The Woman Upstairs (4 page)

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so
scared
!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at
this
, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

When you look at the boy, Josh, who skipped the grade alongside you, and you see him wiping his nose upon his sleeve, and note his physical scrawniness, his chin’s bloom of acne, next to the other tenth-grade boys with broader chests and clear, square jaws, when you observe that he still takes his lunch with his old ninth-grade friends—all of them boys in black T-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say
KISS
or
AC/DC
, all of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as lank as seaweed—you cannot see any triumph in him at all. He seems clearly to have lost, to be lost, to be a loser; because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade, social success—
modest
social success, to be sure, but still—was half the battle. When Frederica Beattie invites you to join her birthday party—a sail on her father’s boat, with six other girls, two of whom are from the most popular set—you feel pity for Josh, who will never taste such nectar.

But wait: nobody ever pointed out that Josh, in his obliviousness, was utterly happy. He’d already taught himself the quadratic formula; he wouldn’t be stymied in any area of academic advancement. In fact, he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neurobiologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal. He
would marry a perfectly attractive, if rather knock-kneed, woman and spawn several knock-kneed, bespectacled nerds, replicas of himself. It will all work out more than fine for him, and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise. He will not know there was a social test; he will not know that he failed it. No, a sail on Frederica Beattie’s father’s boat was an honor that he dreamed not of; and his yen for society, such as it was, was perfectly satisfied by his old clan, now a year behind him. He could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon; and so he remained who he was forevermore. Femininity as masquerade, indeed.

It was in high school that I decided—or, as I would have had it, that I realized—that I would become an artist. Having discovered a set of sympathetic friends who reveled, precisely, in our not-grown-up-ness, a handful of girls and boys who liked to jump in puddles during downpours, or gather on the playground at dusk, as much to swing on the swings as to smoke pot behind the cupola, I found that our group loitered increasingly in the art room after school, with the head art teacher’s tacit blessing. He was a stocky fellow in knee-high hunting boots and leather jerkins, with luxuriant shoulder-length locks and a pointy red goatee: he looked like a refugee from a community theater Shakespeare production, and his name, most wonderfully, was Dominic Crace.

Although the premises were officially closed, he left out supplies for us, cupboards unlocked, paints and brushes by the sink, and even, sometimes, on the worktable, the key for the darkroom. It was within its red gloom that, as an anxious junior, I suffered my first real kiss, a wet-tongued clinch with a senior named Alf, whose many-zippered leather jacket was the most splendid thing about him. I’d long thought him cool, but he proved—it was a surprise to realize this was possible—as awkward as I was, the upshot of which was that the kiss was neither repeated nor ever again mentioned. Our friendship, such as it was—something along the lines of extended family—remained unchanged; it was simply as if the kiss had never happened; and at times, afterward, I’d wonder whether it had.

Thinking ourselves subversive, pining for the decades of adventure that we had, in our belated births, so narrowly missed, we stayed in the room until nightfall and painted posters and slogans on large sheets of construction paper, and taped them up around the hallways.
REVOLT
, they read, in bursts of primary color, and
SHUN COMPLACENCY
, and
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR SOUL IS?
, and
FIGHT MONEY! KISS AN ANARCHIST!

If Dominic Crace was on our side, the janitors were, ironically, in a useful revolutionary lesson, the enemy: they roamed the halls at night charged with tearing down our unauthorized posters before the next morning’s assembly. Our game was to post the best ones in corners where the janitors wouldn’t find them, or not, at least, until they’d been widely appreciated. We thrilled to paint them, thrilled to hang them, thrilled, the next day, to scout for the survivors:
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF
, with the cerulean blue outline of a couple embracing, lasted three days on the inside of the back door to the biology lab;
THEY F
——
YOU UP, YOUR MUM AND DAD
, which was, as a quotation, a contribution from my mother, made it a whole week inside the cupboard door in the gym where the basketballs were kept. But the frankest—SAT
S, SCHOOL ACTIVITIES
:
WHAT
’
S IT ALL FOR
?—was held up in assembly by a frowning Mr. Evers, the principal, who said that while we were all in favor of free speech, slogans of this kind were unhelpful to the fabric of our community and undermined morale. Moreover, he explained, they made a bad impression on any guests. This is not, he said, in the spirit of Manchester High School. He advised that there were many avenues for expression, and that those who needed to express confusion or discontent were welcome to submit articles to the school newspaper for publication. That, he hoped, would be an end to it.

Dominic Crace, who knew full well who we were, didn’t turn us in, nor did he lock up the supplies; and we, who sniggered at Mr. Evers’s pompous speech, were nevertheless like flies in a trap, lured by the delights of Crace’s art room. The following year, my last, all of us who were still at the school—Alf had graduated, along with a few others, leaving six of us seniors, three juniors and a sophomore—signed up for Studio Art.

Our first homework assignment was to draw a bee inside a violin inside a pear. Everybody else took Crace literally, and drew painstaking pencil renditions of these items, ever smaller, like Chinese boxes. Nobody was very good at perspective, but for some this worked out better than for others. I didn’t even try to draw. I went home and built a large hollow papier-mâché pear on a coat hanger form—in two pieces, initially, that eventually I sealed together—and I lined the inside with gold foil. I made a violin out of a matchbox and a picture of an instrument cut from a glossy magazine, and I caught a honeybee out among my mother’s lavender, using the old bug-catcher from the attic. I asphyxiated him in the jar.

Having painted him with shellac, pleasingly, so he glistened, I laid the sleeping bee in the half-open violin matchbox, glued it to the floor inside the pear, and then, with my big brother’s help (he must have been already living in Tucson and home for a visit with Tweety, who eventually became his wife), I rigged up a tiny bulb, like a nightlight, inside the pear before I sealed it, and ran the cord discreetly out the bottom. Crucially, I burrowed a peephole through the pear’s skin, through the papier-mâché flesh, so you could peer inside it; and even now I have to say, when the cord was plugged in and the wall of gold foil illuminated the pear’s hollow core, the glistening sleeping bee in his violin matchbox was oddly beautiful. I decided that it was a russet pear, and painted the outside in beautiful crimson reds, many layers of paint so it was thick and shiny. I worked very hard at it—I
loved
the pointlessness of the enterprise; it gave me such satisfaction, an answer to my earlier posters. This, Mr. Evers, I thought, this is what it’s all for—and when I took it into class and set it up alongside all the pencil drawings, I had the exhilaration of seeing Mr. Crace make a temple of his hands beneath his chin (a temple, mind you, that pulled discreetly at the ends of his devilish goatee) and chuckle aloud.

“This,” he announced, looking around at us one after the other with a flicker of glee that suddenly brought to mind Willy Wonka rather than Petruchio, “now
this
is a work of art.” He paused, bent at the waist and peered in at my bee in his chamber, then straightened and whirled around. “Whose is this? Whose is it? It’s yours? I knew it. Well done, Nora Eldridge,” he said. “Well done, you.”

4

Sirena was an artist—is an artist. A real one, whatever that means. Now she’s even well known, in certain important circles. Even though she lives in Paris, Sirena isn’t French; she’s Italian. This isn’t obvious because her last name is Shahid and her husband’s first name is Skandar, and her son has the same name as the last shah of Iran—not that any of them is remotely Persian. They simply liked the name. Skandar is from Lebanon, from Beirut. Okay, someone in his family was from Palestine before that, but that’s a long time ago now; and at least some part of it, on his father’s side, I think, was from Beirut all along. One part of him is Christian and another part is Muslim, which surely explains a lot about all of it to someone, though not especially to me. Besides which, I wasn’t talking about Skandar, who doesn’t come into the story until much later, but about Sirena, to whom he was—and is—married, who is Italian and an artist.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Sirena was herself from the Middle East, on account of her skin, that fine olive skin, which on her son looked as though he’d been dusted with powder, glaucous almost, but on her elegant bones appeared at once old and young, young because her cheeks were so smooth and full, like fruit. She didn’t have any wrinkles except at the corners of her eyes, and there, spectacular crow’s-feet as if she’d spent her life grinning or squinting into the sun. And she had grooves from the edges of her nose to the corners of her mouth,
but these weren’t wrinkles, exactly, they were expression. Her nose was avian, strong, Italian, I suppose, and the fine skin was pulled tight across it, a little shiny sometimes. There, on its bridge, were dotted a few freckles, like a small spray of sand. She had the eyes, Reza’s eyes, and the fierce black brows, and straight glossy black hair streaked with silver. She wasn’t young—even when I met her, when Reza was eight, she must have been around forty-five; but you wouldn’t have put her age so high. It was in the eyes—the life in the eyes—and the crow’s-feet. Ironically, they made her seem younger.

I should have met her at the Back to School Night at the end of September—the evening on which the parents come to the classroom at dinnertime, having mysteriously disposed of their offspring, and cram themselves into their children’s tiny desks and listen to the teacher expound with infectious enthusiasm on the joys of multiplication tables and the mysterious importance of learning cursive. This presentation is followed by a speech from the principal, Shauna McPhee, in the auditorium, and the requisite tepid, gelatinous pizza and warm soda afterward that we, the beleaguered and by now exhausted teachers, must stay behind to clean up.

If I’d met Sirena then, I would have made the effort to approach her, I know that; but as it was, I met her before, because Reza got beaten up. Not quite true: I’ve always been prone to exaggeration. But he did get attacked, and he did get hurt.

In the third week of school, on the playground after classes on Wednesday, the first truly crisp and autumnal day of the season, three fifth-grade boys ganged up on Reza while he was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or “by his own,” as the children sometimes charmingly put it. First they threw balls at him—not small balls, big ones, basketballs, and not in fun but hard, with vicious aim. “I thought they were playing dodgeball,” said another kid who’d been nearby; but unfortunately nobody proposed the game to Reza, who wouldn’t have known what it was anyway—and then, somehow, things deteriorated further, and one of them, Owen, a large boy and a stupid one, I have to say, having taught him for a year and struggled mightily to be able to promote him at the end of it, grabbed Reza by the collar, hauled him up against a metal pillar and punched him in the ear. He called Reza
“a terrorist” and told him the playground was for Americans. It took a while to get the story clear, and somewhere it involved Owen’s uncle suffering from PTSD following a tour in Iraq; but nothing, frankly, could excuse or explain the whole appalling fiasco.