The Woman Upstairs (17 page)

“Oh, hardly.” I was delighted, and bashful. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve brought you something. To eat. I brought it from Paris for you, and I thought, Maybe this will please Nora for supper tonight, and it will give me a chance to say hello, and thank you.”

“Thank you?”

“Ah, Nora! You know why. I’ve felt terrible that we never properly said good-bye, that I never thanked you. When what would we have done without you? I hate the e-mail, and the telephone too—especially in English, I get confused—but at last here I am, with a foie gras and a bottle of Sancerre, and some very special panettone, to say ‘Happy new year.’ ”

“Foie gras?”

“You don’t like it? I worried you might not. Don’t feel you have to eat it. I’ll bring you something else—a quiche? A stew? What would be nice?”

“I love foie gras. Really. Thank you.”

She was all aflutter. She was happy to see me. She felt guilty about having left without saying good-bye. She had brought me a foie gras. Could I have been more content? I poured her a glass of her Sancerre, although it wasn’t properly cold. I debated offering to put in ice cubes, but decided not to.

There she was: Sirena in my kitchen. She’d never been there before. She said nice things about my apartment. She admired the art. She threw her puffy coat on the sofa and sat at the kitchen table as if we were settling in for a long tête-à-tête. I, like the yellow fat around the foie gras as I scooped it out of the jar, was positively deliquescent.

“How was it to be home?”

“Home? Oh, Nora. I only wish it were home, the way Cambridge is home for you—this beautiful apartment, which smells of you and speaks of you, the place you know so well and that knows you. But what I always forget and then rediscover when I return is that I don’t belong in Paris, not really—I’m a foreigner there, too. For whom is Paris home, really, except the concierges gossiping in their corners?”

“But you must’ve been pleased—”

“Yes, I know what you mean. Reza so loves his little friends. And Skandar his big ones. It was a relief, in some ways—not to feel so responsible for them.”

“But for you?”

“I have history there, and friends, and colleagues; and home is where my boys are, of course. But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you’ll never truly be at home again. What you’ve left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you’ve left behind at every stop.”

“So you didn’t have a good time?”

“I did, and I didn’t. I missed you, and the studio, my work—I wasn’t like you, you see—no creation for me, just a great many meals in restaurants and the busyness of holidays.” I didn’t entirely know whether to trust her: she was seeming false, to me, as if onstage.

“When did you get back?”

“A day or two ago. Skandar had to be in New York by last night—another conference. Meetings. You know how he is.” A rueful smile. I thought of how often she was on her own—but with Reza. Not like me. Not truly alone.

“But I want to hear about you,” she said. “A new year, a new beginning. What have you been up to while we’ve been gone?”

“It’s been pretty quiet, really. Getting on with things.”

“Christmas?”

“With my father and my aunt.”

“Not the troublesome brother?”

“Matt? He doesn’t come at this time of year. When you have your own family, you’re absolved, aren’t you?”

“Absolved? Not where I come from. My mother came to stay with us, and my oldest sister. It was very noisy at our house. Reza was profoundly spoiled.”

“That sounds like what Christmas should be.”

“Yes, I suppose. But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I’m a daughter and a sister and a mother—never an artist. I could be, I don’t know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allow no room for anything but my duty.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You? But you’re so free! I envy you that. How many times I thought of the studio and of you in it, working. Or of you thinking, calmly, here in your lovely apartment—it’s not exactly how I imagined it, but not so far off. While I was making beds and stews and presents and silly conversation …”

“The grass is always greener …” I thrilled to think she’d thought of me—had thought enviously of me. “I was worried about Reza.”

“He’s done so well. You’ve seen his eye, yes? The scar will be quite discreet … You were so good to him, and to me, that awful evening.”

“You were worrying about the emotional stuff.”

“Emotional stuff. Ah, yes. Boys throwing rocks. But children are resilient. It’s good we went away—he’s had a chance to forget. He had some nightmares, but couldn’t tell me what they were about. I don’t know if they were related. Who can say? Shauna McPhee tells me the boy was expelled.”

“Straight away.”

“So: now a new year, a new beginning. I’ve vowed not to complain. I’m too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I’ve also vowed to work very hard—it’s no time at all from now until May. The months will be gone before we know it; and I’ve promised my gallery that I’ll come home ready for my exhibition. So:
au travail!
” She stood up as she said this: time to go. And then: “What have you promised yourself for the new year?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t made any new year’s resolutions. That night I’d spent in the studio, oblivious to the time, aware only too late that the ball had dropped in Times Square, I’d wished Emily D happy new year: I’d lifted her, in her lacy nightgown, from her high, narrow bed, and had stroked her glossy head; and then had returned her, carefully, to her dollhouse life. Happy new year to you. “I’ve resolved to be more independent,” I said.

“You? But you’re more independent than anyone!”

“More alone, maybe.” And for some reason I thought of my mother, each day more trapped, until she was buried in her aloneness. “It’s not the same thing, you know.”

2

Because I’d complained of my solitude, I worried that Sirena’s invitation to dinner the following week was a pity call. I was invited for 7:30. I arrived at 7:40, afraid I was late, carrying a bottle of expensive Italian red—Barolo, I think—recommended by the girl behind the cheese counter at Formaggio. I had the feeling when he opened the door that Skandar was surprised to see me.

“Ah! You’re here. Sirena, Nora is here. Come in.” The entrance was very narrow, the stairs heading straight up, and Skandar had to back up them in order for me to get in the door. It wasn’t clear what physical salutation, if any, was in order, so we did nothing but bob and smile awkwardly.

“I haven’t got the wrong day, have I?”

He shook his head, laughing, and reached for my coat, backing up the stairs the whole time.

“The wrong time?”

Sirena appeared at the summit, with Reza beside her, already in his checked pajamas. “Welcome! So much better than your last visit to our house. This time, we offer you superior food to toast and tea.”

They’d set the table with flowers and candles, so the horrid tinted globe light was turned off, and by lighting strategic lamps around the space, they’d managed to make it almost attractive.

“Come, Miss E, come see my room.” Reza at once took me by the
hand and pulled, while his father poured wine and his mother returned to the stove.

I followed him there to find that it, too, was transformed, by a slowly spinning magic lantern that cast upon the wall the colored shadows of jazz musicians playing—a green drummer at his kit, a rose saxophonist, a burly blue outline wielding a bass guitar. A large poster of a running soccer player—French, I assumed—took up most of the wall above his bed, and flickered in the light almost as if alive.

“That’s Zidane,” Reza explained. “He’s the best. He used to play for Juventus—do you know them?”

“No.”

“Let me explain …” He pulled me down to sit beside him on the bed and began to recount, with more enthusiasm perhaps than clarity, the trajectory of Zidane’s career, on both the French national teams and the league teams.

“Reza”—his father was smiling in the doorway, holding a glass of red wine and a scotch with ice—“your time with Miss Nora is in the day, at school. This evening is for grown-ups.”

“In a minute? Please?”

Skandar said something in French. He handed me the glass of wine and retreated.

Reza smiled conspiratorially. “I have three minutes,” he whispered, “but nobody will know if we take four.”

Reza had already eaten, and although he sat for a while with us, swinging his legs and picking idly from a bowl of grapes, he didn’t volunteer much, nor even particularly appear to be listening, and before the starter of imam bayaldi and crostini had been cleared he’d asked to be excused and had gone to read
Astérix
in his room.

This was a shame, really, in spite of his odd superfluity; because in the same way that three people only barely constitute a family, a meager and Spartan sort of family, so too three people barely constitute a dinner party. This is especially true when two are intimates and the third an alien, an Upstairs Woman with manners and insufficient
temerity. There is, about such a scenario, an aura of hard work—at least at first. We were all very polite, toiling through our excellent eggplant dish with its crusty toasts. We talked about school; how long had I been there, Skandar asked, and how did it compare to other schools? And then more broadly, how did American and French educations compare; and yes, please—because it really does help—another glass of red would be lovely … And then, bit by bit, it got less stiff. Sirena talked about her schooldays in Milan, and then Skandar spoke of his education in Beirut, at a French-language college, and how his parents had sent him to boarding school in Paris for the last two years (it was, he said, like something out of an old French movie, brutal and competitive and austere, with students flipping out left and right from the pressure, and horsemeat for supper. “Stray cats picked through garbage and howled in the alleyway outside the kitchens, and we used to joke that
they
were in the casseroles”) and how this had altered forever the course of his life without him even knowing it at the time. “Half of my friends from home—maybe more than half—went instead to the American University there, in Beirut; and then they ended up coming here, to the States, for graduate school or whatever. Which means their lives are in English, at least, or are American—all the way, in some cases.” He paused. “A couple are in Canada. In Montreal, you can eat your cake and have it too—speak French and English and Arabic also, because there are so many Lebanese there now.”

“And how’s it different for you? You’re in America now—you’re at Harvard. You can’t get closer to the American establishment than that.”

Behind his glasses he opened his eyes wide in an ironic gesture that made his eyebrows dart up his forehead. “Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But that isn’t my point, really. There’s a way of being in exile, for the educated of any non-European country, that can be very comfortable in its worldliness …”

“The land of silly accents,” I said aloud, without quite meaning to.

“What do you mean?” Sirena frowned.

“Something a friend once said. She worked in radio, but somehow she was invited to an academic dinner, all these old professors at Princeton, and she said half of them had won the Nobel Prize, and that
not one spoke English without a silly accent. She said she felt like she’d taken a plane to the land of geniuses with silly accents.”

Skandar smiled vaguely.

“Not that I’m saying you guys have silly accents.”

“But it’s quite so, your friend is exactly right. In this country, there are pockets like this, almost like low-lying clouds. We’re in one here. They are in America, or on it, but they have very little to do with it, and we—the brown, the black, the yellow, the Jews and Arabs from all over—we congregate, each in our diaspora, and make a world of familiar conversation, a small life in our ivory towers. And we bark at one another in our silly accents, in what is to most of us a foreign tongue. I always marvel that we manage to communicate at all. But maybe we manage to say more than we think—or maybe less. I’m not sure.”

“English is the tyranny,” Sirena put in, looking cross, as if the language itself could be blamed.

“But isn’t it similar in France? You were saying the other day that you don’t feel really at home there, either.”

“In France,” she said dryly, “people speak French rather than English.”

“But also now more English.” Skandar was highly amused. “And sometimes even German. It’s not uncommon to encounter colleagues with whom one might speak all three languages, in different moments. There, you are
in Europe
, not floating on top of it like an alien body.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

He paused, drank. From his eyes I could tell he was ironic and serious at the same time. “In Europe, for good or bad, history is always there, the context is always present. When I say I’m Lebanese of Palestinian extraction, from Beirut, that I’m predominantly a Christian by heritage, and then that I went to university in Paris, that I teach at the École Normale, a great deal is immediately known about me—of what I am and what I am not. Still more can be gauged by my clothes, my demeanor—and I will be placed by these things. Not only by my fellow professors with ‘silly accents,’ but by the greengrocer or the taxi driver also.”