The Woman Upstairs (31 page)

That Thursday night, I went to sit for Reza. I expected it to be my first time together with all three of them at once, but Skandar wasn’t home:
meetings at the university, Sirena said. Some end-of-year thing. She’d join him at the dinner party.

She was distracted, not chatty—rushing to change her clothes, almost peremptory in her list of what there was to eat, of who might call. I fought not to see her brusqueness as a sign, as ill will directed at me. You know how it is: a criminal anticipates suspicion. She reappeared in a black caftan covered with a riot of colorful embroidery, a heavy medallion at her throat. When at last she paused on her way out the door, I couldn’t resist: “Is everything okay? Have I upset you?”

“Upset me? How absurd! You could never upset me. I’m so sorry—I am—out of it. Beset by difficulties in the practical things. If I were only in Paris, I could sort these things out. I’m thinking I’ll have to get on a plane and go there—but with Reza—so complicated. Now the term at Harvard is finished, Skandar is traveling so much … So: my head is full of nonsense—like a chess game. If I move this piece, and then that piece—then, so. And if you don’t look far enough ahead, then bang, you are in trouble.”

Didn’t I know it. “If I can help …”

“You’re here, aren’t you? You’re my greatest help.”

“Put it all out of your mind for tonight. Have fun.”

“Some hotshot economics professor and his psychoanalyst wife? And that tall man with a face like a horse who’s always on the television! I’ve been stuck with him before—he’s so boring and his breath is terrible, like a dead mouse. Who has time for this bullshit? I should get Skandar a professional wife. No, you’re the lucky ones—you and my little Reza.”

And in truth, we
were
the lucky ones: that evening after we ate, Reza and I sat on the living room floor building a free-form spaceship out of Legos. Using pieces from a great bucket of abandoned creations, we spent over an hour at it, calculating its perfectly symmetrical rocketlike tower and finding the shapes necessary for its wide, ovoid base, complete with lights and windows and opening doors. We created detachable roomlets, some with wings, some with tank wheels; we found Lego people—stringy, hammer-headed Star Wars creatures, a couple of solid fellows who looked like farmers, a grass-skirted cannibal or two—and populated our space station. Each time we added
a person, Reza invented a story for him, about where he came from, what he did, why he was there.

“When I grow up,” he said, out of the blue, “I’m going to be an architect. I want to create worlds for people. And maybe,” he said with a glint that reminded me of his father, “maybe creating worlds will create new people, too. Do you see, by changing his hat, I’ve turned this farmer guy into a heart doctor? Isn’t that cool?”

I was waiting for him to walk me home. He’d always walked me home. But this time, soon after eleven, Sirena came alone.

“I’m exhausted,” she said, as she dropped her bag and keys on the dining table. “I couldn’t stick there a minute longer. Skandar and the mouse-breath man were involved in deep conversation. I don’t know what Skandar thinks he can persuade him to do—go on CNN and insist on a two-state solution? Who is so foolish, in this country, who wishes to remain employed? So I said to him, ‘Skandar, maybe you’re going to save the world tonight, but I must get some sleep …’ ”

“It
is
late—”

“Yes, and you’re teaching in the morning. I’m terrible, to forget—I’m sorry. It’s raining, a bit—do you want me to call you a taxi?”

“It’s okay. I’ll walk.”

“At least take the umbrella.”

So I took from Sirena the golf-sized, striped umbrella that Skandar had more than once held gallantly over my head, and I walked myself home. The distance felt longer than it had in months. Had he stayed there on purpose? He must have. Was the dark upshot of our brief numinous hour to be the loss of so close a friend? Because, as I realized only then, after all our walks and conversations, I could have counted him as a friend.

Henceforth, inevitably, Skandar was often uppermost in my thoughts. Sometimes I’d seem to forget, and my obsessive imagination would follow
its old familiar trajectory—to the imaginary Vermont farmhouse, the peaceable artistic gynocracy, where a mere hand upon the arm set the veins pumping in double-time. And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it’s not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother’s death, I’d catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

Sometime over that weekend, Sirena decided that she needed to fly to Paris to sort out the casting of the heart for her Wonderland. It was too complicated to try to clarify things on the computer or over the telephone, she told me on Monday morning, when I called to confirm the details for the school visit that afternoon. If the heart wasn’t right—it was to be open, split in the middle, on a Lucite dais a few yards in front of the film of Sana dancing; and it was to spray out, every few minutes, a particular rosewater scent—then, as she said, the heart of her installation wasn’t right. She’d leave on Tuesday, on the late Air France flight for Paris, and said she’d be back the following weekend. So I knew that, on Monday, and maybe it affected me somehow.

The kids were hugely excited. Any field trip is a hit—you could take them to a sewage treatment plant and they’d love it—but this one was weird and free, and even more fun because of it. Kids like breaking the routine, riding the school bus in the middle of the day, the feeling of possibility. We left Appleton at eleven thirty, right after their early lunch. They were unusually rowdy in the bus: Noah climbed over three rows of seats before I could get him to sit down; Ebullience had a spat with Miles over some hand-held computer game they ought not to have had in the first place; Sophia started to cry because she said Mia had pulled her hair. I had to raise my voice and threaten to turn around and go back to school. It was that kind of a beginning.

That said, I felt good about the excursion. Almost all the parents had said yes to the filming—it must have seemed cool to think their kids would be in some kind of movie—but I’d also arranged, at my end of the studio, for us to make papier-mâché masks. I’d had the kids read an abridged version of
Alice in Wonderland
the previous week, and we’d looked at old illustrations of the Cheshire Cat, and the Jabberwocky, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mad Hatter: I’d told them they could make masks of any of them, or of any other character they chose. The plan was to break the kids into two groups, to have one half start making the masks while the other was running around Wonderland, and then to switch them over. The pedagogical reasoning behind the afternoon wasn’t entirely clear even to me, but none of the parents had questioned it. I figured it was pretty memorable for kids to see a real artist’s atelier.

Things started out well. When we got to the studio, the kids seemed awed by the oddity of it all, and they sat quietly in a circle on the floor in the middle of the L while Sirena explained to them who she was and what she was doing. She was pretty good at talking to kids, better than I’d have imagined, and she talked about making art as a kind of magic, and also as a kind of play. Interestingly, Reza didn’t come forward to hug her: he sat squeezed between Noah and Aristide, fidgeting and behaving like one of the boys. I remember thinking that he’d changed, that way, in the course of the year: he’d been so openly affectionate with his mother back in September. But maybe it was discomfiting to be her kid, in this big white studio, in front of everyone, even embarrassing; maybe he felt funny, too, to see me and his mom both here together, and to think that this was our shared space. I don’t know.

Sirena explained that the children were free to treat all of Wonderland as a stage, almost as if they were in a play. “I know you’ve read about Alice,” she said, “and I want you to pretend that you’ve gone down the rabbit hole too. Here you are, in this weird place, and anything can happen.” She pointed to the two cameras we’d set up weeks before, high up at either end of the Astroturf lawn. “In Alice’s Wonderland, she never knows if someone is watching her. Maybe the camera’s on, but maybe it’s not, so don’t even think about it. Think of this as an
adventure, and a game. You can play in groups, or you can play alone. You can make this space what you want it to be.”

We’d hung the mirror shards on their strings from the ceiling to create glittering partitions in the space, and we’d laid out the Alice-dress sky along the ground in a swirling river of fabric that meandered the length of the room. We’d sown whole clusters of aspirin flowers, and some soap tulips, and had scattered around candies and jelly beans for the kids to find. We’d dragged her poufs onto the Astroturf lawn and draped them with burlap, so they looked like boulders. In far corners, we’d hung up several pairs of little red lights, for Jabberwock eyes, and when they flashed, an MP3 player let out roaring noises—quite scary ones, in fact.

All the children wanted to play in Wonderland. Inevitably, making masks seemed like a consolation prize. But we divided them into two groups and told them they had forty-five minutes for their first activity. Then we’d have a break for juice and cookies, and then we’d switch. The bus would be waiting outside for us at two p.m.