along the river, which clears both of their heads.
For a few months after they become husband and wife, Calvin wakes on some mornings reporting that he feels less dizzy than usual, and while Trish knows she should be glad for him — and she is glad, really, on some level — it also gives her a slight chill to the gut, for what reason she chooses not to explore. When, after two weeks of what seems like consistent improvement, he stands up one morning and has to grab for the bedpost, then says he feels worse than ever, she is ashamed to recognize relief in her heart, though Calvin himself is less discouraged by the relapse than she expects him to be.
Trish never thought she could be as happy as she believes she feels these days, riding the train out of the city after work and then walking from the station to her new home, where she is greeted by someone who asks about her day, and is glad to see her. Her experience of herself in the world has improved by many, many degrees, almost all the way up to “second to none,” a phrase she once heard a co-worker use to describe how she felt about her own life. Trish envied the other woman, but never dared to aspire to so exalted a state.
There’s no question of children — they’re both too old for that. But they adopt a dog, whom they name Dizzy, or Diz for short, which amuses Calvin more than it does Trish. Though she doesn’t realize it at the time, he intends the dog’s name to be a point of departure, when they meet new people — as they often do, walking Diz around the river — from which they can move directly to confessing their joint affliction, their shared vertigo. She understands his instinct: It makes him more comfortable to reveal his vulnerability sooner rather than later (as he did in his dating profile), so that nobody will expect too much of him. Also, he says, it weeds out the people you don’t want to waste your time on if they have a problem with your having a problem.
While this makes a certain sense, Trish still asks him to refrain from telling people, especially right away, why their dog has the name he does. The truth is that she can’t stand the idea of anyone getting the impression that she’s had to settle, though this isn’t something she would ever allow herself to know or say. So when Calvin asks why, she cries, “They’re total strangers! Besides, we’re more than that, aren’t we? I don’t think of it as my identity — being dizzy. It’s not the first thing I want people to know.”
Calvin considers this — it’s one of the things she loves most about him, that he listens so closely — and asks, “What is the first thing?” But when she can’t come up with an answer he tells her, “ I guess I do feel like it’s my identity, at this point. It’s been so long for me now, and it does kind of define my life. You know: I spin, therefore I am.” He’s trying to make her smile, but this time it doesn’t work. Reluctantly, he agrees to stop explaining Diz’s name, at least to people they’ve only just met.
Calvin likes making friends at the river. It’s social, but without any commitment; you can leave any time. They become friendly with another couple, Jim and Luanne, who spontaneously ask Calvin and Trish one Saturday if they want to come over for dinner that night. Trish can tell that Calvin is about to decline — they have a standard excuse, for the rare occasions they’re invited somewhere — but before he can give it, she accepts the couple’s offer, ignoring the betrayed expression Calvin bores into her. At home, they argue. “We never do anything,” Trish says, doing her best to hide the exclamation point in her tone. “We’re always cooped up here.”
Calvin looks stricken. But instead of responding directly, he asks her to call off the date. She reminds him that they were only given an address and a time to show up, not a phone number.
“I can’t do it!” he cries, sounding no longer angry, but anguished. Trish resists the temptation to tell him to suck it up. She offers to go to the dinner by herself, but Calvin dismisses this option. “I’ll manage,” he says, like (Trish thinks) the martyr he is, and he takes twice the usual dose of his people pills before they set out.
Luanne and Jim’s condo is filled with photographs of the trips they’ve taken together, both here and abroad. There’s even a picture of them at the Great Wall. Luanne asks if they travel much, and Calvin says no, he’s a terrible flier; Trish can tell he’s on the verge of explaining why, but before he can do so she announces that they don’t have a lot of free time (a lie if there ever was one) or any discretionary income (not so much of a lie), but that she hopes they’ll have both, someday, and be able to travel too. In an effort to deflect Calvin’s sustained stare, she adds that she’s always wanted to see the Sydney Opera House.
The Sydney Opera House! Where does that come from? In fact, she has zero interest in either architecture or opera. It’s just the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of Australia, which is the first place she thinks of that’s faraway. When she says it, Calvin laughs outright. Luanne and Jim look at each other as if they’d had a bet going between them — whether it was a good or a bad idea to invite these two for dinner — and they’ve just realized who won.
The evening ends early. They never see Jim or Luanne again, because they take to walking Diz (sometimes together, but more often separately, now) in a different direction altogether, away from the river on the commercial, less scenic route.
What finally puts an end to it all (I say this so matter-of-factly because I’m sure you can see it coming, though you will probably be wrong about the how and the who) is Trish’s realization, shortly after their third anniversary, that she isn’t dizzy anymore. She’s grown so accustomed to it — the low-level imbalance, the subtle, almost unconscious adjustments she’s learned to make, accommodating the tilt and veer — that when it leaves, it takes her a few days to notice. At first, she doesn’t trust that it’s gone, and she tests herself, cautiously, by lying flat on her back for an hour, by subjecting herself to the strobe lights at the teenagers’ stores at the mall. When neither of these brings on vertigo, she drops into a hair salon, asks for a wash, and lets the girl tilt her head at an angle in the sink that would have produced agony only two weeks earlier. Nothing. She emerges with her old sense of balance, and a new style of hair.
What is it that’s caused her to recover? She has, of course, no idea. And what does it mean to recover — that she’s gotten her old self back? She has little if any desire to recall what her “old self” was.
It takes her a few more days to tell Calvin, who, once he hears what she has to say, sits without blinking for almost longer than Trish can bear. Just as she’s about to explode from the rage of it, he gets up from his chair to come to the other side of the table, where he cradles her head between his hands before kissing the top of it with a tenderness she hadn’t seen coming.
Then he says slowly, “Well, maybe this is good timing. I’ve been thinking that maybe we’ve run our course.”
“What?” It doesn’t sink in right away. “Wait a minute — you’re dumping me?” The absurdity of this makes her laugh, which, she can see, only confirms for her husband the truth of what had seemed hard for him to say.
“Whatever we had once, we don’t have, anymore.” His smile is sad, with something else in it she can’t or would rather not place. He’s talking about the vertigo — right? She feels dismay seep through her, at the idea that they had been bonded by so thin and pathetic a paste.
But there’d been more to it than just that! She knew there was. They’d discovered a lot of things they had in common, both before they got married and after. They loved each other — right? The dizziness had only been the occasion of their original meeting. It was the context, the backdrop, not the reason they’d decided to share this cozy life.
Calvin shrugs in the way she found so endearing, the first time they met. Even then, after only a few hours, she recognized that the casual motion was for him not casual, but rather an acknowledgment of how important a thing had just passed between them. That day, he shrugged after asking if she wanted to stay where they were for another coffee, or head up the street for a meal. As long as you’re sitting across from me, he’d said to her, I don’t care where the table is.
Today, the shrug signals the end of their marriage. Trish looks away, thinking she might have to run for the vomit pail, she feels so blindsided and so ill.
Whatever happened to “for better or for worse”? Calvin had told her he didn’t require that line in their vows, but Trish insisted. Had she thought, in some remote part of herself she rarely accessed, that by committing herself to a man who was so compromised, she’d become a different person? More generous, more appealing… someone she herself might admire, if she met herself out in the world? Someone who might actually visit the Sydney Opera House, or give a shit about her job, or love a decent person the way he deserves to be loved?
Though he’s sitting very close to her, he has receded from her sight. She shakes her head with as much force as she can muster, willing the world to spin. “Don’t do that, honey,” Calvin says, wincing. “You’re hurting yourself! You’ll make the vertigo come back.”
She smiles, but knows he can see her lips trembling. There doesn’t seem any point in telling him what she’s known all along: that she will have no such luck.
