The Woman Upstairs (30 page)

“Did the students feed you well?”

“Falafel. Kebabs. You know.”

“I’ve got some pasta salad left over if you want it. Whole Foods. The rotini with pesto kind.”

He made a gesture, childlike rather than wolfish, of assent. I passed him the brown box. I made a show of washing the fork at the sink before I gave him that, too.

“Anything new?” I tried again. “In the wider world?”

“Ay. In Lebanon, today, another bombing. North of Beirut.”

I hadn’t expected this sort of an answer. I’d intended the question more lightly. It took me a minute to say anything. “Did anyone die?”

“Five or six people wounded. You won’t see much about it here. It’s only worth reporting if someone dies.”

“Do they know who’s responsible?”

He kept his head down, struggled with a wayward rotino. “The elections are in three weeks. Different voices want to make themselves heard. It’s a problem.”

“Were you talking about this with the students?”

“You know how students are—”

“I know how
my
students are,” I said, “but they’re eight years old.”

He smiled. “Isn’t it much the same? They have their opinions and they don’t really want to hear yours, unless it coincides with theirs. It’s always the same.”

“Well, in that sense, we’re all the same.”

“I often think,” he said, “that almost everyone is a child. That if you suddenly were to take off the masks of each of us, we would all be revealed as children.”

“I didn’t know I had a soul mate so near at hand.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I say a version of that almost every day. Sometimes I tell myself, when I’m dealing with annoying adults, to picture the kid there. Because no matter how annoying the kid is, I can feel compassion for him or her.”

“Always?”

“Almost always.”

“What kind of child were you?”

“Fun,” I said, although even as I said it, I realized I was picturing my mother, not myself: my tanned, angular mother in a lime-green golf skirt and a white sleeveless polo, with beaded sandals and enormous shades, a cigarette in one hand, a G&T in the other. She was flirting with Horace Walker from down the block, and she was emphatically not a child. “I was a very fun child. And you?”

“Serious.” He stood up from the cushions, not without effort. “Do you mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I was much too serious as a child, and as a consequence, not very interesting.” He downed the contents of his coffee cup in a single swallow. “I should be going,” he said.

“You just lit a cigarette,” I said.

“True.”

She was there in the room with us, even though the lights at her end were turned off. I didn’t need to name her. “Do you want to see the installation so far?”

“In a minute,” he said. We both knew I was talking about her installation, not mine. “I’d like to see what you’re working on first.”

I didn’t know that I believed him—didn’t we all really want to see her installation? I poured more wine into his coffee cup. “Fine,” I said. “Sounds good. Which one did you want to see?”

“All of them,” he said, “if possible. How many are there?”

“Three. Well, two, really. One whole, and two halves.”

“Great. Show me.”

He pored over them, one after the other, squatting down and closing one eye to peer directly in the windows, rather than looking at them from overhead. He moved very slowly and he looked very carefully, and whenever he wanted to touch anything, he looked at me first, questioningly, and waited for my permission. While he was looking, he seemed very much the serious child he claimed he’d been, and it pleased me—it excited me—how gravely he took my rooms, my artists, and how there was no gushing and no exclamation, just silent care. He took care. I loved him for it, and couldn’t help comparing him with
his wife, and thinking how much steadier, how much more freely his own person he was.

When he was done at last, he stood back and he looked at me, instead, in the same serious way. “These are remarkable,” he said finally. “Quite extraordinary.” He filled his wine cup, lit another cigarette. “They are at the same time truthful, and emotional—and so small.”

“So
small
?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“They put so much in so small a space. It’s like a Persian miniature, painted with a single bristle: tiny, precise, here is an entire world. Everything that matters, all emotion.”

“Yes.” If that was what he meant, then okay.

“But the question is why? Why so small? To speak softly, but to tell the greatest truth? Or, like the Persian miniatures, to be portable, to be able to go everywhere, and still to show, by their beauty and intricacy, their owner’s vast wealth? Or in this case, is it because they don’t feel they’re allowed to be bigger?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why not a whole room, a life-sized room, for each of these? Why only a little box?”

I shrugged, aware of unexpected stinging behind my eyes.

“Or again: Why, when there’s so much emotion in these rooms, in these artists—why is it all sad?”

“I put Joy in each room. You only have to look for her. She’s there—a golden amulet.”

“Okay, fine. But why, one time, just one time, is she not the biggest element? Why does Joy not take the whole room?”

There were tears in my eyes. I could feel them pooling. I blinked repeatedly so he wouldn’t see them. I suddenly understood that whatever else, Sirena’s art was joyful: that it was true—even if she wasn’t necessarily true—and joyful at the same time. My art was sad, because my soul was sad. Was this right?

“Do you think my soul is sad?” I asked him.

“I think your soul is lovely,” he said, and although he was still serious—as far as I could tell, he was completely serious—I was also reminded of Didi saying, “If it looks like a maple leaf and it feels like a maple leaf and it lies under a maple tree …”

“I think that you don’t think so, but your soul is beautiful,” he went on, and he took my left hand between his two hands, which were square and fleshy and hot and dry, like a furnace, but all these things excitingly so. “And I think it has a great capacity for joy and for sadness both. You don’t need to worry for a moment about your soul. Rather, you need only to move all of your emotions out of their little boxes, and let them take up the whole room.”

“They wouldn’t just take up a room,” I said.

“I know, your insatiable ravenous wolf. But how will you know his rampaging, unless you free him from his cage?”

I was both in the moment and outside it, aware of the theater and the kitsch of it—how could I not be?—and yet wholly involved—my fingers, my skin, my heart. Inside my ear, Didi’s voice was laughing—“silly!”—and Sirena’s voice I wouldn’t even imagine, the cry of it, like pain, and my mother in the background, quietly whispering, “How dare you, Mouse? How dare you? Who do you think you are, Mouse? Who do you think you are?”

But then, the pull upon me was not who I thought I was; it was who
he
thought I was: not Emily, or Virginia, or Alice, or Edie, or even Sirena. Not a Woman Upstairs. Not one thing. That I did not myself know my outline did not, at that point, matter at all. To someone, I had an outline, implausibly a worthy one. When his hands moved to rest, warm, even, like hot stones upon my back, just to be nakedly Nora Eldridge seemed, briefly, as though it could be forgiven; as though it could even be enough.

12

At first, I thought it could all be okay. Skandar and I had a conversation—oblique, weird, but a conversation—about how this was meaningful but wrong, and how it couldn’t continue. I was baffled, you see: this wasn’t a story I’d lived inside my head. The bead didn’t fit my thread. And yes, I believed I could simply will it away, because I had to, because there was too much at stake otherwise.

How strange that to feel oneself clearly, transparently, compassionately seen by one precious person meant to risk vile distortion in the eyes of another. Always we tell the children it’s best to be honest; but I knew, too, when to lie, in order to be true to something greater. It hadn’t felt false, or willed, or like seduction, or like a mistake. It hadn’t felt in conflict with my friendship with Sirena, or my love—my mad love—for her.

My sadnesses were many, but there was not, among them, a sadness at what we’d done, the absolute moral value of which didn’t seem to me to be negative: if you could only separate that bead from its neighbors, take it out of time and hold it up to the light, how beautiful and clear a bead it would be. If you were to make a room for the artist Nora Eldridge, and depict in it that experience, it would be joy. I don’t know what to say about the fact that for a time we lay upon the Astroturf, among the wavering aspirin flowers. I can’t explain it; or I couldn’t then.

On Monday morning, I almost choked at the sight of Reza at his desk, in his pressed T-shirt with a lock of black hair curling straight up to the sky. Now, suddenly, I saw not so much his mother’s eyes but his father’s nose, his father’s lips. His own goofy smile. I must have looked oddly at him, as he forced, in return, a stretchy, Gumby-esque grin, the grin of someone who’s done nothing wrong but is nevertheless afraid of being accused. Even from the front of the room I could see the scar by his eye, my scar; and with the sight of it came the memory of the doctor at the hospital, sewing her fine seam.

I didn’t choke, I didn’t stop, the day was launched, the moment passed, and in the unwavering routine of 3E, in the absolute familiarity and hullabaloo of my children around me, it was the events of Friday night, rather than this, that seemed like a dream; and as the day went on, I forgot about them. And then, that afternoon, we had an Appleton-wide staff meeting—Shauna in love with the sound of her own voice, droning on about plans for the end of the school year: our talent show, our fund-raiser, our school-wide picnic—and I didn’t even try to go to the studio. I wasn’t sorry.

On Tuesday afternoon, I felt myself lacking in courage; but aware, too, that the encounter had to take place—that as with Reza, with Sirena, too, I had to step across the awkwardness and proceed to the next scenes, the scenes of her finishing Wonderland, of our excited bond over her glorious installation, over our shared understanding that hers was the art, and the life, that mattered.

The shock was to recognize from the moment I entered the room that for Sirena there was no discontinuity at all between then and now. Her blithe greeting, her fervid hair-twiddling and shawl-adjusting, all were unchanged. She was the same Sirena who’d hopped on the morning Amtrak to New York five days before, blissfully, selfishly oblivious and full of the excitements of her trip.

“It’s so hard to decide—they both are really great”—“great-e”—“and
they both want me to go with them. I’ll need your help, Nora—I trust you so much. When I showed my naked ones to Anna, she had tears in her eyes. She said they were stunning—and I said to her, ‘Be careful. You must imagine them in their context, in relation to the other pieces of the installation’—and she said, ‘Sirena, that’s great, but whatever you put around them can’t make them less stunning. More so, maybe, but not less.’ ”

“And the other guy?” I couldn’t help but be excited for her, even if she was a braggart. Somehow I could feel all my feelings separately—and the cloud of guilt, too, with its inadmissible tinge of triumph; I could keep it all in my head at once.

Because even I couldn’t hide from myself that not only did I want Sirena and Reza and—now, most tangibly—Skandar (don’t ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast, breathing skin, will insist otherwise), but I also wanted Wonderland, I coveted
her very imagination
, and wished it were mine.

I listened to Sirena talk about the two gallerists and their spaces and the promises they’d made to her, and I was with her and not with her at the same time. It wasn’t like at school with Reza, where the everyday realities had simply supplanted and replaced the other. Here, Skandar hovered in the studio, a shadow across the windows’ bleached light; and the fact that she couldn’t see him between us didn’t make him go away. Confusingly, I didn’t love her less, or long for her less, although I envied her more. If she’d put her arms around me then—well, in some metaphorical way she did put her arms around me, she had done so from the beginning; and perhaps I’d even thought, all those months, that she could really
see
me; and on some level I believed it even after Skandar stopped, and looked, and actually saw—even then, so late, I believed that she could see me, and so my guilt made Skandar a shadow that I marveled that she could not see. I thought, “This is going to be hard. Harder than I realized.” But I didn’t think, “This is going to be impossible.”