The Woman Upstairs (37 page)

I shrugged.

“I’m not trying to push domesticity down your throat. I’m not saying what I’ve got is for everyone. Not what you want—totally cool. But you’ve got to want
something
.”

“What if I don’t?”

“If you
say
you don’t, then you’re either lying to yourself or you’re lying to me. Because I know you for a wanting sort of person.”

“How about a Buddhist conversion? Like you’ve wished upon me all these years?”

“Buddhist bullshit. A Labrador puppy is more of a Buddhist … Nora, promise me it’s not still the same old?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Buddhist, no, obsessive, yes. I know you too well, and I know you hoard things under your rock to nibble away at when you’re alone. So I’m asking, no bullshit, is it same old, same old?”

I loved her for asking. She was making the gesture of a true friend, and in life you don’t get many. But I laughed with an insouciance I hadn’t known I could fake, and I said, “You are one crazy lady. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

The whole summer trip to Europe—almost three weeks of it—was really organized around Paris. Around being in Paris when they were going to be there. Obviously I wasn’t planning to spend three weeks in Paris—it was only five days. But they were headed off to Italy in the first instance, to Sirena’s family, and then, after a brief stop back at home, on to Beirut for a spell. Reza got out of school at the end of June and they were leaving at once; so I made sure to time my visit to the City of Light to coincide with them.

I hadn’t been there since my management consultant days, an extravagant, dreamlike distant time when I’d stayed at the Royal Monceau and ordered room service, a breakfast I still remembered for its glinting heavy pewter pots and its stiff white cloth, the table rolled silently across the carpet and set up facing the window, as if it were my own private restaurant. This would be a more modest experience: I’d booked a single room in a three-star near St. Michel, named (one hoped eponymously) the Plaisant Hotel, the twenty-first-century revamp of a Jean Rhys hotel, I could tell from the website, with narrow corridors and creaking floors and faulty plumbing, and the gleam of sage-colored paint on walls that had once been wrapped in smoke-infused crimson damask wallpaper.

Was my trip memorable and extraordinary? Need you ask? I can rave about the vastness of the spaces on the road to Oban, or the sun-filled mist hovering above the earth in the early morning at Grasmere. I can describe my sweet hotel in Bloomsbury with, in my room, the smallest bathroom—and surely the most minute sink—known to man. I can bore you with photographs of Big Ben or the Bay of Naples, and feed you on tidbits about Nelson and Emma in love, or about Anne Boleyn in the Tower. I purchased souvenirs unthinkingly to show my third-grade class, only to remember I would not have, this year, a third-grade class. I chatted with a family from Milwaukee at the next table while I ate Welsh rarebit at Fortnum & Mason, and I bought four
hopelessly impractical gilt-rimmed champagne glasses in Portobello Market, that I then had to lug around Europe in a specially wrapped box with a handle, as though they were eggshells, or a bomb.

Early on, in the B&B in Grasmere, lying in bed looking with one eye closed at the sprigged wallpaper and the pale blue sink in the corner of the room, I thought to myself that I could lie there all day and no one would mind. I could fib and say I’d seen Wordsworth’s house, without seeing a single thing, without doing more than buying a postcard from the gift shop—but probably I wouldn’t need to lie, because who would ask me? What finally got me moving was not my own desires—I had none, except to get to Paris—but rather the thought that I might miss my cooked English breakfast, prepared by Mrs. Crocker with her lacy apron and her appraising eye; and that should I not get out of the house relatively promptly, that same Mrs. Crocker would appear at my door in a different apron, the housekeeping apron, with a dustpan and brush and a bucket full of solvents, and would chase me, sourly, from the room. My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of upstairs, but you can’t take the upstairs out of her.

Naples was marginally better, because I could muster some genuine will for the sites, and because the crumbling, garbage-filled city itself frightened me, and fear is a strong emotion and one I’ve had much truck with in my life. When I came out of an empty museum on the hill and had to walk alone across the empty park surrounding it, I had to ask myself whether my palpitations and breathlessness were caused by genuine risk to my life, or whether I was merely indulging a habit in the hope that my fear would keep me safe. Safe! When you’re over forty, nowhere is safe. An airplane is suddenly the safest place in the world. Death and his zealous minions—dread, despair, disease—can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you. Sirena had Skandar, and Skandar, Sirena; as my mother, I now understood, had had my father, humble protector though he might be; and he had her. Matthew had Tweety; Didi had Esther; Aunt Baby, of course, would have had her Lord—because although not strictly a Bride of Christ, she’d lived with Him most of her life. And I, charging across the empty park in the late afternoon with my fists clenched, had only myself.

Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.

My Plaisant Hotel proved indeed wonderfully pleasant, tucked in a short cul-de-sac on the less fashionable side of St. Michel, facing a walled garden. Stucco-fronted, its facade was embellished by riotous purple and blue and red window boxes, and looked almost English from the outside. My room faced the street, with those wonderful old doors (that egg-shaped handle that moves a long metal bar up into its socket: a mechanism simultaneously antique and of a futuristic simplicity) that open almost onto the void, or rather, onto a void from which you are protected by the most delicate of wrought-iron balconies. When I entered my room and put down my bags and opened the windows wide, I reverberated with the joy of being in Paris. My hotel had no room service, I overlooked a view of parked cars and scrubby yard rather than the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, but it didn’t matter: the particular pitch of the police sirens was to me exotic; as were the burning rubber smell in the subway and the tawny gold of the monuments’ stone in the sunlight. All the clichés of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not clichés; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha’s Vineyard in my youth—whatever it is, each time it is familiar and new at once, an overturning.

And Paris, well: the young North African man at the hotel reception smiled at me in a conspiratorial way; the waiter in the tourist café in St. Michel where I stopped for a drink that first afternoon—an expensive beer, but a great view of Notre Dame—asked me why a beautiful young woman like myself was traveling alone. Bathetic bullshit, but winning—a different set of rules, a different Fun House, and one more palatable maybe just for being unknown. But it made me wonder again how much of what I loved about the Shahids was their foreignness,
and their impermanence—whether I’d all this time longed for them simply because I couldn’t have them. After so much time, they were all figment now.

The difference is that they live and breathe. My mother no longer does, nor Aunt Baby, even; and there is no place on this earth that they can be found. Whereas on the evening of my second day in Paris, as agreed by e-mail and confirmed by telephone (did I feel a twitch, a frisson, at the sound of her voice? Or did I hear a different voice, now, in my head, and ultimately prefer it?), I took a taxi over to their fashionably seedy neighborhood behind the Bastille.

I’d spent a lot of time imagining their place, and inevitably the reality did not correspond. The building was on the wrong side of the street. Its entrance hall was smaller than I’d expected. But then the elevator, old-style, with the accordion grille, was exactly as I’d pictured, and consequently too small for me to brave. I walked up four flights, and then there they were—no, there was Sirena, in the doorway, her crow’s-feet more pronounced, her shoulders more four-square, and although it took me a few minutes to put my finger on the change, her hair all black now—enough, she’d thought, of the aging experiment; and she looked, ironically, older for it. Maybe she just looked older, plain and simple.
We’re at that age
, as they say and I now say also. Years older than I am, she’s perilously close to fifty. She said all the right things, as did I, and we hugged, and I waited for my heart to open. But as she led me into their apartment, the thought that came unbidden was: Here is someone that I used to love. Or even: Here is someone who resembles, to a large degree but imperfectly, someone that I used to love. I didn’t want to feel, of all things, wistful and melancholic: I had a case against these people, who had packed up my soul along with their blankets and books, and had kept it without caring for it all these years. A case against these three Black Monks who had prophesied for me—all but promised—a future which had not begun to come to pass; and who, with their promises in hand, had abandoned me as if it were a mere lark—I had a case—

But who could have a case against that laugh? Or against Skandar’s long-lost smile, as if he’d been dropped by parachute into his own living room and didn’t quite know where he was … He, too,
seemed genuinely pleased to see me—how long had it been?—and after we embraced, he held me by the wrist for a moment, almost unthinkingly—as if, I thought, Sirena were not in the room and as if, oddly, I were a child. Then Reza came out of his room, somewhere in the back of the apartment: in this big-footed and gawky manlet, his features oddly proportioned in the way of boys almost pubescent—a pimple, yes, perhaps even two, upon his chin—I strained to see my perfect child. His eyebrows were now frankly heavy, his voice croaking; but his eyelashes, and his eyes: yes, there he was entirely recognizable. Not in manner, though: you’d think he’d never known me, or else that it was he who’d kissed my bare breasts among the aspirin flowers—he was that bashful, that awkward, glancing up like a coy maiden, shuffling and rustling his enormous hands and feet, adult puppet pieces on his boy’s body. His curls were longish, in fashion: I noticed this. I knew he’d be the boy the girls dreamed of. I’d known that from the moment I first saw him. He showed such palpable relief when his mother told him to go do his homework, that we’d catch up at dinner, that I had to let him go happily. As his door shut, Sirena rolled her eyes—in that moment, more typically motherly than I’d ever seen her. She said, “Homework? What do you think, it’s a nonsense. At this age, it’s all Facebook, all the time. From video games to Facebook—for boys, this is the socialization process.” She snickered. “I’m thinking of how to make an artwork really to say something about this. But it’s difficult … Nora, my friend, a cocktail? A wine? What would you like?”