The Woman Upstairs
Read The Woman Upstairs Online
Authors: Claire Messud
Tags: #Urban, #Literary, #Contemporary Women, #Fiction
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND
ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2013 by Claire Messud
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.
Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found following the author’s acknowledgments.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Messud, Claire, [date]
The woman upstairs : a novel / Claire Messud.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“This Is a Borzoi Book.”
1. Elementary school teachers—Fiction. 2. Women artists—
Fiction. 3. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3563 E8134W66 2013
813′.54—dc23
2012017806
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Messud, Claire, [date]
The woman upstairs / Claire Messud.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96240-9
I. Title.
PS3563.E77W66 2013 813′.54 C2012-905634-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Front-of-jacket photograph © Bjanka Kadic/Millennium Images, U.K.
Jacket design by Gabriele Wilson
v3.1
For Georges and Anne Borchardt
and, as ever, for J.W.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu se’.
—
MACHIAVELLI
,
The Prince
Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from oneself, the lover.
—
MARCEL PROUST
,
Remembrance of Things Past
Fuck the laudable ideologies.
—
PHILIP ROTH
,
Sabbath’s Theater
PART ONE
1
How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about
that
.
I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over forty fucking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone—every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.
Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we’re brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third
grade, they’re well and truly gone—they’re full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their
hair
looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics.
How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than “dutiful daughter” is “looked good”; everyone used to know that. But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.
That’s why I’m so angry, really—not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being
me
—because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I’m angry because I’ve tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn’t fun anymore and it isn’t even funny, but there doesn’t seem to be a door marked EXIT.
At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should’ve known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside-out upside-down mirrors. Sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I’d be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end.
I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In
recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality—and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so
different
—until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all.
I’m not crazy. Angry, yes; crazy, no.
My name is Nora Marie Eldridge and I’m forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one. Neither old nor young, I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blond nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain. Quite nice looking in some moments, I think is the consensus, rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances, read in quantity in my youth. I’m neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call a spinster, but don’t anymore, because it implies that you’re dried up, and none of us wants to be that. Until last summer, I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maybe I’ll go back and do it again, I just don’t know. Maybe, instead, I’ll set the world on fire. I just might.
Be advised that in spite of my foul mouth, I don’t swear in front of the children—except once or twice when a rogue “Shit!” has emerged, but only sotto voce, and only in extremis. If you’re thinking how can such an angry person possibly teach young children, let me assure you that every one of us is capable of rage, and that some of us are prone to it, but that in order to be a good teacher, you must have a modicum of self-control, which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way.
Second, I’m not an Underground Woman, harboring resentment for my miseries against the whole world. Or rather, it’s not that I’m not
in some sense
an Underground Woman—aren’t we all, who have to cede and swerve and step aside, unacknowledged and unadmired and unthanked? Numerous in our twenties and thirties, we’re positively legion in our forties and fifties. But the world should understand, if the world gave a shit, that women like us are not underground. No
Ralph Ellison basement full of lightbulbs for us; no Dostoyevskian metaphorical subterra. We’re always upstairs. We’re not the madwomen in the attic—they get lots of play, one way or another. We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We’re completely invisible. I thought it wasn’t true, or not true of me, but I’ve learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn.