The Life Room (19 page)

My mind is going to overflow. He rested his hands on the bare skin of my exposed upper arms and it sent a shiver through my body. We looked at each other and I realized then that Stephen was not going to kiss me and that I was not going to kiss him. We smiled shyly and laughed. “I guess it’s time,” I said. All the emotions of being young, of finding someone you were attracted to, came back, and I realized how strange it was to feel that way again, how difficult it would be never to experience that tingling sensation of being hyperaware, so vibrantly alive. In my smile I felt my face coming to life and was suddenly embarrassed. I turned to look down, then laughed, and I heard Stephen laughing, too, and our laughter broke through my embarrassment.

Stephen told me it was good to see me so happy. It had been great to see me.

I took out my card with my university address and office number and handed it to him. He made some comment about the fact that now we were going to exchange business cards as if we were beyond that convention, and reached into the back pocket of his wallet and gave me his card in return. We said good-bye and hugged. When his hands were around my waist and then my hips, my body was wet with perspiration. When I touched his back to hold him it was warm against my palms. I was shaking a little. I looked up into his eyes and he kissed me on the lips. I did not protest. The scent of his body rose to my nostrils. It was salty and dark like earth, the same as I had remembered it. His fingers slid down my hips and touched the piece of skin between my skirt and my shirt that had risen when I lifted my arms to embrace him. I was terribly hot and the heat of Stephen’s body so close to my own made my heart move violently In my chest. I closed my eyes to drown out what? Feeling? Fear? It was more complicated than fear. There was an edge to it. I sensed my own weakness rising in me. It was weakness born when promise is suddenly snatched back and you are left hungering for something you don’t quite understand, and it was that particular weakness that only he inspired in me. Or at least I thought so then.

I stepped back after our lips brushed. It was too intense. Stephen stepped back, too, and looked at me shyly, and I saw the boy in him again. We both smiled and I walked away holding his card in my palm. Once I reached the elevator bank and looked back at Stephen I was stunned to find him still standing where I had left him, watching me walk away. For a moment I wondered whether I should go back and say good-bye again, but the part of me that was girlish and shy took over and I stepped into the elevator. By then my body was so filled with adrenaline I could barely think. My cheeks flushed. It was as if everything was happening so fast and I needed to slow it down so I could digest it and know how to act. After I had unlocked the door to the hotel room I had a premonition that Stephen was going to come back for me, that he was in a moment coming up the tube-shaped elevator and would soon be in front of my door, and I opened it and stepped out to look for him, but the narrow gray carpeted halls with their soft lavender walls were empty. I stared down a long corridor of absence. I went back into the room and sat immobile on the foot of the bed. I
needed
to begin packing. My plane was leaving later that night. But I was paralyzed. I unfolded myself onto the bed and lay down thinking I had made a grave mistake. There was something inside Stephen he wanted to give me, or something I needed from him, something we needed to say to each other, and we had let the opportunity pass. How would it have hurt if I had invited him up to my room? If we had ended the unrequited journey? Would I now be able to relax? I didn’t want to leave Paris. I didn’t want to return home. Did that mean I had no home now, other than these four walls in a hotel room painted a light Parisian blue? My room with the little French desk that now held my belongings, my folders and books and notebooks, the armoire filled with my clothes and the delicate pitcher. These were all I would need in the world. My own quiet. It had been so long since I’d felt this way.

Tears filled my eyes and moved down my cheeks. It was easier and more familiar to long for what I could not have than be in its presence, and my tears seemed to release some of the tension that had formed a knot in my body. I was surprised by how long I needed to cry. How bereft and lost I was. I thought as I began to pack that I’d never move beyond those feelings. Suddenly I was glad that I was leaving Paris, that I had to quickly finish packing and catch my flight, otherwise I’m not sure what I would have done. Once I had calmed down and settled myself against these overwhelming feelings, I was compelled to write it all down, this journal of what had transpired in Paris, lest it be forgotten. It was an urge almost like hunger. I couldn’t wait until I had taken a cab from the hotel, checked in at the airport, found my seat on the airplane (it seemed an eternity) so that I could take out my notebook and pen and make sense of things. And now what? Will I be able to return to my life unharmed?

Eleanor walked with John and Rob to the baggage claim and through customs. They were tired and barely spoke. In expectation of returning home to their individual families, each had retreated back into themselves. They looked at each other tentatively, and then parted with quick hugs and promises to keep in touch. John slipped into the car he had ordered. Irrationality, grogginess, separation anxiety—whatever it was, she didn’t want him to leave. She watched him through the window of the limousine as he lit up a cigarette, and then the limousine pulled off, taking him away to his suburban home in New Jersey.

It was early morning, the sky pink beneath the darkness. Slowly the dawn accepted the break of day and the light shifted. She smoothed the creases on her skirt, accumulated from ten days in Paris.

When she turned the key in her apartment door, her sons and husband were asleep in their rooms. A lovely light was cast in the apartment, half dark and half light—that semidark when objects just begin to emerge with clarity. As she quietly walked down the hallway to the bedrooms, she heard Noah’s sigh as he turned over and Nicholas’s thicker breathing. The warmth and press of light through the curtains filled their rooms, and for a moment she could not tell which bed she wanted to enter first.

She caught her reflection in the mirror in the hallway. Nothing about her had changed. She had seen the tougher, severe, more complicated look in women who had followed their passion. She just looked tired.

She couldn’t help herself. She awoke the boys first, sliding next to Noah in his bed and kissing him, then Nicholas. She took in their individual smells that had become a part of the way she breathed. They couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Noah sat in her lap, where he had come to join her, touching her dangling earrings. Nicholas sat next to her on his bed, clinging to her, touching her hair, reaching for her hand, in his excitement to have her home forgetting his need to separate. “Mommy, I missed you,” he said, hugging her. Noah wanted to know how high the Eiffel Tower was and whether she’d actually climbed all those stairs. Michael stood in the hallway of the boys’ room, yawning, in only his boxer shorts.

“My, my, look what the cat dragged in,” he said, his voice not yet awake. He reached for her and she stood up and fell into his arms, taking in the warmth of his body. “Aren’t we glad Mommy’s home,” he said to the boys.

Noah and Nicholas talked excitedly, trying to outshout each other. She tried to stay in tune to all that they said, not wanting to miss anything, feeling herself slowly come back to life in their presence. Michael said he would make pancakes for the occasion. The boys ran to help him. Noah liked spooning the batter onto the skillet and watching it begin to bubble and Nicholas asked if he could flip them if he promised to be careful. She reluctantly let them go and went into her bedroom to change out of the spent clothes she’d worn on the plane, happy to discard them in the hamper.

Breakfast was full of chatter and excitement. Noah poured too much syrup over his pancakes, making a lake on his plate. Though another day she would have scolded him, that morning she kept quiet. Nicholas spilled his orange juice. Michael loaded her plate with more pancakes than she could eat, and before he sat down, he reached over and kissed her again, clearly happy that she was home. Noah refused to eat, jumping up and down, touching her with his sticky hands, until he had opened his presents. She indulged him and went into the hallway to fetch her suitcase. They loved the hand-painted trucks and trains, the French books and stuffed bears she had brought home. “Will you read it to us in French?” Noah asked, holding a French version of
Goodnight Moon
, remembering how she had read him the English version when he was little. She showed them the postcards she’d collected. Michael appreciated the handwoven blue shirt and the Hermes tie she’d picked for him. He tried the shirt on over his T-shirt, then put on the tie, and the boys laughed since he was still in his boxer shorts.

She was truly happy looking into her children’s bright, laughing faces. She observed Michael’s cheerful smile, noting how her presence seemed to fill them with contentment. Noah told her he had looked out his window every night to see if he saw her plane coming home, and she put him on her lap, kissing the top of his hair, remembering how when the boys were both babies she couldn’t seem to get enough of them, their physical bodies producing in her their own kind of hunger. “He actually thought he could see you out the window if he kept watching, Mommy,” Nicholas said. “I told him that the plane wouldn’t actually fly over New York City, but he didn’t believe me. What an idiot.”

“Nicholas, don’t call your brother an idiot,” Michael said.

Eleanor looked at Michael, realizing how hard it must have been for all of them to be pulled out of their comfortable routine by her absence, and she felt guilty for having enjoyed her trip, for being so caught up with her new friends that she’d even, at times, forgotten them completely. “How were they?” she asked, clearing the table. “Did they really miss me terribly? Was it hard for you?”

“We managed,” he said. “But you owe me.” He looked at her sardonically and smiled. “I’ll cash in later.” He came behind her at the sink and pressed up against her when she was cleaning the breakfast dishes and the boys were playing with their new toys in the living room. Then he went into the dining room to check his phone messages.

After she cleaned up the kitchen, she went to unpack. She held in her hand the blouse she had worn on her last day in Paris and brought it to her face, unable to quite let it go. It smelled of the lavender perfume in her hotel room. As she unpacked, she felt herself back in Paris again. She checked her pockets and in her light jacket she found Stephen’s card. Unthinking, she brought it to her lips, then folded the clothes into a shopping bag to take to the cleaner. She took out the notebook she had kept in Paris, slipped Stephen’s card inside, and tucked it into the top drawer by her bedside table. She turned the key, locking the drawer.

Filled once again with a quick rush of euphoria, she carefully unpacked the pitcher she had bought in Paris. She took it into the living room to show Michael. She remembered Keats’s poem, thought of John, and smiled. She thought about the lines from the end of the poem, how the speaker becomes aware that the lovers shown on the urn are in fact “far above . . . all breathing human passion.” The poem’s speaker relishes the happiness of the urn’s world, where spring is permanent, where the melodies from the piper are “ever new,” and where love is “forever warm.”

Michael was at the dining room table looking at slides of animal heart tissue through his microscope. She was slightly disappointed that he was already back to his work, but she decided not to bother him, realizing that in her absence his own work must have suffered. She looked out the terrace window, opened the doors, and stepped out. The clouds were pillowed over the trees in the park.

“The sky is so beautiful today,” she said, coming back inside. Michael was still looking into his microscope, making notes on a pad next to him. “I think we should take the boys to the park. When I was in Paris I thought of them every time I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. We have to remember that life is gorgeous.” She looked over his shoulder where his eye was pressed over the lens. “We can’t miss any of it. Isn’t it strange how one day you can feel closed off to the world, and then the next day everything feels possible?”

“I was in the pathology lab all week,” he said, glancing up at her, sensing something was different. “I’ve been looking at animal cells while you’ve been traipsing all over Paris.”

She looked at him, slightly hurt, but decided to let the comment go. “But what about when you leave the hospital? You have to start noticing things. The sky on the way home at dusk. The way the gray slowly creeps in.”

“I usually think about my patients on the way home.” Michael glanced up at her, raising his eyebrows suspiciously. Then he put his eye back to the microscope.

“Look what I bought in Paris.” She showed the pitcher to him and told herself she was willing to accept the imperfection of her own capacity for human love and connection if only she could reach him for a moment. She put it next to his microscope on the table.

“It’s nice,” he said, barely raising his eyes from the lens.

“These buds. They remind me that everything is on the brink of becoming if we want to believe it’s so.”

“It’s nice,” Michael said again, looking up to adjust the magnifying lens.

“You don’t see it, do you?” She wished for him to see what she saw, to share it with him.

“What?”

“How beautiful it is.”

“Give me a minute, Eleanor. You’ve been to Paris but life has been going on here. This slide I’m looking at. There’s an anomaly.”

She left the dining room to find the boys, trying not to allow herself to feel disappointed. He did not want to see that anything about her was any different since it was not a difference they had experienced together, and the realization both frustrated and moved her. The boys were still in the living room playing with their new toy trucks and trains. She put the pitcher safely on her dresser in her bedroom, where it would not be harmed. When she climbed into bed later that evening she opened a book, but her eyes kept wandering back to the pitcher. Throughout the day things had seemed a long way off. They had all decided to go to the park. The boys brought their Rollerblades and Eleanor and Michael had followed behind them holding hands. Later in the day the boys went off on playdates; Michael worked while she took a nap. They ordered Chinese food for dinner, too tired to cook. She had lived the hours as if experiencing the day from a great distance, unable to bridge the disconnection she experienced being back home. She told herself she was just tired. Jet lag. She looked at the pitcher and imagined again what the buds would look like if they burst into being. She remembered stopping to look at the pitcher with Stephen and the lunch he made for her in his studio, how her hand pressed over his cut finger to stop the blood from flowing.