The Woman Upstairs (14 page)

“I think I do.”

“Never mind. It’s okay. As you say, his eye will be fine—that’s the most important thing.” She stood, piled the plates. “It’s late now. Not time for more melodrama. I don’t think Reza will be at school tomorrow, but you must be, so you must get home to sleep.”

At the door, like my mother, she turned on a new and brilliant
smile. “Nora, my dear, I can’t ever say enough thank-yous for tonight. What would we have done without you? You’re a true friend.” She extended her arms, and I saw that she was offering me a hug. I’m not much of one for hugs—they make me uncomfortable—but I stepped into her embrace and hugged her back. She didn’t try to kiss my cheek, but instead clasped me tightly against her, long enough for me to unstiffen and properly hug her back. I could feel the lumpy hooks of her bra through her sweater. She smelled of perfume and the sharp sweat of fear. I don’t know where it came from, but I felt like crying. It had been such a long day.

“I don’t know if I’ll be at the studio tomorrow,” I said, pulling away at last.

“I don’t think I will be,” she said.

“When does Skandar come?”

“Maybe earlier, now. We’ll see. He doesn’t really believe in a crisis—he’s seen too many and he says they’re almost never really real.”

“Easy to say from the outside.”

“Always. Good night.”

“Call me if you need my help?”

From her mysterious smiling nod I knew she wouldn’t call me. And I was right.

Then there was the waiting. Reza didn’t come to school the next day, or the next. Or the next, Thursday, by which time I understood that we wouldn’t see him again before the holidays. On the Wednesday and again on the Thursday after school I went back to the studio and found it abandoned—the coffee cup she’d been drinking from when I called from school standing half full on the counter. On the Friday, on the Saturday, the Sunday, I couldn’t bear to go back alone.

They were returning to France for two weeks, but I didn’t know exactly when they were leaving. I kept waiting for Sirena to call—to tell me how Reza was faring, to report on his state of mind, for God’s sake even to ask whether there was any homework he ought to be doing. By Thursday, it occurred to me to call them—think of all the things
that might have happened: Reza’s eye might have gotten infected, or he might have become hysterical or despondent, or Sirena and Skandar might have had an enormous argument about any of it—about Skandar being away, or about being in Cambridge in the first place, or even about the fact that
I
had taken the boy to the hospital—any of these might have happened. They might have decided to leave early for France. They might have decided to return home for good. The one thing I didn’t want to believe was that they were going about their days in that dingy town house in perfect and consoling uneventfulness, and simply not thinking of me at all.

Don’t think that I wasn’t aware the whole time of the tenuousness of my claim: she might have called me a true friend, but wasn’t I essentially just a common schoolteacher and a sometime co-tenant? There were, in my own life, people I’d treated as cavalierly: one was always aware of the hierarchy, however much one tried to pretend indifference to it.

And yes, in all this thinking, in the deafening silence, I started to be angry, a little. Who were they to ignore me? What sort of manners were these, not only in the broader, human sense but even professionally, even if there were no more intimate connection—perhaps all the more so in that case—didn’t you owe your son’s teacher a phone call, when she’d rushed him to the hospital and stayed there with you for hours, just to say that he’d be back and when, or wouldn’t be back, but that he was fine, or Christ, that he wasn’t really fine, but even then, to say one more time “thank you” because you know, in life, when people put themselves out for you it behooves you to express gratitude.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate. And I was aware, in all this emotion, that as soon as she called—if she called—all would be forgiven. Every time my phone rang, my heart turned in vain hope. It was a reflex; I couldn’t control it.

Owen had been expelled by Shauna, efficiently, unceremoniously, before noon on Tuesday morning. The school was thick with the gossip
of it, from smallest to largest, and Reza’s fall to the ground, dripping scarlet blood in the snow, became mythic, almost Homeric. There were whispers that he was brain-damaged, that he’d been blinded, that the Shahids were going to sue—all kinds of garbage, from the playground to the staffroom, and repeatedly colleagues would stop me in the hall or in the bathroom to check the veracity of one rumor or another. Somehow, this hubbub blew past me like a dream: I could hear only the wind in my head.

On Friday morning we had the holiday assembly, where my class performed
The Fir Tree
from the Hans Christian Andersen story—God, it felt apt to me that week. Luckily, Reza’s part as a woodcutter had involved only three lines, which young Noah cheerfully usurped and delivered with gusto. Then everybody did a dance to “I Have a Little Dreidel,” after which a Nigerian girl named Ethel, in the fifth grade, performed a soaring rendition of “Silent Night”: the remarkable voice emanating from her slight chest billowed vast around us all, rich and clear, like some extraordinary divine food. Then Shauna said a few upbeat and largely inane words about the season’s festivals of light and the new beginning to which we all were looking forward—with no mention at all of the incident at the beginning of the week—and then, suddenly, it was lunchtime, and vacation.

The children dispersed both swiftly and slowly, their lovely disharmonious babble overtaking the air all the way to the ceilings, as they stuffed their packs and donned their gear and hugged and patted one another, depositing cards and parcels on my desk like religious offerings, some of them discreetly, so I wouldn’t notice, others proudly, some of the girls clutching at me, hugging my hips, my tummy, my arm; the boys less forthcoming, almost shy in some cases, and each of them calling, on their way out the door, “Bye, Miss E! Happy holidays, Miss E! Have a good Christmas! See you next year—get it? Bye! Bye! Bye!”

And then there I was, alone in my classroom with the fluorescent lights, the pile of bright trophies on my desk, the noise fading down the hall, the stairwell, the midday winter sun at the windows, my life suddenly empty, gone. I put away books, dusted the blackboards, tidied my pens into the drawers. There was a teachers’ lunch in the staffroom, but I didn’t want to go—the pleasantries we exchanged
were always the same, only this time, surely, there would also be gossip about Reza, about Owen, about Shauna’s decision not to mention them in the assembly. I put on my coat, hunted for a grocery bag in which to stow my booty. (How many cards had I accumulated, over my teaching years? But in the pile there was not one from Reza, so none that I wanted.)

It would have been the perfect day to go to the studio, where Emily D’s solitary bedroom awaited my solitary attentions. Instead, I slipped out of Appleton without saying good-bye, dropped my things at home and went to the matinee of
Closer
, a movie with Jude Law and Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts and Clive Owen that made me feel a hundred years old and completely alone in the universe.

My dad was feeling under the weather, and this helped me. He’s simultaneously stoical and hypochondriacal, my father: he’ll be trumpeting ostentatiously into his linen handkerchief while insisting that nothing’s the matter—his voice a croak, his eyes red-rimmed and filmy—and then suddenly he’ll wave his fork at you and confide, alongside the jiggling speared sausage or lettuce leaf, that he’s read in the Mayo Clinic newsletter about an underreported but devastating viral bronchitis, every symptom for which he seems to have; or about the warning signs for prostate cancer that have him worried about how often he urinates (he never says “pees”); or about adult-onset diabetes that could explain why he seems so often to take an afternoon nap. He doesn’t want you to feel concern about his symptoms but would like you to be aware, as he is aware, that at any and all times he is, or may be, stepping closer to death.

I went with him right after school ended to the old Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. We were supposed to attend a concert in their cavernous music room, a string quartet on a wooden dais in front of two hundred retirees and music nerds in rustling coats in the dark in the middle of the day; but he decided at the last minute that his cold symptoms—a vigorous postnasal drip that had him constantly clearing his throat, a stream of catarrh that required much nose blowing—would
spoil the experience both for him and for the rest of the audience. So instead we wandered the galleries with their familiar contents, tiptoeing among the masterpieces that seemed still to have Isabella’s dominating fingerprints upon them, all the way up to the room at the top where she herself, immortalized by Sargent, proud and myopic, stood guard over her domain. Afterward, we scurried down to the tearoom to get a table ahead of the concertgoers. My father, who in age has developed a sweet tooth, ordered hot chocolate and a cake.

“Your mother loved this place,” he observed, as he always did, as though that were reason enough to come.

“The tearoom, you mean?”

“The whole thing. That courtyard. All those ferns. She loved that. Whenever we came, she’d say so.”

“Do you love it too?”

“Bit dark for me. Nice art, but it’s all jumbled up. Seems like it needs a good spring cleaning.”

“We didn’t have to come here, you know.”

He shook his head, even as he was blowing his nose. I could see a small crusty scab on his bald pate: another skin cancer that would have to be burned off. “It’s good for me. I know that.”

“What, culture?”

“It was your mother who loved these things. But it’s important to do them sometimes, even if you don’t love them. And it’s nice to be with you.”

“I don’t get it. Why’s it important? If you don’t enjoy it, then why, especially at your age …”

“At that point, why anything, Nora? Don’t be silly. You get dressed because you get dressed. You don’t ask if you
enjoy
it. You eat most meals because a body’s got to eat. And it’s the same with the museums: once in a while, you’ve got to do it.”

“Standards? You’re saying it’s about keeping up standards? That seems weird to me.”

“Is this interesting, Nora?”

“To me it is. You’re saying that you should do things
as if
you cared about them, even when you don’t?”

“Sometimes you might learn something.” He fumbled at a bit of
cake that had fallen from his fork. “Life isn’t just about doing things you enjoy, you know.”

“God knows I know that. But the museum isn’t like, I don’t know, property taxes or anything. It’s supposed to be a pleasure.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t pleasurable.”

“Yes you did. You implied it. I mean, we could go to the movies, or whatever, instead.”

“Nora, why are you doing this? Can’t we have our cocoa and talk about nice things? How was the Christmas assembly with the kids?”