The Woman Upstairs

PART TWO





1





By the time school started, Emily’s room was ready. All it lacked were the projections, her own magic lantern illuminating her words, Death himself, the Muse, Joy. I’d spent the week from Christmas to New Year’s almost entirely sealed in with Emily. I’d had dinner with my father once, and had met a group of four girlfriends for drinks—intimates for years, they seemed to me raucous and silly that night, a million miles from my world—but aside from those excursions, I’d been long days, long evenings, in my private white-lit space, sanding and gluing and whittling, eating stale cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper that I fixed, half asleep, in the mornings at home, and browned apple quarters and bars of expensive, almost crumbly, Italian chocolate, very dark, in gilded foil, that were my reward when things went well. I didn’t sleep there again, because I’d felt my age the morning after Christmas, my bones sore, my joints stiff; but I’d conquered some demon and no longer feared the dark. No: that’s not quite true. I still feared the dark—when I quit the building near midnight, I raced like Cinderella down the stairs, two at a time, before the clock might strike, and dashed to my battered VW Golf as if to my imminently vanishing gilded pumpkin coach—but I was more in love with Emily, that week, than I was afraid of anything else. I felt pure and quiet and proud; and alone with it, like Emily herself.

As for the others—the Shahids—I’d cauterized, or thought I had. If I’d said to Didi that it was a wound, she would’ve scoffed; but it was, and at her urging, I’d forced it to scab. Which was all very well until they came back.



On the first day of school, when I watched him stomp in his snow boots into the classroom with his backpack and his black-and-white pom-pom hat in hand, a hard look set upon his tender face that, when he saw me, saw me smile, softened, reciprocally, into a grin of such real and direct affection, a grin of the furry-lashed eyes—his dear, scarred eye!—as much as of his lips, and when I saw that smile, my smile, for me, my innards somersaulted as if I were a teenager blown a kiss by a pop star.

I hadn’t known for sure, had I, that he’d return. No call, no e-mail, no note—I’d even wondered, fingering Sirena’s scarves in my studio, catching their vestigial scent—not our studio, in those days, but mine—whether I’d dreamed the lot of them, whether all my talks with her had been no more real than my fantasized sexual encounter with her husband.

There is a story by Chekhov like this that had fascinated me in college. The black winter of my second year, assailed by doubt at not having gone to art school, I’d read it over and over. “The Black Monk”: about a man who imagines himself visited by a ghostly monk, with whom he has life’s vital conversations, about creativity, and greatness, and the meaning of existence. The monk assures him of his importance, of his exceptional talents. Then he realizes that the monk isn’t real; that he himself must be mad. But how much better to be mad in the company of the monk, than to be sane, and constrained in his aspirations, and alone. And mediocre. That, worst of all, is what he has to acknowledge, when his family forces him into clarity: that he’s nothing special after all. Sirena had been my Black Monk, and perhaps she’d been only a delusion.

But there was Reza, quite suddenly, in our classroom at Appleton, holding out to me, with almost a blush, a tacky key chain of the Eiffel Tower, a belated Christmas present. So he—even they—had thought about me, too. They’d missed me. My first thought was that she’d be at the studio at that moment, and I had half a mind to skip out of school, to leave them all behind, and go to find her. Never mind that I’d accomplished as much in my ten solitary days as I had in all the weeks of talk leading up to them—she was my Muse, my alcoholic’s bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.

Reza’s eye didn’t look too bad. He’d had the stitches out; the scar—tidy, tidy, I’d seen the surgeon at her seam, hemming his flesh—was red, still, and looked raw, but didn’t cause alarm among the children. If anything, it gave Reza a rakish air, as if he were a beautiful little bandit. He deflected all questions about the incident, with knowing smiles and taps upon the shoulder: an initiate, he gave nothing away.

He did, however, expand about Paris, about the bumper cars at the Bastille and his favorite bakery, where a warty old woman named Léonie gave him a palmier every morning because she was so happy to see him. He told about the white plastic Christmas tree that listed wildly in the lobby of their building, and the resident dogs that lifted a leg in passing against its synthetic trunk, so that quickly the entrance grew redolent not of pine needles and snow but of stale urine. Reza was, for a child, and given the gaps in his English, a good storyteller, and he managed to make everyone laugh, which made us all feel, after the interruption of break, like a family again.



I didn’t go to the studio that afternoon, because I didn’t want to seem pathetic to myself. I didn’t want to want so much to see her. It was my austerity choice, my show of independence. I didn’t even know whether she’d be there. Instead, I went for a run and bought fresh trout from the fishmonger, and went home.

I’m not a cook. I’d bought the fish but didn’t want to prepare it; I’d taken it out of the fridge and put it back again, and was eyeing the cans of soup in the cupboard when my buzzer rang, downstairs. I almost didn’t go down: it was cold in the stairwell, and I expected it to be kids selling magazine subscriptions or the MASSPIRG guy shilling for handouts. As I approached the door, I switched on the outside light, my frown at the ready.

And there she was, in a long black puffy coat, carrying a big bag: shorter, one eye lazier, her hair more ragged than in my mind’s eye, but smiling, arms out wide, her elegant curled lip stretched over her slightly prominent front tooth, her crow’s-feet crinkled.

“Carissima!” she exclaimed. “My dear, dear Nora! How have you been?” She took my upper arm with her hand, tightly, and led me inside and shut the door behind us. “Hard at work—you’ve been so hard at work! I was there this afternoon, at the studio. It is perfection, this little room you’ve made—” She was almost herding me up the stairs, but stopped, held me at arm’s length, and looked at me: “What extraordinary work you’ve done, Nora. Your Emily’s room is unlike anything else.”

“Oh, hardly.” I was delighted, and bashful. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve brought you something. To eat. I brought it from Paris for you, and I thought, Maybe this will please Nora for supper tonight, and it will give me a chance to say hello, and thank you.”

“Thank you?”

“Ah, Nora! You know why. I’ve felt terrible that we never properly said good-bye, that I never thanked you. When what would we have done without you? I hate the e-mail, and the telephone too—especially in English, I get confused—but at last here I am, with a foie gras and a bottle of Sancerre, and some very special panettone, to say ‘Happy new year.’ ”

“Foie gras?”

“You don’t like it? I worried you might not. Don’t feel you have to eat it. I’ll bring you something else—a quiche? A stew? What would be nice?”

“I love foie gras. Really. Thank you.”

She was all aflutter. She was happy to see me. She felt guilty about having left without saying good-bye. She had brought me a foie gras. Could I have been more content? I poured her a glass of her Sancerre, although it wasn’t properly cold. I debated offering to put in ice cubes, but decided not to.

There she was: Sirena in my kitchen. She’d never been there before. She said nice things about my apartment. She admired the art. She threw her puffy coat on the sofa and sat at the kitchen table as if we were settling in for a long tête-à-tête. I, like the yellow fat around the foie gras as I scooped it out of the jar, was positively deliquescent.

“How was it to be home?”

“Home? Oh, Nora. I only wish it were home, the way Cambridge is home for you—this beautiful apartment, which smells of you and speaks of you, the place you know so well and that knows you. But what I always forget and then rediscover when I return is that I don’t belong in Paris, not really—I’m a foreigner there, too. For whom is Paris home, really, except the concierges gossiping in their corners?”

“But you must’ve been pleased—”

“Yes, I know what you mean. Reza so loves his little friends. And Skandar his big ones. It was a relief, in some ways—not to feel so responsible for them.”

“But for you?”

“I have history there, and friends, and colleagues; and home is where my boys are, of course. But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you’ll never truly be at home again. What you’ve left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you’ve left behind at every stop.”

“So you didn’t have a good time?”

“I did, and I didn’t. I missed you, and the studio, my work—I wasn’t like you, you see—no creation for me, just a great many meals in restaurants and the busyness of holidays.” I didn’t entirely know whether to trust her: she was seeming false, to me, as if onstage.

“When did you get back?”

“A day or two ago. Skandar had to be in New York by last night—another conference. Meetings. You know how he is.” A rueful smile. I thought of how often she was on her own—but with Reza. Not like me. Not truly alone.

“But I want to hear about you,” she said. “A new year, a new beginning. What have you been up to while we’ve been gone?”

“It’s been pretty quiet, really. Getting on with things.”

“Christmas?”

“With my father and my aunt.”

“Not the troublesome brother?”

“Matt? He doesn’t come at this time of year. When you have your own family, you’re absolved, aren’t you?”

“Absolved? Not where I come from. My mother came to stay with us, and my oldest sister. It was very noisy at our house. Reza was profoundly spoiled.”

“That sounds like what Christmas should be.”

“Yes, I suppose. But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I’m a daughter and a sister and a mother—never an artist. I could be, I don’t know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allow no room for anything but my duty.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You? But you’re so free! I envy you that. How many times I thought of the studio and of you in it, working. Or of you thinking, calmly, here in your lovely apartment—it’s not exactly how I imagined it, but not so far off. While I was making beds and stews and presents and silly conversation …”

“The grass is always greener …” I thrilled to think she’d thought of me—had thought enviously of me. “I was worried about Reza.”

“He’s done so well. You’ve seen his eye, yes? The scar will be quite discreet … You were so good to him, and to me, that awful evening.”

“You were worrying about the emotional stuff.”

“Emotional stuff. Ah, yes. Boys throwing rocks. But children are resilient. It’s good we went away—he’s had a chance to forget. He had some nightmares, but couldn’t tell me what they were about. I don’t know if they were related. Who can say? Shauna McPhee tells me the boy was expelled.”

“Straight away.”

“So: now a new year, a new beginning. I’ve vowed not to complain. I’m too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I’ve also vowed to work very hard—it’s no time at all from now until May. The months will be gone before we know it; and I’ve promised my gallery that I’ll come home ready for my exhibition. So: au travail!” She stood up as she said this: time to go. And then: “What have you promised yourself for the new year?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t made any new year’s resolutions. That night I’d spent in the studio, oblivious to the time, aware only too late that the ball had dropped in Times Square, I’d wished Emily D happy new year: I’d lifted her, in her lacy nightgown, from her high, narrow bed, and had stroked her glossy head; and then had returned her, carefully, to her dollhouse life. Happy new year to you. “I’ve resolved to be more independent,” I said.

“You? But you’re more independent than anyone!”

“More alone, maybe.” And for some reason I thought of my mother, each day more trapped, until she was buried in her aloneness. “It’s not the same thing, you know.”





2





Because I’d complained of my solitude, I worried that Sirena’s invitation to dinner the following week was a pity call. I was invited for 7:30. I arrived at 7:40, afraid I was late, carrying a bottle of expensive Italian red—Barolo, I think—recommended by the girl behind the cheese counter at Formaggio. I had the feeling when he opened the door that Skandar was surprised to see me.

“Ah! You’re here. Sirena, Nora is here. Come in.” The entrance was very narrow, the stairs heading straight up, and Skandar had to back up them in order for me to get in the door. It wasn’t clear what physical salutation, if any, was in order, so we did nothing but bob and smile awkwardly.

“I haven’t got the wrong day, have I?”

He shook his head, laughing, and reached for my coat, backing up the stairs the whole time.

“The wrong time?”

Sirena appeared at the summit, with Reza beside her, already in his checked pajamas. “Welcome! So much better than your last visit to our house. This time, we offer you superior food to toast and tea.”

They’d set the table with flowers and candles, so the horrid tinted globe light was turned off, and by lighting strategic lamps around the space, they’d managed to make it almost attractive.

“Come, Miss E, come see my room.” Reza at once took me by the hand and pulled, while his father poured wine and his mother returned to the stove.

I followed him there to find that it, too, was transformed, by a slowly spinning magic lantern that cast upon the wall the colored shadows of jazz musicians playing—a green drummer at his kit, a rose saxophonist, a burly blue outline wielding a bass guitar. A large poster of a running soccer player—French, I assumed—took up most of the wall above his bed, and flickered in the light almost as if alive.

“That’s Zidane,” Reza explained. “He’s the best. He used to play for Juventus—do you know them?”

“No.”

“Let me explain …” He pulled me down to sit beside him on the bed and began to recount, with more enthusiasm perhaps than clarity, the trajectory of Zidane’s career, on both the French national teams and the league teams.

“Reza”—his father was smiling in the doorway, holding a glass of red wine and a scotch with ice—“your time with Miss Nora is in the day, at school. This evening is for grown-ups.”

“In a minute? Please?”

Skandar said something in French. He handed me the glass of wine and retreated.

Reza smiled conspiratorially. “I have three minutes,” he whispered, “but nobody will know if we take four.”



Reza had already eaten, and although he sat for a while with us, swinging his legs and picking idly from a bowl of grapes, he didn’t volunteer much, nor even particularly appear to be listening, and before the starter of imam bayaldi and crostini had been cleared he’d asked to be excused and had gone to read Astérix in his room.

This was a shame, really, in spite of his odd superfluity; because in the same way that three people only barely constitute a family, a meager and Spartan sort of family, so too three people barely constitute a dinner party. This is especially true when two are intimates and the third an alien, an Upstairs Woman with manners and insufficient temerity. There is, about such a scenario, an aura of hard work—at least at first. We were all very polite, toiling through our excellent eggplant dish with its crusty toasts. We talked about school; how long had I been there, Skandar asked, and how did it compare to other schools? And then more broadly, how did American and French educations compare; and yes, please—because it really does help—another glass of red would be lovely … And then, bit by bit, it got less stiff. Sirena talked about her schooldays in Milan, and then Skandar spoke of his education in Beirut, at a French-language college, and how his parents had sent him to boarding school in Paris for the last two years (it was, he said, like something out of an old French movie, brutal and competitive and austere, with students flipping out left and right from the pressure, and horsemeat for supper. “Stray cats picked through garbage and howled in the alleyway outside the kitchens, and we used to joke that they were in the casseroles”) and how this had altered forever the course of his life without him even knowing it at the time. “Half of my friends from home—maybe more than half—went instead to the American University there, in Beirut; and then they ended up coming here, to the States, for graduate school or whatever. Which means their lives are in English, at least, or are American—all the way, in some cases.” He paused. “A couple are in Canada. In Montreal, you can eat your cake and have it too—speak French and English and Arabic also, because there are so many Lebanese there now.”

“And how’s it different for you? You’re in America now—you’re at Harvard. You can’t get closer to the American establishment than that.”

Behind his glasses he opened his eyes wide in an ironic gesture that made his eyebrows dart up his forehead. “Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But that isn’t my point, really. There’s a way of being in exile, for the educated of any non-European country, that can be very comfortable in its worldliness …”

“The land of silly accents,” I said aloud, without quite meaning to.

“What do you mean?” Sirena frowned.

“Something a friend once said. She worked in radio, but somehow she was invited to an academic dinner, all these old professors at Princeton, and she said half of them had won the Nobel Prize, and that not one spoke English without a silly accent. She said she felt like she’d taken a plane to the land of geniuses with silly accents.”

Skandar smiled vaguely.

“Not that I’m saying you guys have silly accents.”

“But it’s quite so, your friend is exactly right. In this country, there are pockets like this, almost like low-lying clouds. We’re in one here. They are in America, or on it, but they have very little to do with it, and we—the brown, the black, the yellow, the Jews and Arabs from all over—we congregate, each in our diaspora, and make a world of familiar conversation, a small life in our ivory towers. And we bark at one another in our silly accents, in what is to most of us a foreign tongue. I always marvel that we manage to communicate at all. But maybe we manage to say more than we think—or maybe less. I’m not sure.”

“English is the tyranny,” Sirena put in, looking cross, as if the language itself could be blamed.

“But isn’t it similar in France? You were saying the other day that you don’t feel really at home there, either.”

“In France,” she said dryly, “people speak French rather than English.”

“But also now more English.” Skandar was highly amused. “And sometimes even German. It’s not uncommon to encounter colleagues with whom one might speak all three languages, in different moments. There, you are in Europe, not floating on top of it like an alien body.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

He paused, drank. From his eyes I could tell he was ironic and serious at the same time. “In Europe, for good or bad, history is always there, the context is always present. When I say I’m Lebanese of Palestinian extraction, from Beirut, that I’m predominantly a Christian by heritage, and then that I went to university in Paris, that I teach at the École Normale, a great deal is immediately known about me—of what I am and what I am not. Still more can be gauged by my clothes, my demeanor—and I will be placed by these things. Not only by my fellow professors with ‘silly accents,’ but by the greengrocer or the taxi driver also.”

“What’s so great about that? Especially if they’re wrong?”

“I’m not saying that it’s good or bad. I’m just explaining how it’s different.”

“You mustn’t be defensive of your country,” Sirena chided. Her irritation had been subsumed in the business of the main course. She was ladling up bowls of lamb stew over rice, fatty and spicy and fragrant.

“In America,” Skandar went on, “there are places like Harvard, where I walk in the door and some version of this happens and I think no more about it. Not, here, so much about my social origins; more about my philosophical ideas, my academic affiliations. I’m known, in a certain way. But mostly—” The wry smile again. In my Barolo fog, I registered that it was a sexy smile, confidential somehow. “Mostly, in America, I’m a cipher. If, to a person on the street, I say I’m from Beirut, he might ask me where that is. If I say I have Palestinian relatives and that I was raised a Christian, he may wonder ‘How is this possible?’ And if I explain that I went to university in Paris, he might wonder that I’ve done such an illogical thing. In America, Europe and the Middle East seem very far away indeed. If you’re a Lebanese who comes here for university, to study, then you become immediately American. You’re accepted, which is wonderful, but you’re given an entirely new suit of clothes, a new outline, that has no context, and you must grow to fit it, or fit it to shape you, or whatever. You come with no baggage.”

“Bring me your tired, your hungry … That’s what this country is for.”

“Of course. I’m simply saying that if I’d come to this country at eighteen, instead of going to Paris, my shape, as well as the shape of my life, would be different, in countless ways.”

“But we are who we are,” said Sirena, in a slightly warning tone, the tone of a spouse who has heard it before, or who feels that her husband verges on the garrulous. “And now, being who we are, we must eat. Nora, eat!”

I put a forkful of her extraordinary stew in my mouth, thinking, “This, of everything this evening, is what I ought to remember: the explosion of flavors, pine nuts, lamb, cumin, currants”—but I was only half attending to my food. I was watching Skandar trifle with his portion while he spoke, and watching him speak only to me, as if Sirena were not in the room. Three is a difficult number, I thought again.

“Don’t you think it works both ways, though?” I asked, eventually. “I mean, if I go to live in Europe, or in Beirut, don’t I suddenly appear, um, denuded? Here, I have my context; but there, I’m just an American.”

Skandar’s eyes were, at this, appraising. As if assessing my Americanness as an attribute. “Just an American? Never. A beautiful woman like you, in France, or in Lebanon, would be seen above all as a beautiful woman. Not so, Sirena?”

Sirena gave a weary nod. “I’m going to say good night to Reza. It’s time he put out his light.”

A few moments later, she reappeared and interrupted her husband: “Nora,” she beckoned from the hallway. “Would you come for a moment? Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

Reza sat up in bed and reached out both arms to embrace me—again, I was hugged, as if affection were commonplace. “Good night, Miss E,” he spoke softly in my ear. “You’re the best.” Then he pulled back and bestowed upon me a luminous and loving smile. I know it sounds silly, but as if he were my own son. As if he actually loved me. I bathed in it; but felt angry, too, at all that Sirena had and seemed to take for granted, idling placidly in the doorway with her arms crossed and a dreamy faraway look.

“Bonne nuit, chéri,” she said to him, and something more, in French, as well, as we withdrew, and left him to the darkness and his brilliant spinning jazz musicians dancing across the wall.



Because it wasn’t far—or because … I could imagine reasons that flattered me, and others that had nothing to do with me—Skandar offered to walk me home. It was only about six blocks, across the slope of the most prosperous stretch of Cambridge, past the dark, still gardens with their looming snow-tipped trees, past cavernous houses in which a single upstairs window shone yolkily out, illuminating a small swath of icy lawn; or past others, shrouded entirely by the night, like sleeping ogres. Skandar smoked as we walked, cupping his cigarette inside his hand like a fisherman in a gale. I was made awkward by him, by the silence, though he didn’t seem to notice, and I could think of nothing better to say than that the streets were very quiet, which pointless observation he ignored.

“A pretty girl like you,” he said, not looking at me, “you have no husband, no children?”

“Not right now.”

“You had a husband, then?”

“Almost, a long time ago.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Skandar, please …”

“I don’t mean to embarrass you. But when Sirena told me you were single, I thought surely there’s a mistake, maybe you’re just very private.”

“No, nobody special right now.” And after a moment, “And I’m not gay.”

“I know you’re not gay.”

Did he think I’d been flirting with him? “How are you feeling about Reza?”

“What about Reza?”

“About what happened at school, before the vacation.”

He shrugged, blew icy breath and smoke. “Am I asked to have feelings about it? I don’t think so, ultimately. I wish it hadn’t happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn’t happen again—but here too, if I’m wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.”

“You’re a cynic, then.”

He, usually slow in his movements, turned very quickly to look at me, and his glance seemed almost angry. “Cynic? Absolutely not. I am a realist. I am a pragmatist. But I’m also an optimist. Otherwise, I couldn’t do what I do.”

“Which is?”

“To what end does one speak about the ethics of history, about the moral questions inherent in the very history of history, if not then to look to the future and hope—no, not to hope, to work, for better?”

“I suppose—”

“No, this is serious. I’m a man who studies and reflects, but I’m committed to the conversations going on, wherever they take place, among whichever parties. And they matter.”

I imagined a gilded halo around him, but it was the pinkish fizz of a streetlight. This was the trouble with places like Cambridge, Massachusetts: these people—these men—who thought they were God’s gift; and yet about whom there remained some aura, and the possibility, just faint, that they were God’s gift—it couldn’t be gainsaid.



If they were a meal, I would have eaten all the courses with equal relish: each so distinct, and so uniquely flavorful. I had no way to conceive of them all together—I have to be clear about this, because otherwise you might think that I was fond of a family, that their family-ness was a pleasure to me; and you might infer from that that there was trust between us (a fact really true only about Reza), a mutuality the existence of which I always doubted. I was in love with Reza. I was in love with Sirena. I was in love with Skandar. All these things were true; they were not mutually exclusive, but they also, most important, did not, as far as I could see, pertain to one another.

Didi’s construction—that I was in love with Sirena but wanted to f*ck her husband and steal her child—wasn’t right. I wanted a full and independent engagement with each of them, unrelated to the others. I needed their family-ness—how else would each of them have been brought to me?—and yet I despised it. I didn’t want to be with them together (although that was preferable to not being with any of them) and I hated to think of them all together, in the evenings and on the weekends, without me and with barely a thought for me.

As for trust, I had so little: “Why would he want even to talk to me?” I asked Didi, the next time I saw her. “Why would he choose to walk me home, in the freezing cold, in the dark?” I couldn’t quite admit to myself what I wanted her to say, what reassurance I was after, but I was physically aware of my disingenuousness, a tightening in the center of my chest—can you clench your esophagus?

“Do you need to ask? Men will be men will be men.”

I shook my head so hard it hurt. “It isn’t. It’s not so simple. It can’t be.”

“He can want your approval without himself wanting more.”

“I suppose—”

“I want you to want me,” she sang, “I need you to need me …”

“Live at Budokan. I know. But what does he want with my approval?”

“That’s his way, perhaps.”

“It doesn’t feel like a ‘way’—it feels specific, to me. There’s a way of talking—of looking—he is looking at me, do you know what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying he has the seducer’s eyes.”

“No—it’s much more transparent than seduction. He’s not trying to impress me; he’s really trying to talk to me; he’s—”

Didi put a hand on each of my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “If he’s good at his job,” she said, “you won’t think he is doing a job. That’s what it means to be a seducer.” She let me go. “Everybody, for such people, is the exception. You know that. Everybody is an individual to be conquered, and you’re only as good as your last conquest. Which isn’t about sex, necessarily, although it can be. It’s what people said about Bill Clinton—he always made you feel you were the only person in the room.”

“So you’re saying that’s his thing? And all he really wants is a quick blow job under the table?”

She shrugged. “I’m not saying any of that. I’ve never met the guy. I’m saying that the world contains such people. If it’s shaped like a maple leaf, the color and texture of a maple leaf, and you find it underneath a maple tree … that’s all I’m saying.”

But I knew better, even as I feared worse. Both with Sirena and with Skandar, I veered between fantasies of intimacy and of bleak rejection. Doubt, that fatal butterfly, hovered always in my breast. What did I bring to them? Who was I to them, neither glamorous nor obviously brilliant nor important in the world? And yet, all three of them looked to me for something, even if none of us could tell what it was. Each of them wanted something, and their wanting made me believe that I was capable. Not that I was an extraordinary woman, exactly, but only not exactly that. Something quite like that. Which always since childhood I had secretly wanted to believe—no: had in my most deeply secret self believed, knowing that the believing itself was a necessary precondition to any doing at all—but had never allowed myself to let on. It’s not right to say that they made me think more highly of myself; perhaps more accurately, that they allowed me to, in their wanting. My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious, hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them, too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would.