The Woman Upstairs (26 page)

She eyed my bag. “I didn’t bring anything today,” I said, not telling her that I’d eaten an entire cupcake the day before because she wasn’t there, and that I’d felt so sick I had to go home.

“It’s better,” she said, fussing with the coffee, the pot, the water. “I rely too much on your sweet things.”

I flopped down on the cushions. “So what’s up?”

“You know, yesterday I was in New York.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Ah, in my busyness—I must have forgotten. Or maybe because of being nervous, I didn’t want to spoil my luck.”

I waited a moment, then asked, “So did you get lucky?”

She shrugged, smiling again. “We’ll see,” she said. “But it looks good. This week, one thing, the week after next another thing; we’ll see.”

“Come on, Sirena. Just tell me. What’s the news?”

She sat beside me, leaned in conspiratorially: “Yesterday, I had
lunch with a friend of mine who is an artist, a seriously good artist, a man in his sixties—he makes sculptures—sexy also, with a deep voice—and he wanted me to meet an important art critic. A woman from the university. She’s older, very famous, and she is curating, for two years from now, an important exhibition of art by women, feminist art. It will be unlike anything before—the museum in Brooklyn is opening a new wing, a feminist wing, and this will be the first exhibition, to open the building … Exciting, no?”

“So she wanted to meet you?”

Sirena gave a laugh, a “modest” laugh. “To meet me? Ah, no, she didn’t even know that I exist-e. Frank—he’s my friend—he makes it seem a coincidence, or friendly, that we’re meeting for lunch this way. He tells her I’m looking for a gallery in New York—which is true, of course, and not next week but the one after I go two days to meet with two galleries that may be interested to represent me. So this is the official question, if there is one, for the lunch, which one of these is best, and why, or whether I should be with a different gallery, another one, so. But really, secretly, Frank wants her to think of me for her big exhibition. There will be something like forty artists, and she wants it to be international, and I?”—Sirena made a film-star face, her hands held wide on either side of her cheeks—“I am
very
international!”

“That’s amazing. I mean, it’d be—”

“It would be a whole new level, yes? Of exposure, recognition, standing—can you imagine?”

“Yes.” I could imagine. How far from my world she would be catapulted, and how fast. “That’s completely amazing.”

“It hasn’t happened—it may never happen, I know—but I think she liked me, we laughed a lot, we got on very well—but what a dream, no? What a dream come true if it does.”

By which I felt it was asserted, or confirmed, that the dreams that were, for each of us, to the fore, were very different; and that the imaginary conversations that had so energetically circled my mind were not, at least, for today. Today was about Sirena. Of course it was. “I wish I’d brought a cake after all,” I said brightly. “We should be celebrating.”

“Celebrating? Not yet! No! We’re waiting—not till this critic decides—that could take ages—but until the meetings in two weeks, these gallery owners—this could change everything.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this before.”

“I’m superstitious. I’m not logical—I worry about spoiling my chances, about making bad luck.”

“But you’ll tell me now.” I didn’t say it as a question. If I sounded weary, she didn’t notice.

“So I shouldn’t—I hope it’s okay with the Fates—but I’ll tell you, yes, because otherwise I might explode.” She went on to describe the two gallerists she was going to meet. One was a young woman in her early thirties who’d only recently struck out on her own, after working for ten years at an established SoHo gallery, the name of which meant something even to me; and the other, Elias, was a guy in his forties, Middle Eastern, edgier, who’d had his gallery for a while and had attracted some attention in the art world for his bold choices. He, she explained, was a friend of a friend of Skandar’s, which was good in the sense that he was somehow a known quantity, his outline made sense and his track record was good, and he’d approached her when he heard she was in the States for a year. But the young woman had written to her in Paris, at her home address, not even knowing she was in the United States, and had said that the Elsinore installation had moved her to tears and that she’d never been able to forget it, and that if Sirena didn’t yet have any American representation, then she, Anna Z, would be happy to fly to Paris to talk it over with her—“and
that
,” Sirena observed, “is a commitment. That’s passion.”

Sirena was full of the pros and the cons of each of these possibilities, stumbling over her words in her enthusiasm, now that she’d allowed herself to talk about it. I wasn’t jealous—how could I be, when I, with my dioramas, had turned my back so deliberately upon the Eliases and Annas of this world?—but I wished I could more clearly see that it had occurred to her—that it might however slightly have worried her—that I might be.

“What does Skandar say?” I asked eventually, and noted the familiar flicker of exasperation.

“Skandar? What do you think? He can see it this way, he can see it that way; but, he says, it’s not a matter of how he sees it at all. For all he talks, my husband sometimes doesn’t say very much. In this case, officially he has no opinion. But I know he’d like me to choose Elias. His family is Lebanese. Has Skandar given you his special talk about
the fishermen of Tyre? Yes, so: from Tyre to Princeton, via the long road—this is Elias. This is what Skandar, in his heart, would want.”

“You don’t
know
that,” I said, mildly resentful that my thrilling conversation with Skandar had been revealed as “his special talk.”

“Believe me, I know him. I know it. And have to be careful that I don’t choose to please him, or else to displease him. I must make my choice alone.” She sighed. “I wish you could come with me. I’d like to know your opinion of these people. You see so clearly.”

“Well, maybe—depending—when do you go?”

“Thursday and Friday, the week after next. I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

“If it were in a few weeks—”

“I can’t change the meetings. It’s too bad. I’ll tell you all about it when I come back. It’s in the future. But enough: How are you, Nora my friend, in
your
work?”

Did she care? What I wanted was a sense of her spontaneous engagement, the feeling you have with your closest—that I have with Didi, for example, but not with Esther—that they don’t have to be careful, that their reactions are kind and genuine at the same time. Even as I say it, I realize it’s a lot to want. Maybe I’m registering an intractable discontent, born of my doubt about whether and how much she loved me, and whether, or how, I might ever know.

You’d think it would be an easy question to ask—do you love me?—but you’d think that only if you’ve never wanted to ask it yourself. That afternoon, instead of openly confessing as I’d dreamed of doing, I raised the question of departure.

“Isn’t it wild how fast the time is going?” I said. “I can’t believe you guys will be leaving before too long.”

“Wild. I know,” she said.

“When do you go? I should know, but …”

“My show opens the sixteenth.”

“July sixteenth?”

“July sixteenth?” she laughed. “In Paris? That would be like not having a show at all!”

“June sixteenth? In Paris? How did I not know that?”

“I think I haven’t been saying so out loud, to try not to be too much afraid. I’ve been pretending there is more time.”

“The sixteenth? But Appleton doesn’t get out until the twenty-third. You can’t go before then. And what about the kids? What about the kids coming here? I thought we said the end of the month.” We had already largely set up the space—the flowers, the mirror-shard strands of rain, the beginnings of the Jabberwock eyes—and we’d spent two rainy afternoons a couple of weeks before installing the video cameras for the shoot: we were, in some practical way, ready to go at the studio end. But to bring my kids there required time-consuming paperwork at Appleton: the approval of a field trip from Shauna’s office; the permission slips signed by the parents. It couldn’t be done overnight.

“Don’t be such a schoolteacher, Nora. We’ll work it all out. I can’t possibly be here when there is my opening in Paris. We haven’t yet discussed things at home. Skandar also, his plans are complicated—conferences here, in Montreal, in Washington—eh,
basta
. We’ll figure it out.” And with a sweep of her arms at the studio around us: “And we must bring the children, while there’s still time. That isn’t dispensable! Let’s fix the date today. So much to do before we get there—mountains to climb!”

“Wonderlands to build.”

“So,
au travail!
” And she was up on her light feet, her back to me, into her universe, gone.

She was so flippant about it—only two months before her Paris opening, and I’d just heard the date for the first time. When I got home that evening I took out the calendar, looked at it, all laid out on paper, the little boxes of days. Much would depend on how much she could finish in Cambridge; but she’d certainly have to leave by the beginning of June. I needed to steel myself for that. They wouldn’t pull Reza out of school, would they? Skandar would stay. Or maybe they’d ask me to look after him, if Skandar had to go for his conferences. I could feel along my arm the heat that Reza had emanated as he drifted off to sleep—I could do that, I could take care of him.

That was Thursday. Friday I knew she wasn’t coming. If I was alerted ahead of time, this wasn’t any problem. Not only kids are like this. As a teacher, I know from long experience that if you warn people beforehand, things go better. I knew I’d be alone at the studio, I planned
to be there late, I took my brown cardboard salad box from the Alewife supermarket and a cheap bottle of red wine from the liquor store next door, and I gathered my mother’s Polaroid camera—this was before the film was like gold dust, so I took along plenty of it—and all my Edie paraphernalia—more of it than you might imagine your average middle-aged third-grade teacher to possess—and I went to Somerville.

I’ve told you about this. I got a bit drunk. I played the music pretty loud. I danced, and posed, and I took pictures. I was being free, and I suppose in some way it was an exorcism—surely that’s not the right word? By allowing Edie’s ghost to inhabit me, I was banishing the meek and accommodating Miss Eldridge, the calm and responsive Miss Eldridge, the good friend, good daughter, good teacher, doormat Miss Eldridge, the Miss Nobody Nothing that everyone smiles at so cheerfully and immediately forgets. I was getting rid of her.

I danced and drank and smoked and took cartridges of blurry Polaroids of myself, as if I were Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at one and the same time. And this went on until the whole bottle was empty—I drank most of it, but somehow a goodly bloody dollop ended up on the front of my Edie white T-shirt. It was a splotch on my left boob that then dribbled downward, so it looked like a bleeding heart. And then I took it off, so I was dancing in my white bra, stained in one spot by the wine.

And do you know what I did, in that dizzied state? I tiptoed into Sirena’s Wonderland forest and I lay down on the Astroturf grass with the flowers waving around and above me and casting shadows on the walls in the half-light, like dancers; and I closed my eyes and I slipped my flat hand under my waistband, and I tickled my own stomach, following with my blind fingers its declivity between my hip bones; and with my fingers seemingly independent explorers, I traced a blood-ringing, singing line down either side of me, over my hips and into the fur of my groin, and from there into the wetness between my legs; and I wasn’t, for a while, Edie or Alice or Emily or anybody but
a body
, or I was another Nora altogether, and with the grass prickly beneath me, and both my hands now against myself, inside myself and on my reverberating skin, all there was, was
yes, yes, yes
, and I was in Wonderland, and for that brief unashamed, unhidden time, I was free.

9

I got up the next morning a new person. At least, I thought so. Replete, I looked at the self I’d been all week—all month—for months—with mild dismay, the way an ex-smoker looks at his former, needy self, and marvels. I got up, I called my father, I drove to Brookline, I took him to brunch at Zaftigs, and then I drove him to the arboretum and we walked for a long time among the trees in their young maiden green and their bursting Disney blossoms. He limped because of his bad hip, but every time I asked he said he wanted to keep going, so we did. It was cold, but we didn’t overly notice, and I could see the color of health spreading in his saggy cheeks, my dear, gray father, so nobly struggling on. I was sad to have neglected him.

He talked about the Red Sox game he was going to watch later that day—against Tampa, I think it was—and we talked about my mother’s love of flowers and blossoms, the zeal of her gardening, but we laughed at how bad-tempered she’d get when her plants died on her, when they didn’t make it through the winter. As if it were a personal insult. I said I’d always thought it was because she didn’t control anything in her life and she felt at least the plants ought to listen to her, and that her confidence was devastated when they didn’t.