The Woman Upstairs

3





The next time I saw Sirena was in New York, almost two years later, when her Wonderland installation was part of the inaugural exhibition at the new feminist wing of the Brooklyn Museum. She’d been represented in America by Anna Z for almost all that time, and the two had become very close friends—Anna Z was younger, and Sirena was her up-and-coming star. When I saw them standing together inside the door of Anna’s gallery on West Thirteenth Street, there was something about their physical relation to one another that reminded me of how it had been between us, and I suffered a great wave of jealousy.

Sirena, although the smaller of the two, seemed to emanate intensity, light almost, and Anna bent toward her, like a plant toward the sun. There was no awkwardness when I approached—a familiar embrace from Sirena, who then held me at arm’s length and said, “Nora, darling, let me look at you!” Nobody would have known, perhaps least of all she herself, what she’d meant to me, what I’d lost, and now saw again from a sad and solitary distance.

We were meeting for drinks, Sirena and I, but not dinner: she was a Parisian artist in New York for a big opening, and her evenings were claimed by more important people than myself. But that afternoon, Sirena had the grace to introduce me to her gallerist as a dear artist friend from Boston. This meant that Anna Z, slightly praying mantis–like, looked at me as though I were potentially someone important. But then she wanted to know where I “showed”—a Fun House term if ever there was one—and I could feel my cheeks redden as I muttered some vague guff about how family difficulties had forced me to put things on hold for a while. After that, Anna turned back toward her sun, and aside from a couple of faintly curious, faintly pitying glances, was done with me.

And with Sirena? Two years had passed. Two years in which we’d exchanged perhaps ten e-mails, but in which I’d thought about her—and about Skandar and Reza too—every single day. It used to be that when people said, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of X or Y,” I considered it embarrassing and quaint hyperbole; but thanks to the Shahids, I now understood. In my thoughts, I’d even set aside times of day for them, and places, where I permitted myself the indulgence. For example, the wholesale fantasies—some old, some new—were permissible in bed after lights-out. There were still, distantly, dreams of an artist’s life in Vermont or Tuscany; but more often, somewhat basely, I pictured myself in Paris—in a glittering restaurant with Skandar, our knees touching under the tablecloth as we discussed the differences between the French intellectuals and the Americans, or a post-Iraq world. Or I imagined grandly showing Sirena my artwork in a fashionable Spartan gallery that had courted me, while craven young girls in black looked on, awed, from the sidelines. I knew even as I had them that these dreams were impure—after all, the whole point of the Shahids, for me, had been to escape a world of pretending, to be seen for who I really was—but I couldn’t help it: their natures, you could say, had corrupted me. My need for their approval, and my understanding of what approval meant to them—this had changed the shape of my self, even, let alone of my dreams.

At that time, two years after they left, I was ashamed still to be at Appleton; ashamed because I believed that they’d write me more often, that they’d pay me more mind, that they would love me more intently, if I were more impressive in the world; which made me—how pathetic we are—wish it were so.

You see, in addition to my bedtime imaginings, I permitted myself to indulge my quiet obsession when the e-mail brought me news of them. I had put both Sirena and Skandar on Google Alerts; and you’d be amazed—I was—at how often the ether tapped my shoulder with a new development in one life or another. In this way, when I sat with Sirena in the dark bar near Anna’s gallery, I knew already about Skandar’s promotion at the university, and about the important lecture series he’d given in the fall of 2006 at Oxford. I knew the lectures were to be published as a book in late ’07, and I even knew what the cover of the book would look like; just as I knew that Skandar had recently updated his author photo and now looked to the world less blurry and more like himself. I’d heard him on the BBC online, talking about the Israeli bombings in Lebanon, which had made me think about him with great tenderness for days afterward; and I’d seen him on YouTube discussing incomprehensibly in French the current politics of Algeria, looking especially dapper in a crisp white shirt. I knew about the enthusiastic reviews that Wonderland had received in Paris, and then in Berlin, where the installation had been mounted at the Hamburger Bahnhof as part of a show on the spiritual in art. I knew collectors were leaping to acquire the videos she’d made of people visiting the installation, and that the Saatchi guy had bought one and in so doing made her valuable. She’d filmed a naked man coming through; and a gaggle of French schoolchildren, like our Appleton class that long-ago afternoon; and inevitably a girl dressed up as Alice herself. Now these videos, or rather, selections and compilations of them, got shown alongside the installation itself, so that everyone who visited knew that they were themselves being filmed; and someone had written a big essay in Artforum about this, about the viewer and the voyeur in Sirena Shahid’s work. And because she’d made this gag her gag, she’d unwittingly led people to behave in extraordinary ways, sometimes, while they were visiting Wonderland: there’d been the couple that simulated f*cking in public, and the university student who came through the installation in a furry white bunny suit, with enormous ears … Of course, Sirena didn’t show videos of these spontaneous interventions, but bemused critics wrote about them and asked probing questions about the line between art and exploitation, whether this was collaborative art or mere comedy, and whether there was a willful or incidental degradation in these cases, in the approach of art to reality television.

That said, nobody denied that Sirena made thoughtful and beautiful and emotionally affecting art—they all said so. In the space of two short years, she had successfully rendered herself controversial in certain ways, and this controversy had made her famous, certainly in Europe, but even in the North American art world, so that her inclusion in the Brooklyn Museum’s inaugural feminist exhibition in the spring of 2007 seemed, ex post facto, by no means a favor or a risk taken by the curators but was, rather, artistically utterly de rigueur. That famous art historian–cum–curator could now assert that she would no more have left Sirena out of her show than she would have cut off her fingers or included a man.

All this I knew from my Google Alerts; but all this I feigned not to know. And it was interesting—always, she was interesting, even when she caused me pain—to hear how she spoke of herself, and of her boys, and of our by then long-gone time together.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, “that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I’ve never had a harder time.” (Except, she said “time-e.”)

“I guess I didn’t realize it was that bad,” I said. What else could I say?

“Realize it was that bad? But that’s the extraordinary thing. It can’t have been so bad, or it was bad for a purpose—because the Wonderland I made—” She paused, and with a gentle tilt of her head, she added, “That I made with your amazing help, and could not have made alone—that Wonderland has been an enormous change in my life. I sometimes forget, because it hasn’t been always easy—I’m not supposed to say this, because then you’re ungrateful for success, but to you, my Nora”—the hand upon my arm—“I can tell the truth. So these past two years, they’ve been tough. All the travel, Reza doesn’t like it; nor Skandar. He’s not a showy person, but that’s because he’s the center of attention; and when the attention is not for him, he’s not such a sunny character. He can be unhappy, and difficult, and behave badly. Also, his mother has been very sick, last year—she’s better now, but cancer, does the worry ever go away afterward?—so, yes, it’s all been much too busy, and not so easy”—all this time I was really looking at her, waiting for her to recognize me, waiting to see her properly in her eyes; but they were either downcast or darting about, and didn’t focus on my face—“but it’s as if the time in Cambridge, yes, such a hard time for us all—is in a separate box, now it’s put away, it doesn’t have a place in my every day. Even though it’s where things began to change, because it’s where I met you, my friend, and made the beginnings of my Wonderland.”

“But you remember it?” As I asked, I had so clearly before me the winter light from the windows into the studio, the paint-spattered faucet at the sink, the chipped cups and the poufs and the grimy, bruise-colored rug under the coffee table. I could see their town house, feel the flimsiness of its painted plywood front door, the door handle slipping in its socket, see the stains on the beige broadloom going up the stairs inside the entrance, and smell the faintly institutional biscuity smell that the house retained even after they’d illicitly smoked many cigarettes in it. No, I could remember all of it: the waxiness of the paper bags from the cake shop; the light on her hair in the subterranean booth that afternoon at Amodeo’s; the sound Skandar’s dress shoes made behind me in the packed snow, when he walked me home in wintertime between the drifts, and the freeze in my throat when I gulped the air. The small, muscled roundness of Reza’s upper arms when he undressed for bed, and the strawberry birthmark on his left biceps, his rib cage naked and frail as a bird’s breast; and the tidy silvery streak that emerged, over time, from the red welt near his eye—I could see that plastic surgeon, too, with her unexpected high heels and her square hands and her fairy-tale deftness with the needle and thread … any moment of it all, all of it, I could have handed over, translucent, shining bead upon shining bead, had Sirena but wanted to hold them—which, it seemed, she did not especially, as she said, “Oh, I can remember if I try—I’m not that old yet! But it’s all fuzzy, and in my memory, dark. Even though I know it can’t be. Surely Boston isn’t always dark?”

“No,” I said. “That’s your imagination. It’s quite a bright city, actually.”

Many things had been all in my imagination, surely I knew that; but then there was what had been decidedly, entirely real, all the moments and details so vivid, still alive to me—and for Sirena, like so much flotsam, long jettisoned into the broad ocean of her past. As that Air France flight had risen into the night air, two years before, so Boston had fallen away beneath her.

“I can barely remember making the installation at all,” she said. “I do remember you sewing together all the blue dresses, though.”

“There were a lot of them.”

“D’you know something funny,” she said. “You remember that postcard you sent, the illustration from the early edition of Alice in Wonderland, the one where she is so big and her neck is so long?”

“Of course.” I’d sent it almost at once after they left, my first dispatch, never answered, to their mythical Paris address, timed to arrive for the opening of her exhibition.

“Well, it’s still on our refrigerator,” she said, bemused. “Right there, for the longest time. I don’t know who saved it—I don’t think it was me. Reza, maybe?”

I smiled. Reza.

“Yes, so there you are with us, all the time,” she said. “Sometimes I’m taking out the orange juice, or the yogurt, and I see Alice there, so startled, with her long neck, and I think of you.” Sirena was finally looking at me, then, in the nasty bar, as she rifled blindly for a credit card in her overstuffed wallet, and her smile was real—the old smile, the old face, that I’d so loved.



It was in this affectionate spirit that I visited the Brooklyn Museum the next morning, soon after opening time, by myself. I was the only visitor walking through Wonderland in the quiet, and I was surprised by the coziness imparted by the canopy of Alice dresses, three wide swathes of blues draped overhead, rippling slightly in the air-conditioning breeze. The lighting fell upon the aspirin flowers so that their colors glowed as they bobbed, gently, above the electric-green grass; and the mirror shards glittered and glimmered, unignorable, unsettling, but not overwhelming. I hadn’t forgotten the nudes, but my memory had changed their features, or else I saw them differently now—the girl’s splayed toe, the dark-nippled heft of a slightly drooped breast, the delicate flaring of a freckled nostril, the rib that protruded at an un-ribly angle, witness to almost a century of life—and they were enormous, bigger than I was, where I’d seen them small upon a computer screen. They, like everything else, rippled slightly, as if they were breathing, as if the room were breathing around us.

And then the famous cast plastic heart, upon its pedestal, lurid, halved, its protruding ventricles like the blowing tubes of an airplane life jacket, its innards dark, wet-looking, although they were dry; and then the automatic intermittent pump of it, a slight hiss from its core, Sirena’s precious rosewater mist rising to fill the air—the soul, it was meant to be, I think—consuming the room in scent, smelling of flowers and an instant later of death, in the way that rosewater does. And Sana, then, finally, twirling, gigantic, above it all. There was a pair of small black benches in this central space, and I sat on the left-hand one and watched—forgetting that I was myself being filmed, though of course, like everyone else, I was.

I must have stayed at least half an hour there, in the rosewater air among the glowing flowers. Wonderland, eat me, drink me; yes, yes, yes. I was still in love with this, with her, with them, and how could I help it if being inside her head felt to me so familiar, as if it were the inside of my own mind, as if I’d built this Wonderland myself, as if this life, all of this, were for me, too. I felt, in that half hour, so full, like an overflowing vessel, its trembling meniscus arced toward the sky. I felt—for months, I’d felt this every second, and then for two years had been denied that feeling—I felt as though in any given instant, anything might happen, all wonder and possibility, the antithesis of a Lucy Jordan moment. I felt brilliantly alive. And I thought, somehow, still, that she—that they—had given that to me. I couldn’t be angry, not wholly angry, at someone or something that could fill me with such joy in life. You’re bound to love such a gift, and its giver.



I grant that this wasn’t much to go on, but it would sustain me, if you can believe it, for two more fallow years, years in which I still held on to the idea of her, of them, to the hope that they had offered me.

Think of that: two more years. More than four years in total, about fifteen hundred days, and every single day they were with me, somehow. Out of some sense of obligation, some sense that I should move on, I went on dates with several men—an anxious divorcé with three kids, ground down by bitterness and care; a fifty-year-old who seemed so clearly gay that surely only he didn’t know it; a Buddhist with long thin fingers who spoke terribly softly and made me want to shout and pummel his contained and withholding chest—and yet every time I sat in a restaurant in that way, I’d hear Skandar’s laugh, or see his apologetic smile, and remember—my Book of the Wonders of the World—how much more there was out there, beyond the limits of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’d want to turn and flee my mediocrity.

Having vacated the Somerville studio long before the lease was up, unable to bear its ghosts, I tried intermittently to work on my dioramas, without success, and ultimately without hope. They sat forlorn under a dust sheet in my second bedroom, my former so-called studio, lumpen as corpses, from which, if I had to enter the room, I averted my eyes. One thousand five hundred days, some surely alarming proportion of the time left to me on this planet, I dedicated in my heart to the Shahids. You could say it wasn’t their fault; you could say it was nothing but my own madness; but that wouldn’t be quite true.

I sent e-mails, every so often, to Sirena, mostly, or even to Reza—I asked if he’d studied life cycles yet, when our sixth graders, under a new science teacher, dissected eggs in various stages of development and shouted in the hallways in their awe at life. Once I even found an excuse to write to Skandar, with a link about a Kennedy School conference I’d read about, and he politely sent back a couple of lines saying they were all well, and asking if I was ever coming to Paris … but for the most part, I heard nothing from them.

I became aware, in the early fall of 2008, that Skandar had been in Cambridge without contacting me: when I turned on the local television late one Saturday night, he was there in his rumpled jacket, part of a panel discussion about race relations in America—meaning, in this instance, Arab relations—and he spoke eloquently about how the possible election of Obama might change the tenor of society. The program had been filmed five days before it aired; I was sure he would already have decamped. Was I hurt? Yes; but not offended. Think of what was between us, and of what separated us. Better to be close only in our hearts. Besides, these whirlwind business trips that important people make—they don’t have time to look up old friends even if they want to. I knew that.

The Woman Upstairs is like that. We keep it together. You don’t make a mess and you don’t make mistakes and you don’t call people weeping at four in the morning. You don’t reveal secrets it would be unseemly for you to have. You turn forty and you laugh about it, and make jokes about needing martinis and how forty is the new thirty, and you don’t say aloud and nobody else says aloud what all of you are thinking, which is “Well, I guess she’s never going to have kids now!” and then, still less admissibly, “Is that because she didn’t think she wanted them, or because she didn’t get around to it (silly fool, a failure of time management) or is it, poor lamb, because of some physical impediment (pitiable case)? Why is she single, anyhow? It’s not as if her career has been so spectacular—she’s only a schoolteacher, and among schoolteachers she’s not even Shauna McPhee.”

All these things the Woman Upstairs knows are being said, and she hates knowing, and is infuriated to know, and she valiantly hides both her knowledge and her fury, and everyone remembers her fortieth, held in the bar of the Charles Hotel, no expense spared, as the best party they’ve been to in a long while, a party the way they used to be before spouses and children, and you’ve got to hand it to her, Nora Eldridge really does make you feel that forty is the new thirty—yes, well. All of this you know, and you bury deep, like dead men, but they’re there, the skeletons are there, and you’re always with them.

You’d never tell the story of your friendship with the Shahids for a whole host of reasons—you have your dignity, after all—but among them, you wouldn’t want to seem the unsavory sort of person who might acknowledge, simply in the telling, that people like the Shahids were more compelling, somehow higher on your personal totem pole, than the person to whom you were talking about them. The Woman Upstairs, whose face to the world is endlessly compassionate, would never have such a thing as a personal totem pole. The Woman Upstairs does not aspire in such self-serving ways. She must not appear to have an ugly heart. Who could love an ugly, lonely heart?



Skandar, Sirena, Reza—each of them was, in his or her way, my Black Monk. I had a veritable monastery inside me! Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden, heart’s desires: life, art, motherhood, love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing, that I could be seen for my unvarnished self and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could—that she must, indeed—leave a trace upon the world. If this were so, then I could be an artist, and then it would be allowed. Who would allow it? They would. How would they allow it? I was waiting for a sign.

Traces, signs, I hoped for some evidence of what I might have meant—of the fact that I meant at all. Finally, a few short months ago, I got it. Finally, all the elucidation at once, the confirmation of what I meant to them. Yes, you hovered so very long in Doubt, embracing Doubt, teasing yourself with it; and then suddenly, at last you knew.





4





This is what’s most surprising about life, really: the most enormous things—sometimes fatal things—occur in the flicker of an eye, the tremor of my mother’s hand. Sometimes you don’t even grasp an event’s importance for a long time because you can’t believe something momentous could possibly appear so nondescript.

Aunt Baby died, mercifully and suddenly, between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year. Never plagued by ill health, which had been her great, spinsterly anxiety, she lived long enough to see the new president inaugurated and then some, and to hope, in her piety, that God had a handle on the economy. In her careful frugality, she didn’t die penniless, and although her estate was divided among six of us—Matthew, me, and those distant cousins in the photos—there was still, after the depressed sale of her Rockport condo and after taxes, a tidy sum of more than a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Matthew and Tweety said the inheritance was for the brat’s college fund—the sensible couple, making the sensible choice. My father got no money, but was made the earthly custodian of two large and unlovely Victorian paintings of cows in the fields, ornately framed, and a silver tea set.

The condo was sold in April, and as soon as I received my aunt’s legacy, I made a radical choice: I decided to take a year’s leave from Appleton. Money in the bank, middle age on the way—I’d turned forty-two already by then, and was looking at forty-three. I was getting arthritis in my left knee, which made running harder, and I’d started to dye my hair just to look normal. I needed glasses for the print on the aspirin bottle. All in the space of a couple of years. Death knocking. The sniper on the roof. I’d almost renounced bearing a child of my own, but this didn’t mean I didn’t want children. I’d renounced, I thought, once and for all, the fantasy of being an artist of any renown, but I would still have said I hoped to make art; and I suppose I thought that time, or rather a lack of it, was my impediment.

I’d also been teaching at Appleton for ten years, an entire decade, and even Shauna McPhee was moving on (although not, in her case, willingly: the parental revolution against her, which had never subsided, had finally moved the functionaries at City Hall, who had, in turn, moved her). So my official reason was that after long service, I needed a short break, to recharge the batteries, rediscover the world; and the perceived reason was surely that I needed to weather some small midlife crisis—oh, Nora, she’s worked hard, sweet woman, so patient with the kids, and she’s had to contend with a lot, you know? And the official real reason was that I needed time and space properly to give my art a try, because I hadn’t been able to manage it, these past few years, on top of the demands of school and my aging father; and the secret real reason was that I was miserable, because even all these years later, every night when I lay down to bed, I still clung to the shreds of my Shahids—so little to keep me going, a few perfunctory e-mails and that one sighting, each memory worn threadbare from overuse—and in clinging, I still hoped for the richer and more fulfilling and more wondrously open and aware existence that so briefly had seemed possible. Well beyond forty now, I wanted genuinely to give myself the chance at that life, although I didn’t know, really, what it might entail.

I signed up for a sculpture class at Mass Art, starting in September, and for a pottery class in a studio off Monsignor O’Brien Highway, because I thought perhaps I needed to explore new media. I ordered an expensive digital camera off the Internet, so I could explore photography on my own. I was the teacher planning a curriculum for a single pupil: myself. I ordered books from the library—Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, shocking, wonderful, intimate photographs—aware as I did so that I had no family to photograph, aside from my father, or Matthew and Tweety and the kid, who didn’t count.

The most dramatic thing I did was to book a summer trip to Europe. Why not? I didn’t ask my dad if he’d like to go with me. I jokingly suggested to Didi that she might come along—without Esther and Lili, it went without saying—and she laughed. “How’re you going to meet any guys if you’ve got me in tow? I’m like the opposite of a beard: fake lesbian lover as potential mate deterrent!”

“It’s not about meeting anybody. What a ridiculous idea.”

“Well, it ought to be,” she said. “It’s about time.”

“About time for what?”

“You’re in your prime! Like Miss Jean Brodie. Remember her? It doesn’t last forever, so don’t waste it.”

“Waste it?”

“Nora Adora, do I have to get blunt with you? When was the last time you even had a fling?”

I shrugged.

“I’m not trying to push domesticity down your throat. I’m not saying what I’ve got is for everyone. Not what you want—totally cool. But you’ve got to want something.”

“What if I don’t?”

“If you say you don’t, then you’re either lying to yourself or you’re lying to me. Because I know you for a wanting sort of person.”

“How about a Buddhist conversion? Like you’ve wished upon me all these years?”

“Buddhist bullshit. A Labrador puppy is more of a Buddhist … Nora, promise me it’s not still the same old?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Buddhist, no, obsessive, yes. I know you too well, and I know you hoard things under your rock to nibble away at when you’re alone. So I’m asking, no bullshit, is it same old, same old?”

I loved her for asking. She was making the gesture of a true friend, and in life you don’t get many. But I laughed with an insouciance I hadn’t known I could fake, and I said, “You are one crazy lady. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”



The whole summer trip to Europe—almost three weeks of it—was really organized around Paris. Around being in Paris when they were going to be there. Obviously I wasn’t planning to spend three weeks in Paris—it was only five days. But they were headed off to Italy in the first instance, to Sirena’s family, and then, after a brief stop back at home, on to Beirut for a spell. Reza got out of school at the end of June and they were leaving at once; so I made sure to time my visit to the City of Light to coincide with them.

I hadn’t been there since my management consultant days, an extravagant, dreamlike distant time when I’d stayed at the Royal Monceau and ordered room service, a breakfast I still remembered for its glinting heavy pewter pots and its stiff white cloth, the table rolled silently across the carpet and set up facing the window, as if it were my own private restaurant. This would be a more modest experience: I’d booked a single room in a three-star near St. Michel, named (one hoped eponymously) the Plaisant Hotel, the twenty-first-century revamp of a Jean Rhys hotel, I could tell from the website, with narrow corridors and creaking floors and faulty plumbing, and the gleam of sage-colored paint on walls that had once been wrapped in smoke-infused crimson damask wallpaper.



Was my trip memorable and extraordinary? Need you ask? I can rave about the vastness of the spaces on the road to Oban, or the sun-filled mist hovering above the earth in the early morning at Grasmere. I can describe my sweet hotel in Bloomsbury with, in my room, the smallest bathroom—and surely the most minute sink—known to man. I can bore you with photographs of Big Ben or the Bay of Naples, and feed you on tidbits about Nelson and Emma in love, or about Anne Boleyn in the Tower. I purchased souvenirs unthinkingly to show my third-grade class, only to remember I would not have, this year, a third-grade class. I chatted with a family from Milwaukee at the next table while I ate Welsh rarebit at Fortnum & Mason, and I bought four hopelessly impractical gilt-rimmed champagne glasses in Portobello Market, that I then had to lug around Europe in a specially wrapped box with a handle, as though they were eggshells, or a bomb.

Early on, in the B&B in Grasmere, lying in bed looking with one eye closed at the sprigged wallpaper and the pale blue sink in the corner of the room, I thought to myself that I could lie there all day and no one would mind. I could fib and say I’d seen Wordsworth’s house, without seeing a single thing, without doing more than buying a postcard from the gift shop—but probably I wouldn’t need to lie, because who would ask me? What finally got me moving was not my own desires—I had none, except to get to Paris—but rather the thought that I might miss my cooked English breakfast, prepared by Mrs. Crocker with her lacy apron and her appraising eye; and that should I not get out of the house relatively promptly, that same Mrs. Crocker would appear at my door in a different apron, the housekeeping apron, with a dustpan and brush and a bucket full of solvents, and would chase me, sourly, from the room. My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of upstairs, but you can’t take the upstairs out of her.

Naples was marginally better, because I could muster some genuine will for the sites, and because the crumbling, garbage-filled city itself frightened me, and fear is a strong emotion and one I’ve had much truck with in my life. When I came out of an empty museum on the hill and had to walk alone across the empty park surrounding it, I had to ask myself whether my palpitations and breathlessness were caused by genuine risk to my life, or whether I was merely indulging a habit in the hope that my fear would keep me safe. Safe! When you’re over forty, nowhere is safe. An airplane is suddenly the safest place in the world. Death and his zealous minions—dread, despair, disease—can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you. Sirena had Skandar, and Skandar, Sirena; as my mother, I now understood, had had my father, humble protector though he might be; and he had her. Matthew had Tweety; Didi had Esther; Aunt Baby, of course, would have had her Lord—because although not strictly a Bride of Christ, she’d lived with Him most of her life. And I, charging across the empty park in the late afternoon with my fists clenched, had only myself.

Who is he who walks always beside you? No-f*cking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.



My Plaisant Hotel proved indeed wonderfully pleasant, tucked in a short cul-de-sac on the less fashionable side of St. Michel, facing a walled garden. Stucco-fronted, its facade was embellished by riotous purple and blue and red window boxes, and looked almost English from the outside. My room faced the street, with those wonderful old doors (that egg-shaped handle that moves a long metal bar up into its socket: a mechanism simultaneously antique and of a futuristic simplicity) that open almost onto the void, or rather, onto a void from which you are protected by the most delicate of wrought-iron balconies. When I entered my room and put down my bags and opened the windows wide, I reverberated with the joy of being in Paris. My hotel had no room service, I overlooked a view of parked cars and scrubby yard rather than the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe, but it didn’t matter: the particular pitch of the police sirens was to me exotic; as were the burning rubber smell in the subway and the tawny gold of the monuments’ stone in the sunlight. All the clichés of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not clichés; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha’s Vineyard in my youth—whatever it is, each time it is familiar and new at once, an overturning.

And Paris, well: the young North African man at the hotel reception smiled at me in a conspiratorial way; the waiter in the tourist café in St. Michel where I stopped for a drink that first afternoon—an expensive beer, but a great view of Notre Dame—asked me why a beautiful young woman like myself was traveling alone. Bathetic bullshit, but winning—a different set of rules, a different Fun House, and one more palatable maybe just for being unknown. But it made me wonder again how much of what I loved about the Shahids was their foreignness, and their impermanence—whether I’d all this time longed for them simply because I couldn’t have them. After so much time, they were all figment now.

The difference is that they live and breathe. My mother no longer does, nor Aunt Baby, even; and there is no place on this earth that they can be found. Whereas on the evening of my second day in Paris, as agreed by e-mail and confirmed by telephone (did I feel a twitch, a frisson, at the sound of her voice? Or did I hear a different voice, now, in my head, and ultimately prefer it?), I took a taxi over to their fashionably seedy neighborhood behind the Bastille.

I’d spent a lot of time imagining their place, and inevitably the reality did not correspond. The building was on the wrong side of the street. Its entrance hall was smaller than I’d expected. But then the elevator, old-style, with the accordion grille, was exactly as I’d pictured, and consequently too small for me to brave. I walked up four flights, and then there they were—no, there was Sirena, in the doorway, her crow’s-feet more pronounced, her shoulders more four-square, and although it took me a few minutes to put my finger on the change, her hair all black now—enough, she’d thought, of the aging experiment; and she looked, ironically, older for it. Maybe she just looked older, plain and simple. We’re at that age, as they say and I now say also. Years older than I am, she’s perilously close to fifty. She said all the right things, as did I, and we hugged, and I waited for my heart to open. But as she led me into their apartment, the thought that came unbidden was: Here is someone that I used to love. Or even: Here is someone who resembles, to a large degree but imperfectly, someone that I used to love. I didn’t want to feel, of all things, wistful and melancholic: I had a case against these people, who had packed up my soul along with their blankets and books, and had kept it without caring for it all these years. A case against these three Black Monks who had prophesied for me—all but promised—a future which had not begun to come to pass; and who, with their promises in hand, had abandoned me as if it were a mere lark—I had a case—

But who could have a case against that laugh? Or against Skandar’s long-lost smile, as if he’d been dropped by parachute into his own living room and didn’t quite know where he was … He, too, seemed genuinely pleased to see me—how long had it been?—and after we embraced, he held me by the wrist for a moment, almost unthinkingly—as if, I thought, Sirena were not in the room and as if, oddly, I were a child. Then Reza came out of his room, somewhere in the back of the apartment: in this big-footed and gawky manlet, his features oddly proportioned in the way of boys almost pubescent—a pimple, yes, perhaps even two, upon his chin—I strained to see my perfect child. His eyebrows were now frankly heavy, his voice croaking; but his eyelashes, and his eyes: yes, there he was entirely recognizable. Not in manner, though: you’d think he’d never known me, or else that it was he who’d kissed my bare breasts among the aspirin flowers—he was that bashful, that awkward, glancing up like a coy maiden, shuffling and rustling his enormous hands and feet, adult puppet pieces on his boy’s body. His curls were longish, in fashion: I noticed this. I knew he’d be the boy the girls dreamed of. I’d known that from the moment I first saw him. He showed such palpable relief when his mother told him to go do his homework, that we’d catch up at dinner, that I had to let him go happily. As his door shut, Sirena rolled her eyes—in that moment, more typically motherly than I’d ever seen her. She said, “Homework? What do you think, it’s a nonsense. At this age, it’s all Facebook, all the time. From video games to Facebook—for boys, this is the socialization process.” She snickered. “I’m thinking of how to make an artwork really to say something about this. But it’s difficult … Nora, my friend, a cocktail? A wine? What would you like?”

And she was off—we were off—and it was familiar, but it was also different. Just as Reza had trained her into motherhood, day after day, over years, so, too, she’d been trained, since last we’d spent time together, to think of herself as an artist of importance in the world; and it was obvious, somewhat wearingly, even when she was supposedly being lighthearted about her work.



A scientist acquaintance once explained to me that to attain nuclear fusion—which would apparently solve the global energy crisis—you have to replicate exactly the conditions of the birth of a star. This is obviously very hard, and very rare, and very fleeting. And I realized, in the Shahids’ living room, that I’d fallen in love not only with a particular configuration of people, but with that particular configuration in a particular moment in their lives and in mine. It wouldn’t have mattered if I were myself Peter Pan, ever unaltered: the minute Wendy starts to change, the idyll is over. Each of them was different, even though they were much the same. Their configuration was different. You couldn’t replicate what had been.

That didn’t make it worthless. We were friends. I still envied them their family; and I felt my blood swell with tenderness at certain gestures, certain expressions, tics that carried me back. But I left—with the promise that Sirena and I would have lunch, or at least breakfast, on Thursday (I was returning to Boston on Friday)—thinking I’d been wrong to imagine there’d been a breach of trust, flushed with the warmth of their charm and at least a bottle of wine, touched by the supper Sirena had prepared—

(“Oh,” I said, “you remembered! How sweet!”

“Remembered?”

“The first time you had me over in Cambridge? This is the stew you prepared.”

“Imagine! I’d completely forgotten. I’m afraid it’s just a sign of how limited is the …”

“Repertoire,” said Skandar, winking at me; and I couldn’t tell whether the wink said that he, too, remembered that evening; or whether it just agreed that together we would tease his wife.)

—touched by the details Reza recalled from his long ago Cambridge classroom—painting—the twins—times tables. I looked, at the dinner table, for the trace of the scar by his eye: when he leaned into the light, I thought I could glimpse the faintest of white lines, though I couldn’t be wholly sure. I still loved them, if differently. I felt full of forgiveness, and sanity. But not hope. As I fell into my pleasant low bed in my pleasant room in my pleasant hotel, I was conscious in my semiconsciousness of feeling the opposite of hope—which would be despair. I was clear, right before slumber took me off, that this was why I’d chosen a light, bright, post—Jean Rhys, anti–Emily Dickinson, never Virginia Woolf hotel: because everything about its pleasantness insisted, inarguably, No Suicides Here.

I had all this anger. Years of it, decades of it, my very body full of it, bloody with it. And I’d lumbered across the Atlantic to lay it all down upon a doorstep. Almost like blackmail: love me absolutely, or take this shit from me. I had the mother lode. Yes, the term is apt. It was to be assuaged or offloaded. And yet, while I left their home feeling welcomed, even loved, it was a different, smaller sort of love than I’d wanted—not so much a glacier or a fireworks display as a light shawl against an evening breeze. Recognizably love, but useless in a gale.





5





There’s so much to see and do in Paris. So much that it’s a wonder I saw it. A wonder that I saw that I could see it. But for so long I’d trained myself to read and find the references to Sirena and Skandar, that it would have been a shock of another kind had I missed it. I had a lot of time, really, in Paris: five whole days. I arrived on Monday, was leaving on Friday. We’d had dinner on Tuesday. I was to call Sirena on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. On Wednesday, I got up and descended the stairs to the breakfast room—a sweet atrium, with pots of flowers in the corners and an electric fountain against the wall, a naked cherub with an overturned ewer, trickling water into a shell-shaped bowl—spectacular, cheerful kitsch—with my Pariscope in hand. It listed everything—films, gay nightclubs, poetry readings, gallery shows.

Ignoring my zealous spread of baguette crumbs over cloth, clothes and newsprint, I flipped through beyond the museum listings to the private galleries. Here was a city, like New York and unlike Boston, where a private dealer might have an exhibit of Picasso lithographs. Or where you could see Robert Polidori’s enormous Chernobyl photos, up for sale at over 20,000 euros apiece. It was half as a lark that I looked for Sirena’s name—she didn’t have any major installations at present, she’d told me over supper: her next was a commission for a group show at the Serpentine Gallery in London the following spring, on the theme of rebirth and renewal. But there she was, a listing at a gallery in the 7th, a show open only for a few more days. A show titled After the Fall: The Wonderland Tapes. Here, without the installation itself, would be the videos she’d made at, or in, the installation, to get people to respond to the responses to her work.

It seemed a favor to her to go to see them—the videos, as far as I was concerned, were the least interesting part of her art; although I knew important critics disagreed with me—and I was aware that if I hated them, I might just lie and pretend I didn’t know about them. Credit to her modesty, I thought, that Sirena hadn’t told me about the show; or perhaps credit to her now arrogant grandeur: perhaps she thought the videos were too trifling to bother with? Either way, I’d go out of my own curiosity, pure or impure, and would see what I thought. If it felt like spying on her life—how little it was, compared to all the Google Alerts I’d assiduously studied, all the details I’d hoarded and treasured as if she’d told me of them herself, as if we were in the kind of regular contact that close friends ought to be.

I decided to do the Louvre that morning, and then the Musée d’Orsay, and then to make my way back on foot through the Quartier Latin toward my hotel. It was neither forced nor peculiar to pass in front of the Galerie Werther—I could almost chance upon it, with that itinerary in mind. Certainly she couldn’t accuse me of having gone out of my way.

The day was hot, and the museums thronged, the visits grueling. The only respite came in the wing of the Louvre that houses Napoléon’s apartments, full of brocaded textiles and gilded furniture, rooms of china and silverware of no interest to anyone (including me) and, as a consequence, all but empty. I made the mistake of having lunch late, near the Musée d’Orsay on an abandoned street, in a hushed restaurant astronomically priced, where in shock I ordered only a starter, a tiny puff pastry with a tablespoon of creamed chicken inside and a watercress garnish; which perhaps was insufficient sustenance for the full-on Grand Central–like mill of the second museum. Somehow, I felt I had to see as much as possible—who knew when I might return to Paris?—and so I forced myself into the crowded narrow corridors and craned my neck to peer at paintings, blocked by the audio-guide set, a mass that drifted slow and imperturbable as oxen through the galleries.

It was all a bit much. When I came out, I should have stopped in a pastry shop for an éclair, or at least a restorative coffee. But I was daunted by the Frenchness of it all, couldn’t face waffling to the server in atrocious French, or lapsing, to their triumphant disdain, into my American English. I was shaky on my pins, walking the streets, finding the distances farther than I’d anticipated. All of this I explain—why? In order to excuse, or temper, what I then felt, which would have been dramatic regardless, but was surely intensified by my vulnerability just then.

Galerie Werther was on a trendy street parallel to the Seine, a few blocks in from the river but below the Boulevard Saint Germain. The sidewalks were lively in the late afternoon, though not anything like the museums; yet the gallery was very quiet, empty but for an etiolated young man in a black shirt and black jeans, who gave me only a nod as I came in. The room had lower ceilings than I would have imagined, and was smaller. But it was spare, and white, and it had a blue poured concrete floor, and seemed every bit the sort of gallery one would expect for a star.

There were six video screens—framed and back-lit, flat screen, very chic—hanging on the walls. I was looking, in part, for my Appleton darlings, for my lost paradisiac year. The videos didn’t seem to have any particular narrative order, or any particular shape or duration. One seemed to be stills, cobbled together; another, in which four random patrons of the crowded exhibit started twirling in front of Sana’s video, was clearly scripted, and reminded me of an ad for cell phones, filmed at Heathrow, that I’d seen on YouTube. For each of the screens there were headphones on a stick, and you could listen to one of three soundtracks—each incongruous, sometimes funny. I was thinking, almost begrudgingly, “She’s good. She’s very good at this—whatever this is.”



I saw my video last. It was on the back of a column in the middle of the gallery, so at first you didn’t even know it was there. From afar, it looked grainier, less professional than the others, more like a 1980s tape, with that slightly titillating quality of spontaneity, of the unexpected find. I could see, too, as I approached, that it was one of only two videos marked with a red dot, which meant—as I knew from the gallery sheet I’d picked up at the door—that the edition was fully sold out. There were five copies of each video for sale; and of this one, no more.

As I got closer, I realized that what I saw was not the same Wonderland as in the other videos. In addition to being a grainier image, the setting itself was partial, unfinished, differently lit. It was indeed a Wonderland I knew: our Somerville studio. My heart lifted. I thought I’d see Reza, as he’d been, running boisterously among the aspirin flowers. Maybe it hadn’t been entirely ruined, after all, by my shrieking intervention? I thought I’d see Chastity and Ebullience wrapping themselves in swaths of Alice-blue cloth, tripping and falling on top of each other, or even Noah, picking the flowers, picking his fight with Reza—and then I was close enough to see what the video actually showed. And then, you see, I couldn’t help it: I lost my breath. I couldn’t breathe. My vision closed in like a tunnel, and then I couldn’t see anything at all.



The young assistant had to manhandle me, which was for us both a grave humiliation. He didn’t even bother speaking French—clearly my clothes, or my shape, my general New England sensibleness, screamed “USA”—and he kept saying, “Are you okay, madame? You are okay, madame. Are you okay?” He pulled his own chair out from behind the desk and had me sit in it. He gave me water. He suggested that I put my head between my knees. He proved more practical on all fronts than his aspect might have suggested, but I could also tell that he was annoyed by me, that I seemed to him like some stray off the streets, come in to foul his pristine temple to Sirena’s art. Heaven forbid that her temple should be fouled!

And yet this was what the video showed, for all the world to see: the fouling of Wonderland, by none other than myself. The fact that I was essentially supine in the images, and half undressed, and pretending (not that the viewer would know this) to be Edie Sedgwick, the fact that the etiolated youth could never have guessed that the zealous masturbator in the Wonderland video was the sensible Merrell-wearing Woman Upstairs who’d stolen his chair and spoiled his calm, didn’t make the facts less true.

Somehow, I had been filmed in that most private moment. Somehow, I had been seen; and could then be displayed, an object, like one of the artists in my own dioramas. I could be sacrificed. In the upper grades at school, you teach the kids ethics: you ask them, would they push a button that would kill an anonymous person in China, if they’d get a million dollars. Would they push the button if it made them famous. If nobody knew they’d pushed the button. If it meant the whole world would acclaim you as an artist. If it showed the world some genuine truth about what it was like to be a sad, lonely f*cker. Would you?

Yes, it was true, if I thought about it, the cameras had already been set up, by then, for the kids—we’d set them up weeks ahead of time. I’d helped her do it. But how did she film me? She hadn’t been in the studio that day at all—had she? I couldn’t remember for sure. There must have been a motion-sensitive setting. She must have set the cameras to tape anytime anyone set foot in her Wonderland. Maybe she was taping herself? Maybe it wasn’t the plan to trap me, like a fish in a net; or maybe it was. Maybe she’d hoped she’d catch me there somehow—but she could never have anticipated such prize footage, such a perfect humiliation. When had she seen it? Had he seen it, too? And if he had, then suddenly his visit to the studio, his supposed seduction, became something completely different. It became something between them, something that had nothing to do with me. Something for which I was the unwitting scapegoat. She’d cared little enough to use the tape—to sell the tape—or else she’d been angry enough. But not angry enough to confront me; not angry enough (if she had known about Skandar and me) to think it merited discussion. I had been so discountable that she could do this to me, and claim to have remained my friend. What a year it had been: I’d been useful in so many ways.

There is what is imaginary and there is what is real. What is imaginary—how she taped me, why she taped me, whether she taped Skandar and me, when she decided to use the tape—these are things you cannot reach. Even if I asked her, I would never know the truth. What is imaginary—our friendships, my loves, these people, my inventions—is untouchable, if not inviolate. And then, there is reality: there is what happens, what you know, or think you know, with certainty. But maybe these two are ultimately one; maybe you can’t protect the one from the other. There’s that room inside your mind where you are most freely and unconcernedly yourself, and then there are the many layers of masquerade by which you protect that skinless core; but there she was, my most unguarded self (a fantasy self!), famous at last, visible but invisible, hanging on a wall in Paris and five times sold.

And this, needless to say, by the woman—and not to forget, her husband—whom, among all mortals, I had chosen and drawn close to and loved, yes, wholeheartedly loved, and forgiven a myriad of shortcomings. But not this one. Never this one. I knew that even then, perched on the chair in the gallery sipping my cloudy glass of tepid, overchlorinated water and insisting to the youth that I did not need a taxi, or a doctor, that I would be on my feet and on my way in a matter of minutes—I knew in the middle of all this that I would never, ever, ever forgive her this. That she had—again, no: that they both had, because he must have known, at some point, he had known, and done nothing; or worse, had come to me only because he’d known—but this, surely, was not thinkable—not thinkable, that—they had ruthlessly destroyed everything, betrayed everything.

You don’t need suicides where there is murder.



I didn’t call them. I couldn’t even imagine calling them. I didn’t call Didi, either, although I might have, because I didn’t want to get into it. How could I begin to explain what it meant, to see myself laid bare on Sirena’s gallery wall, the great rippling outrage of what it meant—about each of us, about myself perhaps most of all, about the lies I’d persistently told myself these many years. And all certain things suddenly wildly uncertain. And what about art, and being an artist: Is this, then, what it took to be something, to become someone? Was this what was meant by “sacrificing everything” for your art? Or at least, everyone?



Here’s the good part: I carried all this anger, full to the brim with it, and now it’s allowable. Now it’s justified. I’ve learned from my mistakes. I’ve been liberated by my failings: I’ve been a fool, but now I’m a wise fool. I’ve been crushed by the universe; I’ve frittered the gold of my affection on worthless baubles; I’ve been treated like dirt. You don’t want to know how angry I am. Nobody wants to know about that. I am furious at both of them—at the lie of their friendship, their false promises of the world and of art and of love—but just as mad at myself, at my stupid dreams, my misplaced trust, my worthless longing.

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there’s no telling what I might do. I could film my anger and sell it, I could do some unmasking of my own, beat the f*ckers at their own game, and on the way I could become the best-known f*cking artist in America, out of sheer spite. You never know. I’m angry enough to set fire to a house just by looking at it. It can’t be contained, stored away with the recycling. I’m done staying quietly upstairs. My anger is not a little person’s, a sweet girl’s, a dutiful daughter’s. My anger is prodigious. My anger is a colossus. I’m angry enough to understand why Emily Dickinson shut out the world altogether, why Alice Neel betrayed her children, even though she loved them mightily. I’m angry enough to see why you walk into the water with rocks in your pockets, even though that’s not the kind of angry I am. Virginia Woolf, in her rage, stopped being afraid of death; but I’m angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough—finally, God willing, with my mother’s anger also on my shoulders, a great boil of rage like the sun’s fire in me—before I die to f*cking well live.

Just watch me.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of this book would not have been possible without the generous support of the Humanities Center at Harvard, where it was begun, and of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where it was completed. I am particularly grateful for the kindnesses of Professor Homi Bhabha and of Professors Joachim Nettelbeck and Luca Giuliani. My thanks also to Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, for pointing me toward Berlin; to Diala Ezzedine and Hashim Sarkis, for sharing their knowledge, and Beirut, with me; to Beatrice Gruendler, for our discussions about Arabic literary history; and to all my fellow Fellows at the Kolleg, for inspiring conversations.

My thanks also, always, to my literary agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt; to my British agent, Felicity Rubinstein; to my British editor and dear friend Ursula Doyle at Virago; and to my U.S. editor Robin Desser at Knopf.

In what have been challenging years, the precious faith and friendship of a few have been invaluable. My particular thanks to Elizabeth Messud, Susanna Kaysen and John Daniels, Melissa Franklin, Sheila Gallagher, Shefali Malhoutra, Mark Gevisser, Ira Sachs, Mary Bing and Doug Ellis, Fiona Sinclair, Julie Livingston and, it goes without saying, to my indefatigable optimist, James Wood, and our two beloved children, Livia and Lucian.

My especial and ineffable gratitude to my father, François Michel Messud (1931–2010), who taught me the importance of laughter, and of rage, and who had no tolerance for the Fun House; and to my mother, Margaret Riches Messud (1933–2012), who lived lightly upon this earth, whose letters taught me how to write and whose eyes taught me how to see.





PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint “My Happy Ending,” words and music by Avril Lavigne and Butch Walker. Copyright © 2004 by Almo Music Corp., Avril Lavigne Publishing Ltd., EMI Blackwood Music Inc. and Sonotrock Music. All rights for Avril Lavigne Publishing Ltd. controlled and administered by Almo Music Corp. All rights for Sonotrock Music controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.





A Note About the Author


Claire Messud’s most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children, was a New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. All four books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Messud has been awarded Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Other titles by Claire Messud available in eBook format

The Emperor’s Children 978-0-307-26601-9

When the World Was Steady 978-0-307-80656-7

Like: www.facebook.com/clairemessud

For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com