The Woman Upstairs

The Woman Upstairs - By Claire Messud



Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono quello che tu se’.

—MACHIAVELLI, The Prince





Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from oneself, the lover.

—MARCEL PROUST, Remembrance of Things Past





F*ck the laudable ideologies.

—PHILIP ROTH, Sabbath’s Theater





PART ONE





1





How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I’m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents’ shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I’m over forty f*cking years old, and I’m good at my job and I’m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone—every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say “Great Artist” on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say “such a good teacher/daughter/friend” instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is F*ck YOU ALL.

Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we’re brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they’re well and truly gone—they’re full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than “dutiful daughter” is “looked good”; everyone used to know that. But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.

That’s why I’m so angry, really—not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I’m angry because I’ve tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And behind every mirror is another f*cking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn’t fun anymore and it isn’t even funny, but there doesn’t seem to be a door marked EXIT.

At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should’ve known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside-out upside-down mirrors. Sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I’d be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end.

I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. No: let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I’d managed to get out into Reality—and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: it felt so different—until I suddenly realized I’d been stuck in the Fun House all along. I’d been tricked. The door marked EXIT hadn’t been an exit at all.



I’m not crazy. Angry, yes; crazy, no. My name is Nora Marie Eldridge and I’m forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one. Neither old nor young, I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blond nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain. Quite nice looking in some moments, I think is the consensus, rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances, read in quantity in my youth. I’m neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call a spinster, but don’t anymore, because it implies that you’re dried up, and none of us wants to be that. Until last summer, I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maybe I’ll go back and do it again, I just don’t know. Maybe, instead, I’ll set the world on fire. I just might.

Be advised that in spite of my foul mouth, I don’t swear in front of the children—except once or twice when a rogue “Shit!” has emerged, but only sotto voce, and only in extremis. If you’re thinking how can such an angry person possibly teach young children, let me assure you that every one of us is capable of rage, and that some of us are prone to it, but that in order to be a good teacher, you must have a modicum of self-control, which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way.

Second, I’m not an Underground Woman, harboring resentment for my miseries against the whole world. Or rather, it’s not that I’m not in some sense an Underground Woman—aren’t we all, who have to cede and swerve and step aside, unacknowledged and unadmired and unthanked? Numerous in our twenties and thirties, we’re positively legion in our forties and fifties. But the world should understand, if the world gave a shit, that women like us are not underground. No Ralph Ellison basement full of lightbulbs for us; no Dostoyevskian metaphorical subterra. We’re always upstairs. We’re not the madwomen in the attic—they get lots of play, one way or another. We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We’re completely invisible. I thought it wasn’t true, or not true of me, but I’ve learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn.



Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible? I’ve asked people for years, always thinking their answer revealed who they were. I’m surrounded by a world of fliers. Children are almost always fliers. And the woman upstairs, she’s a flier too. Some greedy people ask if they couldn’t have both; and a certain number—I always thought they were the conniving bastards, the power-hungry, the control freaks—choose the vanishing act. But most of us want to fly.

Do you remember those dreams? I don’t have them anymore, but they were a joy of my youth. To confront despair—the dogs at my heels, or the angry man with a raised fist or a club—and have only to flap my arms, rising slowly, directly upward, like a helicopter or an apotheosis, and then soaring, free. I skimmed the rooftops, gulping the wind, rode the air currents like waves, over fields and fences, along the shore, out over the ruffled indigo of the sea. And the light of the sky, when you fly—do you remember that? The clouds like illuminated pillows, close and moist when you ventured into them, and ah! the revelation when you came out the other side. Flying was everything, once.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the wrong choice. Because you think the world is yours, but really you’re always flying away from something; and the dogs at your heels and the man with the club—they don’t go away because you can’t see them anymore. They are reality.

As for being invisible, it makes things more real. You walk into a room where you are not, and you hear what people say, unguardedly; you watch how they move when they aren’t with you. You see them without their masks—or in their various masks, because suddenly you can see them anywhere. It may be painful to learn what happens when you’re behind the arras; but then, please God, you know.

All these years, I was wrong, you see. Most people around me, too. And especially now that I’ve learned that I really am invisible, I need to stop wanting to fly. I want to stop needing to fly. I want it all to do over again; but also I don’t. I want to make my nothingness count. Don’t think it’s impossible.





2





It all started with the boy. With Reza. Even when I saw him last—for the last time ever—this summer, when he was and had been for years no longer the same, almost a young man, with the illogical proportions, the long nose, the pimples and cracking voice of incipient adulthood, I still saw in him the perfection that was. He glows in my mind’s eye, eight years old and a canonical boy, a child from a fairy tale.

He walked into my classroom late, on the first day of school, grave and uncertain, his gray eyes wide, their millipedic lashes aflutter in spite of his visible effort to control them, not to blink, and above all not to cry. All the other children—most of whom I knew from the schoolyard the year before, knew by name even—had come early and prepared, with book bags and packed lunches and a parent waving from the doorway, some with their mother’s lipstick still pink upon their cheeks; and they’d found their desks and we’d introduced ourselves and announced a single salient fact about our summers (the twins Chastity and Ebullience had spent two months with their grandma in Jamaica; she kept chickens—this was one fact per child; Mark T. had built a go-kart and raced it at the park; Shi-shi’s family had adopted an eight-year-old beagle named Superior from the pound [“he’s the same age as me,” she said proudly]; and so on), and we were beginning to establish our classroom rules (“No farting,” shouted Noah from the cluster of tables by the window, provoking universal hoots and giggles) when the door opened and Reza walked in.

I knew who he must be: everybody else on my roster was already there. He hesitated. He put his feet, in their prim closed-toed sandals, very carefully one in front of the other, as if he were walking on a balance beam. He didn’t look like the other children—not because of his olive skin, his fierce little eyebrows, the set of his lip, but because his clothes were so tidy, so formal and foreign. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with blue and white checks, and a pair of long navy linen Bermudas, pressed by an invisible hand. He wore socks with his sandals. He carried no bag.

“Reza Shahid, yes?”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody”—I spun him by the shoulders to face the class—“this is our last new student. Reza Shahid. Welcome.”

Everyone called “Welcome, Reza,” loudly, and even from behind I could see him trying not to flinch: his scalp retracted up his head and the tops of his ears wiggled. Already in that moment, I loved his nape, the carefully marshaled black curls lapping their uneven shoreline along the smooth, frail promontory of his neck.



Because I knew him, you see. I hadn’t known he was Reza, had never suspected he would be mine, a pupil in 3E; but the week before I’d seen him, had stared and been stared at, had even exchanged a laugh with him, in the supermarket. I’d been struggling with my bags at the checkout—the handle of one had broken, and I was trying to pick it up from beneath, while grasping the rest of my groceries in the other hand; and succeeded only in spilling my apples out across the floor. Bright red, they dispersed underfoot as far as the café area by the window. I scuttled after them, hunched to the ground, leaving my two bags and my purse sprawled in the middle of the aisle to the door. I was on my knees to retrieve the last stray from beneath a table, my left arm pressing four bruised apples clumsily to my breast, when a single, illuminating burst of laughter made me look up. Over the back of the neighboring booth hung this beautiful child, his curls dancing unkempt, his T-shirt impastoed with the filth of a day’s play and the bloody-looking sauce of whatever he’d been eating.

“What exactly is so damn funny?” I couldn’t help the “damn.”

“You are,” he replied, after a moment’s silence, his mouth in a serious line but his eyes mirthful. He had a strong accent. “You are very funny, in your apples.”

Something about his face, the matte smoothness of his cheeks with their faint rosy tinge, the wildness of his black hair and eyebrows and lashes, the amused intensity of those mottled gray eyes—I smiled in spite of myself, glanced back at my piles of food near the checkout, pictured my Baba Yaga–like dance across the floor, saw myself as he must have seen me. “I guess you’re right.” I stood up. “Want one?” I offered him the last apple, salvaged from the dust. He wrinkled his nose, barked his short laugh once more.

“Not good now.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

As I made my way to the exit, I looked over again at his table. He was not with his mother or father. His babysitter, young, with enormous breasts, had draped a tattooed arm—the design something Celtic—across the back of the banquette. Her hair was crimson, and what looked like a safety pin glinted in the skin of her lower lip. She plucked idly at her lettuce, leaf by leaf, and watched the shop as if it were television. The boy stopped his fidgeting and stared at me, brazen and long, but without expression, and when I smiled at him, he looked away. This, then, was Reza.

It quickly became clear that his English was cripplingly poor, but I wasn’t worried for him. That first night after school, I checked his file and could see that his home address was one of the fanciest university housing blocks in a cul-de-sac down near the river. That meant his parents were not even graduate students but visiting faculty, or important fellows of some kind. They, or at least one of them, would have English, would be able to help him; and they would care about it, being academics themselves, which was half the battle. Also, he himself wanted to learn. Even the first day I could see: with the other children, when he didn’t know a word he’d point, say “What is?” and repeat their answers in his funny foreign voice, slightly raspy, several times over. If it was an abstraction, he’d try to act it out, which made the others laugh, but he remained utterly sober and undeterred. Thanks to Noah, he learned the words “fart” and “butt” by lunchtime. I intervened only to clarify that “bottom” and “rear end” were considered more polite, but he had trouble enunciating “rear end.” It came out as “weah wend,” and to me even this seemed moving, because his efforts were so serious.

That was the third reason to know he’d succeed: his charm. I wasn’t the only one felled by it: I could see the little girls gaping and whispering, could divine the boys’ wariness melting as Reza proved such a sport, intrepid at games and cheerfully competitive, exactly the sort of kid you want on your team. And the teachers, even: Estelle Garcia, who teaches science, commented about him at our first teachers’ meeting, “Sometimes, you know, the grasp of English itself doesn’t seem so important. If a kid is passionate enough, you can transcend that.”

I demurred, reminded her of Ilya, the Russian boy, and Duong, from Vietnam, and half a dozen kids we’d seen splutter and almost drown un-Englished in elementary school, so that you sent them only trepidatiously on to middle school, fearing they’d come back thugs, or dropouts, or worse. Sometimes, inevitably, it happened.

“You’re not worrying like this in the first week? That boy picks it all up like a sponge.”

“I’m not worried about that boy at all,” I said. “But he’s an exception.”

Exceptional. Adaptable. Compassionate. Generous. So intelligent. So quick. So sweet. With such a sense of humor. What did any of our praise mean, but that we’d all fallen in love with him, a bit, and were dazzled? He was eight, just a child of eight like any other, but we all wanted to lay claim to him. We didn’t say these kind things about Eric P., or Darren, or moon-faced Miles, whose dark circles beneath his eyes emanated gloom like some form of permanent mourning. Each child is strong in a different way, we always told them. We all have different gifts. We can all make good choices if we try. But Reza gave the lie to this, bound in his charm and beauty as if in a net.

When, in the first week, he knocked Françoise down on the playground, by accident, in the exuberant throes of an impromptu soccer match, he put his arm around her trembling shoulder and sat out with her on the curb until she felt ready to sally forth again. He had tears in his eyes: I saw them. When he discovered that Aristide, whose parents came from Haiti, could speak French, his face opened in delight and the pair gabbled through the lunch hour, until Mark T. and Eli complained that they felt excluded; whereupon he nodded dutifully, shut his eyes for a moment and reverted to broken English, his imperfect medium. I didn’t have to tell him to do it; and from then on he and Aristide spoke French only after school was over, on their way out the door. When, also early on, the children suffered a particularly rambunctious afternoon—it was pouring; they’d been cooped up all day, the sky outside so dark that we bathed for hours in aggravating fluorescence—and in art hour—supposedly my favorite, as I am, or am supposed to be, an artist—the boys had the bright idea of squirting tempera paints from their plastic bottles, first at their papers but then, by the time I noticed, at the furniture, and the floor, and each other—when, in spite of my considerable, vaunted self-control, I raised my voice and thunderously proclaimed myself sorely disappointed—that day, at school’s end, a full hour afterward, Reza stopped at my desk and placed a small hand upon my forearm, delicate as a leaf.

“I’m sorry, Miss Eldridge,” he said. “I’m sorry we made a mess. Sorry you’re angry.”

His sitter hovered in the doorway, her lip glinting. Otherwise I might have hugged him: he seemed, for a moment, so much like my own child.



Children. Me and children. Children and me. How did I, of all people, become the favorite teacher of the Appleton Elementary third-grade class? April Watts, who takes the other section, is like a teacher out of a Victorian novel: she has hair like brown cotton candy, whipped into a gauzy attenuated confection around her head, and bottle-bottom glasses through which she peers, vaguely, her blue eyes enlarged and distorted by the lenses like fishes in a tank. Although only in her early fifties, she wears support hose for her varicose veins and she has, poor ghastly thing, absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s not on account of the hair or the glasses or the veins that I’m preferred, but on account of this last trait. I’ve been known—and I don’t say this pridefully—to laugh so hard that I fall off my chair, which seems to make up for the thunderous outbursts. My emotions, shall we say, are in their full gamut recognizable to the children, which seems to me pedagogically sound.

It was both a great compliment and a crushing blow to have a father say to me, a couple of years back, that I perfectly fulfilled his idea of a teacher. “You’re the Gerber baby of schoolteachers” is what he actually said. “You’re the exemplar.”

“What exactly does that mean, Ross?” I asked with a big, fake smile. It was at the end-of-year picnic, and three or four parents clustered around me in the playground’s fierce sunlight, clutching their miniature plastic lemonade bottles, daubing away at their chins or their children’s chins with ketchup-stained napkins. The hot dogs and tofu pups had already been consumed.

“Oh, I know what he means,” said Brianna’s mom, Jackie. “He means that when we were children, everyone wanted a teacher like you. Enthusiastic, but strict. Full of ideas. A teacher who gets kids.”

“Is that what you meant, Ross?”

“Probably not exactly,” he said, and I was surprised to recognize that he was flirting with me. Parents at Appleton rarely flirt. “But close enough. It was intended as a compliment.”

“Well then, thank you.”

I’m always looking for what people are really saying. When they tell me that I “get” kids, I’m worried that they’re saying I don’t seem quite adult. The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people’s. I see what he means, and because I’ve learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that’s always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I’ve come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood. When Brianna’s mom says that I get kids, part of me puffs up like a peacock, but another part thinks she is calling me crazy. Or that, at the very least, she’s separating me from the tribe of the fully adult. And then this, in turn, will explain—if not to me then to someone who is, seerlike, in charge of explanations—why I don’t have children of my own.



If you’d asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I’d be at forty—and surely someone must have asked? There must be a feature tucked away in the long-lost yearbook laying out our plans for later life—I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work in her airy studio, the children—several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine—frolicking in the sun-dappled garden, doubtless with a dog or two, large ones. I wouldn’t have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children: men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind: they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready; and then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. No money, no man, no help—but in the picture there were those necessary things: the light, the work, the garden and, crucially, the children. If you’d asked me then to winnow the fantasy, to excise all that was expendable, I would’ve taken out the picnic, and the dogs, and the garden, and, under duress, the studio. A kitchen table could suffice, for the art, if need be, or an attic, or a garage. But the art and the children—they were not negotiable.

I’m not exactly not an artist, and I don’t exactly not have children. I’ve just contrived to arrange things very poorly, or very well, depending how you look at it. I leave the kids when school gets out; I make my art—I don’t have to use the kitchen table, because I have a whole second bedroom, with two windows no less, for that purpose—evenings and weekends. It’s not much; but it’s better than nothing. And in the Sirena year, when I had my airy studio to share, when I couldn’t wait to get there, my veins fizzing at the prospect, it was perfect.



I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do, but the failure—the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit—is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough—or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?

No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say “F*ck off” to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done. Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: it is focused only on one thing, whether it’s on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It’s a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s myopia. But that’s what it takes. You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.

I’m like the children: my motivations and my reasons aren’t always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.