The Woman Upstairs (23 page)

I was free and unafraid enough to play my music loudly—Fats Waller or Chubby Jackson or Joe Marsala and His Delta Four for Alice Neel; the Velvet Underground when working on Edie—or to smoke a cigarette or even half a cigarette that Sirena had left behind. There came the week in which I was inspired—ridiculous, I know—to try to Be Edie, and I brought lots of makeup and I painted my face in front of a sliver of mirror salvaged from Sirena’s stores—its very sliverness apt, like some relic from the Factory—powdering my skin white and blackening my eyes into great, dark, glimmering hollows. I didn’t cut my hair off, but I slicked it back, and in a white T-shirt and black leggings, cursing myself for having boobs, for being close to forty, for not being tiny, I danced dervishly nevertheless and took Polaroids of myself doing so, with my mother’s old camera. The images were blurry and partial—an eye and nose, an oiled glint of hairline, a moving arm half blocking the frame—but this somehow seemed in keeping with the spirit of it all. I took my shirt off and took pictures of that, too, impressed by the retro quality of my own out-of-focus torso, my breasts in their plain white bra high and distinct in the camera’s record.

In those solitary studio nights, I wandered up and down the small pathways of Sirena’s semi-assembled Wonderland. I gazed up at where the Alice-dress sky would later hang. I sniffed the aspirin flowers, I held
conversations with myself, or with Sirena, in a loud, almost abrasive tone. I spoke in silly accents and pidgin Cuban Spanish, as if I were Alice Neel’s mother-in-law telling her she couldn’t have her daughter back. I built Alice’s sanatorium beds out of fat, white-coated electrician’s wire and sewed their tiny tufted mattresses from striped Irish flannel stuffed with foam, busy as the fairy-tale elves, bemoaning out loud, in curses, the first diminishings of my middle-aged eyesight, and repeatedly pricking my forefinger. I laid a carefully joined parquet of sawn Popsicle sticks for the floor of Edie’s Factory room, and painted coat upon coat of stain and varnish to perfect its toasty hue. I framed the plate-glass windows of her hexagonal space—all windows, no doors—and sealed them carefully with putty, old-style. I laid the parquet boardwalk in the space around her room, the Edie-viewing-room, which I planned later to crowd with spectators. But I never got to the spectators themselves, which seems to me to make sense, now.

It was a riot. Like a third grader, I was
in my life, in life
. I was alive. I thought I’d been wakened, Sleeping Beauty–like, from a Long Sleep. In fact, I didn’t seem to need much sleep, as if all the years of struggling in a slumber had at least set me up to dispense, now, with rest. I sometimes left the studio at one, or even two, and I was in the shower by six thirty on a school day, bright and neat as a pin in my classroom by five to eight, with a surreptitious wink for Reza, who was often a mite tardy and easily anxious about it. For so long I had eaten my greens and here—at last!—was my ice-cream sundae.

7

There was another strand in this tapestry. What does it signify that I’m loath to tell you, slow to tell you? I want to say it was separate, that it was on another account. But that would be a knowing lie, and not-telling becomes, in the parlance of pious Aunt Baby, a Sin of Omission.

Almost every time I stayed with Reza, Skandar walked me home. When it snowed, he put on a hat, an old-fashioned trilby sort of hat, of battered elephant-gray felt, and he looked like a gangster in spite of his glasses. The gangsters’ accountant, maybe. When it was raining, he carried a vast umbrella, of the sort they have at hotels and golf clubs, and he gallantly held it over me as if he were my valet. He didn’t seem to own gloves, but didn’t complain of the cold, and smoked cigarettes in hoodlum fashion, cupped in his hand, as we walked. It took less than fifteen minutes to go from their town house by the river up to my triple-decker on the wrong side of Huron Avenue. It wasn’t far. And in the beginning, in the cold months, we went straight. In February, when there was a lot of snow, he’d walk behind me down the icy, narrow shoveled paths, and we didn’t talk much. It was hard to hear, single file like that, and by the time we got to my door, I could feel that my nose was red and I could see that his nose was red, his hands deep in his pockets, and he’d smile a smile at once goofy and vague, as if he wasn’t quite sure who I was, and he’d say, “Well, thank you
again, and good night to you,” with a general, whole-body gesture that seemed as though he were clicking his heels. He’d wait like a father until I had the key in the lock, and then he’d set off back again down the road, stepping gingerly because of those leather-soled dress shoes.

The day after Valentine’s Day—I was relieved they hadn’t asked me to babysit Reza on that day—they were going out to another fancy dinner, at the home of the dean of the Kennedy School, and at the studio beforehand Sirena told me that Skandar wanted to cancel.

“He’s not feeling well?” I asked. I was sewing something, I know because I have a distinct physical memory of hunching and squinting, and when I looked up at Sirena it took a moment for my eyes to focus.

“You don’t read the papers?” she asked. “Or listen to the radio?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Hariri.”

I shrugged a small shrug.

“Rafic Hariri? You’ve not heard.”

“I didn’t see the papers today.”

“The prime minister of Lebanon—assassinated yesterday, along with twenty-two other people—his bodyguards, colleagues. They blew up his motorcade outside the St. Georges hotel—it made a crater in the road the size of a small house.”

I looked at the floor and shook my head. “Wow,” I said.

“That’s the trouble with being here. It all seems so far away that nobody pays any attention to anything.”

“Who did it?”

“Who knows? Israel, Syria, Hezbollah—lots of people wanted Hariri dead.”

“Did Skandar know him?”

“He’d met him, more than once. Skandar is very upset—you can understand. His country is in mourning and in turmoil; and here, at the university, even at a private dinner, they want him to talk about this as if it were an idea, not a man, so many men.”

“He was in favor of him then?”

She clicked her teeth. “Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it’s
the wrong question. You should ask Skandar if you want an answer. He’ll give you an entire course, if you let him.”

So that night, as he walked me home after the dean’s supper, at which, I later learned, Skandar had spoken to the assembled company for half an hour, explaining the context and then the potential fallout from Hariri’s assassination—as Skandar walked behind me still on the sidewalk in places but not all the way, I asked him about the attack. He didn’t hear me the first time and I had to turn around to ask again, and he almost bumped into me and we both felt awkward.

“Ah,” he said, when he understood what I was asking. “That’s a complicated question.”

“But you’re upset.”

“Violence is very upsetting, wherever it takes place, whomever it hurts. But my poor Lebanon is a special case, a very particular story. To be still recovering from our terrible war, to be trying to create our skin all over again, to make a whole body—and then, this. Sometime I’ll try to explain. But where would I begin? My beginning? The war’s beginning? The century’s new beginning? Here, with Hariri? Depending where you begin, you’ll tell a different story. We’ll have time for them.” And he left it, that evening, at that.

I, in turn, went home and turned on my computer and Googled “Lebanon war.” Not that I hadn’t known about the civil war—when I was a child, everybody knew there was a war in Lebanon, and if, for example, you’d said to me “Sabra and Shatila” my brain would automatically have added the word “massacre”—I’d absorbed something, after all, by osmosis. But I couldn’t have explained what the massacre involved or even who was massacred, and I certainly couldn’t have told you that the civil war lasted fifteen years. As I read about it, I felt I should have known—I was a schoolteacher, for God’s sake, and Reza was a child in my class! Sirena had mentioned once about Skandar losing a brother in the war—hadn’t she said bombings?—but then again, I didn’t know all the facts about Vietnamese boat people (some of our kids were the children or grandchildren of boat people), and I couldn’t have given you a proper rundown on the history of Haiti, even though we had Haitian kids at Appleton; and we’d had a boy from Oman and there was a girl now in fourth grade from Liberia, and I would’ve had
to Google that to know the first facts beyond where it was located on the map, and in all the year she was in my classroom, I never had. I thought then that maybe Sirena was right about the cotton wool of my American life, that I’d been swaddled and protected from the world. This was a Fun House of its kind, this strange place of safety into which 9/11 could erupt as if from nowhere, as if without logic, to our utter surprise.

Already liberated into what seemed an anti–Fun House reality of the emotions—a knowledge of love—and then on the cusp of my artistic freedom also, I longed now, too, for the expansion of my intellect. I wanted already to have known about such things as Hariri’s assassination, to be able to make some sense of them. It was like my World Book of Wonders, only better, and worse: the complexity, the enormity of the world was suddenly briefly apparent to me, a giant looming object in the periphery of my vision. Almost too big, but not quite. It was there, and I wanted to know it.

My walks with Skandar unfurled with the spring. After the February break, we proceeded side by side and the evening return became a small social event, a natural time for conversation. The distance between their house and my house became too short for our discussions, so we expanded our walks. The first time this happened we stood for ten minutes on my doorstep, and while I felt it would be strange to invite him in, we were both cold and growing numb. Finally he said, “Shall we walk a little more, to finish our talk but also stay warm?” And then we walked four times around the block before finally he agreed that he’d better be going. That was only the beginning. The next time we walked up to the Hi-Rise bakery and back. And each time farther and farther. Over to Harvard Square, and back in a loop that practically passed by their front door again. The walk that finally felt we were breaking an unspoken rule didn’t come until the end of April—a rule-breaking time, in the same week as my solo Edie Sedgwick impersonation. Spring was in the air, that soft feeling against the cheek and the nubs of bright leaves on the branches, rustling about. We tramped
all the way to Watertown and up through the edges of Belmont and back. We walked for over an hour and a half, along empty streets—it was a weeknight, near midnight—beneath the pinkish streetlights and the breathing branches, our talk punctuated by rare lone cars. In my mind, it seemed significant that we never crossed the river. He never took my arm. We never touched at all.

As far as I know, he didn’t pretend to Sirena that he was walking by himself. As far as I know, she knew we were walking together. She never mentioned it. Once when I referred to something Skandar had talked about, she waved her hands as if warding him off and said, “So much talk! I love him, but he’s always talking—jabber, jabber. You’re so good to listen. Sometimes I say to him, ‘Skandar, it’s too bad there isn’t a job that’s just
talking
. That would be the job for you.’ ”

“He could be a talk show host.”

“You think it’s funny, but he couldn’t do it. A talk show host
listens
, no? A talk show host is listening, but Skandar is just talking. No, for a job he’d need to be a talk show
guest
.” She giggled. “But this isn’t a job.”

“All talk and no action,” I said, to say something. That was the closest she and I came to discussing my evening wanderings with her husband.

She was right, though: he was the talker. I told him that having him take me home was like listening to Scheherazade, but he laughed and said I had it backward, then, that I should be telling him the stories—“Where I come from,” he said, “it’s the woman who is the storyteller. The man is her prisoner.”

In my urge to read the runes at every moment, to find hidden import in everything, I took this to mean, in a flirtatious way, that he was offering to be my prisoner. I took it to mean he was attracted to me. Oh, come on, I took all those walks to mean that he was. Not straight away, not especially. But over time—the amount of time he gave to me, the attention—and who was I?—and that he gave it while his wife and son were at home, and his bed was calling. I took all this to have meaning.

What did we talk about? Sirena was right: he loved to talk; and he might have seemed a bore, but he was a wonderful speaker. Even when he told me a story two or three times, I was rapt.

On the first night of true walking, when we circled my block four times, he told me about his maternal grandmother’s village house in the mountains, and staying there when he was small, a boy of five or six, and how he was quite sure he’d seen a jaguar or a panther in the night garden, even though she’d insisted to him over breakfast and again at lunch that there were no such animals in Lebanon.