The Woman Upstairs (35 page)

And so it went, and was gone: I’ll never know the provenance or purpose of the necklace, nor will I know what, if anything, was written inside Skandar’s book. I was, that way, free to imagine many different possibilities.

I never told them about losing the bag, and if they thought it strange that I didn’t thank them for their gifts, they didn’t say so. But the final imaginary nature of those few objects would matter quite a bit, I think, in my peculiar ability to keep alive for so long the intensity of my connection to them all.

3

The next time I saw Sirena was in New York, almost two years later, when her Wonderland installation was part of the inaugural exhibition at the new feminist wing of the Brooklyn Museum. She’d been represented in America by Anna Z for almost all that time, and the two had become very close friends—Anna Z was younger, and Sirena was her up-and-coming star. When I saw them standing together inside the door of Anna’s gallery on West Thirteenth Street, there was something about their physical relation to one another that reminded me of how it had been between us, and I suffered a great wave of jealousy.

Sirena, although the smaller of the two, seemed to emanate intensity, light almost, and Anna bent toward her, like a plant toward the sun. There was no awkwardness when I approached—a familiar embrace from Sirena, who then held me at arm’s length and said, “Nora, darling, let me look at you!” Nobody would have known, perhaps least of all she herself, what she’d meant to me, what I’d lost, and now saw again from a sad and solitary distance.

We were meeting for drinks, Sirena and I, but not dinner: she was a Parisian artist in New York for a big opening, and her evenings were claimed by more important people than myself. But that afternoon, Sirena had the grace to introduce me to her gallerist as a dear artist friend from Boston. This meant that Anna Z, slightly praying mantis–like, looked at me as though I were potentially someone important.
But then she wanted to know where I “showed”—a Fun House term if ever there was one—and I could feel my cheeks redden as I muttered some vague guff about how family difficulties had forced me to put things on hold for a while. After that, Anna turned back toward her sun, and aside from a couple of faintly curious, faintly pitying glances, was done with me.

And with Sirena? Two years had passed. Two years in which we’d exchanged perhaps ten e-mails, but in which I’d thought about her—and about Skandar and Reza too—every single day. It used to be that when people said, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of X or Y,” I considered it embarrassing and quaint hyperbole; but thanks to the Shahids, I now understood. In my thoughts, I’d even set aside times of day for them, and places, where I permitted myself the indulgence. For example, the wholesale fantasies—some old, some new—were permissible in bed after lights-out. There were still, distantly, dreams of an artist’s life in Vermont or Tuscany; but more often, somewhat basely, I pictured myself in Paris—in a glittering restaurant with Skandar, our knees touching under the tablecloth as we discussed the differences between the French intellectuals and the Americans, or a post-Iraq world. Or I imagined grandly showing Sirena my artwork in a fashionable Spartan gallery that had courted me, while craven young girls in black looked on, awed, from the sidelines. I knew even as I had them that these dreams were impure—after all, the whole point of the Shahids, for me, had been to escape a world of pretending, to be seen for who I really was—but I couldn’t help it: their natures, you could say, had corrupted me. My need for their approval, and my understanding of what approval meant to them—this had changed the shape of my self, even, let alone of my dreams.

At that time, two years after they left, I was ashamed still to be at Appleton; ashamed because I believed that they’d write me more often, that they’d pay me more mind, that they would love me more intently, if I were more impressive in the world; which made me—how pathetic we are—wish it were so.

You see, in addition to my bedtime imaginings, I permitted myself to indulge my quiet obsession when the e-mail brought me news of them. I had put both Sirena and Skandar on Google Alerts; and you’d
be amazed—I was—at how often the ether tapped my shoulder with a new development in one life or another. In this way, when I sat with Sirena in the dark bar near Anna’s gallery, I knew already about Skandar’s promotion at the university, and about the important lecture series he’d given in the fall of 2006 at Oxford. I knew the lectures were to be published as a book in late ’07, and I even knew what the cover of the book would look like; just as I knew that Skandar had recently updated his author photo and now looked to the world less blurry and more like himself. I’d heard him on the BBC online, talking about the Israeli bombings in Lebanon, which had made me think about him with great tenderness for days afterward; and I’d seen him on YouTube discussing incomprehensibly in French the current politics of Algeria, looking especially dapper in a crisp white shirt. I knew about the enthusiastic reviews that Wonderland had received in Paris, and then in Berlin, where the installation had been mounted at the Hamburger Bahnhof as part of a show on the spiritual in art. I knew collectors were leaping to acquire the videos she’d made of people visiting the installation, and that the Saatchi guy had bought one and in so doing made her valuable. She’d filmed a naked man coming through; and a gaggle of French schoolchildren, like our Appleton class that long-ago afternoon; and inevitably a girl dressed up as Alice herself. Now these videos, or rather, selections and compilations of them, got shown alongside the installation itself, so that everyone who visited knew that they were themselves being filmed; and someone had written a big essay in
Artforum
about this, about the viewer and the voyeur in Sirena Shahid’s work. And because she’d made this gag her gag, she’d unwittingly led people to behave in extraordinary ways, sometimes, while they were visiting Wonderland: there’d been the couple that simulated fucking in public, and the university student who came through the installation in a furry white bunny suit, with enormous ears … Of course, Sirena didn’t show videos of these spontaneous interventions, but bemused critics wrote about them and asked probing questions about the line between art and exploitation, whether this was collaborative art or mere comedy, and whether there was a willful or incidental degradation in these cases, in the approach of art to reality television.

That said, nobody denied that Sirena made thoughtful and beautiful
and emotionally affecting art—they all said so. In the space of two short years, she had successfully rendered herself controversial in certain ways, and this controversy had made her famous, certainly in Europe, but even in the North American art world, so that her inclusion in the Brooklyn Museum’s inaugural feminist exhibition in the spring of 2007 seemed, ex post facto, by no means a favor or a risk taken by the curators but was, rather, artistically utterly de rigueur. That famous art historian–cum–curator could now assert that she would no more have left Sirena out of her show than she would have cut off her fingers or included a man.

All this I knew from my Google Alerts; but all this I feigned not to know. And it was interesting—always, she was interesting, even when she caused me pain—to hear how she spoke of herself, and of her boys, and of our by then long-gone time together.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, “that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and that
weather
. Do you remember, Nora? I’ve never had a harder time.” (Except, she said “time-e.”)

“I guess I didn’t realize it was that bad,” I said. What else could I say?

“Realize it was that bad? But that’s the extraordinary thing. It can’t have been so bad, or it was bad for a purpose—because the Wonderland I made—” She paused, and with a gentle tilt of her head, she added, “That I made with your amazing help, and could not have made alone—that Wonderland has been an enormous change in my life. I sometimes forget, because it hasn’t been always easy—I’m not supposed to say this, because then you’re ungrateful for success, but to you, my Nora”—the hand upon my arm—“I can tell the truth. So these past two years, they’ve been tough. All the travel, Reza doesn’t like it; nor Skandar. He’s not a showy person, but that’s because he’s the center of attention; and when the attention is not for him, he’s not such a sunny character. He can be unhappy, and difficult, and behave badly. Also, his mother has been very sick, last year—she’s better now, but cancer, does the worry ever go away afterward?—so, yes, it’s all been much too busy, and not so easy”—all this time I was really looking
at her, waiting for her to recognize me, waiting to see her properly in her eyes; but they were either downcast or darting about, and didn’t focus on my face—“but it’s as if the time in Cambridge, yes, such a hard time for us all—is in a separate box, now it’s put away, it doesn’t have a place in my every day. Even though it’s where things began to change, because it’s where I met you, my friend, and made the beginnings of my Wonderland.”

“But you remember it?” As I asked, I had so clearly before me the winter light from the windows into the studio, the paint-spattered faucet at the sink, the chipped cups and the poufs and the grimy, bruise-colored rug under the coffee table. I could see their town house, feel the flimsiness of its painted plywood front door, the door handle slipping in its socket, see the stains on the beige broadloom going up the stairs inside the entrance, and smell the faintly institutional biscuity smell that the house retained even after they’d illicitly smoked many cigarettes in it. No, I could remember all of it: the waxiness of the paper bags from the cake shop; the light on her hair in the subterranean booth that afternoon at Amodeo’s; the sound Skandar’s dress shoes made behind me in the packed snow, when he walked me home in wintertime between the drifts, and the freeze in my throat when I gulped the air. The small, muscled roundness of Reza’s upper arms when he undressed for bed, and the strawberry birthmark on his left biceps, his rib cage naked and frail as a bird’s breast; and the tidy silvery streak that emerged, over time, from the red welt near his eye—I could see that plastic surgeon, too, with her unexpected high heels and her square hands and her fairy-tale deftness with the needle and thread … any moment of it all, all of it, I could have handed over, translucent, shining bead upon shining bead, had Sirena but wanted to hold them—which, it seemed, she did not especially, as she said, “Oh, I can remember if I try—I’m not that old yet! But it’s all fuzzy, and in my memory, dark. Even though I know it can’t be. Surely Boston isn’t always dark?”

“No,” I said. “That’s your imagination. It’s quite a bright city, actually.”

Many things had been all in my imagination, surely I knew that; but then there was what had been decidedly, entirely
real
, all the
moments and details so vivid, still alive to me—and for Sirena, like so much flotsam, long jettisoned into the broad ocean of her past. As that Air France flight had risen into the night air, two years before, so Boston had fallen away beneath her.

“I can barely remember making the installation at all,” she said. “I do remember you sewing together all the blue dresses, though.”

“There were a lot of them.”

“D’you know something funny,” she said. “You remember that postcard you sent, the illustration from the early edition of
Alice in Wonderland
, the one where she is so big and her neck is so long?”

“Of course.” I’d sent it almost at once after they left, my first dispatch, never answered, to their mythical Paris address, timed to arrive for the opening of her exhibition.

“Well, it’s still on our refrigerator,” she said, bemused. “Right there, for the longest time. I don’t know who saved it—I don’t think it was me. Reza, maybe?”

I smiled. Reza.

“Yes, so there you are with us, all the time,” she said. “Sometimes I’m taking out the orange juice, or the yogurt, and I see Alice there, so startled, with her long neck, and I think of you.” Sirena was finally looking at me, then, in the nasty bar, as she rifled blindly for a credit card in her overstuffed wallet, and her smile was real—the old smile, the old face, that I’d so loved.

It was in this affectionate spirit that I visited the Brooklyn Museum the next morning, soon after opening time, by myself. I was the only visitor walking through Wonderland in the quiet, and I was surprised by the coziness imparted by the canopy of Alice dresses, three wide swathes of blues draped overhead, rippling slightly in the air-conditioning breeze. The lighting fell upon the aspirin flowers so that their colors glowed as they bobbed, gently, above the electric-green grass; and the mirror shards glittered and glimmered, unignorable, unsettling, but not overwhelming. I hadn’t forgotten the nudes, but my memory had changed their features, or else I saw them differently now—the girl’s splayed toe, the dark-nippled heft of a slightly drooped breast, the delicate flaring
of a freckled nostril, the rib that protruded at an un-ribly angle, witness to almost a century of life—and they were enormous, bigger than I was, where I’d seen them small upon a computer screen. They, like everything else, rippled slightly, as if they were breathing, as if the room were breathing around us.