The Woman Upstairs (9 page)

My mother was only two years dead, that fall. It felt like an immense distance then, but now, in time’s accordion folds, the two
events—my mother, unable even to move her head, wheezing in her elephantine breathing machine, sliding her eyes to the light, then closing them a final time; Reza at the supermarket, leaning over the bench to laugh at my spilled apples (who has upset the apple cart? I have, I have!)—seem almost contiguous. As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life’s passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar. My mother left here for an unknown there; and then Reza and Sirena and Skandar came to me.

9

The studio Sirena had found was deep inside Somerville, in a former warehouse, all brick and windows, abutting a largely disused railroad track and separated from it by a black stretch of garbage-strewn tarmac and a high chicken-wire fence, in which fluttered the tattered remnants of plastic bags, like flags of the apocalypse. Next door stood a functioning factory that produced millions of tiny Styrofoam beads, a particularly noxious undertaking that seemed destined to cause horrible cancers in those who worked there. Its chimneys blew clouds of chemical fumes into the neighborhood air, on account of which the insides of the studios harbored a lingering tang of melted plastic.

The building was a sprawling four-floor warren of such studios, some tiny, carved up by plywood and nails, and some vast, unspoiled. At the stairwell of each floor hung a huge mottled door, on rollers, like a giant’s door, sealable with a great metal bolt. These doors gave me the creeps: they, the creaking floors, the padlocked cubicles, enclosures hiding who knew what—possibly paints or jigsaws or sewing machines, but just as possibly acid baths or ax murderers. Who knew what violence could take place down the alley by the train tracks on a Sunday night? Even by day, the building looked abandoned.

Following Sirena and the toothless real estate agent to the third floor—I’d never seen a realtor so battered by life as Eddie Roy, a lanky, greasy-haired man in his late sixties, only two steps from the homeless
shelter—I felt nothing but misgivings: the whiff of burning plastic with an undertone of mouse, or rat; the trippable hollows in the steps from decades of trudging feet; the dim, high bulbs shedding light like dust in the corridors; the spatter and rattle of the rain upon the windows and the windows in their ancient sockets, surely like the rattling of the agent’s teeth before they fell—it was all of a bleakness unimagined. I marveled that Sirena didn’t seem to notice, and more than that, she seemed actually excited, her crinkled eyes glittering.

“I hope you’ll like it too,” she confided, her hand again lightly on my arm, apparently unaware of my discomfort. “It is perfect.”

And once Eddie Roy fumbled the padlock at the end of the dank hall, I could see straight away that she was right. It was—even for two; especially for two—perfect. The space, L-shaped, was vast, the ceilings easily fourteen feet high. It had windows, huge, paned, smeared, wet windows, along both sides, windows with deep ledges and loose sashes—but somehow, in this room filled with white light even on that dark fall Saturday, unlike in the scary stairwell, the rattling sounds seemed alive, exciting, like the building breathing. The wood floors, scored and beaten, were beautiful, big enough to skate on. A filthy utility sink hung in the corner of the L, a long paint-spattered metal table beside it. Aside from this, the room, like an enormous, perfect incubator, was empty.

“Yes” was all I could say, and Eddie Roy grinned, revealing his dark gums.

The rent was a stretch, but I didn’t pause to worry about it then. I didn’t stop to question why Sirena wanted me there—that hers was quite possibly a mercenary invitation, a matter merely of halving the cost; that she may even have imagined our paths would barely cross. I saw the light and the space and felt the auguries gathered for me, to bring me back to life, back to my art. I didn’t ask myself if I needed the studio, if I would use it; I blocked from my mind the filthy alley, the echoing stairwell, the smell. All I could think was “Yes, yes, yes.”

We signed the lease by five o’clock, at Eddie Roy’s cinder-block office next to the chicken shop on Highland Avenue. It was again dark, and drizzling still, but we stood hatless on the pavement for a bit, each holding our new keys, and Sirena gave me a sudden hug, in the course
of which I took in a mouthful of her hair, and had awkwardly to disentangle myself.

“For me,” she said, “I know this will change everything. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even make Wonderland here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s my next project. Before we knew we would come here. I was planning it for months. Alice through the looking-glass, you know?”

“Through the looking-glass—like being in the Fun House. I know,” I said.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll be doing.”

That night I went to dinner at Didi and Esther’s place in Jamaica Plain. Didi and I had been in art classes together in college, but we really became friends years later when I moved back to Boston. She was—she is—almost six feet tall, Amazonian, but soft. Her skin has no lumps or pores and her hair is like an amber cloud. She wears crimson lipstick. When I was at the Museum School, we’d walk around the pond together and play pool until late at the Milky Way and complain about our lives. Recently divorced from her college boyfriend, she was working at the BU radio station, but she chucked it in when she turned thirty-one to open a vintage clothing store on Centre Street, not far from the animal hospital. She met Esther—who is very small and high-strung, with curly dark hair and eyes like a pug—when Esther was trying on fifties party frocks to wear to her brother’s wedding in Colorado. When Didi first spoke of her, she said Esther looked like Betty Boop. Esther is an oncologist at MGH, a breast cancer specialist, and it always surprises me how happy they are together because they are so different. Didi is more comfortable in her skin than anybody else I’ve ever known, and I’ve always felt that being friends with her makes me closer to the person I imagine myself to be: someone who doesn’t care about all the wrong things, like money or fashion or status, but who ferrets out the genuinely interesting. And while I’ve grown to be very fond of Esther, who is spiky and crossish in a bracing way, I
do think she cares about that stuff, even cares a lot, whereas I wonder whether Didi is even really aware of it.

When she lived on her own, Didi’s apartment was decorated with posters from Godard films and chili pepper Christmas lights around the mantelpiece, and all the furniture had been salvaged and restored by her own hand. Her coffee table was a giant wooden bobbin for telephone cables that she’d picked out of the dump and painted bright orange. But once she and Esther set up house, all of that was gone. It was all Saarinen this and Eames that, stainless steel and granite, and their condo was beautiful but it looked like a boutique hotel, like nobody really lived there.

At least once they had Lili, she made it messy. Lili is their daughter, adopted from China. She’s tiny, like Esther, and round-faced, with skinny brown limbs; and quiet, but naughty, in a good way. Lili was about four then, and still young enough to love her mothers’ friends as if they were her own, and when I came in the door she grabbed me by the hand and said, “Come see my world, Nora! I’ve made a world!”

I spent the evening’s first twenty minutes cross-legged underneath a table on their enclosed summer porch, helping Lili feed gingerbread and cold tea, served in perfect tiny china cups, to an array of stuffed animals: an elephant in a Batman costume, a rabbit, a duck, even an iridescent armadillo. With Didi’s help, she’d hung a paisley blanket over the table to make a tent, and the light filtered through purple and speckled. She’d denuded sofas and beds of cushions and pillows to pad it out, and had propped up a couple of framed photographs—Didi and Esther at a party; Esther pushing Lili on a swing in winter—against the table legs. She’d dressed her animals in colorful scarves and positioned her dolls so they looked in animated conversation.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili’s world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena’s installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but really what you wanted was for someone else—ideally, a grown-up, because a grown-up matters, has authority, but is also not the same as you—to come and see, to get it, and thereby, somehow, to get
you;
and all of this, surely, so that you might ultimately feel less alone on the planet. And what was also true was that I was happy to be in Lili’s hidden lair—more than happy, I was honored—but after a few minutes I wanted to get
out of it. I wanted to lift the blanket and climb back into the room and stretch my limbs and leave the dollies and their crumbs and their thimble-cups of cold tea (with milk, if you please) behind, and go back to my grown-up friends and their conversation. For fifteen of the twenty minutes I stayed in there, I was humoring her.

And this was why, I told myself, I didn’t want to show my art to anyone, even though showing it had always, from the beginning, been a large part of the point: I didn’t want to show it because I didn’t want to be humored. I didn’t want anybody to feel they had to say nice things, or say anything at all, because I could tell when they were fake, I could always tell, and I hated it. I didn’t want anybody to tell me it wasn’t any good—just as Lili would have been shocked if I’d said such a thing to her: these were not the terms of her world at all—and I didn’t particularly want anyone to tell me it
was
good, either. I just wanted to be
got
, and I didn’t trust that I would be.

Only now—and I felt for my new key in the pocket of my pants—now I’d set myself up to be got or not got regardless. Sometimes Sirena would be in the studio when I wasn’t there. She’d be able to look at, to touch, my dioramas, to snoop and pry. And would it be better if she chose not to? It seemed like leaving my body—or maybe my spirit?—on a table in a room for anyone’s scrutiny, as if it were just a thing.

“Come out now, Nora.” Esther lifted the fringed blanket, and all I could see of her against the light was her pug eyes. “Time to join the land of the living. Supper’s ready.”

Lili protested.

“Yours too, little miss. Time to come out. You have till the count of three to wash your hands.”

Lili scrambled. Since she was small, it was easy for her. Esther gave me a hand getting up, and patted me on the back when I stood, as though I’d accomplished something.

“You seem very jolly.” Didi ladled the fish stew into bowls. There was macaroni and cheese and carrot sticks for Lili, who swung her legs against the chair and chewed with her mouth open before the
grown-ups had even been served. I quelled my teacherly impulse to offer correction.

“I am jolly,” I said. “I’ve rented a studio.”

“Wow.” Didi put down her ladle, sat back in her chair. “That’s news.”

“But what do you need it for?” Esther realized as soon as she said this that I might take it the wrong way, which I did. “I mean, don’t you have a studio at home?”

“I have a second bedroom,” I said. “This is a studio.”

“That’s fantastic.” Didi leaned forward again and passed the bowls around. “I think that’s fantastic.” She looked at me properly. “So tell us how this came about. It seems … quick? Maybe that’s why E is surprised.”

So I told them about Sirena—first about Reza, and then about Sirena. I didn’t say anything about how she gave me butterflies, how our meeting had seemed full of import, how exhilarating it had been to discover that she, too, made art—I didn’t say any of it, but I had the strange experience while telling the story of hearing my own voice talking, and I was aware that I couldn’t modulate it properly, that my volume and my intonation were awry—too loud, too eager, too much information. It was like the moment after a few glasses of wine when you hear yourself slur your words and you wonder whether anyone else is paying sufficient attention to have noticed.

This time, though, I didn’t have to wonder. When Esther took Lili to bed, Didi summoned me out onto the balcony and lit a joint. The rain had finally stopped, but all the downspouts were dripping. The trees in the yard glistened in the dark.