The Woman Upstairs (28 page)

Needless to say, there was no question of my working on Edie or Alice. And there was no question that Sirena might have missed me: she’d been surrounded by disciples and helpers and colleagues, above all by Marlene—whose work, I remembered Sirena telling me, had been included in a group show at MoMA—who reminded me of what the art world was like and why I’d turned away from it. All these months had been mere housekeeping before the real guests arrived. Sirena didn’t need me at all.

I managed to smile a lot. Before she drifted back into Wonderland, I told the Sufi that she was beautiful, and she looked at me as
though I’d spoken to her in Aramaic. I thanked Becca for the spring rolls, even though I’d eaten only one. As I gathered up my stuff, I discreetly swiped my Polaroids into my tote bag. Even glimpsing the fuzz of my chin and shoulder—my white bra strap—in the picture on top of the pile, I was washed with such shame that I felt sick. This amateur silliness. This self-indulgence. Who was I kidding? Had they flipped through them? Becca? Marlene? Heading out, I peered one last time through the gloom toward the distant field of light where Sana was preparing to twirl: she was lost to me. I could see nothing but a shimmering white blur.

10

The next afternoon, the people had vanished, and so too had their equipment. Sirena must have taken out the garbage, even, or had Becca do it, because there was no evidence at all of their presence—except, perhaps, that all the coffee cups were clean, which wasn’t normally the case.

“Nora!” she called as I came in, without looking up. “Come see!” She sat at her computer, and as I approached she set the video of Sana to play. “Langley sent this over just now. We can tinker, of course—but look!”

The colors were so bright—the Astroturf so green, the flowers so fully lilac, lemon, rose. And Sana, except for the lovely olivey bits of her—those hands! Those ears!—was pure, pure white. The video was completely silent, like a dream.

“What about the music?”

“No, no, you see—didn’t we discuss this? Maybe with Marlene—I’m sorry. Nowadays I can’t remember.”

“We didn’t discuss the music.”

“I want it to be silent. Completely silent. Ibn Tufail’s recluse on his desert island didn’t twirl to any music—didn’t
know
any music—but nature’s, or what he might have imagined in his own head. So I want it to be silent. But then my question is—and I have to decide so fast—whether also, in addition to the silence, we give them music to choose from.”

“I don’t get it.”

“So, I want each person to find, in my Wonderland, as much room as possible for her own Wonderland. You know this. For his own Wonderland, even. So what if you have no imagination, or if your dreams need help? So then, maybe, around the video room there are sets of headphones, yes?”

“Yes?”

“Maybe four—or five—maybe even seven.”

“Seven?”

“Because there are life’s seven stages, because there are seven photographs, seven veils, seven unveilings, because there are seven minutes of dancing, because seven is the most magical number there is.” She threw up her hands and then took a cigarette from an open pack on the table. They weren’t Skandar’s brand—she’d bought them on her own, for once.

“So there are seven sets of headphones. It seems like a lot. Kind of cluttered, maybe.”

Sirena shrugged. We were both watching Sana dancing on the screen. One hand was turned toward the sky, the other earthward. She moved her fingers as though they were petals in the breeze.

“So?”

“So each set is different music. Maybe not even all music. Yes, one is what Sana is actually dancing to, Omar Faruk Tekbilek. I must make sure I have the permission. But then one is surely birdsong—spring birdsong, a nightingale and a blackbird, maybe, together. Maybe one is something popular, contemporary—I’ll have to ask someone young. Maybe Maria will know? But no, she’ll listen to horrible music, for sure. And then there may be city sounds on another—New York traffic, for example.”

“That doesn’t seem so contemplative. Not exactly the sounds of enlightenment.”

“Not of itself, okay. But look at the video, look”—we both looked—“and imagine the sounds of horns and brakes and tires, the screech and racket of it. And suddenly her dancing, her prayer if you will, her
resonance
—suddenly the power of her Wonderland is even greater, do you see? Even more free. Because she can be transported
there in her own mind, by her own thoughts, not only when the music, like Pavlov, tells her to be; or not only when the birds are singing, like in heaven; but even when the outside world is in total chaos”—she said “kah-os”—“and disarray.” She waved the cigarette at the screen and the smoke hung, for a second. “This will be beautiful,” she said. “And true.”

I waited a moment for her to go on. When she didn’t, I said, “That’s still only four.”

“Four what?”

“Sets of headphones.”

She glared at me, then cackled. “I didn’t know you could be such a
rompicazzo
, Nora. I like this very much. Very much.”

After I made coffee, she said: “The photographs. Before you go, you must look at the photographs. Because I’ve got to order the prints in France. As always, they should have had the order yesterday. They’re to be on muslin, very big, almost seven feet tall—even with the computers now this isn’t so easy, the size of it, on fabric, and to make seven, it takes time. There isn’t much time, now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s true. So little time.” The week before, when she’d told me the date for her show in Paris, seemed very long ago. Suddenly everything was over: the focus had changed. The Shahids were all looking away from me now. We were hurtling, or I was, toward the end of it all. The terminal patient headlong toward death. The very awareness of finitude speeding everything up, when you most wanted to slow it all. I knew that wasn’t what Sirena meant. She meant that there was so little time until her show. So little time until she was lost to me.

“Show them to me then,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”

The little girl wasn’t so little as all that. I was almost shocked, but also deeply moved, to see her naked. It was a part of Sirena’s purpose that the child not be five or six, because there’s no shame in being naked at that age, the washboard-fronted children with their unobtrusive boy and girl genitals all but interchangeable along the beachfronts. No, the
shock lay in seeing the newly awakening body of this child who must have been around eleven—who was, Sirena confirmed, eleven—the poignant, rosy puff of her breast buds, the nascent rounding of the hip below her waist, but these curves just a suggestion still upon the tight band of her torso, the long, straight perfect limbs of a still god-held child, trailing her clouds of Wordsworthian glory. And there, at the pubis, a few dark strands, the beginning of her hiddenness, but the tidy, childish split of her still frank and clear to the world. In all of them, she stood straight, leaning slightly on her left hip, her right foot slightly splayed, its angle minutely shifting from frame to frame. One hand, her left, reached toward the camera, loomed larger, its smooth square fingernails both carrying, and grasping for, the promise of adulthood. None of the photos showed her face, but the exact cropping point differed, and in some, her chin and mouth were visible. They’d pulled her hair up, so you couldn’t even tell what color it might be, and she was defined, then, by the exposure of her delicate neck, like a stalk, slightly long for the rest of her, and fragile. In one picture—the one showing most of her, that Sirena wanted to use—she bit her lip slightly, and you could discern a mere hint of tooth, pressing the perfect ridged rose of her lip. It was breathtaking.

“You see, there, you understand, yes?” Sirena said. “It is the moment of hesitation: she reaches forward, but she’s uncertain. She wishes also that she might stay. She’s relaxed, but also awkward. A child, but not.”

“Which is why you absolutely cannot use this one,” I said. “Trust the photographer. Trust your friend. She knows what she’s talking about.”

Sirena threw up her hands again and rolled her phlegmy irritation in her throat.

“You’re just using one of the girl, right? Only one picture? Don’t you see, if you use that one, it may seem clear to you what story it’s telling, but precisely because of her mouth, because of that tooth, it’s actually telling a story in a way the others aren’t. And as soon as it’s telling a story, people can interpret it however they want, they can take that picture and put their own story onto it. And even if it seems so clear to you what it says, you can’t control what they think it says. I thought
that was central to your Wonderland, that each experience of it should be open, unique.”

“Yes, of course, but this picture—”

“To you it says, ‘I hesitate on the cusp of knowledge.’ And to a hundred thousand people, that’s also what it says. And then to a hundred pervs in the hundred thousand, it says, ‘That little girl wants to fuck me. I knew it.’ ”

“But this is ridiculous—”

“Have you read
Lolita
? I rest my case.”

Sirena emitted more rumblings but she did not contest what I had said.

“This one,” I said, pointing to the headless version in which the girl’s neck looked most swanlike, and in which, also, the forefinger of the reaching left hand was slightly raised, and by some cast of the light, had around it a rim of shadow, accentuating also its length. It gave the photograph a slightly religious air, some echo of the gestures of medieval Madonnas. “This is the one you must use.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so.”

She sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.” Which grudging comment caused me elation, until she went on, “I’ll ask Marlene to look again. She didn’t choose this one—hers is this”—she pointed at a different image—“but I see why you take this. It’s the finger, yes? You’re right about the finger. I didn’t remark it, but it’s true.”

The pictures that followed were of a twenty-two-year-old, whose moles decorated her fair skin like erotic paint splatters and whose mouth, a pretty bow-shaped mouth with a strong cleft in the upper lip, curled upward in what seemed to be barely contained amusement. There would be two of her, two of all of them henceforth, and in one she, too, stood straight to the camera, though with her hand coyly covering her privates; and in the other, half turned, with her arm extended in embrace of the air, you could apprehend in profile the ripe heft of her breast, with its sharp dark nipple, and the exuberant, even youthful, burst of pubic hair at her groin.

For midlife, Sirena had two sets of photographs. The first was of a tallish woman, slightly heavy in that ponderous, maternal way—her
breasts full and unevenly drooping, their nipples pointing in faintly disparate directions like misaligned headlights. The skin of her round belly was puckered, presumably by childbearing, and this was at odds with the otherwise trunklike firmness of her, the fullness of an inhabited body, with its tracery of purpling veins upon the thighs and its scars—an appendix scar, and a seam, too, around one knee. The woman’s face was visible almost to her eyes—the strong lines from nose to mouth, the cheeks still round but less than fully plump, the incipient wattling beneath the chin. But in one of her two photographs, the one in which her strong, elegantly veined hand clasped her side, she was laughing, open-mouthed and laughing, and even without seeing her eyes you felt the strength of her, and she was beautiful.

I felt both envy and contempt for this faceless woman—forty-four years old, Sirena told me, with three children. I felt envy because my own body, for all it was younger in every aspect, for all it hewed, more closely, to some statuesque ideal—mine, I felt, was a body in waiting, a body yet unused. And while I had, at the first, an instinctive young person’s revolt at the careless blowsiness of this middle-aged body, I had also a sense of alarm that in spite of my efforts to stay young, time would ravage me also, and that like an unopened flower I might wither on the vine. Whereas this, I thought, is the open flower on the cusp of its fading: this is the fullness of life.

The second set of midlife photographs astonished me. At first I couldn’t think why they were there—why two models in this case?—but in an instant I recognized the silver chain around the neck, the curve of the nose, the clavicle with its single small mole, like a dark pearl.