The Woman Upstairs (12 page)

Indeed, for an instant, he looked surprised, like a silent film actor miming surprise, eyebrows aloft and mouth involuntarily agape; and then he recomposed his features into a pleasant, almost ingratiating, smile and extended a hand. “And you must be Nora Eldridge?”

I hesitated.

“Not only my wife’s friend and colleague.” He put the emphasis heavily on the second syllable—col
-league
—which made him sound both foreign and important. “But also my son’s
institutrice
. How do you do?”

This was Reza’s father and Sirena’s husband. “You must be—”

“Skandar. Skandar Shahid. How do you do?” He extended a strong, square, hairy hand, even as he stepped forward and I backward into the studio. “Sirena is not here?”

“She left over an hour ago.”

He peered skeptically into the tidied gloom at her end of the room (so he’d been here before), and then back at my circle of eggy light. “And you have the elves’ workshop,” he said, smiling.

“I’m sorry?”

“You are—I just meant you’re like the shoemaker’s elves, hard at work in the night to make something perfect.” He smiled, but did not show his teeth: a gentleman. “And also, what you are making is very small.” Which meant he had also looked at my diorama, and possibly at my sketches too. Which meant that they’d leaned over my table together, or at the least that he’d perused my belongings, my work, in some idle, prurient way, while Sirena put on her coat, or boiled the kettle. Somehow it had never occurred to me that he could have been there.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s small. I concede that.”

“You can see that?” He laughed, and here a glimmer of tooth was visible. “I’m so glad.” He paused. Like his wife, he spoke with an accent, but unlike Sirena’s, his was clipped, tidy. “Shall I make some tea?” He stepped toward the sink, still with his coat buttoned up. His leather shoes, wet and ruined, left dark marks on the floor. I found his proprietary gesture quite surreal.

“Tea?”

“Would you prefer coffee? Sirena is always for coffee, and I, I am for tea.”

“But Sirena isn’t here—she’s gone home.” I must have sounded rude, because he stopped and turned to look at me as though I’d surprised him again.

Have I said that for all I found his behavior unreadable, Skandar Shahid also proved, superficially, to be pretty much my ideal man. He was the sort of man I would have eyed, on the subway or in an airport, and wondered about; the sort of man before whom, had I been seated next to him at a dinner party, I would have felt tongue-tied and bashful; the sort of man—a grown-up—I would always have thought I could never know.

Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, he had luxuriant dark wavy hair, worn slightly long and now graying, as though he’d stood for a while in a snowstorm. His eyes—but I’d thought Reza’s eyes were
his mother’s?—were Byzantine, ovoid, heavily lashed and dark as wells. They were magnified by glasses, but the glasses were somehow discreet, so that what you saw were enormous eyes only. He had pleasingly rounded cheeks, a nose neither bony nor bulbous, a drawing lesson of a nose, and dark lips, slightly pouting. I wanted at once to touch his chin and feel the evening sandpaper of it. I smiled and said, “Sorry. Tea would be great.”

He filled the pot at the sink, turned on the burner, all comfortably with his back to me. “Do you know if there are biscuits?” he asked, rummaging among the coffee tin and tea boxes. “Wouldn’t you like a biscuit?”

“We’re fresh out, I’m afraid.”

“Fresh out?” He turned, amused. “I like that. Fresh in, fresh out. If I’d come earlier, you would have had them.”

“I guess so.”

“So this is what you and Sirena do, eat ‘cookies’ ”—he said the word as if it were foreign, in quotation marks—“and chatter like schoolgirls?”

“I suppose that’s it. This whole studio thing, it’s an excuse to gossip.”

He swiveled his head on his neck like a bird, looking at me from the corner of his eye, and he smirked. “That’s very good. That’s very good.” He seemed to have found a remnant of biscuit of some kind, and nibbled on it. “You are serious, though.”

“Serious?”

“Sirena says you’re serious. This is what matters. Not whether you sell for thousands or know the fancy people. That you are serious is important.”

“Of course.”

“You look serious.” He peered at me, amused, as he handed me my tea. “Milk?”

“No thanks.” I thought for a moment. “Does
she
sell for thousands, then? Does she know the fancy people?”

“Fancy? What does it mean? Something different to someone different. But yes, she is, she does, whatever it means. She’s started to.” He gave another big, cryptic smile. “In Paris, of course.”

I felt some internal elevator drop in its shaft; what is commonly
called a sinking feeling. Somehow, I had contrived not to think about Sirena’s artistic life outside our private world, about its before and its after.

“This is one reason it was hard for her to come this year—for her career, things in the past year or two really started to, to ‘take off’? at home. Exhibits, the best gallery, reviews, you know. There aren’t here the same opportunities … but I told her, find a studio, work, like a retreat, with no distractions. It will be good.”

“And is it?”

He finished his tea, deposited the cup with a flourish in the sink. “It
is
good. She has found a place, and she has you.”

“She has me?”

“For cookies and chat, a col
-league
, who is serious too.”

“Right.”

“Like many artists, Sirena, when she is sad, can get very sad indeed.” He looked wistful, but strangely as though this had nothing to do with him. “So we are always happy for her to be happy.” He looked at his watch. “She’s late. For once I’m on time, and she’s late.”

“She didn’t mention that she’d be coming back.”

“We’re going to a film, just together, and we agreed—” He interrupted himself, made a great mime of slapping his forehead. “But we changed. We changed the plan.” Again, the watch; then guttural rumblings of exasperation. “She will already be at the cinema. Can you tell me the fastest way to Kendall Square?”

I tried to give him the simplest possible directions, but had the impression he wasn’t taking them in. His distress seemed genuine enough; but I didn’t trust, as he hurried off down the corridor, uttering politesses as he went, that he’d make it to the cinema on time, or possibly even at all.

As I put away my things for the evening and washed out the cups, I constructed a story whereby he’d come, on purpose, in the hope of meeting me. Not because he wanted to know me for himself, but because he wanted to see who his wife spent so much time with, to get the measure of me. Maybe—wasn’t it remotely possible?—she spoke of me with the same barely contained excitement, the slight breathlessness, with which I spoke of her.

It’s the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they’re lying to you, but as often because they’re lying to themselves.

Sirena, after all, rarely spoke to me about Skandar. I imagined that because she didn’t speak of him, he didn’t preoccupy her thoughts. I understood him to be a given, possibly even an ambivalent given. She talked so openly about her work, and her anxieties and fantasies about it, and about the malleability of different materials, and about her complicated feelings about video. She worried that the fashion for video was affecting her interest in it, both her attraction and her repulsion, which I understood. She said that it was one of the things she admired about me, that I had no truck with fashion, that I followed my instincts with such calm. I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t do otherwise; but I was thrillingly gratified by her praise.

Or she talked about Reza—she loved to talk about him, his escapades, his funny comments, his malapropisms in English (“
Maman
, what is a doggy dog world?”), stories of his early childhood. She even talked about her own girlhood, the large family of siblings and her tyrannical mother, deaf in one ear since childhood and correspondingly voluble, as if making up for the sounds that didn’t reach her by putting out a great din into the world; and her father, as soft, as she put it, as a Camembert in summer. She talked about how close she was to her youngest brother—so much like Reza in temperament, she said—and how tempestuous her relations were with her older sister, eighteen months from her in age, who had longed for family but never married, and who doted oppressively on her nephew whenever given the chance. She told stories of her youth, of backpacking through Southeast Asia, and being so stoned in northern Thailand that she spent almost a week in a stupor in a hut in a village near Chiang Mai, with her then-boyfriend forcing her, every so often, to eat or to drink so as to keep body and soul together.

She talked about all these things, but almost never about her husband. What was I supposed to think?

When she spoke of him, it was in connection with Reza, about the three of them doing things together, like speaking English at the supper table or ogling stingrays at the aquarium; or about logistics, at which he was clearly very bad. Skandar showed up two hours late; Skandar forgot altogether; Skandar never paid the bill; Skandar lost the receipts/car keys/telephone number. She had a weariness, half indulgent, half despairing, when she mentioned these foibles, a particular sardonic set to her lovely mouth.

“You must like it, really,” I once said when she explained that the reason no Shahid had attended Back to School Night was that he’d been assigned the job and, forgetting or claiming to, had gone instead to hear a lecture at the Kennedy School. “Isn’t it partly why you married him?”

“I loved it
then
,” she said. “He seemed so free. But you get tired of it, you know.” You, too, might have thought him an ambivalent given.

When I got home that Friday evening, I Googled the pair of them. It seems strange in retrospect that I hadn’t done it sooner, but I realize now that I hadn’t wanted to know what the world thought of them, of her. I’d wanted her to be mine, the way my Emily Dickinson diorama was mine, without a world before or after or outside. It was how we all want life to be, no hubbub or white noise, no distorting mirrors. And so no doubt looking them up on the computer was a mistake.

There they were together, photographed at a cocktail party next to a beaky, long-haired fellow in a rusty velvet jacket; there was Skandar on a panel about Raymond Aron and the philosophy of history, caught behind a long table with his name on a sign in front of him, mid-speech with his eyes shut and his hands raised like birds in flight, a blur. There was a shadowy photograph of Sirena at the opening of her installation of Elsinore, holding a champagne flute and glaring at the photographer, grave and moody and wearing skinny trousers and high heels, her hair piled up on her head with chopsticks. There were links to his essays, in French, unintelligible to me; and his listing as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure; and clips from the papers about Sirena’s exhibitions—two of them, mostly, the Elsinore one and another two years before it, again all in French. When I clicked on “translate this page” I got a comical soup of errors syntactic and grammatical, along
with some obvious howlers on the diction front—a lesson, surely, in the fundamental impossibility of cross-cultural exchange—but I could see that the terms in which Sirena’s work was praised were extravagant, almost uncomfortable. One review in particular raved not so much about the extraordinary constructions of Elsinore but about the video series that accompanied them. This, they said, was Sirena’s true genius, her ability to thrill and amuse and shock and surprise us with her set of six three-minute shorts, each describing the relationship of a creature—including a human observer, filmed unawares from behind; a live snail; and a plasticine Hamlet, which the reviewer liked best—to the spaces.

Not long after, I had a dream about Skandar, that kind of bright, real dream that stays with you into the day and changes you, as if something—what?—has really happened. It’s so visceral that it can’t then be expunged from your memory, as though it were written on the body. It was a sexual dream. We were naked together in bed in an apartment that wasn’t mine, but I knew it wasn’t his, either, and I somehow knew from the high, white, opaque light in the windows that it was in Europe—Amsterdam, maybe, is what I thought, where I’ve never been. I got out of bed to put the kettle on, and I said, “She’ll be here soon, you know,” and he said, “She doesn’t mind. She likes it.” Likes what? I wondered, and got back into bed with him, and then he had his fingers in me and I came. Then there was the kettle boiling and the doorbell ringing (my alarm clock, obviously: time to get up) and I got up to deal with these things but I wasn’t frightened, he’d said she liked it, and when I turned back to look at him, my whole body still tingling, he was leaning against the headboard and sniffing, like a perfumer, at his cunty fingers, with a sly faraway smile and just a glint of tooth.