The Woman Upstairs

PART THREE





1





Sirena never came back to Cambridge.

No, that’s not true: she came back for seventy-two hours, a week later, to pack up her part of the studio. The weird thing is that I have trouble remembering that time, and when I think about her, I always think that she didn’t come back. Perhaps because she was so distracted, almost like a mad person. She’d been visited by the realization that her installation would properly exist only in the right place—what she said to me is “Nora, it’s like we’ve just been pretending. Like I’ve been playing at making my piece. And now there’s almost no time, it’s almost the show, which is like saying it’s almost time to die, and I have to find a way to be ready. Not to be ready is not a possibility. So bang, the playing in Cambridge must stop, and the real life in Paris must begin again. Bang, like this, now.”

She was taking Reza home with her, and there was no point suggesting that this wasn’t a good idea. If you could have seen her, an almost incandescent little body, furious with energy, with the passion for her project: the heart would be done on time, but only because she’d screamed so loudly at the man from the factory, and promised to pay him double—or nothing, if he didn’t deliver. The giant canvas photographs would be ready six days early, but she was still calling the lab every day to be sure they didn’t forget her, forget those girls and women in their enormous, glorious nakedness.

She had men with dollies and packing stuffs and wooden crates for her aspirin flowers and her Astroturf, for the shards of broken mirror and the giant Alice-blue heavenly canopy that I’d sewn for her. None of these things alone seemed to merit the special art-world moving men, who must have cost a fortune, not even the technical things—those video cameras, set up to film our third graders—it was all packed away with her bossily overseeing them, and by the time they were nailing shut the wooden crates it really did seem a more significant assemblage—or perhaps I should say a more significant disassemblage—than I could have anticipated.

Yes, I saw her, and I tried to help—I lugged two bulging garbage bags of Reza’s outgrown clothes to the Goodwill shop at Davis Square, wondering whether some eight-year-old American boy would find himself transformed by the French sandals and Bermuda shorts of the previous fall—but any sense of our intimacy, of our close friendship of a year, was perforce put aside in favor of urgent practicalities. The closeness of our friendship was made, I suppose, into a thing of deeds instead of words, and I should perhaps have been flattered to be left to sweep and clean her end of the studio, flattered to be asked to pick up her dry cleaning and drop off her personal boxes at the UPS Store for mailing … I should have been flattered to be given her half-full bottles of aged balsamic vinegar and French mustard, the remnants of her cotton balls and hair conditioner: that she chose me as their recipient was as much an intimacy, in its way, as had been entrusting her son to my babysitting expertise; and was similarly faintly demeaning, although I can’t quite explain why.

So, yes, I did see her, and in fact saw quite a bit of her, and would have to agree that even in her frenzy to skip town—taking with her my beloved boy, who seemed cheerfully oblivious to the fact that I’d be left behind and was focused chiefly upon the retrieval of his old life, his old friends, his bedroom, even his skateboard—she managed to be affectionate, even apologetic. She said more than once that she’d miss me, and that I’d been an “indispensable” friend. She even gave me her navy blue honeycomb scarf, my favorite, but one of hers, too. It was a gift of love, because she’d miss it.

But my memory is that she didn’t come back because it was never again as it had been; and the more painful because I hadn’t expected things to unravel so fast. I should have known that life is like that, because my mother’s death was like that, and I’d been through it. For so long we knew my mother would eventually die from her illness, and we forestalled believing it, successfully, often, but strangely, the more successfully the nearer it got, because we’d become so intent upon surviving, and so equipped to survive, each new crisis. And until the last fortnight we always thought there’d be more time; and in truth even in the last forty-eight hours we thought it would go on, maybe a week, and so were taken aback—literally caught short of breath, that surprised—when suddenly she breathed her last.

So too with Sirena’s departure; I’d known from the first that it would come; and then not that long before, I’d had the nasty shock of realizing it would come far sooner than I’d anticipated. But who could have expected it without warning, in quite this way?

Then, too, when we dismantled what there was, in the studio, of Wonderland, I was suddenly powerfully aware that it was only a half-built thing—not quite still an imaginary thing, but not fully a thing in the world, either. I’d lived so close to it in my head, her vision had been, to me, so fully realized, that I’d thought for a long time that the installation was closer to completion, there in the studio, than in actuality ever it was.

It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? All those hours spent with each of them, each separately, and such enormous reserves of passion in each case, and what could be more real than that? And it’s not as though, like my mother, they were dying, not as though a great furnace was to pulverize them into a heap of dust no more real than a memory or a thought. They would continue to breathe and move and laugh and talk and think and create—just on a different spot on the planet; and not even on so very remote a spot. But it was a spot remote to me, and because I knew that the three of them would continue to be together and that their lives would have a solidity and continuity far greater than did mine, although I’d still be in the same place and my life would be, superficially, the less altered one—in that way, it was as if I were dying, rather than they. I was the one who had to give them up, and in so doing, give up the world.

I didn’t go with Sirena and Reza to the airport when they left on a Wednesday evening in the second half of May, when there was still a month of school ahead at Appleton. I knew they were going and I made sure I had something to do: I went to see the film The Interpreter at the cinema at six o’clock, and let myself be thoroughly absorbed in the intrigues of Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn at the UN while their flight was taking off from Logan. I was inordinately moved to find a text from Sirena on my phone when I came out of the film into the summer gloaming: “Miss u already,” it said. “R sends special xx. Come 2 Paris!” She’d written from the airport. I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine it, and to see her message—there it was again: Hope.





2





I did see Skandar before he, too, returned to Paris a fortnight later. He called me one evening, at a funny sort of time, around nine at night, and asked if I’d like to meet for a coffee. We met at the Algiers café in Harvard Square, the oldest people there, surrounded by undergrads in their callow exuberance. He looked tired, his eyes behind his glasses blurry, dark rimmed. I wanted simply to touch his cheek, as he sat across the table. I wouldn’t have called it lust, or desire, particularly; not sexual, is what I mean, or perhaps not proprietorial.

These words, these words are so imprecise, so inadequate: when I speak of love, or desire, or even of longing, the freight of these words is for each of us so particular. If I could explain once and for all about my three Shahid loves: the sexual element was undeniably there, with both Sirena and Skandar. But it wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the core of what I experienced. It was longing—“longing” is a better word than “desire”: it carries its quality of reaching but not attaining, of yearning, of a physical pull that is intense and yet melancholy, always already a little sorrowful, self-knowing, in some wise passionate and in some measure resigned. Desire suggests a burning, fervid, unreflective, something that wants, above all, satisfaction. And what you have to see about my Shahids is that always, at any moment—even when I briefly allowed myself to believe otherwise; even, in that one, precious instance, when I held one of them in my arms—I always knew that my desire could not be satisfied, that it would never be satisfied; but that I was still close enough to hold on, intermittently, to the fantasy of its satisfaction, and that this, this was enough to keep it, for so very long, alive.

So the fact is that I longed to touch his face—to have that contact, to feel his skin against my fingertips—but I also fully understood and accepted that it was not, in that visit, in the cards. (Although, how not to wish that I were different? What would the undergraduates have seen, if I’d dared to do it? What would they have cared, of two dull old people huddled in a corner? And what might have unfolded, and how might it have altered fate’s course, if I’d had the temerity simply to stretch my hand out across the table, to press it gently to his sweet, slightly pouchy cheek?)

Skandar had with him a plastic shopping bag that he placed awkwardly on the table between his Turkish coffee and my urinously bright mint tea.

“I’m having to finish the packing alone,” he said, with his most apologetic look. “I’m not very good at it. At first I think we must simply keep everything, but when I realize how much trouble it is to pack things, to send them, then I say we must throw everything away. It’s much better Sirena’s job, this kind of thing.” I could tell that he’d never before been left behind in this way.

“So then I thought of you,” he went on, “who’ve been such a friend to us all. I thought perhaps you might like to have one or two things that it doesn’t make sense for us to take back.” He pushed the bag across the table toward me, almost knocking my tea. I reached to take it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “No need to look at it here. Because whatever you don’t want to keep, you can just get rid of it.”

I laughed.

“No, no—I’m not saying this is a bag full of garbage; quite the opposite. But these are things that no matter what, I won’t take home.”

We didn’t stay long in the Algiers—he was flying to DC early for meetings, and still had a lot to take care of—and in the brief time we spent together the only thing he said to acknowledge what had happened between us was this: “Live, my dear Nora. Satisfy your hunger. There’s food all around you, you know.”

“What kind of food, I’d like to know?”

“Ah”—he smiled—“you must taste all things, actually to know if you like them.”

And what good is that, I wanted to ask, if the most delicious fruit is forbidden?

When we parted on the sidewalk, he put his arms around me in a close embrace—I was enfolded—and he held me to him several good beats longer than form required. It was the sort of hug in which no passerby would have seen anything upon which to comment, and yet which I knew—or could claim to know—meant more than it appeared to. It was to be my sustenance for a long time to come. He was shy and averted his eyes, afterward, and he shuffled off down the pavement in the direction of his house. From behind, he looked small and his gait seemed an old man’s, a short man’s, and I was briefly, in a new way, touched by him yet again.



As for the bag, which would play so intently upon my imagination in the months—what am I talking about? In the years!—that followed: What was in the bag? I wish I were properly able to tell you. I opened it and glanced in at its contents under the light of a storefront at the corner of Brattle and Church streets. I could see that it contained a copy of his most recent book in English—a gift which, I imagined, he’d inscribed to me; and while I was anxious to know what he’d written, I didn’t think I could pull out the book there on the street. There was a rolled-up picture of Reza’s—I could tell straight away that it was his snow scene: we’d done them in art class back in January, and his had been particularly inventive. There were, mysteriously, three pairs of kitchen scissors in the bottom of the bag, the plastic-handled kind you buy at the supermarket; and there was something small, wrapped in tissue. In this, my impatience was too great: I tore at the paper, which had been clumsily but thoroughly taped, and shredded it until I uncovered a heavy silver chain with, hanging from it, an elaborate silver cross, inlaid with turquoise and what looked, in the semi-dark, like a blood-red stone. It was heavy in my hand, and rather elegant, a bit tarnished but still bright. What did it mean? Whose was it?

I let it slip back into the bottom of the bag. I wanted to think he had chosen it with me in mind. More likely it was an end-of-year gift from Reza, selected in haste by Sirena from a pile of possibles, and forgotten in the rush of departure. The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I’d learned over the years.

But in fact, I’d never know for sure. In my efficient forethoughtfulness, when called out into the night, I’d brought the geography sheets about Samantha and Jordan’s road trip through state capitals, of which I needed twenty-two—no, now only twenty-one—copies in the morning. So I popped over to the all-night Kinko’s next to the post office on Mt. Auburn. There was a paper jam on about the third copy, and I had to track down the bloated attendant, who blinked in the fluorescent light and burrowed into the machine with his pale, fat fingers. All this hoopla over a few photocopies—I’d thought to have been simplifying my life, because the copier at school was always either in use or out of order—and I got home to my apartment to realize that I’d left Skandar’s plastic bag on the table next to Self-Serve Copier Number Seven. I tried to call them, but nobody answered. I contemplated going back, but it was after eleven and my courage failed me.

In the morning I hurried over to Kinko’s before school, but the bleary girl who’d replaced the boy had no idea about a plastic bag. She showed me a lost-and-found box containing several sets of keys, an umbrella, two mismatched winter gloves, and a BlackBerry with a green dragon sticker on its back: this was the only place where lost things might be found. Eric would be back on at ten p.m., if I wanted to come in then and ask him personally; but unfortunately there was nothing further she could do for me.

And so it went, and was gone: I’ll never know the provenance or purpose of the necklace, nor will I know what, if anything, was written inside Skandar’s book. I was, that way, free to imagine many different possibilities.

I never told them about losing the bag, and if they thought it strange that I didn’t thank them for their gifts, they didn’t say so. But the final imaginary nature of those few objects would matter quite a bit, I think, in my peculiar ability to keep alive for so long the intensity of my connection to them all.