The Woman Upstairs (11 page)

I’d worried about her judging me, but it never felt that way. It felt as though she was curious, plain and simple, because she was curious about me. Because she liked me. One afternoon when she was passing me my coffee, she put her hand not on my arm but on my hand. “My God, you know, it’s great that you’re here,” she said. “I might go crazy without you.”

“To friendship.” I raised my chipped cup.

“Yes, to friendship.”

“We’re both lucky, you know,” I told her. “This is such a gift for me. Even if I’m getting into trouble.”

“How do you mean?”

I told her about missing the staff meeting, and Shauna’s annoyance. “But it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because I’m here with you.”

And then I felt I’d sounded too eager, too needy. I could feel myself blushing.

“Ah, but it’s different, you see, for you. This is nice for you, but it’s just an extra in your real life, which goes on every day,” Sirena said, looking not at me but out the window, holding her cup beneath her chin as if she were cold. “But for me, I have here in Boston no real life, so this is it. This is everything. Besides Reza and Skandar, of course. Which is why I’m so glad you’re here.”

I could have said a lot of things. I wanted to say that my real life had fewer furnishings than her temporary pretend life, that the mystery of my life was how it could be so much like a highway through
the Great Plains, miles and miles of straight and flat with barely even a tree. And now, not merely a tree, but an oasis. I didn’t say this, obviously.

Instead I nodded, looking at her profile silhouetted against the light, and the glimmer of her dark, sad eyes, and I wanted to step forward and touch her the way she touched me, but I couldn’t see a way to do it that wouldn’t be awkward. I guess I’m repressed, or uptight, but I was worried in part because I didn’t know quite what it was that I felt—some intensity of emotion I couldn’t articulate—and I had no idea what it was that she might herself feel, and I didn’t want to be misconstrued or embarrassed. So although I wanted to touch her arm, I did no such thing: I nodded, I smiled, I downed the dregs of my coffee, and as I placed my cup noisily in the sink, I said, “Well,
au travail!
” using her words, if not her gestures, for the first time.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I was in love with her—which I was—but in a romantic way—which I was not. You’re thinking, how would I know whether I was romantically in love, I whose apparently nonexistent love life would suggest a prudish vacancy, uterus shriveled like a corn husk and withered dugs for breasts? You’re thinking that whatever else she does, the Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her
Sex and the City
reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog, the woman with her class of third graders and her carefully pearly smile—whatever else she manages, she doesn’t have a love life to speak of.

Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you to tell me that I don’t know what love is?

My indifference to Alf’s slobbering first clinch in the Manchester High School darkroom, and my inability to see the point of a husband when I was sixteen, were not, perhaps, an auspicious beginning. But,
reader, in my time, I almost married. I can’t quite believe it myself, looking back.

In college, I had boyfriends, yes, in the way that girls who are chiefly popular with girls have boyfriends. For long stretches, I would pine, religiously, monastically even, for someone unrealistic and inappropriate. Then, in between the ranks of the unloving and the ranks of the unloved slipped the stragglers and wanderers against whom I had no defenses. These were my early lovers, the there-and-gone: the Englishman visiting for a semester with his talk of Wittgenstein and his crazed quiff of black hair; my roommate’s brother’s friend Nate up from Harvard for a long weekend, blinking behind his glasses and swigging in the cold from his hip flask of bourbon; or Avi, Joanne Goldstein’s boyfriend from Israel, fresh out of the army, dark-skinned, hairy and muscled, who kicked around Middlebury for the better part of a season, smoking lots of dope and having sex with whomever he felt like, while Joanne was in class or at the gym or wherever she was and apparently not noticing.

In the summer after senior year, by which time I thought I’d never know love, I met Ben. It was August, and hot. We met on Martha’s Vineyard, where I was staying with my friend Susie at her parents’ house, at a picnic on Aquinnah beach, playing volleyball, the sand frying our soles, and he stood out not only because he was tall and lean but because he had about him from the first an air of patient sweetness that he never lost, something almost childlike. He asked me to dinner in Edgartown and picked me up on a borrowed moped, and winding back to Susie’s along South Road after supper, with the high moon and the gnarled fairy-tale trees overhanging the road, I felt with him both safe and capable of adventure. When we came to the open field beyond which you see the sea for the first time, and it was lit by the pewter moonlight and by hundreds of fireflies, like dotted fairy lanterns, he stopped the bike and we perched on the knobbly stone wall, just looking for a while in silence—it was, actually, breathtaking—and then we kissed. I remember sighing, with both pleasure and a sort of resignation, and thinking, “Well, that’s that then.”

Ben was fresh out of college also, from Northern California originally, but moving to New York, so I hopped on the bandwagon and
moved to New York too, where I rented an apartment with Susie and another girl from college named Lola, in a greasy tenement at 102nd and Amsterdam, which was not then a particularly pleasant place to live.

Ben lived in Alphabet City, and in the evenings he played in a band. He worked, days, the first year, as a mover, and he got very strong, and I worked as a waitress, and for a while it was all fun, in the way life is fun when it’s provisional. But what seems fun at first can get old quickly, and soon my head hurt and my feet were tired and I found my customers demanding and rude, so I bought a suit with money sent by my parents, and I started interviewing for business jobs, and to my surprise got an offer from this management consultancy, and once something like that was offered, how could I say no?

And then I must have changed. I certainly wasn’t painting any pictures. In those days, the early nineties, art seemed pointless, and it was exhilarating to have money for the first time … I can’t explain it entirely—it’s as if it happened to a different person, and I look back and see who I was then and she looks like nobody I would ever have known. But because I became this person, and because Ben was deeply accommodating and because he loved me, he felt he needed to change, too. I’d say things like, “We’re not kids anymore—it’s time to get serious,” and in time, he signed up for law school at NYU, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you feel it’s time to get serious but have no clue what that might entail. Needless to say, he also packed in the band, which in some way he didn’t need anymore, because he had me in his free time. We were living together by then, in a tiny, dully respectable low-ceilinged postwar box east of Gramercy Park, a no-man’s-land, vibe-wise, a few blocks from the Arts Club but a million miles from any art. I barely looked at art; I thought my plan to become an artist had been a fantasy of the powerless, and that with money of my own—with power!—I had no need of it.

My office was on the thirty-fourth floor; I went everywhere by taxi; I flew on planes and sat in airports and stayed up tapping at my computer late nights in hotels. I was only twenty-five, and owned four pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. I possessed a fancy oversized white sofa and the most expensive comforter money could buy, from Sweden
(an item I still enjoy). And when Ben asked me to marry him—over a dinner so rich in a restaurant so elaborate that we were the youngest patrons by twenty years and probably the only ones without gout—I realized—not straight away, but in the weeks that followed, with the diamond bright and heavy on my finger (what use had I for a diamond?)—that Ben the white-collar criminal defense lawyer bored me, sweet though he was, and that I didn’t care about the sofa or the shoes or even the comforter, and that I didn’t even
like
fancy food, which either made me constipated or gave me diarrhea.

You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs. I had a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it. If I’d married Ben and moved to Westchester (you know, don’t you, that we would have moved to Westchester?), then, years later when my mother got ill, I wouldn’t have given myself over to her as I did, because there would already have been children (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen; and there would have been those jobs, and all the things that went with them, and there would have been Ben, who, guileless as he was till the last, I came to despise for his very malleability, his likeness to myself, almost, and to look upon—quite wrongly, I now see—with contempt.

I don’t know where he is now, more than a decade later, Ben Souter (“My suitor Souter,” I joked in the beginning), but I hope for his sake that he married happily and has bonny children and a big house, and I hope he’s raked in his millions while remaining ever sweet.

Nor was he by any means my last, all those years ago. I don’t need to enumerate them to you—briefly the married man; for much longer, the weary graduate student; the boy ten years my junior who told me—the only person in my life I think actually to say this to me—that I was sexy. This perhaps makes me sound defensive. Which I suppose I am. Because before the Shahids I thought I understood love and what it was and how I felt about it; and they turned it all upside down. The very fact that I can tell you without blinking that I could kill them—that above all I could kill her—says all that needs to be said. Oh, don’t worry, I won’t. I’m harmless. We Women Upstairs are that, too. But I could.

12

In the two weeks before Christmas, two things happened. The first was what I’d feared, in my studio solitude in the dark. I’d been trying to fight my terror, to sit tight through its spasms, and keep working into the evenings at Emily’s diorama. I was working on Emily’s bed, and there was no sound but the knocking of the radiators and the intermittent distant shipboard roar of the furnace igniting, blowing, juddering into sleep again. I’d let the CD player lapse into silence, because I wanted to be sure I could hear any human sounds, and feared that music would muffle them.

And then, as I sanded and whittled in my pool of light, I
did
hear sounds. The distant tramp on the stairwell, faint and almost hollow, and then footsteps, starting, stopping, ginger footsteps, growing louder, pausing along the corridor—would I catch the rattle of a padlock, the squeak of an unoiled hinge?—and no, the walker came on again, advanced ever closer. The steps, as my nightmare dictated, came to my door. The end of the hallway: nowhere else to go.

I put down my paper, my sanded sticks. My hands hovered over the table, and I was aware from the bowl of silence in the room that I held my breath. I didn’t want to scrape my chair along the floor. I could hear my heart. Did light show under the lintel? Perhaps—but wait: a knock. Not a random knock, a quiet, rhythmic knock, like a secret, or a message.
Dum-da-da-dum-dum
. And again.

Should I open? Did he know I was there? Did he know who I was? Was the rhythm a sign, or a meaningless fact? Was it someone knocking on the wrong door, or something far darker?

In my flurry, I moved. The chair let out a furious, maiming shriek.

The knock again, louder this time. Again the same rhythm; again twice. An announcement. And then, a rattling of the handle.

What now? What now? So important, my authoritative teacherly voice told me, not to cower like a child; but I picked up my X-Acto knife and checked that the blade was extended.

“Who is it?” I scraped my chair now as loudly as I could, a reversal of strategy, and stomped, in what I hoped was a manly way, toward the intruder. “Who is it?”

The voice on the other side—a man’s—said something I couldn’t grasp. I came up so close to the door that I imagined I could hear him breathing on the other side. He emitted a cough, a smoker’s cough, into which I tried to read an entire personality.

“Who is it? Speak clearly please?” The schoolteacher at last triumphant.

And then I heard her name, pronounced not as I pronounced it, but as she herself did. See-rreh-na. As if by an Italian.

I put the X-Acto knife in my rear pocket—with a mental note to remove it before sitting down—and fiddled with the bolt and swung the door wide, almost angrily, to try to take the visitor by surprise.