The Woman Upstairs (20 page)

Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period. We’re all after what’s juicy, what breathes. If you’re really clever, like Sirena, then you create a persona—or maybe, more disturbingly, you become a person—who, while seeming impressively, convincingly to eschew fakery, is in fact giving people, very consciously, exactly what they want. Wouldn’t you call the person who builds a Wonderland—a Wonderland that you can see and touch and smell, that both is and is not Alice’s Wonderland, and is also some twelfth-century Islamic Robinson Crusoe’s Wonderland, is both East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real, and somehow, because of its freedom in
not
being wearingly faithful, becomes above all
your
Wonderland, or yours and Sirena’s at once, as though you were intimate with her in some way, wouldn’t you call such a person a Purveyor of Dreams? You would, and some Frenchie critic subsequently did, and if you’re wondering what could possibly be wrong with being a Purveyor of Dreams—I mean, you could say, isn’t that what Art is for?—you should keep in mind that the desire to be that, to do that—to be the fittest at artistic survival—requires ruthlessness. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world:
a ruthless person
. Which would explain why I don’t seem to make the cut.

That evening, when we stood over her blueprint and I marveled, she asked me again for help. It was only a couple of weeks after the
babysitting request, because I remember that I’d been to take care of Reza only twice, then, and there was, in my heart, a particular rush of thankfulness to Sirena: this in addition to all my other complicated passion, because I thought in some way she’d finally given me a son, my son. I cooked supper for him; I read to him; I scolded him about his homework, not as a teacher but in a parental way; and after kissing his forehead and smoothing his duvet, I perched in his room on the hard chair, in the penumbra, as the jazz musicians paraded brightly around the wall, watching the gentle rise and fall of his small bundled self until he fell asleep.

It was new, then, this thing with Reza, and it made me love Sirena all the more because it seemed almost a biblical gift. It really felt as though Sirena had bestowed upon me the flesh of her flesh, and I was savoring it most richly, still new, when all of a sudden there came, unbidden, another: the blueprint, unfolded.

“What do you think?” she asked me. She put her hand on me, of course. She looked up at me with the famous almond eyes, wide. “Does it look like—what do you think? Is it a land of reason and a land of marvels at the same time?”

How to answer, when mostly I was feeling the hand? And wondering, as I always did, what I felt about the hand.

“It’s a map.”

She clicked her tongue. “You mustn’t tease me. There is a map, there are the furnishings for my world”—she gestured at the bags and boxes—“but now there are other, bigger things to build. The island itself, if you like.” She sighed. “It doesn’t entirely make sense, because in Paris the shape of the space is different, not long and narrow but more a strangely divided rectangle. I’ll make it like a pathway, a journey. But I must build it here first, to see, obviously for the scale of it, but also to get started on the video.”

This was her big idea. She wanted to build a version of her Wonderland in the studio, she said, so that the Appleton kids—
my
Appleton kids, my third-grade class—could come and discover it. She would film their discovery. This was her plan. After that she might make other videos, she hoped, but the one she cared about was the kids. “And here’s the thing, you see, Nora, my dear: I cannot build the Wonderland,
and I cannot make the video, without you.” She crinkled her eyes, her mouth, in her most endearing smile. “You know this, don’t you? After all our conversations.” She sighed. “I never worked before with the help of anybody. But you—with your help, we will make something wonderful—a wonderful Wonderland!”

“Yes, sure—” I felt so many things at once. Chief among them excited; but also, afraid. Yet again, some boundary was being broken. I would let it break, because I wanted to; but what would it mean, to bring my kids—to bring her kid, our kid—here?

She was already imagining it: “The Jabberwocky, to go—in English?”

“Snicker snack.”

“Yes, the Jabberwocky, his eyes, eyes of light in the darkness—the suggestion of monstrosity, it’s better.”

“I guess.”

“Because then it is each person’s monstrosity, yes? You see? I don’t tell you what is monstrous, just like I don’t tell you what to love. I simply allow you to imagine.” She had taken her physical self back into herself, arms crossed over her chest, her shawl clutched round, but still, the smile. “Because each of us has our own fantasies, our own nightmares.”

“True.”

“What is for me perfection, you don’t even think twice about.”

“You never know—”

“You never know. Exactly. So we must keep the doors as open as possible, let as many fantasies come into Wonderland as we can. So that everyone can see themselves there.”

“Wonderland always seemed to me like a pretty scary place when I was a kid.”

“Yes! Scary, but we want to be scared.”

“I guess.”

“With mirrors and lights—like children, we want all the emotion, good, bad, and then poof, we want the emotion to go away again. We will do this, for the children, for Reza’s classroom, when you bring them here …”

“It depends, surely—”

“Because in the end, we want above all to be safe, yes? Almost everybody wants this in the end.”

We stood over her map of Wonderland and she told me that she couldn’t build it without my help. She wanted to bring together two different ideas of wonder, one imaginary and one spiritual. On the one hand, she had her story about a boy, then a man, raised alone on an island, and of his solitary discovery of science, and of spiritualism, culminating in his worship of a God he’d come to believe in absolutely—a worship that took the form of a spinning trance. She would mix this antique Eastern mysticism with a different kind of wonder, a modern Western wonder, that was Alice in Wonderland’s: a place where reason—and the ground—didn’t remain stable, where the imagination confused good and evil, friend and foe. One Wonderland was about trying to see things as they are, she said, about believing that such a thing as clarity was possible; and the other was about relativism, about seeing things from different perspectives, and also about being seen, and about how being seen differently also changes you. Both possibilities were amazing and frightening at the same time; but only one of them, she said, could lead to wisdom. She wanted her artwork, she said, to offer the possibility, at least, of wisdom. For this, she said, she needed me.

I was too dignified to gush or fawn on her. I had enough masquerade in me for that. I told her—truthfully—that I hadn’t worked with anyone else on an art project since high school—those heady afternoons in Dominic Crace’s lair. I mentioned that I was hoping, now that Emily was to all intents and purposes finished, to continue with the cycle, although perhaps not in chronological order—and that there was, after all, barely any time, just a few hours in the afternoons. But her eyes were smiling at me as though I were actually saying, “Yes, yes, of course, YES!” and I knew that she knew that, and that we were both excited about it.

That was in the middle of a week, the beginning of February; and by the weekend I was canceling another visit to my poor father in
Brookline, in order to drive Sirena to a vast used clothing warehouse south of town, recommended by Didi. I’d promised I’d take him to the medical supply in Belmont to look for a raised toilet seat to ease his bad hips, and I figured, guiltily, that another week or two with the old seat would surely not be too bad. Sirena and I were going to choose a mountain of light blue dresses and pinafores—Alice clothes—from which to sew the canopy of her new sky.

There was, to this, an element of the costume department back in college, a sort of “what the hell” good cheer completely antithetical to my pious and oh-so-precise reconstructions; and it was—how could I have forgotten this?—
fun
. It was simply fun to turn up the radio and the heat in the car to full blast, to sing along, like hams, to Macy Gray—“Try to walk away and I stumble …”—and then to roll into the Avril Lavigne hit of the time that the third graders loved without having the faintest idea about the emotions it expressed. “My Happy Ending,” it was called: “You were everything, everything that I wanted … All this time you were pretending / So much for my happy ending …”—we bawled the lyrics like teenagers, and Sirena’s funny Italian lingering upon the endings of the words themselves (“my happy-e ending-e”) made us laugh still more.

The actual sky was vast and blue and impeccable and American, the very canvas of possibility, the gray highway stretching out before us, salted white as sand, and the bay to our left, as we headed south, all glitter in the winter sun. I was so happy it was like a food, like I’d been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know,
fully
, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: “Imagine—imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this,” and in the middle of the singing I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing—an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was.

I have an old friend from college, long lost, who used to say that you should never let yourself think of a journey as long, because then it
will feel long no matter what. By the same token, it’s important, when you’re the Woman Upstairs, never to think of yourself—but
never
, do you understand?—as alone or forlorn or, God help us, wanting. It will not do. It cannot be. It is the end.

At the warehouse, we rifled through racks and bins of all kinds—vast shapeless nylon granny dresses, shrunken, felted woolen dresses, polyester stretch pants, sheets and blankets, sequined netting, iridescent organza, animal print plush jersey jackets, bolts of corduroy in extraordinary shades of plum and puce and pear. Sirena fingered everything with her eyes closed, as if the garments had messages in braille upon them—“It’s to know if I can work with this,” she explained, when I teased her. “Some fabrics, the synthetics, the fake ones, like some people, is this”—and she mimed scraping her fingernails on a blackboard.

“Are there people you don’t like, then?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before.

“Nora!” She shook her head incredulously. “Aren’t there people
you
don’t like?”

“So many of them.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t choose, not in this way. For me, life’s too short. Yes?
Life is too short
. When they”—she mimed the fingernails—“then they must go. Like the fabric, I don’t take it home; so with the people, they’re the same. Not for me!”