The Woman Upstairs (25 page)

And sometimes—as with my mother dying—you have some idea of what it is that must unfold, and some inkling, however inadequate, of what it will entail. Whereas at other times—as in the last weeks of
April and the beginning of May 2005, when it got warm and cold again, when it rained a great deal, it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, although I was filled with such joy—you sense the importance, but only that. What it is and what it means you may not fully understand, not for months but for years.

I can tell you that it was on a Tuesday night that I walked with Skandar all the way to Belmont and back again, and it was a night when it had rained earlier but the rain had stopped, and the dark sky was streaked with scudding clouds. There was a smell of earth about, of soil, rich and dark, as we passed the cemetery where my mother was buried, and again when we reached a neighborhood of houses, of small, square gardens that were laid out like open chocolate boxes on the modest street. The new leaves rustled in the breeze over us, and sometimes drops of water fell upon our heads.

That evening, I remember, I’d played chess with Reza after dinner, and he’d let me win—it was one of his favorite things, magnanimous child, to see his own superiority and then to relinquish it. Afterward, at bedtime, I read him an abridged
Three Musketeers
that he enjoyed; and when it was lights-out, he’d asked whether, instead of sitting in the hard chair as I usually did, I might lie alongside him, as his mother would if she were there. I hesitated only a moment before laying myself down, the length of his narrow bed, my arm up under my head so I could better watch him; and he rested his beautiful hand upon my other arm, just to be sure of me, so like his mother, and he closed his fine eyes and went almost immediately to sleep.

So I remember that night, that Tuesday, because it was when I took new steps in my closeness to both son and father: the same night, although they didn’t know it, one and the other.

And on my long walk with Skandar, after he and Sirena came home from their supper, it was new, because I also talked. We were passing the cemetery and I asked if he’d ever walked there, because it was so beautiful, but he hadn’t, and I told him about going to see my mother’s grave, and then I told him about her, Bella Eldridge, and her years of illness, and her admirable, grown-up combination of competence and resignation, and how furious it made me, how looking at her life I felt like a ravenous wolf, I wanted her to have had the chance
to devour the world, to be greedy, to be sated. He laughed and said, “Why don’t you want these things for yourself, instead, who are here on earth to enjoy them? Don’t you think she’d want you to want them for yourself?”

“But I do,” I said, so emphatically that I almost reached to touch him. “I
do
want for myself. Enormously.”

“I would never have known that,” he said. “If you hadn’t told me. You seem wonderfully calm in your life, as though it’s in enviable order. As though there’s nothing extra that you would require. You don’t have messes, or make them. You’re so generous to everyone—to your school, to Reza, to Sirena—even to me.
You don’t look like a ravenous wolf.”

“Well I am,” I said. “I’m starving.”

We were passing an ice-cream shop at that point, and he made a joke about how, if it were open, I could be satisfied.

“I could eat every last spoonful in that place and it wouldn’t fill a corner of my hunger,” I said.

“Then you must find a way to feed yourself.” He was quite earnest now. “You must ask for what you need.”

“Need?” I laughed. “That’s a complicated word, isn’t it? Who needs anything, really, besides some food and water? I’ve already got much more than I
need
.”

“But if you’re a ravenous wolf …” He looked off into the distance, smiling as ever. “I can’t think of you this way, you see. It doesn’t make sense to me. What is it that you want?”

“Life,” I said. “All of it. Everything. I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want the prison doors to close.”

“Prison doors? But really—”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense to you, who grew up with war and misery all around you, and I know terrible things have happened in your family—your brother—I know. But trust me.”

And I told him—which is odd to think, even now, because of course I hadn’t ever properly told Sirena; bits and pieces, maybe, but not the whole story—about how I’d grown up with my mother’s longing and had never found a way to fulfill it, how I’d always thought there were rules about what was possible and allowable, even though I hadn’t known, really, who’d made those rules. How in high school, art
had seemed the way to break the rules, to get around them; but how it hadn’t, then, seemed properly grown up, afterward.

“Who says you have to be grown up?” he asked.

“Tell that to an elementary school teacher! I don’t know. It seemed like, who did I think I was, to think I could be an artist, you know? And it didn’t seem like I could make a living—”

“Did you try?”

“I couldn’t bear to be a failure. It seemed worse to try and fail than not to try. And then my mother, you see—”

“Yes,” he said, “I do see.”

And we walked along in silence for a while.

“Service,” he said, “is one of life’s great joys. It’s a privilege to be in service.”

“You’re joking, right? What does that even mean?” I’d always thought of my service as my enslavement.

“It’s a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. For whatever reason: out of love, or duty, or something else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don’t need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.”

“That isn’t what I meant at all.”

“I know,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it less true.”

Then, you see, I had in my head a certainty that I had to say something to Sirena. It was a time when everything was significant and related to every other thing, and when Skandar said this about the joys of service, and when he said I must find a way to feed the wolf, I understood these things to pertain to Sirena, or rather, to Sirena and me.

All that Wednesday at school, my hands trembled when they were at rest, as if I’d drunk too much coffee. It was a freakishly warm day, a summer’s day like a hot flash, and I sweated, too. My innards flipped and twisted the way they did before I took a plane. I couldn’t eat the salad I’d brought for my lunch. I couldn’t sit still. I thought about saying something to her, and I couldn’t imagine how she might react.

All my life, I’d shied away from things I couldn’t imagine. My basic feeling had been that if I couldn’t imagine it, it wasn’t a good idea. It was the same with my mother’s illness: imagine the worst and you can protect against it. If you can’t imagine it, then there’s no protection. Not good, not good.

This conviction was behind my renunciation of the artist’s life before I’d begun to live it. I couldn’t imagine how to be an artist
in this world
. Looking around at my fellow art school students, at the ones we all knew were going to make it, I couldn’t imagine pleasing the bigwigs from the galleries and museums, the fashion-makers who organized biennials. I couldn’t see myself schmoozing the way the class stars did, flattering older artists and seedy has-been critics to try to wangle an opening for their own advancement. I saw them at it and I couldn’t picture myself doing it. I could have rattled off the bullshit about fragmentation and identity and the tropes of gender, whatever the fuck they are, and Roland Barthes and Judith Butler and Mieke Bal—I could do that, they taught us how to do it, that’s what art school seemed mostly to be
for
, but I couldn’t do it with a straight face and I couldn’t even
imagine
doing it with a straight face, and that’s why I went to get my master’s in Education and appeared to myself and to the world to have forsaken my one dream.

But you see, my dream in my head of being an artist, and my dream in the world of being an artist, I couldn’t—until Sirena, I couldn’t—connect them. And I forsook the world for the dream in my head, because there, and in my second bedroom off Huron Avenue, and then finally, in that blissful year in Somerville, I could have the dream that I was an artist, it could be real, without any of the bullshit that passes, in the first part of the twenty-first century in the Western world, for being an artist. I could be an Emily Dickinson of an artist.

And here’s another thing I was fretting over, as I covered the small distance between the cake shop and the studio, the sidewalk and the studio door—did I think that Sirena was a wonderful artist because I was in love with her, or was I in love with her because she was a wonderful artist, or was I in love with some idea of her that was far from the truth, in which case should I actually be asking myself what, really, in my heart I thought of her art—what
did
I think of her art? Maybe I
didn’t know. But the moment I became aware of the question, I knew it mattered very much
to me
. It mattered more than almost anything: my answer to that question would surely determine whether I was at last living in reality; or whether I was still dreaming, trapped in my endless hall of mirrors.

After all that obsessive spinning on my mental gerbil wheel, after all my worrying and reconfiguring—you know, don’t you, that when I got to the studio and opened the door and called out her name in a cheery singsong, there was no reply. No sound at all. Lights off, everything still. I put down my almost cold coffee and the bag with the cake in it and my handbag and my tote bag containing the folder of highresolution shrunk-down photographs of Edie Sedgwick, and I walked from one end of the L to the other, moving more and more slowly, because I couldn’t get my head around the fact that she wasn’t there. In those few minutes, scoping the joint (and the spring afternoon light was flooding in, I remember it exactly, great dust-dancing beams of it, and the studio smelled slightly of glue and old apples, as well as of Sirena’s cigarettes), I wondered whether actually I was going nuts, losing my grip. Because I’d been so
certain
that she’d be there, bent over some finicky detail, or smoking by the open window, or even lying on the cushions wrapped up, like a papoose, in her scarves—I’d been so certain of my reality that the facts were at first impossible for me to accept.

The next day, I didn’t know at first whether I’d go there or not. I broke one of my rules, and asked Reza if his mother was okay.

“How do you mean?” I was struck by how good his English had gotten: his intonation was native now.

“She wasn’t in the studio yesterday, and I thought maybe …”

He laughed, a little bark. I remembered him all those months before, in the Whole Foods, with the apples. “My mother never gets sick,” he said. “Papa says she’s like a superhero. No, she went away.”

“Away?”

He was keen to get out the door. I could hear his friends agitating
in the hall. “But she’s back now. She came back in the night.” He threw this over his shoulder, and was gone.

When I made my way to the studio that afternoon, it was humbly: the story in my head, my desire for some confession, my wish to activate a drama between us, to lay claim to her attention, was up against some stronger reality of hers. Whatever had taken her away like that, so suddenly, would take precedence over me. As was so often the case—we Women Upstairs!—her life would be shown to be more important than my life.

She was there, her hair in a messy bun, a streak of blue ink across her forehead. She was leaning over a large picture book when I came in, clasping one of her shawls at her breast, and when she turned she threw her hands wide, dropping her shawl, and her face opened into an enormous, natural, crooked-toothed grin, against which I had no defenses.

“Nora!” She stepped swiftly across the room, light-footed. “I have such news!”

“Everything’s all right then?”

“Everything is all right? Everything is
great
”—only she said “great-e,” in her particular way. She fiddled with her hair, making it fall around her face. “Let me make us some coffee—I’ll tell you—”