The Woman Upstairs (21 page)

“There must be a word for that,” I said. “What’s the word for that in Italian?”

“
Respingere
, maybe—to reject, to return something.”

“Re-spinge? I love that: ‘Spinge it!’ Ditch the dope and spinge the sponge! Spinge him again—re-spinge him!”

We were excitable enough to laugh even at this, and it passed then into our vocabulary, part of the lexicon between us, so that when I was annoyed with someone I’d say, “Spinge her,” or Sirena might complain, giggling, that we should “re-spinge the sponges.” It doesn’t seem very funny now, but it became one of our things, after that.

On the way home, we realized we were famished, that it was late. The afternoon sun, still bright, hung now coldly low in the sky, and the heat in the car had that prickling, parched quality that comes when it’s genuinely freezing outside. We decided to get something to eat.

I don’t know why I thought of the Italian bar up behind Davis Square. Mostly it was the sort of place you went for drinks, when it was too late for everything else; and it wasn’t a place where you thought of eating, much. But years before, before my mother was even sick, a lifetime ago in my artist phase, when I’d thought I might yet turn out to be the person that I wanted to be—whoever that person might have been—I’d spent a long afternoon there with two friends—a hilarious and beautiful gay guy, Louis, who cut hair fantastically well, and cut mine for a while, and who was killed a couple of years later on the Mass Ave bridge riding his bike in the rain at night; and a woman named Erica I’d known in New York, who’d been at law school with my boyfriend Ben but dropped out to work with the homeless, which makes her sound worthy, but actually she was as funny as Louis was, and maybe that’s why I thought of the bar, because we’d laughed so much that seven-hour afternoon, sitting in front of a superior tureen of Italian wedding soup made, I remember, by the barman’s Sicilian mom, and what amounted, in the end, to four bottles of a delicious Nebbiolo, a bit more than one each, which, drunk over seven hours, was the perfect amount. The bar had no windows to speak of and operated in an eternal darkness, out of time, so we went inside in one era and came out in another, like time travelers. I’d loved that stretch—it had happened only the once, when I was at an age where I thought that was, or ought to be, what artists
did
—and maybe for that reason, or maybe for the soup, I suggested that bar and we went there.

The owner was still behind the counter, fatter now, and balder, but he’d been both fat and bald all those years before. Sirena and he, with some kind of ethnic telepathy, seemed able to tell from looking at one another that they should speak Italian, and within moments they were deep in animated conversation, and he was promising to cook for us with his own hands his mother’s special pasta with broccoli and anchovies—it would seem that she had, in the intervening years, gone to meet her maker. He set us up in a corner booth, tufted oxblood
leatherette up our backs higher than our heads, and on the walls the requisite photographs of Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, and three whole candles for ourselves. Aside from an older guy having scotch at the bar, we were the only customers. When we came in, Sinatra was on the sound system, but the owner said something to Sirena and she laughed and he put on instead something older and nightclubby, a woman singing in Italian, and Sirena was loving it—she closed her eyes and swayed and hummed along, for a bit.

Sirena and I had our bowls of pasta and our red wine and our candles and our booth. We were tired from the long trek, and I had that tingling under my skin that comes after the cold, at once invigorating and strangely soporific. It was all feeling like a dream, and in the middle of this dream I had a revelation. Sirena was saying something, and I couldn’t quite hear it, or follow it, because of how I was feeling, so I was just looking at her, watching her talk, her elegantly inelegant stubby hand resting on her wineglass, the crinkles in the corners of her eyes, the crazy darkness of her brows and her tickly lashes, the glimmer of the candlelight on her dark irises and on strands of her hair. And suddenly I thought: “I want to stay with you. Actually, forever. I do.”

And she saw me looking at her, in a fond and foolish way, and she cocked an eyebrow—to say what? “I see you”? “I understand”? “We are here together”?—and took my hand in hers and held it as it lay on the table. “Today we had a great day, yes? If only each day was like this one,
cara mia!
” And I barely heard her, because I felt her hand upon my hand, all through my body. I felt her skin. I really felt it.

You don’t ask to have such a thought. You also can’t take it away, once you’ve had it. I’d never had such a thought about Sirena, not in all the time I’d been in love with her. But I had the thought unbidden, just like that, in Amodeo’s bar, and in the first instant of having the thought, I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to tell her. The only person I could think of who would really understand was Sirena herself. And then, at once, I had the horrifying presentiment of her recoil. What if she didn’t feel the same way? And what if she did feel the same way? And how could it be that all the great welter of emotion I experienced in her company would be somehow and suddenly summarized by—reduced to—this?

5

With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again.

If you were me, and you had this revelation—but lo, I don’t just love, I
want!
—and you wanted to but couldn’t tell Sirena, what would you do? You’d tell Didi. As it happens, if you were me, you’d find yourself unwisely telling both Didi and Esther at the same time, in the sticky booth at their favorite pub in Jamaica Plain, the very next evening, even though you knew you didn’t want Esther’s opinion. But your revelation was burning so in your hand that you couldn’t hold on to it a second longer.

If you were me, you’d be surprised by their unified reaction; and then surprised at your surprise.

They didn’t quite laugh, but Didi made a sound, with beer, in the back of her nose, that was infuriatingly close to laughter.

“You’re making fun of me? I tell you this huge thing—this huge thing for me—and you’re pretty much my closest friends, and you
laugh
at me? Am I going crazy here?”

“Hey, Nora Adora—”

“No. For real. I might have to—”

“Take a deep breath. I wasn’t laughing. Esther wasn’t laughing. Were you, sweetie? We love you. Calm down.”

“We somehow knew what you were going to say,” Esther said. “We were laughing at our goddesslike prescience.”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “You were laughing at the dumb straight girl who’s finally coming to her belated awakening, sad creature that she is.”

“Come off it, you know us better than that. You do. Honestly?”

Esther was making pug eyes at me, and Didi was holding on, rather sweatily, to both of my hands, as if they both feared I would bolt.

“Because we anticipated it—which wasn’t so hard—I mean, you did say you’d had a revelation yesterday and we knew you weren’t out with your dad—we talked about it. We discussed it.”

Didi squeezed my left hand more tightly. She wore a lumpy ring that cut into my finger and I flinched, which I saw her register. “We discussed it, and we decided that you’re wrong.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? How can I be wrong about what I felt? About what I
feel
? If I can’t tell, then I’d like to know who could.”

“Trust us,” said Esther. “We’re experts. We can tell.” She was joking, but only halfway, and I hated her in that moment, a frank hot flush of hatred.

“I know it seems bizarre,” said Didi, still clutching. “I don’t mean this as some, you know, questioning of your judgment—”

“Nor as some judgment of your experience,” Esther broke in. “I mean, your
experience
is obviously totally valid.”

“Gee, thanks. Big of you.”

“Calm down, sweetie—”

“Let go of my hand. I’m not your sweetie.”

“Listen here,” said Didi, in her sharp, no-nonsense, long-lost radio voice, letting go of my hand and drawing herself up to her full height, which, even seated, was much greater than mine. The red neon of a Bud sign lit up her hair from behind. She’d become a giant fairy-tale genie. “Listen here, Miss Eldridge. Stop answering back. Listen to what we’ve got to say, and then we can talk about it. Okay?”

She made a mistake in using the word “we,” in including Esther, but I nodded as I pulled my hands to safety in my lap.

“Nobody is denying your girl crush.”

“Crush?”

“Objectionable term, but accurate diagnosis.”

“Crush?”

“I told you to listen, quietly. Hear me out. Okay?”

I made my eyes into slits.

“So, you’ve known for ages how you feel about this woman—she inspires you as an artist, she makes you laugh, she makes you feel alive. All these things are true, and wonderful and rare, and it’s also true that often they are linked to sexual desire. Up till now, you hadn’t made that link—because—”

“Because I was afraid to.”

“That’s not what I was going to say, actually. Because it availed you nothing. Because it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. Because you didn’t need to. Because it seemed to you as though your emotions were getting expressed well enough anyhow, your need for intimacy was being met, and that—the whole physical thing—wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t the point.”

“Okay, and so now that’s changed.”

“Wait. What I’m saying is that everything is always changing, from one minute to the next, and that maybe this sudden urge to kiss her, it’s more like a power surge than a permanent change in voltage—do you see what I mean?”

“What Didi means, I think …,” Esther began, but Didi knew me well enough to raise a warning hand.

“What I mean is that, yes, there was a moment when your affection and delight were bubbling over and seeking a means of expression and you wanted something more. Bang. In that moment you totally did. I’m not denying that. But I’m really wondering whether that’s actually some seismic Sapphic shift in you. You know that I of all people would be all for it if it were—there’s nothing I love more than women loving women. But in this case, I think Esther and I are in agreement here, we’re really wondering about that. It seems like this could be part of a different story, you know? A piece from a different puzzle.”

“What’s in it for you, to deny me my revelation?” I said, more petulant now than angry. “Why do you want me not to be in love with Sirena? Why?”

“The only person we care about here is you, Nora. I know you love her, but I don’t give a shit about this Italian chick. And I don’t want to see you throw yourself needlessly in harm’s way. I’m not denying your feelings, I’m just asking a question about the story you’re choosing to tell about those feelings, that’s all.”

I rolled my eyes. The overlap between my theater of annoyance and my actual annoyance bordered on the awkward. “Who made you my fucking therapist?” I said, my arm already outstretched to signal to the waitress that we needed another round. “I’m not paying for these services.” And I managed a laugh, though it came out more like a guffaw, and then I asked them about the obscure local women’s soccer team they loved and often went to watch, and how it was doing—not well, as it turned out. I closed the conversation down.

Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away. In this case, if anything, I became more convinced of the truth of what I’d felt in Amodeo’s, certain that I’d had a revelation, something like a conversion. But certain now, too, because of Didi and Esther’s reaction, that I had to keep my knowledge a secret,
from everyone
.

You might wonder how this was different from all that had come before, from months of being more generally, less specifically, in love. You might think it was essentially the same. But I felt I’d finally awoken, that the world was at last clear to me and that its shapes made sense. Not only did I have hope in a general way, I had something specific to hope for. I was certain that I
understood
. And certain that if I tried to explain what I understood, I would be—as I had been, with Didi and Esther—misunderstood.

When my father asked mildly if I was dating anyone—clearly, in his inarticulate way, fretting about my calcifying spinsterdom, unable to see, as my mother would have, that I had almost fulfilled her dream of independence—I snapped at him that I was too old for that kind of nonsense, which false bitterness made his voice, when he protested, small and sad.

But it was as if my revelation had opened a door in my head, into a further room where all life was suddenly potentially titillating, where everything was secretly part of my secret. Whenever I saw an article, or
a book, or a film about a hidden or unrequited love, I thought it had been placed purposefully in my path, so I wouldn’t feel alone. When I was driving anywhere, or ambling the supermarket aisles, or lying in bed at night boiling my toes against the fake fur hot water bottle I’d bought on sale in January, I was now always thinking about Sirena.

No, let me be precise: I wasn’t actually. That would suggest real things. In a way that hadn’t been true before, I was thinking about my thoughts about Sirena. I was imagining telling her about my feelings, or I was imagining her confessing, in her particular lilting way, that she found me beautiful, or thought me a great artist, or on one occasion I imagined her saying that she could not now imagine her life without me. What conversations we had, in my head! What honesty, what pure transparency, what a perfect meeting of minds.

How much did Reza feature in these visions? Well, sometimes I’d picture the three of us, installed in a farmhouse in Vermont, or in Tuscany, or in a thatched bungalow on a Caribbean island, in order that we might live cheaply enough to make art, and grow a resplendent garden from which to feed ourselves. I knew the layouts of these various houses, the unfolding of their rooms. I built them in my mind, and we inhabited each of them at different times. I knew how the morning sunbeams fell in slats upon the terra-cotta floors in Italy, and the sounds of chickens scrabbling in the yard outside, audible as soon as you opened the casement window. I knew how the snow from the field behind the house reflected white in the bathroom mirror in Vermont, where the steaming water in the clawfoot tub smelled of sage, and Sirena, stepping into the bath, dropped her slippers—Moroccan babouches—one and then the other on the pink and purple round rag rug in the middle of the white painted wooden floor. I knew the kiss of the rising Caribbean wind, warm upon my ruffled arm hairs, if I stood in the shadowy doorway and squinted at the passing schoolchildren in their navy and white uniforms, kicking up dust as they ambled by, and I scanned their knots and clutches for Reza, his laughing olive face among the chocolate and coffee faces of his peers.