The Woman Upstairs

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.

“Tell me,” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs and passing the joint over. “What is this actually about, for you?”

“What do you mean?”

She exhaled. “This whole thing, it’s not only about the studio. I mean, it’s fabulous, it’s delicious about the studio. It’s the best decision you’ve made in years. But you’d made up your mind before you went there, hadn’t you?”

I thought for a moment. “I guess I had.”

“So it’s not about the actual studio.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

I shrugged, and laughed. I couldn’t say. There were not words to describe it; and no way, had there been the words, of not revealing too much. Even with Didi, I didn’t want to reveal too much. “I’m excited. Does it matter?”

She took another toke, narrowed her eyes. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”





10





Remember this season. This dinner, this day, the signing of the lease, took place on the Saturday before the presidential election: John Kerry versus Dubya, in Dubya’s Round Two. This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply f*cked, and home also. Two American wars raging—bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars marked by betrayal, incompetence and corruption. Don’t get me started.

We’d had a young woman, a girl really, only twenty-five, come to the school the year before to speak about her NGO—she’d set it up herself, this frilly slip of a thing with her denim miniskirt and her silver-blue eye shadow, she’d lobbied Congress and gotten millions to do it, God knows how, barely out of college, and its purpose, to count the civilian casualties, seemed such a sane and good thing to do. She spoke about it for the kids in a very gentle way, in her high and breathy voice, about how she wanted to help everybody who got hurt, Iraqis the same as Americans, and that if you didn’t keep track, some folks might get forgotten. We had only the fifth and sixth graders go hear her, even so, because her job was counting bodies, basically, and however bright a gloss you put on that, you can’t go frightening the tinies and giving them nightmares. I thought it was pretty brave of Shauna to have her at all, but I guess she was the niece of someone on the school board, and she actually visited three schools that fall before she went away.

I couldn’t see how this kid could count for much, and then a couple of months later she was on the evening news, on CNN, in a headscarf with a clipboard and no eye shadow at all, and she was for real, and sober and impressive and she didn’t even say “like” once, and she was telling terrible stories about the numbers of Iraqis—children, families, old women—whose injuries and deaths were not being officially reported, but she was going door to door with her clipboard and with a dozen others she’d recruited, and they were doing damn good work.

And it was only about four months later that she was in the news again, The New York Times this time, a headline, small, right on the front and a picture on the fifth page, but with the eye shadow again, a picture taken before she went, obviously; and she was there because she and her translator had been in a car following an armored convoy on the infamous road to the airport, and some motherf*cker blew them up with a rocket. And it said in the article (I will always remember this) that the last thing she said, when the soldiers came rushing to help her charred and seeping tender self splayed in the dust by the side of the road outside Baghdad, the last thing she said before she died was “I am alive.” She was twenty-six.

But she was alive, of course, she’d been more alive in that short space than many are in a lifetime; and then she was dead. I took the article to show Shauna, who gets only The Boston Globe, but the news had been in The Globe, too. We didn’t tell the kids, so one or two of them probably still sometimes think of her out there, counting the hurt and the dead, of whom there are still so many and whom she would be counting if she were still alive to count.

That’s what that time was like. And yet, through November, I greeted each morning as though it were spring, as though instead of a daily darkening, both seasonal and societal, we were embarked upon a brilliant new adventure, finding each new day more perfectly illuminated than the last. Which I was.

It was like being eleven, and craving your best friend’s company. If I woke up every morning with such zeal, every leaf or cup or child’s hand meticulously outlined for me like a wonder of nature, bathed in superior light, it was because in my heart I held each day the possibility of a conversation, of adventure, with Sirena. This possibility—often a likelihood—was inextricably bound up with the excitement of the studio, of the pure, bright, drafty, shabby space where we would meet.

She spent entire days there, while I trailed in near dusk, at three thirty or so, when the angle of the sunlight was long and the air powdery, already tinged with night, a bleak and glorious winter light. We’d have coffee: along with jewel-colored lengths of Indian silk that she’d pinned to the walls in her end of the studio, a grubby rug, three small tufted poufs and a tiny Moroccan brass tray table, Sirena had installed a burner on the long table, and had provided an Italian percolator, the heavy octagonal kind that sits upon the stove, and an array of chipped teacups from the Goodwill shop. She had the gift of making things beautiful, and comfortable too, in an easy way, a gift I’d thought of as my mother’s, growing up. I loved that the studio, while still Spartan, gestured in its few furnishings toward an Oriental souk. I even loved, when I went to find it empty, that she’d left dirty cups scattered about, ringed with tarry coffee grounds, and smearily marked by her crimson lipstick; and often a scarf or a sweater forgotten on the floor, as if she were saying to me, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”

I took to bringing snacks—scones from the Hi-Rise, or cupcakes from the then-new shop in Davis Square, a quick stop on Highland Ave on my way to the studio—and she’d break from her work to boil the coffee, and we’d hang out and talk for three-quarters of an hour or so, until she’d stand, quite suddenly, and brush at a few nonexistent crumbs, and say “au travail”—which even with my pitiful French I could understand and came to expect. Then I’d wash the coffee cups and she’d sweep the floor, in two or three brisk strokes, and turn her back to me, retreating to her corner of the L. I, too, would go to my corner, feeling slightly like a dog dismissed to its basket, and turn on my bright lights over the table I’d set up, and, fed on cakes and conversation, I would work, as the night fell around us, until there was only my pool of light and her pool of light and the music from the CD player hovering softly in the vast dark space between us.

At around five thirty or a quarter to six, she’d pack up her gear and go home to Maria the babysitter and to Reza and, notionally, to Skandar, although for months he remained a cipher to me, heard only as the murmur on the cell phone when she spoke quietly and rapidly and, I always imagined, with faint irritation, in French.

I loved working with someone else nearby. It was like being in Mr. Crace’s art room all over again. What I hated—although never straight away—was the time after Sirena had gone.

For a while, I’d be so busy with the scene I was working on that I didn’t notice. That fall I was making a tiny replica of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst bedroom, about the size of a boot box, each floorboard in place, the re-creation of her furnishings exact and to scale. Once I’d made her room, and made her, as perfectly as I could, in a white linen nightie with ruffles, my aim was to set up circuitry so that my Emily Dickinson might be visited, sitting up in her bed, by floating illuminations—the angelic Muse, her beloved Death, and of course my tiny gilded mascot, Joy herself.

This was, I imagined, the first of a series: I wanted to make one of Virginia Woolf at Rodmell, putting rocks in her pockets and writing her final note: my idea was that there would be slides of the river, raging, and sound effects, too; and an actual copy of the handwritten note that would project not onto the diorama wall but out Virginia’s bedroom window, onto our walls outside, so that instead of being small, the words would be huge. In my mind’s eye, they would flicker: the flickering was, to me, very important.

Then there was to be one of the painter Alice Neel, in the sanatorium to which she was sent after her nervous breakdown at around the age of thirty. I wanted there to be an echo, you see, between Emily Dickinson’s spare white room and Alice Neel’s white room, the monastic and the asylum: both retreats, but of such different types. And both the province of women. I even thought about the title of my nonexistent series: A Room of One’s Own? I thought the question mark was the key.

I loved the story of Alice Neel, in part because her life was so hard and bitter but turned out all right in the end, and in part because her art, like mine, was resolutely unfashionable for almost all of her life, and because of that she had to know why she was doing it and why she kept doing it to the last. She was the AFH: the Anti-Fun-House. I was bound to love her for that.

The last diorama I planned was to be the opposite of the others. It was going to be Edie Sedgwick’s room in Warhol’s Factory. Instead of trying to escape the world, Edie sacrificed herself to it. She existed only in the public gaze. Imagine that: a surface, so beautiful, from which all depth has been erased. But then, the photos, their intensity, her vitality—it certainly looks as though a soul was trapped behind those eyes.

Edie was essential. I’d spent a chunk of my adolescence in thrall to Edie Sedgwick, in love with the insect limbs in their black tights, and the giant eyes, and the stares, even though she was already long dead in my day. She was the cool people’s Marilyn Monroe—smaller, faster, brighter, more immediately alive, and more efficiently dead, an anorexic slip of a life, with no more known interiority than a dachshund. Yet if, when I was sixteen and on my way to college, you’d asked me whether I wanted to be Georgia O’Keeffe or Edie Sedgwick, I would definitely have hesitated. And I might have said Sedgwick. She’d defined something, we said back then.

But the point is that I was consumed—in a digressive, obliterating way—by my hypothetical series, and by my Emily Dickinson diorama in the first instance, by its practical minutiae. I had paintbrushes comprised of a single hair, and a loupe like a watchmaker’s that I could attach to my forehead, and I’d spend three days on a miniature replica of the woodcut landscape that hung between the windows in Emily’s bedroom, only to decide, once it was done, that the likeness was poor, and that I needed to begin again.

Hours and hours and hours of dollhouse labor, and I loved it, was lost in it like one of my children. But when Sirena left me, sooner or later I’d look up from my table and realize that I was alone in a tiny pool of light in a great dark room, as if I were myself the figure in someone else’s diorama, manipulated in my own stage set by a giant I could not see. Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption: I’d walk to the windows and peer into the night, trying to make sure I wasn’t being watched; I’d stand at the studio door, listening for movement in the hallways, or in the neighboring rooms. If there were footsteps or clamor, I was reassured if they were loud, as though the faceless were announcing themselves; happier still when there were voices or, as sometimes, a distant radio; but if the sounds were muffled, muted, intermittent, my heart seized, and I feared that the hooded villain of my nightmares was lurking in the stairwell awaiting my departure.

Sometimes I could get over it, force myself back to my table, my Lilliputian world, and lose myself again; but on other evenings—particularly if the weather was silent, no rattling, no rain, no sounds at all but those around me—I’d succumb to my terrors, packing up in haste and banging at top volume through the building, down the hallway, down the stairs and out, always surprised by the softness of the streetlights, the bland calm of the road outside the warehouse.





11





I discovered that I wanted to work, much more than I’d ever realized, but I didn’t want to work alone. The paradox was perfect: I didn’t want to work alone and yet could only do my work alone. What possible answer could there be to my dilemma? Sirena. Sirena was my answer.

I tried, then, on Tuesdays, when the children had science with Estelle at the end of the day, and on Thursdays, when they had PE last thing, to escape to the studio forty minutes earlier. Once I forgot a staff meeting, and got a puzzled rebuke from Shauna: “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Because this isn’t like you.”

“Isn’t it?” I said. “I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Don’t make me worry about you, Nora,” Shauna said, and while she acted concerned I could tell from her tone she meant it. People don’t want to worry about the Woman Upstairs. She’s reliable, and organized, and she doesn’t cause any trouble.

“Never been better,” I said, and meant it also. On those Tuesdays and Thursdays I had almost an extra hour of company while I worked; and Sirena was glad of my presence too, I could tell by the way she gathered her scarves around her and drifted toward me, even if I did no more than say hello. She’d ask about Reza, or about the other children, whose characters she came to know from my stories, or about finding a good local shoemaker, or whatever it was—and we’d be talking then, and also working or preparing to, and we’d have our coffee with the afternoon before us—it was only two thirty, on those days—and I could barely keep from grinning. Who cared about Shauna McPhee?

Occasionally, Sirena would come to my end of the studio and lean over Emily Dickinson’s room. She always behaved as though it were new to her, as though this was something she never did when I wasn’t there.

“It’s really coming along,” she’d say, with an intake of breath, running a tentative finger along a wall’s top edge. Or she’d point to the photos and postcards of the actual room spread out on my table and say, “Wow, you’ve got it exactly” or “How are you going to do that piece, then?”

I’d worried about her judging me, but it never felt that way. It felt as though she was curious, plain and simple, because she was curious about me. Because she liked me. One afternoon when she was passing me my coffee, she put her hand not on my arm but on my hand. “My God, you know, it’s great that you’re here,” she said. “I might go crazy without you.”

“To friendship.” I raised my chipped cup.

“Yes, to friendship.”

“We’re both lucky, you know,” I told her. “This is such a gift for me. Even if I’m getting into trouble.”

“How do you mean?”

I told her about missing the staff meeting, and Shauna’s annoyance. “But it doesn’t matter,” I said, “because I’m here with you.”

And then I felt I’d sounded too eager, too needy. I could feel myself blushing.

“Ah, but it’s different, you see, for you. This is nice for you, but it’s just an extra in your real life, which goes on every day,” Sirena said, looking not at me but out the window, holding her cup beneath her chin as if she were cold. “But for me, I have here in Boston no real life, so this is it. This is everything. Besides Reza and Skandar, of course. Which is why I’m so glad you’re here.”

I could have said a lot of things. I wanted to say that my real life had fewer furnishings than her temporary pretend life, that the mystery of my life was how it could be so much like a highway through the Great Plains, miles and miles of straight and flat with barely even a tree. And now, not merely a tree, but an oasis. I didn’t say this, obviously.

Instead I nodded, looking at her profile silhouetted against the light, and the glimmer of her dark, sad eyes, and I wanted to step forward and touch her the way she touched me, but I couldn’t see a way to do it that wouldn’t be awkward. I guess I’m repressed, or uptight, but I was worried in part because I didn’t know quite what it was that I felt—some intensity of emotion I couldn’t articulate—and I had no idea what it was that she might herself feel, and I didn’t want to be misconstrued or embarrassed. So although I wanted to touch her arm, I did no such thing: I nodded, I smiled, I downed the dregs of my coffee, and as I placed my cup noisily in the sink, I said, “Well, au travail!” using her words, if not her gestures, for the first time.



I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I was in love with her—which I was—but in a romantic way—which I was not. You’re thinking, how would I know whether I was romantically in love, I whose apparently nonexistent love life would suggest a prudish vacancy, uterus shriveled like a corn husk and withered dugs for breasts? You’re thinking that whatever else she does, the Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog, the woman with her class of third graders and her carefully pearly smile—whatever else she manages, she doesn’t have a love life to speak of.

Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you to tell me that I don’t know what love is?

My indifference to Alf’s slobbering first clinch in the Manchester High School darkroom, and my inability to see the point of a husband when I was sixteen, were not, perhaps, an auspicious beginning. But, reader, in my time, I almost married. I can’t quite believe it myself, looking back.

In college, I had boyfriends, yes, in the way that girls who are chiefly popular with girls have boyfriends. For long stretches, I would pine, religiously, monastically even, for someone unrealistic and inappropriate. Then, in between the ranks of the unloving and the ranks of the unloved slipped the stragglers and wanderers against whom I had no defenses. These were my early lovers, the there-and-gone: the Englishman visiting for a semester with his talk of Wittgenstein and his crazed quiff of black hair; my roommate’s brother’s friend Nate up from Harvard for a long weekend, blinking behind his glasses and swigging in the cold from his hip flask of bourbon; or Avi, Joanne Goldstein’s boyfriend from Israel, fresh out of the army, dark-skinned, hairy and muscled, who kicked around Middlebury for the better part of a season, smoking lots of dope and having sex with whomever he felt like, while Joanne was in class or at the gym or wherever she was and apparently not noticing.

In the summer after senior year, by which time I thought I’d never know love, I met Ben. It was August, and hot. We met on Martha’s Vineyard, where I was staying with my friend Susie at her parents’ house, at a picnic on Aquinnah beach, playing volleyball, the sand frying our soles, and he stood out not only because he was tall and lean but because he had about him from the first an air of patient sweetness that he never lost, something almost childlike. He asked me to dinner in Edgartown and picked me up on a borrowed moped, and winding back to Susie’s along South Road after supper, with the high moon and the gnarled fairy-tale trees overhanging the road, I felt with him both safe and capable of adventure. When we came to the open field beyond which you see the sea for the first time, and it was lit by the pewter moonlight and by hundreds of fireflies, like dotted fairy lanterns, he stopped the bike and we perched on the knobbly stone wall, just looking for a while in silence—it was, actually, breathtaking—and then we kissed. I remember sighing, with both pleasure and a sort of resignation, and thinking, “Well, that’s that then.”

Ben was fresh out of college also, from Northern California originally, but moving to New York, so I hopped on the bandwagon and moved to New York too, where I rented an apartment with Susie and another girl from college named Lola, in a greasy tenement at 102nd and Amsterdam, which was not then a particularly pleasant place to live.

Ben lived in Alphabet City, and in the evenings he played in a band. He worked, days, the first year, as a mover, and he got very strong, and I worked as a waitress, and for a while it was all fun, in the way life is fun when it’s provisional. But what seems fun at first can get old quickly, and soon my head hurt and my feet were tired and I found my customers demanding and rude, so I bought a suit with money sent by my parents, and I started interviewing for business jobs, and to my surprise got an offer from this management consultancy, and once something like that was offered, how could I say no?

And then I must have changed. I certainly wasn’t painting any pictures. In those days, the early nineties, art seemed pointless, and it was exhilarating to have money for the first time … I can’t explain it entirely—it’s as if it happened to a different person, and I look back and see who I was then and she looks like nobody I would ever have known. But because I became this person, and because Ben was deeply accommodating and because he loved me, he felt he needed to change, too. I’d say things like, “We’re not kids anymore—it’s time to get serious,” and in time, he signed up for law school at NYU, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you feel it’s time to get serious but have no clue what that might entail. Needless to say, he also packed in the band, which in some way he didn’t need anymore, because he had me in his free time. We were living together by then, in a tiny, dully respectable low-ceilinged postwar box east of Gramercy Park, a no-man’s-land, vibe-wise, a few blocks from the Arts Club but a million miles from any art. I barely looked at art; I thought my plan to become an artist had been a fantasy of the powerless, and that with money of my own—with power!—I had no need of it.

My office was on the thirty-fourth floor; I went everywhere by taxi; I flew on planes and sat in airports and stayed up tapping at my computer late nights in hotels. I was only twenty-five, and owned four pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. I possessed a fancy oversized white sofa and the most expensive comforter money could buy, from Sweden (an item I still enjoy). And when Ben asked me to marry him—over a dinner so rich in a restaurant so elaborate that we were the youngest patrons by twenty years and probably the only ones without gout—I realized—not straight away, but in the weeks that followed, with the diamond bright and heavy on my finger (what use had I for a diamond?)—that Ben the white-collar criminal defense lawyer bored me, sweet though he was, and that I didn’t care about the sofa or the shoes or even the comforter, and that I didn’t even like fancy food, which either made me constipated or gave me diarrhea.

You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs. I had a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it. If I’d married Ben and moved to Westchester (you know, don’t you, that we would have moved to Westchester?), then, years later when my mother got ill, I wouldn’t have given myself over to her as I did, because there would already have been children (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen; and there would have been those jobs, and all the things that went with them, and there would have been Ben, who, guileless as he was till the last, I came to despise for his very malleability, his likeness to myself, almost, and to look upon—quite wrongly, I now see—with contempt.

I don’t know where he is now, more than a decade later, Ben Souter (“My suitor Souter,” I joked in the beginning), but I hope for his sake that he married happily and has bonny children and a big house, and I hope he’s raked in his millions while remaining ever sweet.

Nor was he by any means my last, all those years ago. I don’t need to enumerate them to you—briefly the married man; for much longer, the weary graduate student; the boy ten years my junior who told me—the only person in my life I think actually to say this to me—that I was sexy. This perhaps makes me sound defensive. Which I suppose I am. Because before the Shahids I thought I understood love and what it was and how I felt about it; and they turned it all upside down. The very fact that I can tell you without blinking that I could kill them—that above all I could kill her—says all that needs to be said. Oh, don’t worry, I won’t. I’m harmless. We Women Upstairs are that, too. But I could.





12





In the two weeks before Christmas, two things happened. The first was what I’d feared, in my studio solitude in the dark. I’d been trying to fight my terror, to sit tight through its spasms, and keep working into the evenings at Emily’s diorama. I was working on Emily’s bed, and there was no sound but the knocking of the radiators and the intermittent distant shipboard roar of the furnace igniting, blowing, juddering into sleep again. I’d let the CD player lapse into silence, because I wanted to be sure I could hear any human sounds, and feared that music would muffle them.

And then, as I sanded and whittled in my pool of light, I did hear sounds. The distant tramp on the stairwell, faint and almost hollow, and then footsteps, starting, stopping, ginger footsteps, growing louder, pausing along the corridor—would I catch the rattle of a padlock, the squeak of an unoiled hinge?—and no, the walker came on again, advanced ever closer. The steps, as my nightmare dictated, came to my door. The end of the hallway: nowhere else to go.

I put down my paper, my sanded sticks. My hands hovered over the table, and I was aware from the bowl of silence in the room that I held my breath. I didn’t want to scrape my chair along the floor. I could hear my heart. Did light show under the lintel? Perhaps—but wait: a knock. Not a random knock, a quiet, rhythmic knock, like a secret, or a message. Dum-da-da-dum-dum. And again.

Should I open? Did he know I was there? Did he know who I was? Was the rhythm a sign, or a meaningless fact? Was it someone knocking on the wrong door, or something far darker?

In my flurry, I moved. The chair let out a furious, maiming shriek.

The knock again, louder this time. Again the same rhythm; again twice. An announcement. And then, a rattling of the handle.

What now? What now? So important, my authoritative teacherly voice told me, not to cower like a child; but I picked up my X-Acto knife and checked that the blade was extended.

“Who is it?” I scraped my chair now as loudly as I could, a reversal of strategy, and stomped, in what I hoped was a manly way, toward the intruder. “Who is it?”

The voice on the other side—a man’s—said something I couldn’t grasp. I came up so close to the door that I imagined I could hear him breathing on the other side. He emitted a cough, a smoker’s cough, into which I tried to read an entire personality.

“Who is it? Speak clearly please?” The schoolteacher at last triumphant.

And then I heard her name, pronounced not as I pronounced it, but as she herself did. See-rreh-na. As if by an Italian.

I put the X-Acto knife in my rear pocket—with a mental note to remove it before sitting down—and fiddled with the bolt and swung the door wide, almost angrily, to try to take the visitor by surprise.

Indeed, for an instant, he looked surprised, like a silent film actor miming surprise, eyebrows aloft and mouth involuntarily agape; and then he recomposed his features into a pleasant, almost ingratiating, smile and extended a hand. “And you must be Nora Eldridge?”

I hesitated.

“Not only my wife’s friend and colleague.” He put the emphasis heavily on the second syllable—col-league—which made him sound both foreign and important. “But also my son’s institutrice. How do you do?”

This was Reza’s father and Sirena’s husband. “You must be—”

“Skandar. Skandar Shahid. How do you do?” He extended a strong, square, hairy hand, even as he stepped forward and I backward into the studio. “Sirena is not here?”

“She left over an hour ago.”

He peered skeptically into the tidied gloom at her end of the room (so he’d been here before), and then back at my circle of eggy light. “And you have the elves’ workshop,” he said, smiling.

“I’m sorry?”

“You are—I just meant you’re like the shoemaker’s elves, hard at work in the night to make something perfect.” He smiled, but did not show his teeth: a gentleman. “And also, what you are making is very small.” Which meant he had also looked at my diorama, and possibly at my sketches too. Which meant that they’d leaned over my table together, or at the least that he’d perused my belongings, my work, in some idle, prurient way, while Sirena put on her coat, or boiled the kettle. Somehow it had never occurred to me that he could have been there.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s small. I concede that.”

“You can see that?” He laughed, and here a glimmer of tooth was visible. “I’m so glad.” He paused. Like his wife, he spoke with an accent, but unlike Sirena’s, his was clipped, tidy. “Shall I make some tea?” He stepped toward the sink, still with his coat buttoned up. His leather shoes, wet and ruined, left dark marks on the floor. I found his proprietary gesture quite surreal.

“Tea?”

“Would you prefer coffee? Sirena is always for coffee, and I, I am for tea.”

“But Sirena isn’t here—she’s gone home.” I must have sounded rude, because he stopped and turned to look at me as though I’d surprised him again.

Have I said that for all I found his behavior unreadable, Skandar Shahid also proved, superficially, to be pretty much my ideal man. He was the sort of man I would have eyed, on the subway or in an airport, and wondered about; the sort of man before whom, had I been seated next to him at a dinner party, I would have felt tongue-tied and bashful; the sort of man—a grown-up—I would always have thought I could never know.

Neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, he had luxuriant dark wavy hair, worn slightly long and now graying, as though he’d stood for a while in a snowstorm. His eyes—but I’d thought Reza’s eyes were his mother’s?—were Byzantine, ovoid, heavily lashed and dark as wells. They were magnified by glasses, but the glasses were somehow discreet, so that what you saw were enormous eyes only. He had pleasingly rounded cheeks, a nose neither bony nor bulbous, a drawing lesson of a nose, and dark lips, slightly pouting. I wanted at once to touch his chin and feel the evening sandpaper of it. I smiled and said, “Sorry. Tea would be great.”

He filled the pot at the sink, turned on the burner, all comfortably with his back to me. “Do you know if there are biscuits?” he asked, rummaging among the coffee tin and tea boxes. “Wouldn’t you like a biscuit?”

“We’re fresh out, I’m afraid.”

“Fresh out?” He turned, amused. “I like that. Fresh in, fresh out. If I’d come earlier, you would have had them.”

“I guess so.”

“So this is what you and Sirena do, eat ‘cookies’ ”—he said the word as if it were foreign, in quotation marks—“and chatter like schoolgirls?”

“I suppose that’s it. This whole studio thing, it’s an excuse to gossip.”

He swiveled his head on his neck like a bird, looking at me from the corner of his eye, and he smirked. “That’s very good. That’s very good.” He seemed to have found a remnant of biscuit of some kind, and nibbled on it. “You are serious, though.”

“Serious?”

“Sirena says you’re serious. This is what matters. Not whether you sell for thousands or know the fancy people. That you are serious is important.”

“Of course.”

“You look serious.” He peered at me, amused, as he handed me my tea. “Milk?”

“No thanks.” I thought for a moment. “Does she sell for thousands, then? Does she know the fancy people?”

“Fancy? What does it mean? Something different to someone different. But yes, she is, she does, whatever it means. She’s started to.” He gave another big, cryptic smile. “In Paris, of course.”

I felt some internal elevator drop in its shaft; what is commonly called a sinking feeling. Somehow, I had contrived not to think about Sirena’s artistic life outside our private world, about its before and its after.

“This is one reason it was hard for her to come this year—for her career, things in the past year or two really started to, to ‘take off’? at home. Exhibits, the best gallery, reviews, you know. There aren’t here the same opportunities … but I told her, find a studio, work, like a retreat, with no distractions. It will be good.”

“And is it?”

He finished his tea, deposited the cup with a flourish in the sink. “It is good. She has found a place, and she has you.”

“She has me?”

“For cookies and chat, a col-league, who is serious too.”

“Right.”

“Like many artists, Sirena, when she is sad, can get very sad indeed.” He looked wistful, but strangely as though this had nothing to do with him. “So we are always happy for her to be happy.” He looked at his watch. “She’s late. For once I’m on time, and she’s late.”

“She didn’t mention that she’d be coming back.”

“We’re going to a film, just together, and we agreed—” He interrupted himself, made a great mime of slapping his forehead. “But we changed. We changed the plan.” Again, the watch; then guttural rumblings of exasperation. “She will already be at the cinema. Can you tell me the fastest way to Kendall Square?”

I tried to give him the simplest possible directions, but had the impression he wasn’t taking them in. His distress seemed genuine enough; but I didn’t trust, as he hurried off down the corridor, uttering politesses as he went, that he’d make it to the cinema on time, or possibly even at all.

As I put away my things for the evening and washed out the cups, I constructed a story whereby he’d come, on purpose, in the hope of meeting me. Not because he wanted to know me for himself, but because he wanted to see who his wife spent so much time with, to get the measure of me. Maybe—wasn’t it remotely possible?—she spoke of me with the same barely contained excitement, the slight breathlessness, with which I spoke of her.

It’s the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they’re lying to you, but as often because they’re lying to themselves.

Sirena, after all, rarely spoke to me about Skandar. I imagined that because she didn’t speak of him, he didn’t preoccupy her thoughts. I understood him to be a given, possibly even an ambivalent given. She talked so openly about her work, and her anxieties and fantasies about it, and about the malleability of different materials, and about her complicated feelings about video. She worried that the fashion for video was affecting her interest in it, both her attraction and her repulsion, which I understood. She said that it was one of the things she admired about me, that I had no truck with fashion, that I followed my instincts with such calm. I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t do otherwise; but I was thrillingly gratified by her praise.

Or she talked about Reza—she loved to talk about him, his escapades, his funny comments, his malapropisms in English (“Maman, what is a doggy dog world?”), stories of his early childhood. She even talked about her own girlhood, the large family of siblings and her tyrannical mother, deaf in one ear since childhood and correspondingly voluble, as if making up for the sounds that didn’t reach her by putting out a great din into the world; and her father, as soft, as she put it, as a Camembert in summer. She talked about how close she was to her youngest brother—so much like Reza in temperament, she said—and how tempestuous her relations were with her older sister, eighteen months from her in age, who had longed for family but never married, and who doted oppressively on her nephew whenever given the chance. She told stories of her youth, of backpacking through Southeast Asia, and being so stoned in northern Thailand that she spent almost a week in a stupor in a hut in a village near Chiang Mai, with her then-boyfriend forcing her, every so often, to eat or to drink so as to keep body and soul together.

She talked about all these things, but almost never about her husband. What was I supposed to think?

When she spoke of him, it was in connection with Reza, about the three of them doing things together, like speaking English at the supper table or ogling stingrays at the aquarium; or about logistics, at which he was clearly very bad. Skandar showed up two hours late; Skandar forgot altogether; Skandar never paid the bill; Skandar lost the receipts/car keys/telephone number. She had a weariness, half indulgent, half despairing, when she mentioned these foibles, a particular sardonic set to her lovely mouth.

“You must like it, really,” I once said when she explained that the reason no Shahid had attended Back to School Night was that he’d been assigned the job and, forgetting or claiming to, had gone instead to hear a lecture at the Kennedy School. “Isn’t it partly why you married him?”

“I loved it then,” she said. “He seemed so free. But you get tired of it, you know.” You, too, might have thought him an ambivalent given.

When I got home that Friday evening, I Googled the pair of them. It seems strange in retrospect that I hadn’t done it sooner, but I realize now that I hadn’t wanted to know what the world thought of them, of her. I’d wanted her to be mine, the way my Emily Dickinson diorama was mine, without a world before or after or outside. It was how we all want life to be, no hubbub or white noise, no distorting mirrors. And so no doubt looking them up on the computer was a mistake.

There they were together, photographed at a cocktail party next to a beaky, long-haired fellow in a rusty velvet jacket; there was Skandar on a panel about Raymond Aron and the philosophy of history, caught behind a long table with his name on a sign in front of him, mid-speech with his eyes shut and his hands raised like birds in flight, a blur. There was a shadowy photograph of Sirena at the opening of her installation of Elsinore, holding a champagne flute and glaring at the photographer, grave and moody and wearing skinny trousers and high heels, her hair piled up on her head with chopsticks. There were links to his essays, in French, unintelligible to me; and his listing as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure; and clips from the papers about Sirena’s exhibitions—two of them, mostly, the Elsinore one and another two years before it, again all in French. When I clicked on “translate this page” I got a comical soup of errors syntactic and grammatical, along with some obvious howlers on the diction front—a lesson, surely, in the fundamental impossibility of cross-cultural exchange—but I could see that the terms in which Sirena’s work was praised were extravagant, almost uncomfortable. One review in particular raved not so much about the extraordinary constructions of Elsinore but about the video series that accompanied them. This, they said, was Sirena’s true genius, her ability to thrill and amuse and shock and surprise us with her set of six three-minute shorts, each describing the relationship of a creature—including a human observer, filmed unawares from behind; a live snail; and a plasticine Hamlet, which the reviewer liked best—to the spaces.



Not long after, I had a dream about Skandar, that kind of bright, real dream that stays with you into the day and changes you, as if something—what?—has really happened. It’s so visceral that it can’t then be expunged from your memory, as though it were written on the body. It was a sexual dream. We were naked together in bed in an apartment that wasn’t mine, but I knew it wasn’t his, either, and I somehow knew from the high, white, opaque light in the windows that it was in Europe—Amsterdam, maybe, is what I thought, where I’ve never been. I got out of bed to put the kettle on, and I said, “She’ll be here soon, you know,” and he said, “She doesn’t mind. She likes it.” Likes what? I wondered, and got back into bed with him, and then he had his fingers in me and I came. Then there was the kettle boiling and the doorbell ringing (my alarm clock, obviously: time to get up) and I got up to deal with these things but I wasn’t frightened, he’d said she liked it, and when I turned back to look at him, my whole body still tingling, he was leaning against the headboard and sniffing, like a perfumer, at his cunty fingers, with a sly faraway smile and just a glint of tooth.