The Life Room (34 page)

She shook her head in disbelief. She started to tell him that of course she didn’t believe him, but before the words came out of her mouth she stopped. “Daddy?”

“Eleanor?”

“Are you taking your blood pressure pills?”

“There’s no pressure in my heart, Eleanor. It’s another one of your mother’s myths.”

She was absently drinking a glass of wine at a dinner party.

“Eleanor,” Marcia said. “Where are you?”

Eleanor thought she had perfected the art of being present and removed at the same time. Apparently she hadn’t. In her mind she was replaying a scene with Stephen, and the dinner with Michael and their friends had receded to the background, had become the fiction.

“You’re not having an affair, are you?” Marcia started laughing. Brian looked at Eleanor. “Brian, do you think Eleanor’s having an affair?” Marcia laughed harder.

Eleanor took a sip of her wine. “Can you imagine me having an affair?” She looked at Marcia with slight contempt. Marcia, bored by being a stay-at-home mom, had lately been talking about dabbling in film. She wanted to use Brian’s money to see if she could invest her way into a project. It irked Eleanor that she thought that all she had to do was spend some of Brian’s money and she could make a film. That she could buy her way into art.

An awkward silence descended. Michael stared at her dead on, scrutinizing, the way he did sometimes when he thought she was completely absent. She had no appetite for her salad of tiny macrobiotic greens. He looked down and then up at her over his wineglass.
Where are you, Eleanor? Where have you gone?
the look said.
Why can’t I find you anymore?

After the appetizers, Michael continued to study her sternly, as if he had digested what had been said and was looking for imprints of betrayal on her body. His look said,
What are you doing? Why are you throwing away our life together?

Eleanor met his eyes. She realized how lonely it was to be at Marcia and Brian’s house with all of them thinking she was with them while she was actually inside her own mind with no way to be reached. She rose to go to the bathroom. Brian followed. Tenderly, he put his hand on the back of her neck. “Give your husband a kiss, Eleanor. Tell him you love him. Men need that. Michael’s been under a lot of stress at the hospital.”

She brushed her teeth, relieved to be home from the dinner party. She looked at herself in the mirror. She told herself to lie down beside her husband and will him to possess her mind. Their attraction to each other had to be there still, buried somewhere. She remembered the time they had first made love. Michael took his stethoscope and ran it along every part of her body, listening to her insides, her stomach gurgling, her heart beating, the pulse in her wrists, her neck, her chest. The stethoscope was cold but it eventually warmed to her body heat. He listened and probed but he did not speak. It was his way.

She slipped into bed and waited for Michael to come out of the bathroom. When he folded his body underneath the covers she reached over and touched his shoulder to pull him toward her. “I don’t know what’s happened to us,” she said. “I’m sorry I seem so far away. It’s just sometimes I feel as if I don’t have anything to contribute when we’re out with Marcia and Brian.”

“Is that what it is? If that’s it we don’t have to see them anymore.”

“I wanted to be like them. But I’m different. You and I. We’re different.”

“I’m still the same, Eleanor. You’re the one who has changed.”

She was stunned to hear him say it. She knew he was right and yet she didn’t know how to define it or explain it. She wished she were like Marcia, who seemed absorbed in the details of her life, the things Eleanor cherished, too, her children, her husband, making dinners, going on vacations, but who didn’t seem to need that much more. Was she like that once, too? It wasn’t fair to Michael that she was different. Michael thought that all she needed was a good dinner at night, a glass of wine, the touch of his lips on her cheek when he kissed her. That it was enough to have their beautiful home, their beautiful children.
You’re a doctor’s wife, for god’s sake
, his look said to her.
Look how much you have in comparison to others
, he said without speaking. He didn’t know that it wasn’t enough. That she was her father’s daughter.

She couldn’t get comfortable in bed. It was as if Stephen was inside her, tormenting her with a different kind of life he might provide if they were together. She turned and twisted, pulling the covers over her tightly. She knew she had too much heart and emotion. It was her fatal flaw. She would have liked to laugh at herself. Who wouldn’t?

She turned her back to Michael as if to protect him from herself. He pulled her back toward him.
You’re my wife
, his body said to her.
I want you whether you like it or not
. The desperation with which he needed her was sexy, and she did want him. But even after, she felt empty inside; lonely. When he finished he took the bedspread that was folded neatly at the foot of the bed and walked out to spend the night on the couch. She wanted to call him to come back but she was resigned to their separateness.

“Mommy. Mommy, Mommy,” Nicholas called, his voice growing louder. “Mommy. Mama.”

She looked at the digital clock, the numbers falling with a clunk. It was 3:00 in the morning. “I’m right here, Nicholas,” Eleanor called.

“Mama, where are you?” he called in desperation. “I need to find you. Mommy, Mommy.”

She jumped out of bed. Nicholas was in the kitchen. He was opening the door to the refrigerator and the light it gave off illuminated his face. His eyes were wide open like little Os but he was fast asleep. “Mama, Mama,” he cried anxiously, as if he were searching for her and she had disappeared. She caught up to him.

“I’m right here, Nicholas.” Eleanor hugged him close. But he was stiff. He would not embrace her. His sleep had stolen her from him.

She turned him toward her. She grabbed him by his biceps. “I’m here, Nicholas,” she said. “I’m right here. Can’t you hear me?” She tried to take his hand from the refrigerator door. Michael had woken up by then and stood in the hallway in his boxer shorts and T-shirt, looking tired and miserable.

“Mommy, Mommy,” Nicholas called again.

“Mommy’s here,” Eleanor said, shaking her son. “You’re walking in your sleep.” She caught Michael’s eye and for a second they stood there looking at each other, both fully cognizant of what they’d done. Conspirators against their children. What was between them wasn’t just about them anymore.

Eleanor picked Nicholas up and held him in her arms. He was heavy, but she needed to hold him. “Mommy’s here,” she said again, and hiked him on her hips, wishing he was back inside her womb, so they could exist together inside their own tranquil bubble once more. She carried him back to his bed.

In the morning Michael went into the bathroom, showered, shaved, and dressed for the hospital. Before he left (she was turned into her bed feigning sleep) she heard him go into the boys’ room. First he kissed Noah. Then he kissed Nicholas. She waited for him to come into their bedroom and kiss her good-bye the way he had almost every morning of their married life, but instead he walked down the hallway toward the door. She wasn’t what Michael expected her to be and she felt ashamed. When she heard his key turn in the lock she didn’t know whether she was grateful or whether she wished he had come to say good-bye. But the minute he left the house she felt free.

She walked to the university. The tension began to build inside her as she neared her office building. She worried that when she arrived at school there’d be a message from Stephen—she knew he would call her—and she didn’t know if she had the power to resist it. Instead, she went to the synagogue on 88th Street. She found her way through the dark corridors to the rabbi’s chambers where she had once tried to take William.

The rabbi was sitting at his desk when she walked in. He looked diminutive without the white robe he wore on the High Holy Days. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie and sneakers on his feet. A partially eaten corned beef sandwich was spread out on top of white wax paper on his desk. Next to it was a pair of glasses and a pile of opened books. His computer was on. His study reeked of the deli.

She introduced herself. “I’m intruding on your lunch hour. I can come back later.”

“May I offer you half my sandwich? A pickle?” His head was nearly bald. He was tan. He must have gone to Florida or a tropical island over the holidays.

She started to get up. “I’m not hungry.”

“Sit.” The rabbi said. “One or maybe two inspired moments have come to me after eating a corned beef sandwich.”

“I have a question.” She looked at him tentatively. “Do Jews believe in the devil?”

“There is no devil.” The rabbi paused. He carefully took a bite of his sandwich. He looked up at her and smiled with the wisdom of someone who knows. “Your name is Eleanor?”

She nodded.

“There’s a snake, but there is no devil,” he said, slyly waving a sliver of pickle.

“You mean the Garden of Good and Evil? What form can he take? The snake. Can he be human?”

“You have to solve the puzzle for yourself.”

“So you’re saying that everyone is tempted at one time or another in life? That I’m not alone? I know it happens in literature. But sometimes I get confused.”

“Is that what you hear me saying?”

“I just want to know if the snake is human.”

“It’s whatever you think it is.” She looked into the rabbi’s watery, compassionate eyes. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

“I am afraid.”

“The truth is, Eleanor, we don’t know why certain things happen. Or what they are trying to teach us. Each of us has questions. We have to bring those questions to life, act upon them, contemplate their effect upon our lives. Only you know the answer to what is inside you.”

“So you’re saying that it is okay to have questions?”

“What I’m saying is that without questions there is no meaning.”

“So you’re saying it’s okay to be in the dark?”

“God lives in darkness, too.”

There was a message when she arrived in her office.

I’m polishing the last draft of the novel, Eleanor.

I’ve been meaning to call you but I’ve been working around the clock. It has to be right. It’s for us. For you and me.

She cleared her desk of extraneous papers, laid notes for the chapter she was writing on the table near the window and tried to put them in some kind of order. She told herself that it was okay, that she was capable of living in the world and in her mind at the same time. She could live two kinds of lives. The phone rang.

“Eleanor,” the voice from the other world said. “It’s you. In the living flesh. I’m not talking to your machine.”

“It’s me.”

“Everything is riding on it,” he said, as if he were extending the message he had left in her voice mail. As if he knew there was never any intermission between the lags when they spoke, as if it were one long endless dialogue beginning when they were twelve.

“I’m sure it’s great.”

“No, you don’t understand. If they don’t like it, that’s it. I’m out of here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The jig’s up. I can’t live in this city without a decent advance. I can’t afford it.”

She was quiet. The things she planned to say, the questions she had wondered about when they weren’t together went right out of her mind the minute she heard his voice.

“I’m reading from my novel tonight. Do you want to come?”

“Where?”

“At this bar downtown.”

“I don’t know if I can make it.”

“My agent got me the gig. She’s inviting editors. Media. I need you to be there, Eleanor. It’s finally happened. If you come I won’t be afraid.”

“What are you so afraid of?”

“Of looking at you and having to turn away, having to deny myself the pleasure of being with you.”

“You know that I can’t see you—that’s why you say this.” Eleanor’s eyes filled with tears.

“Let me tell you about this piece I wrote last year about Amazon surfers. They flock to Brazil every year around the full moon and the equinox to chase an endless wave. It develops when the ocean tide advances into the river basin, creating a giant swell that flows upstream for several hundred miles at speeds of 20 miles an hour. A Pororoca wave can be as high as 12 feet. Surfers go after waves half that size because it increases their chances for a long, blissful ride. That’s what I do, Eleanor. I chase the story because when I’m inside a piece I’m not in my head anymore. I know you get it. You do it with words, too. Only your words are about literature. I have to see you, Eleanor. You’re the only one who understands what I do.”

She went to the reading at an East Village bar where they hosted a reading series. Next to the bar was a microphone and a podium and a bunch of people sitting at tables, drinking. She came in late and sat in the back, nursing a glass of wine in the dark, watching him, certain he couldn’t see her. She liked being close to him when he didn’t know she was there. When she wasn’t causing anyone harm. She studied his cheekbones. She studied the way he gripped each page. She didn’t know whether the book actually worked on the page, or whether it was his voice, and the intensity he brought to bear that seduced the audience—whether he was a true or a false poet. There was no question that he was a charmer.

When he read he was a different person. The words tumbled from his mouth. His eyes lit up—he was a brilliant performer. She overheard people whispering about him next to her. “He’s good. He’s like an actor. The way he can get inside the narrator’s head. He’s mesmerizing to watch.”

A boy is wandering in Alaska. It’s cold and the roads are long but he has to keep going. If the bov stops he knows it will catch up with him. He can’t sit still. He has to be in motion. He goes into a bar when it gets dark and he orders a cold beer at the bar and he looks at girls. Their breasts. Their thighs. Girls that want nothing from him. He sits next to a girl with long hair and listens to her talking with her friend. He doesn’t want to talk to her, he only wants to listen. He only wants to hear her light up her cigarette, the sound of the match, the smell of her cigarette smoke. The way the wind sweeps through her hair when she tosses it behind her shoulders. He wants to hear her laugh and stomp out her cigarette in the bent tin ashtray when she’s done. He watches the way she curls her foot around the ankle of her other leg. He watches the way her skirt creeps up when she bends over the bar. He doesn’t want to touch her. At night when he’s back in the motel he fantasizes. She’s on top of him, the girl in the bar. Her hair falls over his face. He looks into her eyes and sees the girl from his past, not the girl in the bar, but the girl he’s running away from. And then he looks out the window into the square pane and into the darkness. And the cold snow.