The Life Room (33 page)

She thought of nothing else, not her work, her husband, her children. She imagined foolishly that she was young. That she was without attachment and in that state it was as if what had started between her and Stephen so long ago was continuing. She told herself that if she let this opportunity with Stephen pass she was denying herself something important. Stephen had entered her life with purpose. If she continued to always do the proper, right thing then she would indeed be a good, proper person. But if she allowed herself to walk through the gates that led to the unknown she would find an important part of herself that had been cut off. Perhaps it was that very thing that might make her discover something extraordinary about herself she might not have known. Every once in a while she would think about the effect on Michael and the boys, but it was something she couldn’t think about, had to purge from her thoughts. How could her love for them be separate from this other thing? How could she be so divided?

She could not deny that every part of her being was suddenly awake. She noticed the snow fall in a way she had never noticed snow before, attuned to the crystal edges, to the lightness and absorption, the perfect quiet. She knew she looked prettier. She didn’t even have to look in the mirror—it was her inner being shining through. She had always thought she was invisible, that like Houdini she could slip through walls, make herself disappear. But now she felt fully visible. Yet her hair was still the same texture and length, her eyes the same colors. She had not lost or gained weight. She told herself that she should walk to Stephen’s apartment. That she should knock on the door and announce herself and not walk away like she had years ago in Colorado when she had not stood up to him. She told herself that she should open her mind and stop censoring her thoughts. It was the most disarming and liberating feeling she had ever experienced.

She wanted to be near Stephen because being with him would be a natural extension of all the thoughts and desires and compassion she had felt for him since they were children. She thought that being with him would be like finding the other half of who she was, that there would be a union. She thought that by making him whole she would make herself whole, that being with him would seal something. That there was the possibility that Stephen would change her, that she could change him, that they could change the idea of each other, and that was not something she could dismiss. If she denied herself this chance she would deny herself the possibility of being with someone who she believed comprehended her deeply. Wasn’t that denying life itself? She wanted to be near him. She had remembered the shape and feel of how they had kissed long ago. She wanted to be near him because she thought it would stop the restlessness that kept her up at night. She thought that by being near him her desire would end. She felt desire for him in her chest, in the tips of her fingers. She liked the way his mind worked. How full of emotion he was. It meant he was alive, that he was feeling something, even if the intensity kept him away from her. She thought if she could break through she would enter into some kind of kingdom that she had craved and had never had. The feeling she imagined was almost indescribable, not even depicted in the books she loved. Oh dear lord, if it were a ruse she was doomed.
Were we all, we who lived deeply, doomed?

“I don’t feel like myself anymore,” Eleanor confessed to Jordan over lunch. She gave Jordan the history. “I don’t know what we are. He’s someone from my past. Someone I knew a long time ago. Someone I’m not sure I even like or trust.”

“And?”

“I can’t stop thinking about him. And now he’s in New York. We meet in the park. Or in a café for coffee. Nothing’s happened. I’m not sure I even respect him. Can you be obsessed with someone you don’t like? He wears sweatshirts and a pendant around his neck.”

“Does Michael know?”

“Should I have told him?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that something has happened. That’s why you’re anxious.”

“Because I haven’t told Michael?”

“Because you’re keeping it a secret.”

“Do you think Michael tells me about women colleagues, other doctors he sees at the hospital? Other women he has lunch with? Aren’t married people allowed to have friends of the opposite sex?”

“But you’re not friends.”

“How did it happen with Luca?”

“You don’t wake up one morning and decide you want to have an affair, Eleanor. I met Luca. That’s how it happened.”

“Were there others before Luca?”

She shook her head.

“What about Jonathan? Did you want things to end?”

“I wanted them to stay the same. I wanted my affair and my husband and my children. But once Luca and I fell in love it got more complicated. He wanted me to leave Jonathan. It drove him crazy that we couldn’t have holidays together. That Jonathan and I were still friends.”

“That’s not what I want.” Eleanor picked the anchovy out of her salad. “I don’t want to lose my family. I want to make it stop.”

“You’re probably working out something deeper.”

Eleanor began to shred her napkin.

“You know. Your relationship with your father. Your mother. Only you know what, Eleanor.”

The napkin had become a castle of torn-up paper on the tabletop.

“You need to have an affair,” Jordan said.

“No. You’re not listening.”

Eleanor stared into her haunted blue eyes. She seemed witchlike. A siren. “This isn’t about my mother or my father. I’m not sure it’s even about Michael. Stephen’s awakening things in me. Before Michael I couldn’t wait to get settled so I wouldn’t have to feel this way anymore. I wanted to know who I was going to marry. I wanted my kids. But now if it weren’t for seeing him again in Paris, I’m not sure I would have known it. It has to mean something, doesn’t it? The fact that he showed up again. The fact that I’ve known him since we were kids?”

“Or the fact that he isn’t your husband?”

“Don’t do that. Stop making what I’m going through be about what you’ve gone through. I told you. I don’t want to have an affair.”

She looked at Eleanor closely. “You know what Freud said, don’t you? There are no accidents.”

“You mean it’s about my childhood? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Is that what you think it is?”

“I thought I could control it.”

“You have to play it out.”

Jordan wasn’t pretty. Her eyes were arresting, but her face was too thin and oily. She had a somewhat tortured expression in her mouth and a geometrical haircut that made her look like she belonged in a different century. But she had a sexy body with big shapely breasts. Eleanor’s eyes went to them the minute she saw her. She walked into a room slowly. The way she held her arms, how her legs turned out slightly like a dancer’s when she walked, it was as if her body was saying
Look at me
. She wore clothes that played up her figure. Thin, gauzy things, low cut and cinched at the waist. She was the kind of woman who surveyed desirable men to see whether there was a vibe. Eleanor had noticed it of late. And yet, when they first met, Jordan was different. Was it midlife, marriage that had changed her? The news of Jordan’s infidelity had traveled through the department quickly. He was a young Italian scholar studying the Italian Renaissance poets. It was a cliché.

“Luca is the first man who is more interested in pleasing me than himself,” she said. “He thinks everyone wants me.”

“Is that what you want him to think?”

“Desire is about power, Eleanor. I don’t care what he thinks.”

“What do you two do together? I mean when you’re not in bed.”

“We haven’t gotten to that stage yet.” Jordan took a bite from her tuna salad. She ordered the same thing every time they had lunch. She picked off the tuna and some egg and left more than half of her salad uneaten. Her antidepressants caused her to lose her appetite. She had been on a different medication that had taken away her sex drive and she had decided she’d rather have her sex drive than her appetite. “I don’t want him to get too close.” Jordan sipped her Diet Coke. “I don’t completely trust him.”

“Is that why you want him?”

She paused. She looked into her picked-over salad, deep in thought, and then up at Eleanor. “It’s why he turns me on.” She did not know if she was jealous or whether she pitied Jordan. The need for intensity, to sacrifice to Eros at the cost of all else, was that not a death in itself?

She left the restaurant no more sure of anything.

She walked back to her office slowly. She thought of her boys. Had the love she had bestowed on them driven her further from Michael? She thought of the life she and Michael were providing the boys, of the commitment they both felt to them. But finally, even giving children a good home and security wasn’t enough to make a person whole. She was still evolving in spite of being a mother. Why had she thought it would be enough?

She quickened her pace and with it her resolve: She would not seek him out again. It was her will triumphing over his. The sun shone on the black iron bars of Columbia’s gates; she walked through feeling as if she had escaped danger by a hair’s breadth.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Eleanor,

The Romantics were either in a state of exaltation or despair. Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth. Their poems express the universal longing for romance and its deep awareness that all romance—literary and human—depends upon incomplete and uncertain knowledge. Think of the self-deception of the speaker in Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or “The Beautiful Lady Without Pity.” I taught this poem today and every time I teach it I see something different. As the poem opens the knight is anguished, ill, lovesick. The knight has fallen in love with the enchantress at first sight. Yet his own words make us doubtful that he sees her as she really is. Read the poem for me, Eleanor. Tell me if you agree. It’s about love’s delusion. Yrs, John

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

John: I read the poem. Some of the saddest lines in the language. “And I awoke and found me here / On the cold hill’s side.” It’s so expressive of forlorn lovers. The knight believes she was his alone. His grandest deception. It isn’t until after she lulls him asleep that he dreams that she has cast the same spell on others. How tragic, when one realizes one’s been delusional. So in need of love the knight chooses an object. It could have been anyone. He might well have loved himself. Truly, Eleanor

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Eleanor, yes, it could have been anyone—that’s the heart of the matter. Your friend, John

She met her father at Kennedy Airport in the VIP lounge.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said, when she saw him sitting at the bar clipping his fingers into a packet of salted nuts. He looked at her.

“Eleanor, so good to see you.”

“Daddy.”

“This face,” he said. Tears were forming in his eyes. He picked up her hands and held them.

“Daddy,” she said. “It’s okay.”

He ordered her a glass of wine.

“How’s Michael? How are my grandsons?”

“They’re good.”

“And this one? How is she? My little girl.”

“I don’t know, Daddy. Something’s happening. I don’t know who I am.”

“You’re my little halavah. My sweet.” She remembered how he used to sing songs from
Fiddler on the Roof
in the house when she was a child. He used to call her his little bird. He made her listen to Bach’s Suites for Cello.
It’s the saddest music I ever heard. When I listen to it I think of my father and my mother and I’m overwhelmed by sorrow
.

“Daddy, I have something I want to give you.” She opened her bag and extracted the prayer shawl wrapped in cellophane. “I’ve had this for years. I’ve wanted to give it to you. To tell you. But I couldn’t.”

“Tell me what?”

“There’s a God. He exists. You’ve been running away for a long time. Why don’t you go back home now. Mom is still waiting for you. You don’t have to live in hotels and fly on planes and drink in lounges. Look. A friend of mine gave it to me a long time ago. Your father had one; this could have been his.”

“My father’s dead.” He looked at the prayer shawl. He looked again.

“My father is dead, Eleanor,” he repeated. “They’re all gone. It’s dirty. My father wasn’t dirty.”

“Take it, Daddy. I want you to have it. Don’t you understand? We’re all connected.”

“I have to go now, Eleanor. I’m going to miss my flight.”

“Daddy,” she said. “Take it.”

“Little bird.”

“Mommy’s waiting. She’s been waiting all these years.” She thrust the prayer shawl at him. “You have to go see her now.”

“It’s dirty, Eleanor. If there was a God would he make such filth?”

He tore open another bag of peanuts and they spilled onto the counter. “Listen, Eleanor.” His hands were trembling. “I spoke to your mother the other day. She’s the only woman who understands me.”

“I know, Daddy.”

“When this deal goes through I’m going to invite all of you to Europe. We’ll rent that little house we always talked about. Your mother. She’ll come, too. Have you listened to Casals perform the Bach suites? The recording I sent you? I wanted you to listen to the intensity of feeling Casals brings to the music. Now and then he makes a mistake and you get a sudden flash of the human element—that this is a real person playing and feeling this music.”

“I don’t want to talk about music, Daddy.”

“The cello suites had been forgotten for almost 200 years. Until Casals rediscovered them again. In his later years, in exile from Franco’s Spain, Casals refused to play in public, saying that he could not perform until Spain was free again. But in private the only music he would play was the suites. Don’t you understand? It means something. People are not forgotten. We’re all going to be together again. I promise. You believe me, don’t you, darling?”