The Woman Upstairs (22 page)

In these fantasies, Reza would always call me Mommy, resting a small, hot hand upon my shoulder while I worked on an art project at a table in the sunlight, or washed lettuce at a porcelain farmhouse sink,
and even as they seemed completely surreal—sturdy-skinned bubbles unconnected to the standing traffic or the rows of cereal boxes or the almost sweaty duvet which surrounded me in reality—these imaginings were more vivid and more alive to me than much that I could see and smell and touch. As with my earlier dream about Skandar, I had to remind myself, for a second, that the scenes hadn’t taken place—or, as I saw it, that they had not
yet
taken place.

And what of Skandar, of whom I had also dreamed? Well, in that spell of late winter, he didn’t yet feature in my fantasy life. He would have to wait, quite literally, until spring.

Let me explain that, in spite of myself, for several months—and in some less pressing way, for several years—this state of fantasy was, in the wake of “the Fabric Weekend,” which might more aptly have been called “the Fabrication Weekend,” the country to which I largely decamped and in which I preferred to stay.

I knew it was potential rather than actual, but I didn’t understand then that it wasn’t Real. I didn’t see that I’d made it up. When Sirena took my hand between both of hers and said, “What would I do without you? You are my angel, my heart’s best love,” I believed her. When Reza said, “I never want you to go away,” I believed him. I built houses, and entire lives, upon those beliefs. If you’d told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That’s always the way.

6

I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see.

I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be—that it will yet be, and most certainly—as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish? My mother, of all people, had taught me by example, by the whimsical panicked procrastination of my childhood and then, more brutally, by the prolonged, involuntary shutting-up-shop of her body, that this was a preposterous dream, that fate was a jailer. But I chose, in that time, not to heed her lessons. We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.

My mother, toward the end, had said to me, but with a sweet smile, “Life’s funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there’s still so much of a life to get through.” And I’d been offended, because I wanted to believe, as her child, that I’d been a dream come true; but above all, I’d pitied her. I’d still somehow believed I’d be different from her. I hadn’t yet had my Lucy Jordan moment, a moment from which the Shahids had granted me a long but finite reprieve.

Happy, crazy—the name for it doesn’t matter. It was like the world was filled with light. This is the trouble with clichés: they describe something truly, and that’s why we use them over and over again, until their substance is eroded to dust. But these things are true: I woke up earlier, more refreshed. I had more energy; my mind moved more clearly, more quickly. I caught no colds, I had no aches, I was luckier, I got on better with people, I laughed more, I worked more, I slept better.
I was awake in my life in a way completely new to me, and I knew that anything—ah! my art!—anything!—was possible.

It’s also true that I developed a constant, unignorable itch, the side effect of the love drug. The itch subsided only when I was with one Shahid or another, or when I was working. As soon as the last school bell rang, my itch was there, waiting. I might be walking around the reservoir with Maggie, who taught sixth grade, or driving my father to see the orthopedic surgeon about the pain in his hip, and I’d be apparently listening to and even participating lucidly in the conversation (“Yeah, it’d be great if Ling’s father could do a Mandarin after-school unit next fall—I think a lot of kids, and parents, would be really into that.” Or, “Well, I think Dr. Fuchs’s take on the replacement is that the pain is totally worth it, and you’re up to the rehab. He wouldn’t have suggested it if he didn’t think you were up to the rehab”), but really inside my head I was attending to my unmentionable itch, I was reliving and reinterpreting conversations (“You won’t be here till six?”—she’d sounded disappointed. She tried to make it seem she didn’t care, but I could tell she’d been disappointed!), I was wondering what she was doing at that moment, I was wondering how long till I could call and find out, I was wondering when I could next get to the studio, and how long I’d be able to stay. I was wondering, as I often did, whether she or anyone else could tell the difference in me, whether my revelation, my awakening, had any outward mark.

Did I say anything? To anyone? And risk awakening from my amazing awakedness? What do you think?

All the exhilarating advantages of my condition, and also its inconvenient effects, led me to want to be at the studio as much as possible. In February, and in March, and in April too, every Saturday, and almost every Sunday, I’d sit or stand or lean or carry all morning, building
Wonderland, Sirena’s Wonderland, laughing and being silly, sometimes just watching, able to ignore the unmentionable itch because it Was No More. And then we’d eat something. After the first couple of weeks, we took turns bringing lunch, and I lingered over my choices in the shops on a Friday evening: flavored breadsticks or big Swedish crackers like enormous communion hosts, wrapped in crinkly white paper; olives, cheeses, cured meats; dolmas; burek; sweet peppers stuffed with soft curd. Tubs of ratatouille, piperade, anchoïade. Endive leaves; strips of fennel. Purple broccoli stalks. Heirloom tomatoes, which cost a fortune in early spring. And sweets: I’d bring such sweets—the famous Highland Avenue cupcakes or sesame buns soaked in honey, or salted chocolate oatmeal cookies, or
loukoum
, or extravagant bars of Italian chocolate from the deli down the road from my house—always I brought enough for Reza, even for Skandar, substantial portions of sweets for the others, to assuage the guilt of my happiness.

There was, in these months, a new side of Sirena, obsessive and imperious, one I hadn’t seen in the fall, and it might, I suppose, have seemed to me selfish. But I was in thrall to her passionate single-mindedness, not least because, as her virtual assistant, I was included within it. Like a madness, her Wonderland was everything to her, and while she didn’t care to talk about it generally, she did talk about it with me. As in, “I think we need more rain sheets, more, yes? … I’m trying to decide whether the shards should be actually dangerously sharp—what do you think, Nora? We don’t want to draw blood, but shouldn’t it hurt to touch it?”

February vacation week, she signed Reza up for robotics camp at the Science Museum and we spent all day every day at the studio. She started to become an organic part of it, like the sink or the chemical smell in the hallway. By mid-March she hardly changed her clothes, or washed her hair, her fingertips were cracked and discolored from the paint and glue, her jeans, like her hair, more stiff and bespattered at the end of each day. She filched her husband’s cigarettes and smoked them with her coffee, one grubby hand palming a chipped cup, the other flicking ash onto the floor. The studio started to stink and was freezing—she threw two windows open wide to clear the fug, with only moderate success.

Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist—as if I’d imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here’s the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn’t feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn’t look at her and think, “Why are you almost famous and I’m only your helper?” I don’t recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw
myself
, saw
what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her
.

And the weirdest thing is that in that time, in addition to sewing together dresses, and sowing flowers on Astroturf, and stringing broken mirrors onto fine wire, in addition to making tapes of cricket sounds and animal-in-the-undergrowth noises, and in addition to fashioning Jabberwock tusks that would ultimately be discarded and forgotten, and rigging up the piercing little bulbs that would be Jabberwock eyes, in addition to working out for Sirena the camera settings for the kids’ video—the Appleton plan, as we called it—and in addition to my regular teaching load and the higgledy-piggledy bustle of my spring term classroom—times tables! Tadpoles! A trip on the school bus to the MFA!—and to my dream nights as Reza’s beloved Auntie—in addition (what had I done with my time up till now, I had to wonder, and have to wonder now again: Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?), anyway, in addition to all these things,
I made my own art
.

It seems hard to credit it, but I did.

I worked on not one but two rooms from my cycle, at one time. Even though I ought, technically, chronologically, to have set about building Virginia Woolf’s workroom at Rodmell, with her notebook open and her shawl draped over her chair and her last note propped upon the mantelpiece, I somehow couldn’t bear to—it was not a season for suicide, not in my life at any rate—and so I set about doing the rooms for Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick, which weren’t exactly cheerful in themselves; but I found, somehow, a joy in them.

The Alice Neel room was to be the sanatorium suicide ward in small-town Pennsylvania where she was locked up after her breakdown. She’d lost her two little girls, one to diphtheria and the other to her fickle Cuban husband, who’d promised to send for her but never did,
and, leaving their daughter with his parents, went on to Paris alone. I wanted to get into the barren room the memory of her little girls, but also I wanted to slip into the corners the ghosts of her future sons, the two devoted and adored boys who stuck by her through thick and thin—through so much thin; and at so great a cost to themselves—as she grew old and fat and plain and was all the time poor, so long unrecognized, obsessed with her work, piling up her unsold canvases in the narrow hallway of her grimy walk-up apartment—but through it all, she’d have those boys, both of whom would flee bohemia for the professions, solid and bourgeois and aggressively uneventful in their days, carrying in them all the pains of her life, of her lost youth and their unknown, lost siblings, but never abandoning her, not ever; and somehow it would have seemed wrong, in the new, golden light of love with which I saw the world illuminated, to make my Alice’s room reflect only the nadir, her darkest isolation, when she felt forsaken by life and by art and by love.

I still wanted my rows of white-draped iron beds, the high white windows unadorned, the swabbed white linoleum floor; I wanted her white nightgown, torn at the shoulder, her hands to her ears in a Munch-like scream. But I wanted the colors of Cuba, of motherhood, of the future, in the interstices, outside the windows, high up the walls, like shoots coming up through the earth, the promise of spring.

For Edie, beautiful Edie, the strangeness was that the joy was already in the room, even as it was killing her. When, as a woman, you make
yourself
the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren’t alone. Edie was never, on the outside, alone. Emily, Virginia, Alice—the woman artist so fundamentally isolated. And then Edie: never alone. Never invisible. Arguably, also, never seen; and in that sense, more than alone: annihilated.

But to imagine her room was in itself strangely pleasurable. How free I felt to do it, because hers was the only wholly
imaginary
room, the only one not based on a photograph or a painting or a description of an actual place. I could make it up: a room lined with blown-up pictures of herself, and in between the pictures, windows, and outside the windows, people crowded around, watching her, the spectacle of her. As if she were in the Christmas display at Bloomingdale’s.

I reserved the making of my rooms for myself. Which isn’t to say they were hidden from Sirena. I mean simply that I worked on them only when Sirena wasn’t there. I waited. I held back. I knew everything about her project, you see, whereas she knew only a bit about mine, and I chose to see this as my triumph, some small upper hand. My dignity, if you will, in subservience.

And of course I wasn’t afraid in the studio anymore. I had a myth of my own invincibility. You can’t imagine, if you’ve never been fearful that way, what a liberation it is to be free of it. You can say it had been silly, that I’d tortured myself for years with an artificial anxiety, and I can’t dispute that this is so; but somehow Sirena—or Reza, or maybe even Skandar—set me free from this. I stopped cowering. She gave me that gift, too.