The Woman Upstairs (18 page)

“What’s so great about that? Especially if they’re wrong?”

“I’m not saying that it’s good or bad. I’m just explaining how it’s different.”

“You mustn’t be defensive of your country,” Sirena chided. Her irritation had been subsumed in the business of the main course. She was ladling up bowls of lamb stew over rice, fatty and spicy and fragrant.

“In America,” Skandar went on, “there are places like Harvard, where I walk in the door and some version of this happens and I think no more about it. Not, here, so much about my social origins; more about my philosophical ideas, my academic affiliations. I’m known, in a certain way. But mostly—” The wry smile again. In my Barolo fog, I registered that it was a sexy smile, confidential somehow. “Mostly, in America, I’m a cipher. If, to a person on the street, I say I’m from Beirut, he might ask me where that is. If I say I have Palestinian relatives and that I was raised a Christian, he may wonder ‘How is this possible?’ And if I explain that I went to university in Paris, he might wonder that I’ve done such an illogical thing. In America, Europe and the Middle East seem very far away indeed. If you’re a Lebanese who comes here for university, to study, then you become immediately American. You’re accepted, which is wonderful, but you’re given an entirely new suit of clothes, a new outline, that has no context, and you must grow to fit it, or fit it to shape you, or whatever. You come with no baggage.”

“Bring me your tired, your hungry … That’s what this country is
for
.”

“Of course. I’m simply saying that if I’d come to this country at eighteen, instead of going to Paris, my shape, as well as the shape of my life, would be different, in countless ways.”

“But we are who we are,” said Sirena, in a slightly warning tone, the tone of a spouse who has heard it before, or who feels that her husband verges on the garrulous. “And now, being who we are, we must eat. Nora, eat!”

I put a forkful of her extraordinary stew in my mouth, thinking, “This, of everything this evening, is what I ought to remember: the explosion of flavors, pine nuts, lamb, cumin, currants”—but I was only half attending to my food. I was watching Skandar trifle with his portion while he spoke, and watching him speak only to me, as if Sirena were not in the room. Three is a difficult number, I thought again.

“Don’t you think it works both ways, though?” I asked, eventually. “I mean, if I go to live in Europe, or in Beirut, don’t I suddenly
appear, um, denuded? Here, I have my context; but there, I’m just an American.”

Skandar’s eyes were, at this, appraising. As if assessing my Americanness as an attribute. “
Just
an American? Never. A beautiful woman like you, in France, or in Lebanon, would be seen above all as a beautiful woman. Not so, Sirena?”

Sirena gave a weary nod. “I’m going to say good night to Reza. It’s time he put out his light.”

A few moments later, she reappeared and interrupted her husband: “Nora,” she beckoned from the hallway. “Would you come for a moment? Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Reza sat up in bed and reached out both arms to embrace me—again, I was hugged, as if affection were commonplace. “Good night, Miss E,” he spoke softly in my ear. “You’re the best.” Then he pulled back and bestowed upon me a luminous and loving smile. I know it sounds silly, but as if he were my own son. As if he actually loved me. I bathed in it; but felt angry, too, at all that Sirena had and seemed to take for granted, idling placidly in the doorway with her arms crossed and a dreamy faraway look.

“Bonne nuit, chéri,”
she said to him, and something more, in French, as well, as we withdrew, and left him to the darkness and his brilliant spinning jazz musicians dancing across the wall.

Because it wasn’t far—or because … I could imagine reasons that flattered me, and others that had nothing to do with me—Skandar offered to walk me home. It was only about six blocks, across the slope of the most prosperous stretch of Cambridge, past the dark, still gardens with their looming snow-tipped trees, past cavernous houses in which a single upstairs window shone yolkily out, illuminating a small swath of icy lawn; or past others, shrouded entirely by the night, like sleeping ogres. Skandar smoked as we walked, cupping his cigarette inside his hand like a fisherman in a gale. I was made awkward by him, by the silence, though he didn’t seem to notice, and I could think of nothing
better to say than that the streets were very quiet, which pointless observation he ignored.

“A pretty girl like you,” he said, not looking at me, “you have no husband, no children?”

“Not right now.”

“You had a husband, then?”

“Almost, a long time ago.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Skandar, please …”

“I don’t mean to embarrass you. But when Sirena told me you were single, I thought surely there’s a mistake, maybe you’re just very private.”

“No, nobody special right now.” And after a moment, “And I’m not gay.”

“I know you’re not gay.”

Did he think I’d been flirting with him? “How are you feeling about Reza?”

“What about Reza?”

“About what happened at school, before the vacation.”

He shrugged, blew icy breath and smoke. “Am I asked to have feelings about it? I don’t think so, ultimately. I wish it hadn’t happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn’t happen again—but here too, if I’m wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.”

“You’re a cynic, then.”

He, usually slow in his movements, turned very quickly to look at me, and his glance seemed almost angry. “Cynic? Absolutely not. I am a realist. I am a pragmatist. But I’m also an optimist. Otherwise, I couldn’t do what I do.”

“Which is?”

“To what end does one speak about the ethics of history, about the moral questions inherent in the very history of history, if not then to look to the future and hope—no, not to hope, to work, for better?”

“I suppose—”

“No, this is serious. I’m a man who studies and reflects, but I’m committed to the conversations going on, wherever they take place, among whichever parties. And they matter.”

I imagined a gilded halo around him, but it was the pinkish fizz of a streetlight. This was the trouble with places like Cambridge, Massachusetts: these people—these men—who thought they were God’s gift; and yet about whom there remained some aura, and the possibility, just faint, that they
were
God’s gift—it couldn’t be gainsaid.

If they were a meal, I would have eaten all the courses with equal relish: each so distinct, and so uniquely flavorful. I had no way to conceive of them all together—I have to be clear about this, because otherwise you might think that I was fond of
a family
, that their family-ness was a pleasure to me; and you might infer from that that there was trust between us (a fact really true only about Reza), a mutuality the existence of which I always doubted. I was in love with Reza. I was in love with Sirena. I was in love with Skandar. All these things were true; they were not mutually exclusive, but they also, most important, did not, as far as I could see, pertain to one another.

Didi’s construction—that I was in love with Sirena but wanted to fuck her husband and steal her child—wasn’t right. I wanted a full and independent engagement with each of them, unrelated to the others. I needed their family-ness—how else would each of them have been brought to me?—and yet I despised it. I didn’t want to be with them together (although that was preferable to not being with any of them) and I hated to think of them all together, in the evenings and on the weekends, without me and with barely a thought for me.

As for trust, I had so little: “Why would he want even to talk to me?” I asked Didi, the next time I saw her. “Why would he choose to walk me home, in the freezing cold, in the dark?” I couldn’t quite admit to myself what I wanted her to say, what reassurance I was after, but I was physically aware of my disingenuousness, a tightening in the center of my chest—can you clench your esophagus?

“Do you need to ask? Men will be men will be men.”

I shook my head so hard it hurt. “It isn’t. It’s not so simple. It can’t be.”

“He can want your approval without himself wanting more.”

“I suppose—”

“I want you to want me,” she sang, “I need you to need me …”

“Live at Budokan. I know. But what does he want with my approval?”

“That’s his way, perhaps.”

“It doesn’t feel like a ‘way’—it feels specific, to me. There’s a way of talking—of looking—he is looking
at me
, do you know what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying he has the seducer’s eyes.”

“No—it’s much more transparent than seduction. He’s not trying to impress me; he’s really trying to talk to me; he’s—”

Didi put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “If he’s good at his job,” she said, “you won’t think he is doing a job. That’s what it means to be a seducer.” She let me go. “Everybody, for such people, is the exception. You know that. Everybody is an individual to be conquered, and you’re only as good as your last conquest. Which isn’t about sex, necessarily, although it can be. It’s what people said about Bill Clinton—he always made you feel you were the only person in the room.”

“So you’re saying that’s his thing? And all he really wants is a quick blow job under the table?”

She shrugged. “I’m not saying any of that. I’ve never met the guy. I’m saying that the world contains such people. If it’s shaped like a maple leaf, the color and texture of a maple leaf, and you find it underneath a maple tree … that’s all I’m saying.”

But I knew better, even as I feared worse. Both with Sirena and with Skandar, I veered between fantasies of intimacy and of bleak rejection. Doubt, that fatal butterfly, hovered always in my breast. What did I bring to them? Who was I to them, neither glamorous nor obviously brilliant nor important in the world? And yet, all three of them looked to me for something, even if none of us could tell what it was. Each of them wanted something, and their wanting made me believe that I was capable. Not that I was an extraordinary woman, exactly, but only
not exactly
that. Something quite like that. Which always since childhood I had secretly wanted to believe—no: had in my most deeply secret self believed, knowing that the believing itself was a necessary
precondition to any doing at all—but had never allowed myself to let on. It’s not right to say that they made me think more highly of myself; perhaps more accurately, that they allowed me to, in their wanting. My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious, hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them, too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would.

3

So began, ironically, my babysitting season. Not the obvious pastime for a Not Exactly Extraordinary Woman; although I see, in retrospect, that it was the perfect—the inevitable—trajectory for the Woman Upstairs. Even at the time, I was aware of how it looked. Plenty of the teachers at Appleton Elementary, the young ones especially, did some babysitting for extra cash. I’d always been disdainful of this: it seemed a sure way to undermine one’s teacherly authority. So much so that when Sirena first suggested the notion, I felt a chastening frisson, as if I’d been struck.

We were lying on cushions in the studio and I’d been laughing at her account of a formal Kennedy School dinner she’d attended, at which the snowy bigwig beside her had held forth for twenty minutes about the unelectability of the Democratic Party (himself a Democrat, without which the lecture might have been considered aggressive), with a glob of red soup glistening upon his chin. She said it seemed almost to be winking at her, the way it caught the light.

“Do you think he had botched dental surgery, and can’t feel anything on his chin, so food routinely gathers in that little hollow? Or do you think if you get big enough in politics, in that behind-the-scenes sort of way, it’s suddenly okay to fart in public or to have bits of food on your face? Or maybe he’s from outer space, or like a person with autism?”