The Woman Upstairs (27 page)

My father looked at me like I was nuts. He said, “What are you talking about? Your mother controlled everything in her life, in
our
lives. She chose where we lived and how we lived and what we ate
and when and what we wore and who we knew and how and when we saw them. She chose how many kids we had—your brother and you, she chose; I wanted six of you—and also when we had you. She controlled everything always, and that’s why gardening made her so damned mad, because she found one thing on this earth she couldn’t fully be in charge of. She was a piece of work, your mother. She was fantastic. I never knew anybody people loved so much, but my God she was a bossy so-and-so.”

I was partly shocked when my father said all this—as much by his vehemence, too, the sight of him in love, his eyes alight in their pouches, a fleck of glistening spittle on his lips—and partly also full of wonder, because I thought for the first time that it was natural, and clear, that each of us would have a different story of who Bella Eldridge was and of how it had been. It stood to reason. Sirena and I, too, would have different accounts of our shared year, and that hers wouldn’t match mine—well, that wouldn’t invalidate mine, just as my father’s picture of my mother didn’t invalidate my picture. Somehow, briefly, on that day after Being Edie, this all seemed just about believable.

I got my dad home in good time and picked him up a six-pack and a jumbo bag of extra-cheese Doritos on the way. My mother would never have allowed him those things, it was true, and my dad in his resumed bachelorhood took freedoms that I could tell excited him, as if he were a small boy getting away with something.

I’d decided not to go to the studio all weekend, which made me realize how much a reflex it had become. After I dropped off my father, I headed home over the BU bridge as if to Somerville, and realized only at Central Square what I’d done. I was almost sure Sirena would be working that afternoon, but I didn’t go to find out. If she wanted my help, she could ask for it. I went home, I went for a run, I had a shower. I’d told myself I’d read a book, but I didn’t feel like it. It seemed depressing to turn on the TV. I e-mailed a few people but tired of that, too. I called Didi but they were out and her cell was off.

Finally, in the early evening, I called Sirena: I left her a message, as professional as I could make it, confirming the date and time for the Appleton third-grade field trip. There were permission slips to get signed, I reminded her. We had to plan ahead. I made scrambled eggs
on toast and went to bed at eight thirty, terribly hungry but not for food. So much for my state of repletion.

Sirena didn’t return my call. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t going to humiliate myself by asking. I held out almost a week, with every kind of crazy story in my head to explain her silence. On Thursday night, I caved. I waited till late, well after nine, before I went over to the studio. I told myself this had nothing to do with her at all, that this was about Edie and Alice and my need to get back to work on them. I’d left the Polaroids on my table, and I’d only really remembered them that day. I knew it was too late—I knew Sirena well enough to know that even if they were facedown, especially if they were facedown, she would have looked at them, scrutinized them, had opinions. I was ashamed to think of it. Maybe her silence was caused by her contempt for the photos—me, blurry in my bra; me, wild-eyed, taking pictures of myself in something like fancy dress; me,
preposterous
, and preposterously, inappropriately, unhumble …

Fun House Nora, the Woman Upstairs, we like her because she’s so thoughtful of others. Because she isn’t stuck up.

Which one is Nora? I can’t quite picture her …

You know, that nice third-grade teacher—not the one with the cotton-candy hair, the other one.

That’s who I’m supposed to be, the other one: “No, not the really great artist in that studio—the other one.”

“Not the beautiful woman in the knockout dress—the other one.”

“The funny one?”

“Oh yeah, I guess she’s that. The funny one.”

Sirena might think the Edie Polaroids were funny. She might think they were some sort of joke. That would be okay, if they were a joke.

So on Thursday night, I went over to see about my rooms, about my artists, to look over the photographs I’d made. I went to retrieve them,
a salvage operation if you will. Unavowedly, I went to see what she’d done during the week, what progress she’d made without me. I went partly hoping that the studio would be exactly as I’d left it, that whatever had been going on—something had been going on—it would have been big enough to keep her away.

Already in the stairwell there were sounds. Wafty Eastern music, not her usual thing, chatter, banging. There was the movement of life, of lives. As I walked down the corridor, I thought maybe she was having a party; but the sounds weren’t party sounds.

They didn’t hear me come in. They were too busy. That’s not quite true: one young woman, in her mid-twenties, in a skimpy black tunic with huge eyes, a very white face and curly ringlets of that rare auburn that looks dyed even when it’s not, broke away from the huddle and came toward me.

“I’m so sorry. Is the noise bothering you?”

“This is my studio,” I said. Not nicely. I couldn’t help it. My eyes turned on my own end of the L, to my table and my things. Someone had dropped her jacket carelessly over my work chair, and had slung shopping bags and a handbag on the floor beside it; but otherwise my stuff, from a distance, looked okay. I could see the jagged pile of Polaroids on my side table: I couldn’t tell whether that was where I’d left them, or whether they’d been moved. “Who are you?” I asked, trying with only minimal success to sound less annoyed. “And what are you doing here?”

“I’ll tell Sirena you’re here—you must be Nora?” I could see from her glance—down, up, down, resting on my dowdy clogs, that I wasn’t as she’d expected. “I’m Becca,” she said. “I’m the makeup artist.”

Upon entering the studio, here’s what I saw: Sirena, at the center of a small clutch of dark-clad people, in dim light, huddled around a film camera. Sirena was the director, I guess. The camera person was a lanky guy with a shaven head and a silver bullet in his dark eyebrow. He had a dotting of stubble, like smut, across his chin, and a black T-shirt from which his long arms stuck out white in the gloom. Later, when he stood up, I’d see that he was enormously tall, at least six and a half feet. He was the only man.

Aside from Sirena and Becca, there were three or four other women.
One of them seemed to be responsible for the lighting, and darted down into the Wonderland area to fuss with spotlights and two big silver reflecting screens. They were all young except for a tall, long-nosed woman in her late forties or early fifties, with big dark hair and stylish red rectangular glasses. She was a friend of Sirena’s, Marlene, a Hungarian photographer from LA, in town on a Radcliffe fellowship.

They were all focused on a woman in white, head to toe in pure white, with a funny tall white cap covering her hair, like a Smurf’s cap without the fold—it stood straight up. All you could see of her body was her face, including her ears, which stuck out, and her hands and feet, which were a lovely even light brown. She wore a long-sleeved plain white dress with an enormous skirt and white leggings. She seemed to grow out of the Astroturf like the carved flowers around her.

Becca scurried over and whispered to Sirena, who swiveled on her high stool (where, too, had that come from?) and blew me kisses with both hands. But she didn’t get up: she indicated that she couldn’t, right now; and so I put my things down and made my way over to the camera as they turned on some Eastern music, a mesmerizing sort of whiny wavering, and started filming again.

At once, the woman in white began to spin, first slowly and then at greater speed, and the vast circle of her skirt billowed out, rippling gorgeously up and down. The wind it made shook the aspirin flowers on their stalks, and they, too, danced. I could see her actually dancing, down at the end of the studio, and then, in the camera’s screen, a miniature version of her dancing also, and the two sights were the same but different. When I looked at her in real life, she seemed to me almost to create a haze around her, a visible air; but in its tiny-fying precision, the camera recorded her spinning like a science.

I stayed for more than an hour, but they were still working when I left. In fact, I left during a break in their filming before what was, Sirena told me later, the final take. She wanted—and ultimately she got—seven perfect minutes of unbroken spinning, her dervish—on hire, or a volunteer, from the local Sufi temple—twirling without cease, without stumbling, in her meditative trance, seven magical minutes. She got these minutes—Sirena never doubted that she would, even though it took almost seven hours for her to be satisfied.

When they broke for Thai food, Sirena, jolly, and public—masked!—in a way I’d never before seen, introduced me around. The cameraman was called Langley. He had a goofy manner, and was older than I’d thought, though not as old as me. Marlene seemed at first curious, at least curious enough to paste on a big smile; and then when she found out I taught elementary school, her eyes, like a lizard’s, hooded over, and she retreated into her pad thai. Sana, meanwhile, the Sufi—originally named Carolina and the rebellious daughter of Puerto Rican Catholics—stood to one side, daintily eating slices of papaya dipped in lime juice, miraculously without spilling even a drop upon her pristine garments. She produced, from within her folds, a linen handkerchief, and carefully wiped her lips and her fingers when she was done. Radiant, she barely spoke: it was, for her, a spiritual event.

This was not obviously so for Sirena: “Where’ve you been, you crazy girl, these past days?” she asked, without waiting for a reply. “You’ve missed all the excitements! It’s too bad—we’ve had such adventures. And this is the last.” She clapped her hands. “This is the centerpiece.” She turned to the beatific woman in white: “And Sana is our star!” Sirena crunched on a tiny spring roll. “But all of them have been fantastic. The little girl, the older woman—wasn’t she extraordinary, Marlene? Marlene’s been my right hand, the person to steady me—because photography, still pictures, up to now, is not so much my thing—video, but not so much the photographs.” She chewed, and even that seemed to me theatrical. “But the pictures, they’ve come out well, no? Marlene is so brilliant a photographer, it’s almost shaming to ask for your opinion”—she put her hand on Marlene’s arm in that way that I’d thought was for me—“but you were so kind as to say”—she was talking to Marlene while telling me the story—“that you thought they were good—”

“I told you, sweetie, they’re phenomenal. You know that.” And Marlene then said, as if she’d turned to look at me, but without turning at all, “She’s so full of false modesty, this one! This installation will make her name.”

“Can you come tomorrow afternoon?” Sirena asked me, fixing me properly with her gaze at last, and for the only time that evening. “I’ll show you the images—now, with the computer, it’s all right here—but
you’ll say whether you agree. For the little girl, Marlene and I have different ideas.”

“She wants to have the head show, the chin and the mouth, for the expression,” said Marlene, still looking at Sirena rather than at me. “But I think it’s better without the mouth. Because then for the young woman you have the mouth, and for the middle-aged woman—”

“Don’t call her that,” said Sirena, laughing. “She’s the same age as we are!”

“And we, my darling Sirena”—somehow she rolled the “r” the way I’d always wanted to—“are also middle-aged. Be proud of it!” But surely, I thought, looking at Marlene, at the impression she gave that her meager flesh pulled wearily away from the bone—surely this woman wasn’t the same age as Sirena? Sirena wasn’t nearly so old. “Anyway, our contemporary, we see her mouth and nose, maybe even the bottom of her eyes, and then—”

“Yes, yes,” Sirena interrupted, “Nora knows: then we see all of her, of our wise woman. As she sees all of herself. Finally. Nora knows this already. We’ve talked about it.”

“Many times,” I murmured. It seemed to me I’d suggested it. The Thai feast was winding down, and Sana the refulgent Sufi had excused herself to go to the bathroom. Even mystics needed to pee. I wondered how she’d negotiate the grimy artists’ bathroom in her voluminous white skirt; but when she returned, she looked pristine as ever.