The Woman Upstairs

3





So began, ironically, my babysitting season. Not the obvious pastime for a Not Exactly Extraordinary Woman; although I see, in retrospect, that it was the perfect—the inevitable—trajectory for the Woman Upstairs. Even at the time, I was aware of how it looked. Plenty of the teachers at Appleton Elementary, the young ones especially, did some babysitting for extra cash. I’d always been disdainful of this: it seemed a sure way to undermine one’s teacherly authority. So much so that when Sirena first suggested the notion, I felt a chastening frisson, as if I’d been struck.

We were lying on cushions in the studio and I’d been laughing at her account of a formal Kennedy School dinner she’d attended, at which the snowy bigwig beside her had held forth for twenty minutes about the unelectability of the Democratic Party (himself a Democrat, without which the lecture might have been considered aggressive), with a glob of red soup glistening upon his chin. She said it seemed almost to be winking at her, the way it caught the light.

“Do you think he had botched dental surgery, and can’t feel anything on his chin, so food routinely gathers in that little hollow? Or do you think if you get big enough in politics, in that behind-the-scenes sort of way, it’s suddenly okay to fart in public or to have bits of food on your face? Or maybe he’s from outer space, or like a person with autism?”

“In English we have a word for it,” I said. “It’s ‘a*shole.’ ”

“Don’t,” she said, “because it makes such seeping liquid only more upsetting.”

And we laughed so hard the tepid coffee splashed out of my cup and into my lap; and then somehow even that seemed related to the soup glob, and we laughed all over again. And only when we were catching our breath from laughing, both of us exhaling those strange almost sobbing breaths that accompany crazy mirth, did she say, very serious all of a sudden, “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask for your help with something. To do with Reza.”

“What’s wrong? Something at school I don’t know about?”

“No, no—you mustn’t worry so much. It’s more about home. With Skandar’s commitments, especially this term, we have to go out so much, you know. When Skandar isn’t traveling, then three, sometimes four times a week—it’s terrible. I hate it.” She sighed. “And Reza hates it most of all. He weeps, often. He clings to me—we have fights—can you believe it? Or worse, he sulks. He goes into his room and shuts the door and won’t come out to say good night, or let me in.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.” I heard my teacher voice come out of my mouth. “Have you tried talking to him about it? He’s old enough, really—he’s eight.”

“And seven, as they say, is the age of reason. I know. So yes, I’ve talked about it with him; and so now I ask your help.”

“Mine?”

“Because he says that it’s only bearable, these evenings, if you come.”

“If I come? Come with you to the events?”

“Come to him, of course! Not every time—that would be ridiculous …” She laughed, and it was not the same kind of laugh as before, and I knew that she knew that what she was asking wasn’t quite right. Even when it was couched as Reza’s request rather than her own, it was strange. It put us on a different footing, a different trajectory. I must have looked hurt.

“It isn’t a business proposal, my friend.” She had her hand on my arm and seemed even to stroke it, as if I were a cat. “It’s a family proposal … Oh dear, is it a cultural difference we’re having here?” Much eye movement. “In Italy, it’s only the closest people that you can ask in this way, as if you were his zia, his auntie. You can picture him, can’t you? So solemn and furious, and I said, ‘What would make it okay for Mummy and Daddy to go out and leave you? What could possibly make it okay?’ And his face lit up, with the joy of asking an impossible dream; he said, ‘It would be all right if Miss E would come.’ Then, he said, it would be much better than all right—it would be better even than having you at home. And I looked sad, so then he said, ‘Well, it would be just as good.’ You know his face in such a moment—who can deny him? I promised him I’d ask you, because it would be his happiness … and you mustn’t feel you have to say yes—but the idea that you’re upset when I ask, this I can’t bear—my friend?” And as if the reach of her arm had been but an introductory tentacle, she rose and embraced me, one of her absolute, enveloping hugs that I found so unnerving.

“Of course,” she went on as she released me, “we will pay you. That goes without saying.”

This made things even worse. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I love Reza. I love you. I wouldn’t hear of it.”

“But Nora—I insist—think of it, the amount of time—”

“Are you joking? Either I’m family or I’m not family. You wouldn’t pay his auntie!”

“Ah, Nora.” Sirena shook her head. “You are an extraordinary woman. And yes, of course you are family. Give me another hug.”

By which time I felt a fool, an uptight fool, for my boundaries and my rules. She honestly made me feel that I was honored to be chosen; that I was, in this role, irreplaceable.



In those next couple of months, everything and nothing happened. You could say, from the outside, that Miss Eldridge, a third-grade teacher in her late thirties, broke one of her cardinal rules and babysat, not once but numerous times, for one of her pupils. So what? You could say that she made unexpected progress with her artwork, launching not one but two room-boxes at once, in a general spirit of expansion; and you could add, accurately, that she became actively involved also in the creation of her friend Sirena’s installation—in all sorts of small, practical ways, from sewing to soldering assistance, to the wiring of tiny lights and the placement of video cameras. And third, you could mention that during this stretch of manic unfolding—of wanton disinhibition—this same Miss Eldridge experienced, in conversation with her friend Sirena’s husband, Skandar—or perhaps, more accurately, over time, with her own friend Skandar—a sort of awakening, a type of excitement about the wider world that she hadn’t thought, in midlife, still possible.

You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch—and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above—a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes.

And if this happens, in youth, slightly more often than the passage of a comet, then in age it seems to happen not at all, or not at all to ordinary people like me. So that if I tell you that over the months from February to May of that year, 2005, it was as if a series of little explosions were being detonated in my brain—if I tell you that I had this lid-lifting experience of the world not once but more times than I can properly count, like some extraordinary prolonged cranial multiple orgasm, an endless opening and titillation of my soul—then you will perhaps understand why, for years afterward, I thought that saying “yes” to the babysitting had without question been the right thing to do.



It became a ritual. And again, as my time with Sirena was kept almost a secret from Reza (in that it was never spelled out to him that we were together), those afternoons when I’d slip away in double time from Appleton to Somerville, to the studio in winter, blanched and window-steamed against the darkening light outdoors, a newborn-ness in its bright light—so too were my evenings with Reza a secret, and part of their wonder was their secrecy, as of a strange sort of almost affair, if that analogy can be imagined uncorrupted by the flesh. I mean that on those days when I’d be going in the evening to their town house by the river, Reza would know it, and knew also, from his parents, that he shouldn’t make public reference to it. We played a dance of glances, of surreptitious significant smiles, that might have perturbed anyone who saw them, exchanged as they were between a boy of eight and a woman who might have been, but wasn’t, his mother. Probably on average twice a week, I’d go from school to the studio, and from the studio home to drop my car, and then would walk—sometimes almost run—directly to the Shahids’ house; and in this way, in the course of a single day, would enjoy each of the flavors after which I pined: Sirena-time, Reza-time and then—because he always saw me home to my door—Skandar-time.

My job, which for some years had loomed so large in my life, shrank, in my mind, to a shadow of itself, as these other employments took its place. You might have thought, talking to me, that I was barely teaching at all, a morning or two a week—but the truth is that my kids somehow made room for my need to let go: they made no trouble, or almost none, that winter and spring. The remedials struggled valiantly, and didn’t lapse into truancy. The families, like dormant volcanoes, shed no molten rock upon their young: no breakups, no violence, no disappearing parents, no catastrophic illnesses. The boy in the second grade—not strictly my purview, but still—who was diagnosed with a brain tumor had the infinite luck for it to be benign. The gods were smiling.



You’re thinking, “But this poor woman, this middle-aged spinster, from where could she have conjured the idea that she had a family; or rather, that she had any family besides her father languishing in his ointment-pink apartment, and her Aunt Baby encrusted in her Rockport condo among the memorabilia, and, like a remote galaxy, Matt and Tweety and their kid out in Arizona?” But families have always been strange and elastic entities. Didi is much more my family than Matt could ever be. And I knew it, with each of the three Shahids, intuitively. I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would be hurt. But you can’t pretend they didn’t need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn’t necessarily have admitted it—except Reza—but you can’t tell me that they didn’t love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you’ve never had this experience—but who has not been visited by love, laughing?—then you can’t understand. And if you have, you don’t need me to say another word.





4





In late January, or perhaps early February, Sirena began to build her world in earnest: Wonderland. She’d spent the fall making the smaller bits—the soap and aspirin flowers in all sizes and in a rainbow of colors, the rainstorm of slivered mirror shards that would hang from the ceiling on near-invisible wires, stored in bags and boxes in her end of the L.

Now what had looked like an artist’s equivalent of doodling was revealed to be purposeful: she unfolded for me, one early evening when we both stayed late, her blueprint. Like being shown the inside of her head, it made those little currents, those jolts, tickle all down my spine. This was surely an intimacy greater than any nakedness: to see this page spread out upon the worktable, with its erasures and its smudges and, given that it was Sirena’s, a coffee ring or two, and all of it overlaid by her notes to herself, tiny, tiny insect-writing possible with only the sharpest of pencils and legible only, by anyone other than herself, with a magnifying glass.

She was building a Wonderland for everyone. Each of us would be Alice. And while it was, in part, about the mysteries of the imagination, it was also about a spiritual discovery of the existing world: Sirena was mixing together Lewis Carroll and the vision of a twelfth-century Muslim named Ibn Tufail, who wrote a story about a boy growing up alone on a desert island, discovering everything—including himself, and God—for the first time.

Sirena wasn’t, like me, constrained by reality, by what actually was or had been. She took on storybook worlds, plundering other people’s imaginations but not their histories. Maybe it’s what made her—what makes her—a real artist in the eyes of the world, whereas I count as a spinster with a hobby, the sort of person about whom appalling words like “zany” are used. But there’s nothing zany about it. My Emily Dickinson room is exactly that: Emily Dickinson’s room, constructed to replicate as precisely as possible the room as historians have determined it actually was, but in miniature. Always, I have an engagement with Death—because my art isn’t, after all, about what is or what might be, but about what was. You could call each of my boxes a shrine.

Sirena, on the other hand, is engaged with the life force. We all want that, really. It’s what attracts us: someone who opens doors to possibility, to the barely imagined. Someone who embraces the colors and textures, the tastes and transformations—someone who embraces, period. We’re all after what’s juicy, what breathes. If you’re really clever, like Sirena, then you create a persona—or maybe, more disturbingly, you become a person—who, while seeming impressively, convincingly to eschew fakery, is in fact giving people, very consciously, exactly what they want. Wouldn’t you call the person who builds a Wonderland—a Wonderland that you can see and touch and smell, that both is and is not Alice’s Wonderland, and is also some twelfth-century Islamic Robinson Crusoe’s Wonderland, is both East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real, and somehow, because of its freedom in not being wearingly faithful, becomes above all your Wonderland, or yours and Sirena’s at once, as though you were intimate with her in some way, wouldn’t you call such a person a Purveyor of Dreams? You would, and some Frenchie critic subsequently did, and if you’re wondering what could possibly be wrong with being a Purveyor of Dreams—I mean, you could say, isn’t that what Art is for?—you should keep in mind that the desire to be that, to do that—to be the fittest at artistic survival—requires ruthlessness. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person. Which would explain why I don’t seem to make the cut.

That evening, when we stood over her blueprint and I marveled, she asked me again for help. It was only a couple of weeks after the babysitting request, because I remember that I’d been to take care of Reza only twice, then, and there was, in my heart, a particular rush of thankfulness to Sirena: this in addition to all my other complicated passion, because I thought in some way she’d finally given me a son, my son. I cooked supper for him; I read to him; I scolded him about his homework, not as a teacher but in a parental way; and after kissing his forehead and smoothing his duvet, I perched in his room on the hard chair, in the penumbra, as the jazz musicians paraded brightly around the wall, watching the gentle rise and fall of his small bundled self until he fell asleep.

It was new, then, this thing with Reza, and it made me love Sirena all the more because it seemed almost a biblical gift. It really felt as though Sirena had bestowed upon me the flesh of her flesh, and I was savoring it most richly, still new, when all of a sudden there came, unbidden, another: the blueprint, unfolded.

“What do you think?” she asked me. She put her hand on me, of course. She looked up at me with the famous almond eyes, wide. “Does it look like—what do you think? Is it a land of reason and a land of marvels at the same time?”

How to answer, when mostly I was feeling the hand? And wondering, as I always did, what I felt about the hand.

“It’s a map.”

She clicked her tongue. “You mustn’t tease me. There is a map, there are the furnishings for my world”—she gestured at the bags and boxes—“but now there are other, bigger things to build. The island itself, if you like.” She sighed. “It doesn’t entirely make sense, because in Paris the shape of the space is different, not long and narrow but more a strangely divided rectangle. I’ll make it like a pathway, a journey. But I must build it here first, to see, obviously for the scale of it, but also to get started on the video.”

This was her big idea. She wanted to build a version of her Wonderland in the studio, she said, so that the Appleton kids—my Appleton kids, my third-grade class—could come and discover it. She would film their discovery. This was her plan. After that she might make other videos, she hoped, but the one she cared about was the kids. “And here’s the thing, you see, Nora, my dear: I cannot build the Wonderland, and I cannot make the video, without you.” She crinkled her eyes, her mouth, in her most endearing smile. “You know this, don’t you? After all our conversations.” She sighed. “I never worked before with the help of anybody. But you—with your help, we will make something wonderful—a wonderful Wonderland!”

“Yes, sure—” I felt so many things at once. Chief among them excited; but also, afraid. Yet again, some boundary was being broken. I would let it break, because I wanted to; but what would it mean, to bring my kids—to bring her kid, our kid—here?

She was already imagining it: “The Jabberwocky, to go—in English?”

“Snicker snack.”

“Yes, the Jabberwocky, his eyes, eyes of light in the darkness—the suggestion of monstrosity, it’s better.”

“I guess.”

“Because then it is each person’s monstrosity, yes? You see? I don’t tell you what is monstrous, just like I don’t tell you what to love. I simply allow you to imagine.” She had taken her physical self back into herself, arms crossed over her chest, her shawl clutched round, but still, the smile. “Because each of us has our own fantasies, our own nightmares.”

“True.”

“What is for me perfection, you don’t even think twice about.”

“You never know—”

“You never know. Exactly. So we must keep the doors as open as possible, let as many fantasies come into Wonderland as we can. So that everyone can see themselves there.”

“Wonderland always seemed to me like a pretty scary place when I was a kid.”

“Yes! Scary, but we want to be scared.”

“I guess.”

“With mirrors and lights—like children, we want all the emotion, good, bad, and then poof, we want the emotion to go away again. We will do this, for the children, for Reza’s classroom, when you bring them here …”

“It depends, surely—”

“Because in the end, we want above all to be safe, yes? Almost everybody wants this in the end.”



We stood over her map of Wonderland and she told me that she couldn’t build it without my help. She wanted to bring together two different ideas of wonder, one imaginary and one spiritual. On the one hand, she had her story about a boy, then a man, raised alone on an island, and of his solitary discovery of science, and of spiritualism, culminating in his worship of a God he’d come to believe in absolutely—a worship that took the form of a spinning trance. She would mix this antique Eastern mysticism with a different kind of wonder, a modern Western wonder, that was Alice in Wonderland’s: a place where reason—and the ground—didn’t remain stable, where the imagination confused good and evil, friend and foe. One Wonderland was about trying to see things as they are, she said, about believing that such a thing as clarity was possible; and the other was about relativism, about seeing things from different perspectives, and also about being seen, and about how being seen differently also changes you. Both possibilities were amazing and frightening at the same time; but only one of them, she said, could lead to wisdom. She wanted her artwork, she said, to offer the possibility, at least, of wisdom. For this, she said, she needed me.

I was too dignified to gush or fawn on her. I had enough masquerade in me for that. I told her—truthfully—that I hadn’t worked with anyone else on an art project since high school—those heady afternoons in Dominic Crace’s lair. I mentioned that I was hoping, now that Emily was to all intents and purposes finished, to continue with the cycle, although perhaps not in chronological order—and that there was, after all, barely any time, just a few hours in the afternoons. But her eyes were smiling at me as though I were actually saying, “Yes, yes, of course, YES!” and I knew that she knew that, and that we were both excited about it.

That was in the middle of a week, the beginning of February; and by the weekend I was canceling another visit to my poor father in Brookline, in order to drive Sirena to a vast used clothing warehouse south of town, recommended by Didi. I’d promised I’d take him to the medical supply in Belmont to look for a raised toilet seat to ease his bad hips, and I figured, guiltily, that another week or two with the old seat would surely not be too bad. Sirena and I were going to choose a mountain of light blue dresses and pinafores—Alice clothes—from which to sew the canopy of her new sky.

There was, to this, an element of the costume department back in college, a sort of “what the hell” good cheer completely antithetical to my pious and oh-so-precise reconstructions; and it was—how could I have forgotten this?—fun. It was simply fun to turn up the radio and the heat in the car to full blast, to sing along, like hams, to Macy Gray—“Try to walk away and I stumble …”—and then to roll into the Avril Lavigne hit of the time that the third graders loved without having the faintest idea about the emotions it expressed. “My Happy Ending,” it was called: “You were everything, everything that I wanted … All this time you were pretending / So much for my happy ending …”—we bawled the lyrics like teenagers, and Sirena’s funny Italian lingering upon the endings of the words themselves (“my happy-e ending-e”) made us laugh still more.

The actual sky was vast and blue and impeccable and American, the very canvas of possibility, the gray highway stretching out before us, salted white as sand, and the bay to our left, as we headed south, all glitter in the winter sun. I was so happy it was like a food, like I’d been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know, fully, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: “Imagine—imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this,” and in the middle of the singing I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing—an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was.



I have an old friend from college, long lost, who used to say that you should never let yourself think of a journey as long, because then it will feel long no matter what. By the same token, it’s important, when you’re the Woman Upstairs, never to think of yourself—but never, do you understand?—as alone or forlorn or, God help us, wanting. It will not do. It cannot be. It is the end.



At the warehouse, we rifled through racks and bins of all kinds—vast shapeless nylon granny dresses, shrunken, felted woolen dresses, polyester stretch pants, sheets and blankets, sequined netting, iridescent organza, animal print plush jersey jackets, bolts of corduroy in extraordinary shades of plum and puce and pear. Sirena fingered everything with her eyes closed, as if the garments had messages in braille upon them—“It’s to know if I can work with this,” she explained, when I teased her. “Some fabrics, the synthetics, the fake ones, like some people, is this”—and she mimed scraping her fingernails on a blackboard.

“Are there people you don’t like, then?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before.

“Nora!” She shook her head incredulously. “Aren’t there people you don’t like?”

“So many of them.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t choose, not in this way. For me, life’s too short. Yes? Life is too short. When they”—she mimed the fingernails—“then they must go. Like the fabric, I don’t take it home; so with the people, they’re the same. Not for me!”

“There must be a word for that,” I said. “What’s the word for that in Italian?”

“Respingere, maybe—to reject, to return something.”

“Re-spinge? I love that: ‘Spinge it!’ Ditch the dope and spinge the sponge! Spinge him again—re-spinge him!”

We were excitable enough to laugh even at this, and it passed then into our vocabulary, part of the lexicon between us, so that when I was annoyed with someone I’d say, “Spinge her,” or Sirena might complain, giggling, that we should “re-spinge the sponges.” It doesn’t seem very funny now, but it became one of our things, after that.

On the way home, we realized we were famished, that it was late. The afternoon sun, still bright, hung now coldly low in the sky, and the heat in the car had that prickling, parched quality that comes when it’s genuinely freezing outside. We decided to get something to eat.

I don’t know why I thought of the Italian bar up behind Davis Square. Mostly it was the sort of place you went for drinks, when it was too late for everything else; and it wasn’t a place where you thought of eating, much. But years before, before my mother was even sick, a lifetime ago in my artist phase, when I’d thought I might yet turn out to be the person that I wanted to be—whoever that person might have been—I’d spent a long afternoon there with two friends—a hilarious and beautiful gay guy, Louis, who cut hair fantastically well, and cut mine for a while, and who was killed a couple of years later on the Mass Ave bridge riding his bike in the rain at night; and a woman named Erica I’d known in New York, who’d been at law school with my boyfriend Ben but dropped out to work with the homeless, which makes her sound worthy, but actually she was as funny as Louis was, and maybe that’s why I thought of the bar, because we’d laughed so much that seven-hour afternoon, sitting in front of a superior tureen of Italian wedding soup made, I remember, by the barman’s Sicilian mom, and what amounted, in the end, to four bottles of a delicious Nebbiolo, a bit more than one each, which, drunk over seven hours, was the perfect amount. The bar had no windows to speak of and operated in an eternal darkness, out of time, so we went inside in one era and came out in another, like time travelers. I’d loved that stretch—it had happened only the once, when I was at an age where I thought that was, or ought to be, what artists did—and maybe for that reason, or maybe for the soup, I suggested that bar and we went there.

The owner was still behind the counter, fatter now, and balder, but he’d been both fat and bald all those years before. Sirena and he, with some kind of ethnic telepathy, seemed able to tell from looking at one another that they should speak Italian, and within moments they were deep in animated conversation, and he was promising to cook for us with his own hands his mother’s special pasta with broccoli and anchovies—it would seem that she had, in the intervening years, gone to meet her maker. He set us up in a corner booth, tufted oxblood leatherette up our backs higher than our heads, and on the walls the requisite photographs of Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, and three whole candles for ourselves. Aside from an older guy having scotch at the bar, we were the only customers. When we came in, Sinatra was on the sound system, but the owner said something to Sirena and she laughed and he put on instead something older and nightclubby, a woman singing in Italian, and Sirena was loving it—she closed her eyes and swayed and hummed along, for a bit.

Sirena and I had our bowls of pasta and our red wine and our candles and our booth. We were tired from the long trek, and I had that tingling under my skin that comes after the cold, at once invigorating and strangely soporific. It was all feeling like a dream, and in the middle of this dream I had a revelation. Sirena was saying something, and I couldn’t quite hear it, or follow it, because of how I was feeling, so I was just looking at her, watching her talk, her elegantly inelegant stubby hand resting on her wineglass, the crinkles in the corners of her eyes, the crazy darkness of her brows and her tickly lashes, the glimmer of the candlelight on her dark irises and on strands of her hair. And suddenly I thought: “I want to stay with you. Actually, forever. I do.”

And she saw me looking at her, in a fond and foolish way, and she cocked an eyebrow—to say what? “I see you”? “I understand”? “We are here together”?—and took my hand in hers and held it as it lay on the table. “Today we had a great day, yes? If only each day was like this one, cara mia!” And I barely heard her, because I felt her hand upon my hand, all through my body. I felt her skin. I really felt it.

You don’t ask to have such a thought. You also can’t take it away, once you’ve had it. I’d never had such a thought about Sirena, not in all the time I’d been in love with her. But I had the thought unbidden, just like that, in Amodeo’s bar, and in the first instant of having the thought, I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to tell her. The only person I could think of who would really understand was Sirena herself. And then, at once, I had the horrifying presentiment of her recoil. What if she didn’t feel the same way? And what if she did feel the same way? And how could it be that all the great welter of emotion I experienced in her company would be somehow and suddenly summarized by—reduced to—this?





5





With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again.

If you were me, and you had this revelation—but lo, I don’t just love, I want!—and you wanted to but couldn’t tell Sirena, what would you do? You’d tell Didi. As it happens, if you were me, you’d find yourself unwisely telling both Didi and Esther at the same time, in the sticky booth at their favorite pub in Jamaica Plain, the very next evening, even though you knew you didn’t want Esther’s opinion. But your revelation was burning so in your hand that you couldn’t hold on to it a second longer.

If you were me, you’d be surprised by their unified reaction; and then surprised at your surprise.

They didn’t quite laugh, but Didi made a sound, with beer, in the back of her nose, that was infuriatingly close to laughter.

“You’re making fun of me? I tell you this huge thing—this huge thing for me—and you’re pretty much my closest friends, and you laugh at me? Am I going crazy here?”

“Hey, Nora Adora—”

“No. For real. I might have to—”

“Take a deep breath. I wasn’t laughing. Esther wasn’t laughing. Were you, sweetie? We love you. Calm down.”

“We somehow knew what you were going to say,” Esther said. “We were laughing at our goddesslike prescience.”

“Oh, f*ck you,” I said. “You were laughing at the dumb straight girl who’s finally coming to her belated awakening, sad creature that she is.”

“Come off it, you know us better than that. You do. Honestly?”

Esther was making pug eyes at me, and Didi was holding on, rather sweatily, to both of my hands, as if they both feared I would bolt.

“Because we anticipated it—which wasn’t so hard—I mean, you did say you’d had a revelation yesterday and we knew you weren’t out with your dad—we talked about it. We discussed it.”

Didi squeezed my left hand more tightly. She wore a lumpy ring that cut into my finger and I flinched, which I saw her register. “We discussed it, and we decided that you’re wrong.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? How can I be wrong about what I felt? About what I feel? If I can’t tell, then I’d like to know who could.”

“Trust us,” said Esther. “We’re experts. We can tell.” She was joking, but only halfway, and I hated her in that moment, a frank hot flush of hatred.

“I know it seems bizarre,” said Didi, still clutching. “I don’t mean this as some, you know, questioning of your judgment—”

“Nor as some judgment of your experience,” Esther broke in. “I mean, your experience is obviously totally valid.”

“Gee, thanks. Big of you.”

“Calm down, sweetie—”

“Let go of my hand. I’m not your sweetie.”

“Listen here,” said Didi, in her sharp, no-nonsense, long-lost radio voice, letting go of my hand and drawing herself up to her full height, which, even seated, was much greater than mine. The red neon of a Bud sign lit up her hair from behind. She’d become a giant fairy-tale genie. “Listen here, Miss Eldridge. Stop answering back. Listen to what we’ve got to say, and then we can talk about it. Okay?”

She made a mistake in using the word “we,” in including Esther, but I nodded as I pulled my hands to safety in my lap.

“Nobody is denying your girl crush.”

“Crush?”

“Objectionable term, but accurate diagnosis.”

“Crush?”

“I told you to listen, quietly. Hear me out. Okay?”

I made my eyes into slits.

“So, you’ve known for ages how you feel about this woman—she inspires you as an artist, she makes you laugh, she makes you feel alive. All these things are true, and wonderful and rare, and it’s also true that often they are linked to sexual desire. Up till now, you hadn’t made that link—because—”

“Because I was afraid to.”

“That’s not what I was going to say, actually. Because it availed you nothing. Because it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. Because you didn’t need to. Because it seemed to you as though your emotions were getting expressed well enough anyhow, your need for intimacy was being met, and that—the whole physical thing—wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t the point.”

“Okay, and so now that’s changed.”

“Wait. What I’m saying is that everything is always changing, from one minute to the next, and that maybe this sudden urge to kiss her, it’s more like a power surge than a permanent change in voltage—do you see what I mean?”

“What Didi means, I think …,” Esther began, but Didi knew me well enough to raise a warning hand.

“What I mean is that, yes, there was a moment when your affection and delight were bubbling over and seeking a means of expression and you wanted something more. Bang. In that moment you totally did. I’m not denying that. But I’m really wondering whether that’s actually some seismic Sapphic shift in you. You know that I of all people would be all for it if it were—there’s nothing I love more than women loving women. But in this case, I think Esther and I are in agreement here, we’re really wondering about that. It seems like this could be part of a different story, you know? A piece from a different puzzle.”

“What’s in it for you, to deny me my revelation?” I said, more petulant now than angry. “Why do you want me not to be in love with Sirena? Why?”

“The only person we care about here is you, Nora. I know you love her, but I don’t give a shit about this Italian chick. And I don’t want to see you throw yourself needlessly in harm’s way. I’m not denying your feelings, I’m just asking a question about the story you’re choosing to tell about those feelings, that’s all.”

I rolled my eyes. The overlap between my theater of annoyance and my actual annoyance bordered on the awkward. “Who made you my f*cking therapist?” I said, my arm already outstretched to signal to the waitress that we needed another round. “I’m not paying for these services.” And I managed a laugh, though it came out more like a guffaw, and then I asked them about the obscure local women’s soccer team they loved and often went to watch, and how it was doing—not well, as it turned out. I closed the conversation down.

Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away. In this case, if anything, I became more convinced of the truth of what I’d felt in Amodeo’s, certain that I’d had a revelation, something like a conversion. But certain now, too, because of Didi and Esther’s reaction, that I had to keep my knowledge a secret, from everyone.

You might wonder how this was different from all that had come before, from months of being more generally, less specifically, in love. You might think it was essentially the same. But I felt I’d finally awoken, that the world was at last clear to me and that its shapes made sense. Not only did I have hope in a general way, I had something specific to hope for. I was certain that I understood. And certain that if I tried to explain what I understood, I would be—as I had been, with Didi and Esther—misunderstood.

When my father asked mildly if I was dating anyone—clearly, in his inarticulate way, fretting about my calcifying spinsterdom, unable to see, as my mother would have, that I had almost fulfilled her dream of independence—I snapped at him that I was too old for that kind of nonsense, which false bitterness made his voice, when he protested, small and sad.

But it was as if my revelation had opened a door in my head, into a further room where all life was suddenly potentially titillating, where everything was secretly part of my secret. Whenever I saw an article, or a book, or a film about a hidden or unrequited love, I thought it had been placed purposefully in my path, so I wouldn’t feel alone. When I was driving anywhere, or ambling the supermarket aisles, or lying in bed at night boiling my toes against the fake fur hot water bottle I’d bought on sale in January, I was now always thinking about Sirena.

No, let me be precise: I wasn’t actually. That would suggest real things. In a way that hadn’t been true before, I was thinking about my thoughts about Sirena. I was imagining telling her about my feelings, or I was imagining her confessing, in her particular lilting way, that she found me beautiful, or thought me a great artist, or on one occasion I imagined her saying that she could not now imagine her life without me. What conversations we had, in my head! What honesty, what pure transparency, what a perfect meeting of minds.

How much did Reza feature in these visions? Well, sometimes I’d picture the three of us, installed in a farmhouse in Vermont, or in Tuscany, or in a thatched bungalow on a Caribbean island, in order that we might live cheaply enough to make art, and grow a resplendent garden from which to feed ourselves. I knew the layouts of these various houses, the unfolding of their rooms. I built them in my mind, and we inhabited each of them at different times. I knew how the morning sunbeams fell in slats upon the terra-cotta floors in Italy, and the sounds of chickens scrabbling in the yard outside, audible as soon as you opened the casement window. I knew how the snow from the field behind the house reflected white in the bathroom mirror in Vermont, where the steaming water in the clawfoot tub smelled of sage, and Sirena, stepping into the bath, dropped her slippers—Moroccan babouches—one and then the other on the pink and purple round rag rug in the middle of the white painted wooden floor. I knew the kiss of the rising Caribbean wind, warm upon my ruffled arm hairs, if I stood in the shadowy doorway and squinted at the passing schoolchildren in their navy and white uniforms, kicking up dust as they ambled by, and I scanned their knots and clutches for Reza, his laughing olive face among the chocolate and coffee faces of his peers.

In these fantasies, Reza would always call me Mommy, resting a small, hot hand upon my shoulder while I worked on an art project at a table in the sunlight, or washed lettuce at a porcelain farmhouse sink, and even as they seemed completely surreal—sturdy-skinned bubbles unconnected to the standing traffic or the rows of cereal boxes or the almost sweaty duvet which surrounded me in reality—these imaginings were more vivid and more alive to me than much that I could see and smell and touch. As with my earlier dream about Skandar, I had to remind myself, for a second, that the scenes hadn’t taken place—or, as I saw it, that they had not yet taken place.

And what of Skandar, of whom I had also dreamed? Well, in that spell of late winter, he didn’t yet feature in my fantasy life. He would have to wait, quite literally, until spring.

Let me explain that, in spite of myself, for several months—and in some less pressing way, for several years—this state of fantasy was, in the wake of “the Fabric Weekend,” which might more aptly have been called “the Fabrication Weekend,” the country to which I largely decamped and in which I preferred to stay.

I knew it was potential rather than actual, but I didn’t understand then that it wasn’t Real. I didn’t see that I’d made it up. When Sirena took my hand between both of hers and said, “What would I do without you? You are my angel, my heart’s best love,” I believed her. When Reza said, “I never want you to go away,” I believed him. I built houses, and entire lives, upon those beliefs. If you’d told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That’s always the way.