The Woman Upstairs (16 page)

“You heard about Ruby Howard? Bernie’s wife? It’s not Alzheimer’s—it’s the worse one, the Parkinson’s one. Lewy Body? You know what that is? Terrible.” A long silence, during which time they might both have been napping, and then Aunt Baby again: “And then Pete Runyon—you remember him from your church? They moved up here when he retired, and his wife, Beth, developed emphysema—she’s home, mostly, now, with her oxygen tank on wheels. I’ve been round to see her a few times lately, cheer her up. But now Pete’s got a cancer diagnosis. The bladder, I think. Or maybe the prostate—but not the easy kind, if it is. Beth’s very discreet, and it’s clearly something with his waterworks, something private. She didn’t want to say, exactly. It looks bad, though.” She sighed. “Don’t you think it’s worst when both people in a couple are sick? I always do. It’s different when you’re on your own—you’re both more of a burden and less of a burden. I mean, you’ve got to get into a home, no question about it, and that’s that. No gray areas. Take Alice and Robin Meynell, for example—do you see who they are? Well, she had a stroke last spring and …”

And on. I cleaned pots, Baby cleaned out the medical closets of all her acquaintances, and my father, phlegmatic, digested. At the door, between warm and cold, I kissed her soft, grainy cheek, I held her clawlike hand in mine, I took my father’s arm, shepherded him across the residual ice—a black swoop here and there along Baby’s tarmac walk—and settled him in his seat. At the other end, I pulled the car under the porte cochère—his building, concierged, had salted assiduously—and accompanied him all the way up to his apartment door, carrying for him his Trader Joe’s grocery bag modestly half full of presents (a new electric razor; a biography of Hamilton; a pair of cashmere-lined gloves) with a Tupperware container of mushy yams on top.

I was, by then, burning, not sleeping. Who would do the same for me, in my dotage? Who would be my good girl? Would it be Matt and Tweety’s precious Charlotte? I couldn’t see it. No: I derived a certain bitter thrill in thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not. I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline. Spontaneous combustion, almost. Almost. Merry Fucking Christmas to You.

In my fury, I did the strangest, most unlike-me thing: at ten o’clock on Christmas night I drove myself through the slick and empty streets, festooned with pagan lights, to Somerville, to the deathly quiet of the warehouse, where I scuttled nimbly up the sagging stairs, my keys between my fingers like a weapon (even in my fury I had room around the edges to be afraid), and I let myself into the studio and locked the door behind me.

It was freezing—the heat had obviously been turned down for days—and at that I hesitated, wondering if I’d made a mistake. But I fixed some coffee, and I turned the music on, and I rifled among Sirena’s things and found a pair of fingerless gloves made of soft black wool. When I put them on I felt like a character in a
Masterpiece Theatre
production (“Please, sir, can I have some more?”), but they did the trick; I could wiggle all digits without stiffness. I sat down at my
table, not in my pool of light but with every fucking overhead light and standing lamp and desk lamp in the entire studio on full blast, as much light as I could get, a Ralph Ellison ocean of light, and I got to work, at long last, with Emily D.

Every time I thought I heard a noise, I’d listen harder to the music, or sing along with it, or stomp my feet. It was Christmas night: there wasn’t anyone in the building. There wasn’t anyone in the street. I was all by my own, as the children say, and I would stay that way till the end. Fuck them all, and if anyone tried to break in or scare me or rape me, I’d give them a piece of my rage.

I worked without moving for four hours, and then, too chicken to go to the bathroom down the hall, I peed in a bucket in the corner of the room and washed it out in the sink and sat down again to work for another four hours, only I got very tired, a blind sort of tired, the sort where your eyes can’t see anymore and go all blurry as though you were having a stroke, to the point where I couldn’t trust what I was making and had to stop awhile. So I put my tools down and I wrapped myself in all her scarves and shawls—they smelled of her perfume, of lemons—and I put a couple of her cushions down on the little rug and the least dusty bit of the floor, near the chairs, and I lay down with my coat over my feet, and right there in the bright light, with the music still playing (it was a five-disc boom box, with a loop: Annie Lennox, Joan Armatrading, Joni Mitchell—old stuff, girl stuff, my reliable musical mates seeing me into slumber), and knowing that I would live with Emily into the new year, and that I would finish Emily’s room—maybe even finish the electrics that would allow Emily’s visions—before I had to go back to school—knowing, that is, that I was on fire and where I wanted to be and angry enough, for once, to be my own self, I closed my eyes, ran my tongue across my mossy teeth and went immediately to sleep.

PART TWO

1

By the time school started, Emily’s room was ready. All it lacked were the projections, her own magic lantern illuminating her words, Death himself, the Muse, Joy. I’d spent the week from Christmas to New Year’s almost entirely sealed in with Emily. I’d had dinner with my father once, and had met a group of four girlfriends for drinks—intimates for years, they seemed to me raucous and silly that night, a million miles from my world—but aside from those excursions, I’d been long days, long evenings, in my private white-lit space, sanding and gluing and whittling, eating stale cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that I fixed, half asleep, in the mornings at home, and browned apple quarters and bars of expensive, almost crumbly, Italian chocolate, very dark, in gilded foil, that were my reward when things went well. I didn’t sleep there again, because I’d felt my age the morning after Christmas, my bones sore, my joints stiff; but I’d conquered some demon and no longer feared the dark. No: that’s not quite true. I still feared the dark—when I quit the building near midnight, I raced like Cinderella down the stairs, two at a time, before the clock might strike, and dashed to my battered VW Golf as if to my imminently vanishing gilded pumpkin coach—but I was more in love with Emily, that week, than I was afraid of anything else. I felt pure and quiet and proud; and alone with it, like Emily herself.

As for the others—the Shahids—I’d cauterized, or thought I had.
If I’d said to Didi that it was a wound, she would’ve scoffed; but it was, and at her urging, I’d forced it to scab. Which was all very well until they came back.

On the first day of school, when I watched him stomp in his snow boots into the classroom with his backpack and his black-and-white pom-pom hat in hand, a hard look set upon his tender face that, when he saw me, saw me smile, softened, reciprocally, into a grin of such real and direct affection, a grin of the furry-lashed eyes—his dear, scarred eye!—as much as of his lips, and when I saw that smile, my smile, for me, my innards somersaulted as if I were a teenager blown a kiss by a pop star.

I hadn’t known for sure, had I, that he’d return. No call, no e-mail, no note—I’d even wondered, fingering Sirena’s scarves in my studio, catching their vestigial scent—not our studio, in those days, but mine—whether I’d dreamed the lot of them, whether all my talks with her had been no more real than my fantasized sexual encounter with her husband.

There is a story by Chekhov like this that had fascinated me in college. The black winter of my second year, assailed by doubt at not having gone to art school, I’d read it over and over. “The Black Monk”: about a man who imagines himself visited by a ghostly monk, with whom he has life’s vital conversations, about creativity, and greatness, and the meaning of existence. The monk assures him of his importance, of his exceptional talents. Then he realizes that the monk isn’t real; that he himself must be mad. But how much better to be mad in the company of the monk, than to be sane, and constrained in his aspirations, and alone. And mediocre. That, worst of all, is what he has to acknowledge, when his family forces him into clarity: that he’s nothing special after all. Sirena had been my Black Monk, and perhaps she’d been only a delusion.

But there was Reza, quite suddenly, in our classroom at Appleton, holding out to me, with almost a blush, a tacky key chain of the Eiffel Tower, a belated Christmas present. So he—even they—had thought
about me, too. They’d missed me. My first thought was that she’d be at the studio at that moment, and I had half a mind to skip out of school, to leave them all behind, and go to find her. Never mind that I’d accomplished as much in my ten solitary days as I had in all the weeks of talk leading up to them—she was my Muse, my alcoholic’s bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.

Reza’s eye didn’t look too bad. He’d had the stitches out; the scar—tidy, tidy, I’d seen the surgeon at her seam, hemming his flesh—was red, still, and looked raw, but didn’t cause alarm among the children. If anything, it gave Reza a rakish air, as if he were a beautiful little bandit. He deflected all questions about the incident, with knowing smiles and taps upon the shoulder: an initiate, he gave nothing away.

He did, however, expand about Paris, about the bumper cars at the Bastille and his favorite bakery, where a warty old woman named Léonie gave him a
palmier
every morning because she was so happy to see him. He told about the white plastic Christmas tree that listed wildly in the lobby of their building, and the resident dogs that lifted a leg in passing against its synthetic trunk, so that quickly the entrance grew redolent not of pine needles and snow but of stale urine. Reza was, for a child, and given the gaps in his English, a good storyteller, and he managed to make everyone laugh, which made us all feel, after the interruption of break, like a family again.

I didn’t go to the studio that afternoon, because I didn’t want to seem pathetic to myself. I didn’t want to want so much to see her. It was my austerity choice, my show of independence. I didn’t even know whether she’d be there. Instead, I went for a run and bought fresh trout from the fishmonger, and went home.

I’m not a cook. I’d bought the fish but didn’t want to prepare it; I’d taken it out of the fridge and put it back again, and was eyeing the cans of soup in the cupboard when my buzzer rang, downstairs. I almost didn’t go down: it was cold in the stairwell, and I expected it to be kids selling magazine subscriptions or the MASSPIRG guy shilling for
handouts. As I approached the door, I switched on the outside light, my frown at the ready.

And there she was, in a long black puffy coat, carrying a big bag: shorter, one eye lazier, her hair more ragged than in my mind’s eye, but smiling, arms out wide, her elegant curled lip stretched over her slightly prominent front tooth, her crow’s-feet crinkled.

“
Carissima!
” she exclaimed. “My dear, dear Nora! How have you been?” She took my upper arm with her hand, tightly, and led me inside and shut the door behind us. “Hard at work—you’ve been so hard at work! I was there this afternoon, at the studio. It is perfection, this little room you’ve made—” She was almost herding me up the stairs, but stopped, held me at arm’s length, and looked at me: “What extraordinary work you’ve done, Nora. Your Emily’s room is unlike anything else.”