The Woman Upstairs (10 page)

“Tell me,” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs and passing the joint over. “What is this actually about, for you?”

“What do you mean?”

She exhaled. “This whole thing, it’s not only about the studio. I mean, it’s fabulous, it’s delicious about the studio. It’s the best decision you’ve made in years. But you’d made up your mind before you went there, hadn’t you?”

I thought for a moment. “I guess I had.”

“So it’s not about the actual studio.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

I shrugged, and laughed. I couldn’t say. There were not words to describe it; and no way, had there been the words, of not revealing too much. Even with Didi, I didn’t want to reveal too much. “I’m excited. Does it matter?”

She took another toke, narrowed her eyes. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”

10

Remember this season. This dinner, this day, the signing of the lease, took place on the Saturday before the presidential election: John Kerry versus Dubya, in Dubya’s Round Two. This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply fucked, and home also. Two American wars raging—bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars marked by betrayal, incompetence and corruption. Don’t get me started.

We’d had a young woman, a girl really, only twenty-five, come to the school the year before to speak about her NGO—she’d set it up herself, this frilly slip of a thing with her denim miniskirt and her silver-blue eye shadow, she’d lobbied Congress and gotten millions to do it, God knows how, barely out of college, and its purpose, to count the civilian casualties, seemed such a sane and good thing to do. She spoke about it for the kids in a very gentle way, in her high and breathy voice, about how she wanted to help everybody who got hurt, Iraqis the same as Americans, and that if you didn’t keep track, some folks might get forgotten. We had only the fifth and sixth graders go hear her, even so, because her job was counting bodies, basically, and however bright a gloss you put on that, you can’t go frightening the tinies and giving them nightmares. I thought it was pretty brave of Shauna to have her at all, but I guess she was the niece of someone on the school board, and she actually visited three schools that fall before she went away.

I couldn’t see how this kid could count for much, and then a couple of months later she was on the evening news, on CNN, in a headscarf with a clipboard and no eye shadow at all, and she was for real, and sober and impressive and she didn’t even say “like” once, and she was telling terrible stories about the numbers of Iraqis—children, families, old women—whose injuries and deaths were not being officially reported, but she was going door to door with her clipboard and with a dozen others she’d recruited, and they were doing damn good work.

And it was only about four months later that she was in the news again,
The New York Times
this time, a headline, small, right on the front and a picture on the fifth page, but with the eye shadow again, a picture taken before she went, obviously; and she was there because she and her translator had been in a car following an armored convoy on the infamous road to the airport, and some motherfucker blew them up with a rocket. And it said in the article (I will always remember this) that the last thing she said, when the soldiers came rushing to help her charred and seeping tender self splayed in the dust by the side of the road outside Baghdad, the last thing she said before she died was “I am alive.” She was twenty-six.

But she
was
alive, of course, she’d been more alive in that short space than many are in a lifetime; and then she was dead. I took the article to show Shauna, who gets only
The Boston Globe
, but the news had been in
The Globe
, too. We didn’t tell the kids, so one or two of them probably still sometimes think of her out there, counting the hurt and the dead, of whom there are still so many and whom she would be counting if she were still alive to count.

That’s what that time was like. And yet, through November, I greeted each morning as though it were spring, as though instead of a daily darkening, both seasonal and societal, we were embarked upon a brilliant new adventure, finding each new day more perfectly illuminated than the last. Which I was.

It was like being eleven, and craving your best friend’s company. If I woke up every morning with such zeal, every leaf or cup or child’s hand meticulously outlined for me like a wonder of nature, bathed in superior light, it was because in my heart I held each day the possibility of a conversation, of adventure, with Sirena. This possibility—often
a likelihood—was inextricably bound up with the excitement of the studio, of the pure, bright, drafty, shabby space where we would meet.

She spent entire days there, while I trailed in near dusk, at three thirty or so, when the angle of the sunlight was long and the air powdery, already tinged with night, a bleak and glorious winter light. We’d have coffee: along with jewel-colored lengths of Indian silk that she’d pinned to the walls in her end of the studio, a grubby rug, three small tufted poufs and a tiny Moroccan brass tray table, Sirena had installed a burner on the long table, and had provided an Italian percolator, the heavy octagonal kind that sits upon the stove, and an array of chipped teacups from the Goodwill shop. She had the gift of making things beautiful, and comfortable too, in an easy way, a gift I’d thought of as my mother’s, growing up. I loved that the studio, while still Spartan, gestured in its few furnishings toward an Oriental souk. I even loved, when I went to find it empty, that she’d left dirty cups scattered about, ringed with tarry coffee grounds, and smearily marked by her crimson lipstick; and often a scarf or a sweater forgotten on the floor, as if she were saying to me, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”

I took to bringing snacks—scones from the Hi-Rise, or cupcakes from the then-new shop in Davis Square, a quick stop on Highland Ave on my way to the studio—and she’d break from her work to boil the coffee, and we’d hang out and talk for three-quarters of an hour or so, until she’d stand, quite suddenly, and brush at a few nonexistent crumbs, and say “
au travail
”—which even with my pitiful French I could understand and came to expect. Then I’d wash the coffee cups and she’d sweep the floor, in two or three brisk strokes, and turn her back to me, retreating to her corner of the L. I, too, would go to my corner, feeling slightly like a dog dismissed to its basket, and turn on my bright lights over the table I’d set up, and, fed on cakes and conversation, I would work, as the night fell around us, until there was only my pool of light and her pool of light and the music from the CD player hovering softly in the vast dark space between us.

At around five thirty or a quarter to six, she’d pack up her gear and go home to Maria the babysitter and to Reza and, notionally, to Skandar, although for months he remained a cipher to me, heard only as the murmur on the cell phone when she spoke quietly and rapidly and, I always imagined, with faint irritation, in French.

I loved working with someone else nearby. It was like being in Mr. Crace’s art room all over again. What I hated—although never straight away—was the time after Sirena had gone.

For a while, I’d be so busy with the scene I was working on that I didn’t notice. That fall I was making a tiny replica of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst bedroom, about the size of a boot box, each floorboard in place, the re-creation of her furnishings exact and to scale. Once I’d made her room, and made
her
, as perfectly as I could, in a white linen nightie with ruffles, my aim was to set up circuitry so that my Emily Dickinson might be visited, sitting up in her bed, by floating illuminations—the angelic Muse, her beloved Death, and of course my tiny gilded mascot, Joy herself.

This was, I imagined, the first of a series: I wanted to make one of Virginia Woolf at Rodmell, putting rocks in her pockets and writing her final note: my idea was that there would be slides of the river, raging, and sound effects, too; and an actual copy of the handwritten note that would project not onto the diorama wall but out Virginia’s bedroom window, onto our walls outside, so that instead of being small, the words would be huge. In my mind’s eye, they would flicker: the flickering was, to me, very important.

Then there was to be one of the painter Alice Neel, in the sanatorium to which she was sent after her nervous breakdown at around the age of thirty. I wanted there to be an echo, you see, between Emily Dickinson’s spare white room and Alice Neel’s white room, the monastic and the asylum: both retreats, but of such different types. And both the province of women. I even thought about the title of my nonexistent series:
A Room of One’s Own?
I thought the question mark was the key.

I loved the story of Alice Neel, in part because her life was so hard and bitter but turned out all right in the end, and in part because her art, like mine, was resolutely unfashionable for almost all of her life, and because of that she had to know why she was doing it and why she kept doing it to the last. She was the AFH: the Anti-Fun-House. I was bound to love her for that.

The last diorama I planned was to be the opposite of the others. It was going to be Edie Sedgwick’s room in Warhol’s Factory. Instead of trying to escape the world, Edie sacrificed herself to it. She existed only
in the public gaze. Imagine that: a surface, so beautiful, from which all depth has been erased. But then, the photos, their intensity, her vitality—it certainly looks as though a soul was trapped behind those eyes.

Edie was essential. I’d spent a chunk of my adolescence in thrall to Edie Sedgwick, in love with the insect limbs in their black tights, and the giant eyes, and the stares, even though she was already long dead in my day. She was the cool people’s Marilyn Monroe—smaller, faster, brighter, more immediately alive, and more efficiently dead, an anorexic slip of a life, with no more known interiority than a dachshund. Yet if, when I was sixteen and on my way to college, you’d asked me whether I wanted to be Georgia O’Keeffe or Edie Sedgwick, I would definitely have hesitated. And I might have said Sedgwick. She’d defined something, we said back then.

But the point is that I was consumed—in a digressive, obliterating way—by my hypothetical series, and by my Emily Dickinson diorama in the first instance, by its practical minutiae. I had paintbrushes comprised of a single hair, and a loupe like a watchmaker’s that I could attach to my forehead, and I’d spend three days on a miniature replica of the woodcut landscape that hung between the windows in Emily’s bedroom, only to decide, once it was done, that the likeness was poor, and that I needed to begin again.

Hours and hours and hours of dollhouse labor, and I loved it, was lost in it like one of my children. But when Sirena left me, sooner or later I’d look up from my table and realize that I was alone in a tiny pool of light in a great dark room, as if I were myself the figure in someone else’s diorama, manipulated in my own stage set by a giant I could not see. Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption: I’d walk to the windows and peer into the night, trying to make sure I wasn’t being watched; I’d stand at the studio door, listening for movement in the hallways, or in the neighboring rooms. If there were footsteps or clamor, I was reassured if they were loud, as though the faceless were announcing themselves; happier still when there were voices or, as sometimes, a distant radio; but if the sounds were muffled, muted, intermittent, my heart seized, and I feared that the hooded villain of my nightmares was lurking in the stairwell awaiting my departure.

Sometimes I could get over it, force myself back to my table, my Lilliputian world, and lose myself again; but on other evenings—particularly if the weather was silent, no rattling, no rain, no sounds at all but those around me—I’d succumb to my terrors, packing up in haste and banging at top volume through the building, down the hallway, down the stairs and out, always surprised by the softness of the streetlights, the bland calm of the road outside the warehouse.

11

I discovered that I wanted to work, much more than I’d ever realized, but I didn’t want to work alone. The paradox was perfect: I didn’t want to work alone and yet could only do my work alone. What possible answer could there be to my dilemma? Sirena. Sirena was my answer.

I tried, then, on Tuesdays, when the children had science with Estelle at the end of the day, and on Thursdays, when they had PE last thing, to escape to the studio forty minutes earlier. Once I forgot a staff meeting, and got a puzzled rebuke from Shauna: “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Because this isn’t like you.”

“Isn’t it?” I said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Don’t make me worry about you, Nora,” Shauna said, and while she acted concerned I could tell from her tone she meant it. People don’t want to worry about the Woman Upstairs. She’s reliable, and organized, and she doesn’t cause any trouble.

“Never been better,” I said, and meant it also. On those Tuesdays and Thursdays I had almost an extra hour of company while I worked; and Sirena was glad of my presence too, I could tell by the way she gathered her scarves around her and drifted toward me, even if I did no more than say hello. She’d ask about Reza, or about the other children, whose characters she came to know from my stories, or about finding a good local shoemaker, or whatever it was—and we’d be talking
then, and also working or preparing to, and we’d have our coffee with the afternoon before us—it was only two thirty, on those days—and I could barely keep from grinning. Who cared about Shauna McPhee?

Occasionally, Sirena would come to my end of the studio and lean over Emily Dickinson’s room. She always behaved as though it were new to her, as though this was something she never did when I wasn’t there.

“It’s really coming along,” she’d say, with an intake of breath, running a tentative finger along a wall’s top edge. Or she’d point to the photos and postcards of the actual room spread out on my table and say, “Wow, you’ve got it exactly” or “How are you going to do that piece, then?”