The Woman Upstairs

13





The next weekend I was going with my father to see Aunt Baby. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and I’d rashly promised that we’d spend the night on Saturday, in order to go to mass with her on Sunday morning. On Friday night, I stayed at the studio almost until midnight—not working on my rooms at all, reading the newspaper online and drinking red wine out of a teacup—but still there was no word from Skandar. On Saturday morning, after a run around the reservoir that failed to clear my head, I went to pick up my father, and some peonies (my mother’s favorite flower) and a Bundt cake (for most of my life, my mother baked cakes for Aunt Baby; but I went to the Coolidge Corner bakery she’d found when they moved to Brookline and she could no longer cook), and we headed north to Cape Ann.

“Did you speak to Matthew this week?” my father asked, looking out the windshield at I-95, and not at me.

“No. Should I have?”

“Tweety’s birthday.”

“I forgot.” I always forgot. Sometimes I thought I forgot on purpose. She never remembered my birthday, either. “Is everybody okay?”

“I guess so,” he said. And then nothing, for a few minutes, silence and the swish of passing cars, and then, “But I think something’s wrong.”

“How do you mean?”

“Something’s wrong. I don’t know exactly what. I didn’t like to ask.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because. Because when I asked to speak to Tweety, to wish her happy birthday, he said she was out.”

“Is that weird? People go out.”

“But then later, I said when will she be home, so I could call again”—he’s very diligent, my father; he was, after all, in insurance all his life—“and he said, in a very strange way, that he didn’t know. That it was probably easier for her to call me.”

“What’s weird about that, then?”

“There was something peculiar in his voice. It was … gravelly.”

“I don’t know what that implies.”

“Rough. His voice was rough, like he was upset.” As far as I could tell—I was driving—my father hadn’t once turned his head to look at me, but he did so now, and he looked wary, his eyes narrow, and he said, “Besides, has Tweety ever called you?”

“Me? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Not in more than twenty years.”

“That’s my point. She’s never called me, either. Even when your mother was dying, she never called.”

“No, I remember.” I’d complained of it: “What kind of family is this?” I’d asked.

“So either he’s too upset to know what he’s saying; or he’s lying on purpose; or she’s gone through some radical change … I can’t make a story of it where there isn’t something wrong between them.”

This wasn’t like my father. It was more like me. “So what sorts of stories have you got?”

“She’s left him.”

“Of course!” I almost said, “You wish!”

“Or she’s sick.”

“Sick?”

“Any kind is possible—physical, mental, you know.”

“Okay.”

“… or the baby’s sick.”

“The baby’s not sick, Dad. And she’s not really a baby anymore.”

“Or they’ve had a big fight and she’s run off.”

“Wow. You’ve got a whole soap opera going for them. That’s wild.”

“Or they could be worried about money—”

I started to laugh. “Dad, this is whacked. You’re talking insanity here.”

“Am I?”

“You’ve got too much time on your hands. If you’re worried something’s wrong, call Matthew and ask him. He’ll probably laugh at you, but he is your son, and he’ll only laugh at you in a nice way. You’ll feel much better.”

“You’re probably right.” My father cleared his throat and recrossed his ever-veinier hands and looked back to the front again, out the windshield. I could tell from how still he was that this had been bothering him a lot, and that now he was relieved; and of course, later, when he spoke to Matthew and found that Tweety had cracked a tooth that day on an olive pit and had rushed off to the dentist, he would be able frankly to laugh.



During the afternoon in Rockport—a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food; followed by a tortoise’s stroll along the uneven breakwater to watch the fishermen and the furious, swooping gulls and a couple of intrepid surfers in satanic glistening wetsuits as they tackled the briny surf, a surf upon which an unsettling gray scum foamed, toxically; while Aunt Baby limped and leaned, in her powdery malodor, upon my arm; and my father, in his businessman’s solitude and navy cotton cable sweater, ambled glumly behind us—I thought repeatedly about this unlikely conversation in the car, and about my advice to him. It was obvious; if you wanted transparency, you had to find the courage to be honest. This was in itself no guarantee that others would be honest with you; but what choice did you have?

I should have spoken to Sirena about my feelings months before, but I’d been afraid of possibility, and also of its limitations. It had been easier to live in my dream, and now it was impossible to speak to her. I must, I resolved, reach as best I could for what was real; which meant I had to telephone Skandar, and ask him outright what exactly was going on.

Once I’d resolved to do this, I became impatient for it. I caught myself being snappish with Aunt Baby: I wished she’d walk faster, speak more quickly, be more interesting, that the day itself, which seemed—compared to my regular life, in itself hardly thrilling—mired in a failure to progress, would just be over. But it wasn’t until after nine that night that, dishes finally done, the ancient, rust-trimmed machine humming, the oldies ensconced again in tales of their late lamented, I was able to step along the cul-de-sac far enough toward the main road to catch a signal on my cell phone, and to call the Shahid house.

Saturday night. I imagined the phone ringing in their living room, the globed chandelier low on its dimmer switch. I imagined Maria, twiddling at her piercings and scoffing popcorn in front of the TV, while down the hall Reza’s sleeping breast rose and fell in the colorful parade of jazz musicians. I knew their lives so well. But no: after the third ring, he answered.

I could picture him rising up from the creaking armchair, reading glasses dangling from one hand, blinking—his white shirt crumpled, the sleeves rolled halfway up his darkly matted forearms.

“Skandar?”

“Yes?” I could tell he didn’t know it was me.

“It’s Nora. Nora Eldridge.”

“Of course!” A pause. His tone unreadable. “How are you, my dear Nora?”

“You know,” I said, trying to sound jolly, light, “it’s been kind of a tough week.”

“Yes.” A statement.

“I kept thinking our paths would cross. The dinner party night—when was it?—I thought I might see you …”

“I’m sorry. I was delayed—held hostage, you might say, by my ambition. Always a foolish thing to succumb to. Sirena makes fun of me for it.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“In what sense?” He sounded careful, which annoyed me. Didn’t he see that we were both on the same side?

“I just meant—it’s a lot, right? Sirena’s away, you’re on your own with Reza—”

“Ah, yes. Thank you for asking. Maria’s courses are over now, so she has all her time. It’s been okay.”

“Great.” This wasn’t the exchange I’d hoped for. But I reminded myself that I needed to be fearless, to be honest, so I wouldn’t be making up fictions in my head. I wanted to know the truth. “Have you found it hard at all—the other?”

“The other?”

“The night in the studio. Are you okay about it?”

“Ah, my dear. How could it be okay? What words are there? My dear Nora, as we said, there are times when—how did you put it?”

“When you break through the mirror, I think I said. Like Through the Looking-Glass.”

“Yes. And as we said, it’s such a rare gift, but it’s also …”

“Separate from life?”

“Yes. Yes, that’s a true way to put it. Separate from life.”

“We both know that protecting Sirena and Reza is the most important thing—”

“Protecting them?” He sounded genuinely surprised. Possibly worried.

“All I mean is that they never need to know, right? We’re agreed on that, right?”

“Yes. Absolutely agreed.”

“Does she suspect anything, do you think?”

“Suspect? I don’t think so, my dear. It’s something separate, it was the heart’s expression, a true moment. But it’s not a story, sadly, because it can’t be.”

“I just mean—”

“We shared something precious, and nothing will undo that. As we’re agreed about what this means, it doesn’t concern Sirena in the slightest. And you know, I don’t think Sirena has any concerns, right now, except a very pressing worry about whether she can finish her installation in time and in a way she can be proud of. I think that right now, she’s only thinking about that.”

Later, I wondered whether what he was telling me in that moment was that for some time she hadn’t been paying him any more attention than she’d been paying me; that he’d been put out, or worse, by her neglect, and that he’d sought diversion, or temporary consolation, with me. Maybe he didn’t even know that this was what he was saying.

I took a deep breath. “Can I ask you something? About her installation?”

“What’s that?”

“Skandar, what do you think it’s saying?”

“Saying?” It sounded as though he was smoking a cigarette.

“What do you think she thinks it means?”

Skandar was definitely smoking a cigarette. He took a moment to reply. I shivered in the dark on the tarmac near the main road: it might be May, but the night breeze off the sea was cold. “Why do you ask such a question? This isn’t a question you’d ask about your own work … It’s meaningless. Each person can—and will—give their own answer—that’s what she wants, and surely you also?”

“But think about it: it’s a collection of signs, right? And they might combine in different ways to create several different interpretations, right? But they wouldn’t be infinite, would they? I mean, there’s a limit to what’s plausible, a meaningful interpretation, don’t you think?”

“Nora, I don’t know what—”

“Let me put it another way. Are there interpretations that are plain wrong?”

“That Sirena would think were wrong?”

“Not even. No. I mean that are just plain objectively wrong—untrue, incorrect, false.”

“I haven’t really thought about it, but if you ask me for an answer straight off, I’ll say yes. With a set of facts, as in historical facts, there are obviously incorrect interpretations. So, with art—a different sort of assemblage of signs, and of course signs are not facts, although they may refer to facts—there might be more leeway, but there would certainly be a point at which a reading or interpretation would be not merely inept, or extreme, but simply wrong. Yes. I’m going to say yes. Why do you ask this question?”

I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was liking me better after I asked this than he had before. He wasn’t humoring me; he was reminded, by it, of the conversations on our long nighttime walks, and was distracted from the possibility that I was needy, someone who could prove troublesome to his loving and stable marriage in ways he hadn’t foreseen.

“No reason,” I said. “I just wondered. Sorry, Skandar, I’ve got to go now. My dad needs me for something.” Which might have been true. But in fact, after I hung up—and turned off—my cell phone, I loitered in the condo driveway for another ten minutes, feeling the sadness of what had been revealed to me.

You shouldn’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer. That’s what it means to have the courage to be honest. I hadn’t asked outright whether I meant anything to him, or what I meant, but he’d made it clear. The true sight of me might have been a passing pleasure, or even, as he said, a precious moment, the heart’s expression—but it changed nothing in his life.

I stood with my arms crossed against the Rockport wind, trying to accept the loss of my newest and most necessary fantasy. I’d realized too late that Skandar was my Black Monk, my Chekhovian familiar. Even more than Sirena, Skandar was the one who could convince me of my substance, of my genius, of the significance of my thoughts and efforts. If you took away my Black Monk, what was I? If nobody at all could or would read in me the signs of worthiness—of artistic worth—then how could I be said to possess them? How could I convince myself, against the whole world’s determination? It wasn’t that I’d felt he had to choose me over her—you wouldn’t ask that someone abandon his family—but I’d thought—I’d hoped—to find his choice harder to make. I’d hoped to get the sense that there was even a choice at all.

When you’re the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. It’s a small thing, you might think; and maybe it depends upon your temperament; maybe for some people it’s a small thing. But for me, in that cul-de-sac outside Aunt Baby’s, with my father and aunt done dissecting death and shuffling off to bed behind the crimson farmhouse door, preparing for morning mass as blameless as lambs and as lifeless as the slaughtered—I felt forsaken by hope. I felt I’d been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore. This wasn’t about sex, desire, or not only, you must understand this—I never fully let him inside me in that way, not as everyone would assume; but what we did together and our union, if I can use that word, was nonetheless absolute; even more so, perhaps, because our limits were real, and created by real love for other people, and we kept true to that too; and the touch of his skin on mine—so much uncovered skin, that thinnest of pulsating sheaths between our souls: ours was a touching replete with all meaning. Or I’d thought so. It had meant, for me. There are other ways of reading the signs: “We didn’t even sleep together” would be one.

When I went inside, they’d turned off the downstairs lights. They must have thought I’d already gone to bed. I fumbled my way up to the second guest room—a closet, almost, with its monastic single bed, where the bedside lamp must have been all of twenty-five watts and there was no question of reading. I lay on top of the coverlet, fully dressed, listening first to my father and then to Aunt Baby snoring, their disharmonious, disconsolate wheezings, carried through the gimcrack condo walls as though we all slept together, one and the other of them laboring with each baleful inhalation toward his ever-nearing end, and I, stock-still, eyes open, waiting for dawn, seized in an unmasterable panic at the loss of my so-beloved, apparently unreal life.