The Woman Upstairs (36 page)

And then the famous cast plastic heart, upon its pedestal, lurid, halved, its protruding ventricles like the blowing tubes of an airplane life jacket, its innards dark, wet-looking, although they were dry; and then the automatic intermittent pump of it, a slight hiss from its core, Sirena’s precious rosewater mist rising to fill the air—the soul, it was meant to be, I think—consuming the room in scent, smelling of flowers and an instant later of death, in the way that rosewater does. And Sana, then, finally, twirling, gigantic, above it all. There was a pair of small black benches in this central space, and I sat on the left-hand one and watched—forgetting that I was myself being filmed, though of course, like everyone else, I was.

I must have stayed at least half an hour there, in the rosewater air among the glowing flowers. Wonderland, eat me, drink me; yes, yes, yes. I was still in love with this, with her, with them, and how could I help it if being inside her head felt to me so familiar, as if it were the inside of my own mind, as if I’d built this Wonderland myself, as if this life, all of this, were for me, too. I felt, in that half hour, so
full
, like an overflowing vessel, its trembling meniscus arced toward the sky. I felt—for months, I’d felt this every second, and then for two years had been denied that feeling—I felt as though in any given instant, anything might happen, all wonder and possibility, the antithesis of a Lucy Jordan moment. I felt brilliantly alive. And I thought, somehow, still, that she—that they—had given that to me. I couldn’t be angry, not wholly angry, at someone or something that could fill me with such joy in life. You’re bound to love such a gift, and its giver.

I grant that this wasn’t much to go on, but it would sustain me, if you can believe it, for two more fallow years, years in which I still held on to the idea of her, of them, to the hope that they had offered me.

Think of that: two more years. More than four years in total, about
fifteen hundred days, and every single day they were with me, somehow. Out of some sense of obligation, some sense that I should move on, I went on dates with several men—an anxious divorcé with three kids, ground down by bitterness and care; a fifty-year-old who seemed so clearly gay that surely only he didn’t know it; a Buddhist with long thin fingers who spoke terribly softly and made me want to shout and pummel his contained and withholding chest—and yet every time I sat in a restaurant in that way, I’d hear Skandar’s laugh, or see his apologetic smile, and remember—my Book of the Wonders of the World—how much more there was out there, beyond the limits of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’d want to turn and flee my mediocrity.

Having vacated the Somerville studio long before the lease was up, unable to bear its ghosts, I tried intermittently to work on my dioramas, without success, and ultimately without hope. They sat forlorn under a dust sheet in my second bedroom, my former so-called studio, lumpen as corpses, from which, if I had to enter the room, I averted my eyes. One thousand five hundred days, some surely alarming proportion of the time left to me on this planet, I dedicated in my heart to the Shahids. You could say it wasn’t their fault; you could say it was nothing but my own madness; but that wouldn’t be quite true.

I sent e-mails, every so often, to Sirena, mostly, or even to Reza—I asked if he’d studied life cycles yet, when our sixth graders, under a new science teacher, dissected eggs in various stages of development and shouted in the hallways in their awe at life. Once I even found an excuse to write to Skandar, with a link about a Kennedy School conference I’d read about, and he politely sent back a couple of lines saying they were all well, and asking if I was ever coming to Paris … but for the most part, I heard nothing from them.

I became aware, in the early fall of 2008, that Skandar had been in Cambridge without contacting me: when I turned on the local television late one Saturday night, he was there in his rumpled jacket, part of a panel discussion about race relations in America—meaning, in this instance, Arab relations—and he spoke eloquently about how the possible election of Obama might change the tenor of society. The program had been filmed five days before it aired; I was sure he would already have decamped. Was I hurt? Yes; but not offended. Think of
what was between us, and of what separated us. Better to be close only in our hearts. Besides, these whirlwind business trips that important people make—they don’t have time to look up old friends even if they want to. I knew that.

The Woman Upstairs is like that. We keep it together. You don’t make a mess and you don’t make mistakes and you don’t call people weeping at four in the morning. You don’t reveal secrets it would be unseemly for you to have. You turn forty and you laugh about it, and make jokes about needing martinis and how forty is the new thirty, and you don’t say aloud and nobody else says aloud what all of you are thinking, which is “Well, I guess she’s never going to have kids now!” and then, still less admissibly, “Is that because she didn’t think she wanted them, or because she didn’t get around to it (silly fool, a failure of time management) or is it, poor lamb, because of some physical impediment (pitiable case)? Why is she single, anyhow? It’s not as if her career has been so spectacular—she’s only a schoolteacher, and among schoolteachers she’s not even Shauna McPhee.”

All these things the Woman Upstairs knows are being said, and she hates knowing, and is infuriated to know, and she valiantly hides both her knowledge and her fury, and everyone remembers her fortieth, held in the bar of the Charles Hotel, no expense spared, as the best party they’ve been to in a long while, a party the way they used to be before spouses and children, and you’ve got to hand it to her, Nora Eldridge really does make you feel that forty is the new thirty—yes, well. All of this you know, and you bury deep, like dead men, but they’re there, the skeletons are there, and you’re always with them.

You’d never tell the story of your friendship with the Shahids for a whole host of reasons—you have your dignity, after all—but among them, you wouldn’t want to seem the unsavory sort of person who might acknowledge, simply in the telling, that people like the Shahids were more compelling, somehow higher on your personal totem pole, than the person to whom you were talking about them. The Woman Upstairs, whose face to the world is endlessly compassionate, would never have such a thing as a personal totem pole. The Woman Upstairs does not aspire in such self-serving ways. She must not appear to have an ugly heart. Who could love an ugly, lonely heart?

Skandar, Sirena, Reza—each of them was, in his or her way, my Black Monk. I had a veritable monastery inside me! Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden, heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I
wasn’t nothing
, that I could be seen for my unvarnished self and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could—that she must, indeed—leave a trace upon the world. If this were so, then I could be an artist, and then it would be allowed. Who would allow it? They would. How would they allow it? I was waiting for a sign.

Traces, signs, I hoped for some evidence of what I might have meant—of the fact that I meant at all. Finally, a few short months ago, I got it. Finally, all the elucidation at once, the confirmation of what I meant to them. Yes, you hovered so very long in Doubt, embracing Doubt, teasing yourself with it; and then suddenly, at last you knew.

4

This is what’s most surprising about life, really: the most enormous things—sometimes fatal things—occur in the flicker of an eye, the tremor of my mother’s hand. Sometimes you don’t even grasp an event’s importance for a long time because you can’t believe something momentous could possibly appear so nondescript.

Aunt Baby died, mercifully and suddenly, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. Never plagued by ill health, which had been her great, spinsterly anxiety, she lived long enough to see the new president inaugurated and then some, and to hope, in her piety, that God had a handle on the economy. In her careful frugality, she didn’t die penniless, and although her estate was divided among six of us—Matthew, me, and those distant cousins in the photos—there was still, after the depressed sale of her Rockport condo and after taxes, a tidy sum of more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Matthew and Tweety said the inheritance was for the brat’s college fund—the sensible couple, making the sensible choice. My father got no money, but was made the earthly custodian of two large and unlovely Victorian paintings of cows in the fields, ornately framed, and a silver tea set.

The condo was sold in April, and as soon as I received my aunt’s legacy, I made a radical choice: I decided to take a year’s leave from Appleton. Money in the bank, middle age on the way—I’d turned
forty-two already by then, and was looking at forty-three. I was getting arthritis in my left knee, which made running harder, and I’d started to dye my hair just to look normal. I needed glasses for the print on the aspirin bottle. All in the space of a couple of years. Death knocking. The sniper on the roof. I’d almost renounced bearing a child of my own, but this didn’t mean I didn’t
want
children. I’d renounced, I thought, once and for all, the fantasy of being an artist of any renown, but I would still have said I hoped to make art; and I suppose I thought that time, or rather a lack of it, was my impediment.

I’d also been teaching at Appleton for ten years, an entire decade, and even Shauna McPhee was moving on (although not, in her case, willingly: the parental revolution against her, which had never subsided, had finally moved the functionaries at City Hall, who had, in turn, moved her). So my official reason was that after long service, I needed a short break, to recharge the batteries, rediscover the world; and the perceived reason was surely that I needed to weather some small midlife crisis—oh, Nora, she’s worked hard, sweet woman, so patient with the kids, and she’s had to contend with a lot, you know? And the official real reason was that I needed time and space properly to give my art a try, because I hadn’t been able to manage it, these past few years, on top of the demands of school and my aging father; and the secret real reason was that I was miserable, because even all these years later, every night when I lay down to bed, I still clung to the shreds of my Shahids—so little to keep me going, a few perfunctory e-mails and that one sighting, each memory worn threadbare from overuse—and in clinging, I still hoped for the richer and more fulfilling and more wondrously open and aware existence that so briefly had seemed possible. Well beyond forty now, I wanted genuinely to give myself the chance at that life, although I didn’t know, really, what it might entail.

I signed up for a sculpture class at Mass Art, starting in September, and for a pottery class in a studio off Monsignor O’Brien Highway, because I thought perhaps I needed to explore new media. I ordered an expensive digital camera off the Internet, so I could explore photography on my own. I was the teacher planning a curriculum for a single pupil: myself. I ordered books from the library—Emmet Gowin, Sally
Mann, shocking, wonderful, intimate photographs—aware as I did so that I had no family to photograph, aside from my father, or Matthew and Tweety and the kid, who didn’t count.

The most dramatic thing I did was to book a summer trip to Europe. Why not? I didn’t ask my dad if he’d like to go with me. I jokingly suggested to Didi that she might come along—without Esther and Lili, it went without saying—and she laughed. “How’re you going to meet any guys if you’ve got me in tow? I’m like the opposite of a beard: fake lesbian lover as potential mate deterrent!”

“It’s not about meeting anybody. What a ridiculous idea.”

“Well, it ought to be,” she said. “It’s about time.”

“About time for what?”

“You’re in your prime! Like Miss Jean Brodie. Remember her? It doesn’t last forever, so don’t waste it.”

“Waste it?”

“Nora Adora, do I have to get blunt with you? When was the last time you even had a fling?”