The Woman Upstairs (38 page)

And she was off—we were off—and it was familiar, but it was also different. Just as Reza had trained her into motherhood, day after day, over years, so, too, she’d been trained, since last we’d spent time together, to think of herself as an artist of importance in the world; and it was obvious, somewhat wearingly, even when she was supposedly being lighthearted about her work.

A scientist acquaintance once explained to me that to attain nuclear fusion—which would apparently solve the global energy crisis—you have to replicate exactly the conditions of the birth of a star. This is obviously very hard, and very rare, and very fleeting. And I realized,
in the Shahids’ living room, that I’d fallen in love not only with a particular configuration of people, but with that particular configuration in a particular moment in their lives and in mine. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were myself Peter Pan, ever unaltered: the minute Wendy starts to change, the idyll is over. Each of them was different, even though they were much the same. Their configuration was different. You couldn’t replicate what had been.

That didn’t make it worthless. We were friends. I still envied them their family; and I felt my blood swell with tenderness at certain gestures, certain expressions, tics that carried me back. But I left—with the promise that Sirena and I would have lunch, or at least breakfast, on Thursday (I was returning to Boston on Friday)—thinking I’d been wrong to imagine there’d been a breach of trust, flushed with the warmth of their charm and at least a bottle of wine, touched by the supper Sirena had prepared—

(“Oh,” I said, “you remembered! How sweet!”

“Remembered?”

“The first time you had me over in Cambridge? This is the stew you prepared.”

“Imagine! I’d completely forgotten. I’m afraid it’s just a sign of how limited is the …”

“Repertoire,” said Skandar, winking at me; and I couldn’t tell whether the wink said that he, too, remembered that evening; or whether it just agreed that together we would tease his wife.)

—touched by the details Reza recalled from his long ago Cambridge classroom—painting—the twins—times tables. I looked, at the dinner table, for the trace of the scar by his eye: when he leaned into the light, I thought I could glimpse the faintest of white lines, though I couldn’t be wholly sure. I still loved them, if differently. I felt full of forgiveness, and sanity. But not hope. As I fell into my pleasant low bed in my pleasant room in my pleasant hotel, I was conscious in my semiconsciousness of feeling the opposite of hope—which would be despair. I was clear, right before slumber took me off, that this was why I’d chosen a light, bright, post—Jean Rhys, anti–Emily Dickinson, never Virginia Woolf hotel: because everything about its pleasantness insisted, inarguably, No Suicides Here.

I had all this anger. Years of it, decades of it, my very body full
of it, bloody with it. And I’d lumbered across the Atlantic to lay it all down upon a doorstep. Almost like blackmail: love me absolutely, or take this shit from me. I had the mother lode. Yes, the term is apt. It was to be assuaged or offloaded. And yet, while I left their home feeling welcomed, even loved, it was a different, smaller sort of love than I’d wanted—not so much a glacier or a fireworks display as a light shawl against an evening breeze. Recognizably love, but useless in a gale.

5

There’s so much to see and do in Paris. So much that it’s a wonder I saw it. A wonder that I saw that I could see it. But for so long I’d trained myself to read and find the references to Sirena and Skandar, that it would have been a shock of another kind had I missed it. I had a lot of time, really, in Paris: five whole days. I arrived on Monday, was leaving on Friday. We’d had dinner on Tuesday. I was to call Sirena on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. On Wednesday, I got up and descended the stairs to the breakfast room—a sweet atrium, with pots of flowers in the corners and an electric fountain against the wall, a naked cherub with an overturned ewer, trickling water into a shell-shaped bowl—spectacular, cheerful kitsch—with my
Pariscope
in hand. It listed everything—films, gay nightclubs, poetry readings, gallery shows.

Ignoring my zealous spread of baguette crumbs over cloth, clothes and newsprint, I flipped through beyond the museum listings to the private galleries. Here was a city, like New York and unlike Boston, where a private dealer might have an exhibit of Picasso lithographs. Or where you could see Robert Polidori’s enormous Chernobyl photos, up for sale at over 20,000 euros apiece. It was half as a lark that I looked for Sirena’s name—she didn’t have any major installations at present, she’d told me over supper: her next was a commission for a group show at the Serpentine Gallery in London the following spring, on the
theme of rebirth and renewal. But there she was, a listing at a gallery in the 7th, a show open only for a few more days. A show titled
After the Fall: The Wonderland Tapes
. Here, without the installation itself, would be the videos she’d made at, or in, the installation, to get people to respond to the responses to her work.

It seemed a favor to her to go to see them—the videos, as far as I was concerned, were the least interesting part of her art; although I knew important critics disagreed with me—and I was aware that if I hated them, I might just lie and pretend I didn’t know about them. Credit to her modesty, I thought, that Sirena hadn’t told me about the show; or perhaps credit to her now arrogant grandeur: perhaps she thought the videos were too trifling to bother with? Either way, I’d go out of my own curiosity, pure or impure, and would see what I thought. If it felt like spying on her life—how little it was, compared to all the Google Alerts I’d assiduously studied, all the details I’d hoarded and treasured as if she’d told me of them herself, as if we were in the kind of regular contact that close friends ought to be.

I decided to do the Louvre that morning, and then the Musée d’Orsay, and then to make my way back on foot through the Quartier Latin toward my hotel. It was neither forced nor peculiar to pass in front of the Galerie Werther—I could almost chance upon it, with that itinerary in mind. Certainly she couldn’t accuse me of having gone out of my way.

The day was hot, and the museums thronged, the visits grueling. The only respite came in the wing of the Louvre that houses Napoléon’s apartments, full of brocaded textiles and gilded furniture, rooms of china and silverware of no interest to anyone (including me) and, as a consequence, all but empty. I made the mistake of having lunch late, near the Musée d’Orsay on an abandoned street, in a hushed restaurant astronomically priced, where in shock I ordered only a starter, a tiny puff pastry with a tablespoon of creamed chicken inside and a watercress garnish; which perhaps was insufficient sustenance for the full-on Grand Central–like mill of the second museum. Somehow, I felt I had to see as much as possible—who knew when I might return to Paris?—and so I forced myself into the crowded narrow corridors and craned my neck to peer at paintings, blocked by the audio-guide set, a mass that drifted slow and imperturbable as oxen through the galleries.

It was all a bit much. When I came out, I should have stopped in a pastry shop for an éclair, or at least a restorative coffee. But I was daunted by the Frenchness of it all, couldn’t face waffling to the server in atrocious French, or lapsing, to their triumphant disdain, into my American English. I was shaky on my pins, walking the streets, finding the distances farther than I’d anticipated. All of this I explain—why? In order to excuse, or temper, what I then felt, which would have been dramatic regardless, but was surely intensified by my vulnerability just then.

Galerie Werther was on a trendy street parallel to the Seine, a few blocks in from the river but below the Boulevard Saint Germain. The sidewalks were lively in the late afternoon, though not anything like the museums; yet the gallery was very quiet, empty but for an etiolated young man in a black shirt and black jeans, who gave me only a nod as I came in. The room had lower ceilings than I would have imagined, and was smaller. But it was spare, and white, and it had a blue poured concrete floor, and seemed every bit the sort of gallery one would expect for a star.

There were six video screens—framed and back-lit, flat screen, very chic—hanging on the walls. I was looking, in part, for my Appleton darlings, for my lost paradisiac year. The videos didn’t seem to have any particular narrative order, or any particular shape or duration. One seemed to be stills, cobbled together; another, in which four random patrons of the crowded exhibit started twirling in front of Sana’s video, was clearly scripted, and reminded me of an ad for cell phones, filmed at Heathrow, that I’d seen on YouTube. For each of the screens there were headphones on a stick, and you could listen to one of three soundtracks—each incongruous, sometimes funny. I was thinking, almost begrudgingly, “She’s good. She’s very good at this—whatever this is.”

I saw my video last. It was on the back of a column in the middle of the gallery, so at first you didn’t even know it was there. From afar, it looked grainier, less professional than the others, more like a 1980s tape, with that slightly titillating quality of spontaneity, of the unexpected find.
I could see, too, as I approached, that it was one of only two videos marked with a red dot, which meant—as I knew from the gallery sheet I’d picked up at the door—that the edition was fully sold out. There were five copies of each video for sale; and of this one, no more.

As I got closer, I realized that what I saw was not the same Wonderland as in the other videos. In addition to being a grainier image, the setting itself was partial, unfinished, differently lit. It was indeed a Wonderland I knew: our Somerville studio. My heart lifted. I thought I’d see Reza, as he’d been, running boisterously among the aspirin flowers. Maybe it hadn’t been entirely ruined, after all, by my shrieking intervention? I thought I’d see Chastity and Ebullience wrapping themselves in swaths of Alice-blue cloth, tripping and falling on top of each other, or even Noah, picking the flowers, picking his fight with Reza—and then I was close enough to see what the video actually showed. And then, you see, I couldn’t help it: I lost my breath. I couldn’t breathe. My vision closed in like a tunnel, and then I couldn’t see anything at all.

The young assistant had to manhandle me, which was for us both a grave humiliation. He didn’t even bother speaking French—clearly my clothes, or my shape, my general New England sensibleness, screamed “USA”—and he kept saying, “Are you okay, madame? You are okay, madame. Are you okay?” He pulled his own chair out from behind the desk and had me sit in it. He gave me water. He suggested that I put my head between my knees. He proved more practical on all fronts than his aspect might have suggested, but I could also tell that he was annoyed by me, that I seemed to him like some stray off the streets, come in to foul his pristine temple to Sirena’s art. Heaven forbid that her temple should be fouled!

And yet this was what the video showed, for all the world to see: the fouling of Wonderland, by none other than myself. The fact that I was essentially supine in the images, and half undressed, and pretending (not that the viewer would know this) to be Edie Sedgwick, the fact that the etiolated youth could never have guessed that the zealous
masturbator in the Wonderland video was the sensible Merrell-wearing Woman Upstairs who’d stolen his chair and spoiled his calm, didn’t make the facts less true.