The Woman Upstairs

6





I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see.

I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be—that it will yet be, and most certainly—as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish? My mother, of all people, had taught me by example, by the whimsical panicked procrastination of my childhood and then, more brutally, by the prolonged, involuntary shutting-up-shop of her body, that this was a preposterous dream, that fate was a jailer. But I chose, in that time, not to heed her lessons. We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.

My mother, toward the end, had said to me, but with a sweet smile, “Life’s funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there’s still so much of a life to get through.” And I’d been offended, because I wanted to believe, as her child, that I’d been a dream come true; but above all, I’d pitied her. I’d still somehow believed I’d be different from her. I hadn’t yet had my Lucy Jordan moment, a moment from which the Shahids had granted me a long but finite reprieve.

Happy, crazy—the name for it doesn’t matter. It was like the world was filled with light. This is the trouble with clichés: they describe something truly, and that’s why we use them over and over again, until their substance is eroded to dust. But these things are true: I woke up earlier, more refreshed. I had more energy; my mind moved more clearly, more quickly. I caught no colds, I had no aches, I was luckier, I got on better with people, I laughed more, I worked more, I slept better. I was awake in my life in a way completely new to me, and I knew that anything—ah! my art!—anything!—was possible.

It’s also true that I developed a constant, unignorable itch, the side effect of the love drug. The itch subsided only when I was with one Shahid or another, or when I was working. As soon as the last school bell rang, my itch was there, waiting. I might be walking around the reservoir with Maggie, who taught sixth grade, or driving my father to see the orthopedic surgeon about the pain in his hip, and I’d be apparently listening to and even participating lucidly in the conversation (“Yeah, it’d be great if Ling’s father could do a Mandarin after-school unit next fall—I think a lot of kids, and parents, would be really into that.” Or, “Well, I think Dr. Fuchs’s take on the replacement is that the pain is totally worth it, and you’re up to the rehab. He wouldn’t have suggested it if he didn’t think you were up to the rehab”), but really inside my head I was attending to my unmentionable itch, I was reliving and reinterpreting conversations (“You won’t be here till six?”—she’d sounded disappointed. She tried to make it seem she didn’t care, but I could tell she’d been disappointed!), I was wondering what she was doing at that moment, I was wondering how long till I could call and find out, I was wondering when I could next get to the studio, and how long I’d be able to stay. I was wondering, as I often did, whether she or anyone else could tell the difference in me, whether my revelation, my awakening, had any outward mark.

Did I say anything? To anyone? And risk awakening from my amazing awakedness? What do you think?

All the exhilarating advantages of my condition, and also its inconvenient effects, led me to want to be at the studio as much as possible. In February, and in March, and in April too, every Saturday, and almost every Sunday, I’d sit or stand or lean or carry all morning, building Wonderland, Sirena’s Wonderland, laughing and being silly, sometimes just watching, able to ignore the unmentionable itch because it Was No More. And then we’d eat something. After the first couple of weeks, we took turns bringing lunch, and I lingered over my choices in the shops on a Friday evening: flavored breadsticks or big Swedish crackers like enormous communion hosts, wrapped in crinkly white paper; olives, cheeses, cured meats; dolmas; burek; sweet peppers stuffed with soft curd. Tubs of ratatouille, piperade, anchoïade. Endive leaves; strips of fennel. Purple broccoli stalks. Heirloom tomatoes, which cost a fortune in early spring. And sweets: I’d bring such sweets—the famous Highland Avenue cupcakes or sesame buns soaked in honey, or salted chocolate oatmeal cookies, or loukoum, or extravagant bars of Italian chocolate from the deli down the road from my house—always I brought enough for Reza, even for Skandar, substantial portions of sweets for the others, to assuage the guilt of my happiness.

There was, in these months, a new side of Sirena, obsessive and imperious, one I hadn’t seen in the fall, and it might, I suppose, have seemed to me selfish. But I was in thrall to her passionate single-mindedness, not least because, as her virtual assistant, I was included within it. Like a madness, her Wonderland was everything to her, and while she didn’t care to talk about it generally, she did talk about it with me. As in, “I think we need more rain sheets, more, yes? … I’m trying to decide whether the shards should be actually dangerously sharp—what do you think, Nora? We don’t want to draw blood, but shouldn’t it hurt to touch it?”

February vacation week, she signed Reza up for robotics camp at the Science Museum and we spent all day every day at the studio. She started to become an organic part of it, like the sink or the chemical smell in the hallway. By mid-March she hardly changed her clothes, or washed her hair, her fingertips were cracked and discolored from the paint and glue, her jeans, like her hair, more stiff and bespattered at the end of each day. She filched her husband’s cigarettes and smoked them with her coffee, one grubby hand palming a chipped cup, the other flicking ash onto the floor. The studio started to stink and was freezing—she threw two windows open wide to clear the fug, with only moderate success.

Sirena was turning, before my eyes, into my ideal of an artist—as if I’d imagined her and, by imagining her, had conjured her into being. And here’s the weird thing: her existence as an ideal woman artist didn’t feel as though it thwarted or controlled me, I didn’t look at her and think, “Why are you almost famous and I’m only your helper?” I don’t recall having the thought even once. Instead, I looked at her and saw myself, saw what suddenly seemed possible for me, too, because it was possible for her.

And the weirdest thing is that in that time, in addition to sewing together dresses, and sowing flowers on Astroturf, and stringing broken mirrors onto fine wire, in addition to making tapes of cricket sounds and animal-in-the-undergrowth noises, and in addition to fashioning Jabberwock tusks that would ultimately be discarded and forgotten, and rigging up the piercing little bulbs that would be Jabberwock eyes, in addition to working out for Sirena the camera settings for the kids’ video—the Appleton plan, as we called it—and in addition to my regular teaching load and the higgledy-piggledy bustle of my spring term classroom—times tables! Tadpoles! A trip on the school bus to the MFA!—and to my dream nights as Reza’s beloved Auntie—in addition (what had I done with my time up till now, I had to wonder, and have to wonder now again: Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?), anyway, in addition to all these things, I made my own art.

It seems hard to credit it, but I did.

I worked on not one but two rooms from my cycle, at one time. Even though I ought, technically, chronologically, to have set about building Virginia Woolf’s workroom at Rodmell, with her notebook open and her shawl draped over her chair and her last note propped upon the mantelpiece, I somehow couldn’t bear to—it was not a season for suicide, not in my life at any rate—and so I set about doing the rooms for Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick, which weren’t exactly cheerful in themselves; but I found, somehow, a joy in them.

The Alice Neel room was to be the sanatorium suicide ward in small-town Pennsylvania where she was locked up after her breakdown. She’d lost her two little girls, one to diphtheria and the other to her fickle Cuban husband, who’d promised to send for her but never did, and, leaving their daughter with his parents, went on to Paris alone. I wanted to get into the barren room the memory of her little girls, but also I wanted to slip into the corners the ghosts of her future sons, the two devoted and adored boys who stuck by her through thick and thin—through so much thin; and at so great a cost to themselves—as she grew old and fat and plain and was all the time poor, so long unrecognized, obsessed with her work, piling up her unsold canvases in the narrow hallway of her grimy walk-up apartment—but through it all, she’d have those boys, both of whom would flee bohemia for the professions, solid and bourgeois and aggressively uneventful in their days, carrying in them all the pains of her life, of her lost youth and their unknown, lost siblings, but never abandoning her, not ever; and somehow it would have seemed wrong, in the new, golden light of love with which I saw the world illuminated, to make my Alice’s room reflect only the nadir, her darkest isolation, when she felt forsaken by life and by art and by love.

I still wanted my rows of white-draped iron beds, the high white windows unadorned, the swabbed white linoleum floor; I wanted her white nightgown, torn at the shoulder, her hands to her ears in a Munch-like scream. But I wanted the colors of Cuba, of motherhood, of the future, in the interstices, outside the windows, high up the walls, like shoots coming up through the earth, the promise of spring.

For Edie, beautiful Edie, the strangeness was that the joy was already in the room, even as it was killing her. When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren’t alone. Edie was never, on the outside, alone. Emily, Virginia, Alice—the woman artist so fundamentally isolated. And then Edie: never alone. Never invisible. Arguably, also, never seen; and in that sense, more than alone: annihilated.

But to imagine her room was in itself strangely pleasurable. How free I felt to do it, because hers was the only wholly imaginary room, the only one not based on a photograph or a painting or a description of an actual place. I could make it up: a room lined with blown-up pictures of herself, and in between the pictures, windows, and outside the windows, people crowded around, watching her, the spectacle of her. As if she were in the Christmas display at Bloomingdale’s.



I reserved the making of my rooms for myself. Which isn’t to say they were hidden from Sirena. I mean simply that I worked on them only when Sirena wasn’t there. I waited. I held back. I knew everything about her project, you see, whereas she knew only a bit about mine, and I chose to see this as my triumph, some small upper hand. My dignity, if you will, in subservience.

And of course I wasn’t afraid in the studio anymore. I had a myth of my own invincibility. You can’t imagine, if you’ve never been fearful that way, what a liberation it is to be free of it. You can say it had been silly, that I’d tortured myself for years with an artificial anxiety, and I can’t dispute that this is so; but somehow Sirena—or Reza, or maybe even Skandar—set me free from this. I stopped cowering. She gave me that gift, too.

I was free and unafraid enough to play my music loudly—Fats Waller or Chubby Jackson or Joe Marsala and His Delta Four for Alice Neel; the Velvet Underground when working on Edie—or to smoke a cigarette or even half a cigarette that Sirena had left behind. There came the week in which I was inspired—ridiculous, I know—to try to Be Edie, and I brought lots of makeup and I painted my face in front of a sliver of mirror salvaged from Sirena’s stores—its very sliverness apt, like some relic from the Factory—powdering my skin white and blackening my eyes into great, dark, glimmering hollows. I didn’t cut my hair off, but I slicked it back, and in a white T-shirt and black leggings, cursing myself for having boobs, for being close to forty, for not being tiny, I danced dervishly nevertheless and took Polaroids of myself doing so, with my mother’s old camera. The images were blurry and partial—an eye and nose, an oiled glint of hairline, a moving arm half blocking the frame—but this somehow seemed in keeping with the spirit of it all. I took my shirt off and took pictures of that, too, impressed by the retro quality of my own out-of-focus torso, my breasts in their plain white bra high and distinct in the camera’s record.

In those solitary studio nights, I wandered up and down the small pathways of Sirena’s semi-assembled Wonderland. I gazed up at where the Alice-dress sky would later hang. I sniffed the aspirin flowers, I held conversations with myself, or with Sirena, in a loud, almost abrasive tone. I spoke in silly accents and pidgin Cuban Spanish, as if I were Alice Neel’s mother-in-law telling her she couldn’t have her daughter back. I built Alice’s sanatorium beds out of fat, white-coated electrician’s wire and sewed their tiny tufted mattresses from striped Irish flannel stuffed with foam, busy as the fairy-tale elves, bemoaning out loud, in curses, the first diminishings of my middle-aged eyesight, and repeatedly pricking my forefinger. I laid a carefully joined parquet of sawn Popsicle sticks for the floor of Edie’s Factory room, and painted coat upon coat of stain and varnish to perfect its toasty hue. I framed the plate-glass windows of her hexagonal space—all windows, no doors—and sealed them carefully with putty, old-style. I laid the parquet boardwalk in the space around her room, the Edie-viewing-room, which I planned later to crowd with spectators. But I never got to the spectators themselves, which seems to me to make sense, now.

It was a riot. Like a third grader, I was in my life, in life. I was alive. I thought I’d been wakened, Sleeping Beauty–like, from a Long Sleep. In fact, I didn’t seem to need much sleep, as if all the years of struggling in a slumber had at least set me up to dispense, now, with rest. I sometimes left the studio at one, or even two, and I was in the shower by six thirty on a school day, bright and neat as a pin in my classroom by five to eight, with a surreptitious wink for Reza, who was often a mite tardy and easily anxious about it. For so long I had eaten my greens and here—at last!—was my ice-cream sundae.





7





There was another strand in this tapestry. What does it signify that I’m loath to tell you, slow to tell you? I want to say it was separate, that it was on another account. But that would be a knowing lie, and not-telling becomes, in the parlance of pious Aunt Baby, a Sin of Omission.

Almost every time I stayed with Reza, Skandar walked me home. When it snowed, he put on a hat, an old-fashioned trilby sort of hat, of battered elephant-gray felt, and he looked like a gangster in spite of his glasses. The gangsters’ accountant, maybe. When it was raining, he carried a vast umbrella, of the sort they have at hotels and golf clubs, and he gallantly held it over me as if he were my valet. He didn’t seem to own gloves, but didn’t complain of the cold, and smoked cigarettes in hoodlum fashion, cupped in his hand, as we walked. It took less than fifteen minutes to go from their town house by the river up to my triple-decker on the wrong side of Huron Avenue. It wasn’t far. And in the beginning, in the cold months, we went straight. In February, when there was a lot of snow, he’d walk behind me down the icy, narrow shoveled paths, and we didn’t talk much. It was hard to hear, single file like that, and by the time we got to my door, I could feel that my nose was red and I could see that his nose was red, his hands deep in his pockets, and he’d smile a smile at once goofy and vague, as if he wasn’t quite sure who I was, and he’d say, “Well, thank you again, and good night to you,” with a general, whole-body gesture that seemed as though he were clicking his heels. He’d wait like a father until I had the key in the lock, and then he’d set off back again down the road, stepping gingerly because of those leather-soled dress shoes.

The day after Valentine’s Day—I was relieved they hadn’t asked me to babysit Reza on that day—they were going out to another fancy dinner, at the home of the dean of the Kennedy School, and at the studio beforehand Sirena told me that Skandar wanted to cancel.

“He’s not feeling well?” I asked. I was sewing something, I know because I have a distinct physical memory of hunching and squinting, and when I looked up at Sirena it took a moment for my eyes to focus.

“You don’t read the papers?” she asked. “Or listen to the radio?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Hariri.”

I shrugged a small shrug.

“Rafic Hariri? You’ve not heard.”

“I didn’t see the papers today.”

“The prime minister of Lebanon—assassinated yesterday, along with twenty-two other people—his bodyguards, colleagues. They blew up his motorcade outside the St. Georges hotel—it made a crater in the road the size of a small house.”

I looked at the floor and shook my head. “Wow,” I said.

“That’s the trouble with being here. It all seems so far away that nobody pays any attention to anything.”

“Who did it?”

“Who knows? Israel, Syria, Hezbollah—lots of people wanted Hariri dead.”

“Did Skandar know him?”

“He’d met him, more than once. Skandar is very upset—you can understand. His country is in mourning and in turmoil; and here, at the university, even at a private dinner, they want him to talk about this as if it were an idea, not a man, so many men.”

“He was in favor of him then?”

She clicked her teeth. “Americans see everything too simply—a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it’s the wrong question. You should ask Skandar if you want an answer. He’ll give you an entire course, if you let him.”

So that night, as he walked me home after the dean’s supper, at which, I later learned, Skandar had spoken to the assembled company for half an hour, explaining the context and then the potential fallout from Hariri’s assassination—as Skandar walked behind me still on the sidewalk in places but not all the way, I asked him about the attack. He didn’t hear me the first time and I had to turn around to ask again, and he almost bumped into me and we both felt awkward.

“Ah,” he said, when he understood what I was asking. “That’s a complicated question.”

“But you’re upset.”

“Violence is very upsetting, wherever it takes place, whomever it hurts. But my poor Lebanon is a special case, a very particular story. To be still recovering from our terrible war, to be trying to create our skin all over again, to make a whole body—and then, this. Sometime I’ll try to explain. But where would I begin? My beginning? The war’s beginning? The century’s new beginning? Here, with Hariri? Depending where you begin, you’ll tell a different story. We’ll have time for them.” And he left it, that evening, at that.

I, in turn, went home and turned on my computer and Googled “Lebanon war.” Not that I hadn’t known about the civil war—when I was a child, everybody knew there was a war in Lebanon, and if, for example, you’d said to me “Sabra and Shatila” my brain would automatically have added the word “massacre”—I’d absorbed something, after all, by osmosis. But I couldn’t have explained what the massacre involved or even who was massacred, and I certainly couldn’t have told you that the civil war lasted fifteen years. As I read about it, I felt I should have known—I was a schoolteacher, for God’s sake, and Reza was a child in my class! Sirena had mentioned once about Skandar losing a brother in the war—hadn’t she said bombings?—but then again, I didn’t know all the facts about Vietnamese boat people (some of our kids were the children or grandchildren of boat people), and I couldn’t have given you a proper rundown on the history of Haiti, even though we had Haitian kids at Appleton; and we’d had a boy from Oman and there was a girl now in fourth grade from Liberia, and I would’ve had to Google that to know the first facts beyond where it was located on the map, and in all the year she was in my classroom, I never had. I thought then that maybe Sirena was right about the cotton wool of my American life, that I’d been swaddled and protected from the world. This was a Fun House of its kind, this strange place of safety into which 9/11 could erupt as if from nowhere, as if without logic, to our utter surprise.

Already liberated into what seemed an anti–Fun House reality of the emotions—a knowledge of love—and then on the cusp of my artistic freedom also, I longed now, too, for the expansion of my intellect. I wanted already to have known about such things as Hariri’s assassination, to be able to make some sense of them. It was like my World Book of Wonders, only better, and worse: the complexity, the enormity of the world was suddenly briefly apparent to me, a giant looming object in the periphery of my vision. Almost too big, but not quite. It was there, and I wanted to know it.



My walks with Skandar unfurled with the spring. After the February break, we proceeded side by side and the evening return became a small social event, a natural time for conversation. The distance between their house and my house became too short for our discussions, so we expanded our walks. The first time this happened we stood for ten minutes on my doorstep, and while I felt it would be strange to invite him in, we were both cold and growing numb. Finally he said, “Shall we walk a little more, to finish our talk but also stay warm?” And then we walked four times around the block before finally he agreed that he’d better be going. That was only the beginning. The next time we walked up to the Hi-Rise bakery and back. And each time farther and farther. Over to Harvard Square, and back in a loop that practically passed by their front door again. The walk that finally felt we were breaking an unspoken rule didn’t come until the end of April—a rule-breaking time, in the same week as my solo Edie Sedgwick impersonation. Spring was in the air, that soft feeling against the cheek and the nubs of bright leaves on the branches, rustling about. We tramped all the way to Watertown and up through the edges of Belmont and back. We walked for over an hour and a half, along empty streets—it was a weeknight, near midnight—beneath the pinkish streetlights and the breathing branches, our talk punctuated by rare lone cars. In my mind, it seemed significant that we never crossed the river. He never took my arm. We never touched at all.

As far as I know, he didn’t pretend to Sirena that he was walking by himself. As far as I know, she knew we were walking together. She never mentioned it. Once when I referred to something Skandar had talked about, she waved her hands as if warding him off and said, “So much talk! I love him, but he’s always talking—jabber, jabber. You’re so good to listen. Sometimes I say to him, ‘Skandar, it’s too bad there isn’t a job that’s just talking. That would be the job for you.’ ”

“He could be a talk show host.”

“You think it’s funny, but he couldn’t do it. A talk show host listens, no? A talk show host is listening, but Skandar is just talking. No, for a job he’d need to be a talk show guest.” She giggled. “But this isn’t a job.”

“All talk and no action,” I said, to say something. That was the closest she and I came to discussing my evening wanderings with her husband.

She was right, though: he was the talker. I told him that having him take me home was like listening to Scheherazade, but he laughed and said I had it backward, then, that I should be telling him the stories—“Where I come from,” he said, “it’s the woman who is the storyteller. The man is her prisoner.”

In my urge to read the runes at every moment, to find hidden import in everything, I took this to mean, in a flirtatious way, that he was offering to be my prisoner. I took it to mean he was attracted to me. Oh, come on, I took all those walks to mean that he was. Not straight away, not especially. But over time—the amount of time he gave to me, the attention—and who was I?—and that he gave it while his wife and son were at home, and his bed was calling. I took all this to have meaning.

What did we talk about? Sirena was right: he loved to talk; and he might have seemed a bore, but he was a wonderful speaker. Even when he told me a story two or three times, I was rapt.

On the first night of true walking, when we circled my block four times, he told me about his maternal grandmother’s village house in the mountains, and staying there when he was small, a boy of five or six, and how he was quite sure he’d seen a jaguar or a panther in the night garden, even though she’d insisted to him over breakfast and again at lunch that there were no such animals in Lebanon.

His big brothers scoffed and said he’d either dreamed it or seen the neighbor’s tabby, inflating it in his tiny mind; but in the subsequent days there were two nocturnal sheep killings higher up the mountain, and everyone in his family changed their tune.

Skandar, like every good storyteller, allowed for the possibility of ghosts and sorcery. “I always assumed,” he said, “that it was someone’s dark spirit, his avatar.”

And then he went on to explain about the local bey’s son, a boy in his late teens at that time, handsome as a god but cursed by rage, who’d beaten an old donkey so badly it had to be shot, that same summer. It was a famous incident in the village, for which the boy received no known punishment, and Skandar said he’d always wondered if the cold black cat slinking across the yard was not this boy’s black soul, or the devil who’d claimed it. And then, with a smile, and lighting another cigarette—the last of that first long walk—he said, “Of course, that black soul would have its moment, and its comeuppance, too, over ten years later, after the war began.”

“How so?” I was like a child, panting for the next chapter.

“Ahmad Akil Abbas,” he said. “By 1975, he was like all of us, that much older, his soul that much darker. A lot of drinking, drugs, a lot of so-called courage. And in ’77, maybe ’78, he organized a local militia—a band of bandits—that murdered Christian neighbors in their beds. Thank God my grandmother was already dead by then—hers was a mixed marriage, a true love match, and this sectarian warring would have destroyed her. The Khourys next door to her had their throats slit and their hands cut off. Their three children had gone to Buffalo, New York, and were too frightened to come back even to bury them; so the other Christian families in the village buried them instead. There weren’t many, already then. Those who could leave, left. But for Ahmad Abbas, when you live this way you also die this way, even if you’re as beautiful as a god, and not long after the Khourys, Ahmad was also murdered and left in the alley behind his father’s house, next to his precious motorcycle. He’d been fed his own testicles. And maybe that, too, was the work of a black cat. Maybe it was the spirit of Leyla Khoury herself. She was stout and placid with a gurgling laugh that came out of her like water from a pump, slowly and then faster, and she was a fantastic cook. Maybe it would have occurred to her to serve him his testicles for his last supper. Maybe she had the last laugh.”

It was impossible not to listen. I would have walked to Provincetown and back. Skandar’s youthful experiences were so far from Manchester-by-the-Sea. When I was fifteen, I painted faux-anarchist slogans after school in the art room and tried to hang them up around the halls. For me, a day trip to Faneuil Hall was the acme, the ne plus ultra. When he was fifteen, he saw neighbors and classmates slip out of view, either into militias or out of the country; and eventually he, too, boarded a plane for Paris and finished school as a boarder there. When he was barely more than twenty, still studying in Paris, his oldest brother was killed by a bombing: he’d been visiting a friend, had stayed overnight, and the apartment building was destroyed. It was another family friend, working with the Red Cross, who’d pulled his body from the rubble.

“When you’re young—but even now—how do you understand this?” he said when he first spoke of it, walking the night streets. “You can’t understand it. It makes no sense. You can allow yourself to be swallowed by your anger, but this will kill you. And yet how can you look at the panther, how can you look him in the eye, when he won’t stay still? When he’s nowhere and everywhere, belongs to no one and to everyone? So if you’re me, how you deal with this is that you say, I’ll look at how we talk about the panther. I’ll study the history of history, the ways that we tell the stories, and don’t tell other stories, and I’ll try to understand what it says about us, to tell one story rather than another, to tell it one way rather than another. I’ll ask the questions about what is ethical, about who decides what is ethical, I’ll ask whether it is possible, really, to have an ethics in the matter of history.”

“I don’t know quite what that means,” I said. I didn’t want to seem stupid, but it was more important to me to try to follow. He had very handsome square hands, and he waved them about in the cold air, displacing smoke, or breath, or both.

“Why did I start with the panther? Is it that I’m trying to make you see, and feel compassion for, the small six-year-old boy that I was? Now this will be your first thought about Lebanon because of me. Well, maybe Hariri first—I would have avoided that if I could. So, violence first, but second, the small boy full of dreams. But I could have started by telling you about PLO raids into Israel at that time, the mid-sixties, or about the war much later, or about the Israeli role in Sabra and Shatila, or I could’ve started by telling you how Beirut is today, all beautifully rebuilt like the city of my childhood and yet different from it. I could have told you the Hariri story, which I haven’t yet done …

“What does it mean, you see, that the first thing every American child knows about Germany is Hitler? What if the first thing you knew was something else? And maybe some people would say that now it’s important, after the Second World War, it’s ethical and vital that Hitler is the first thing a child knows. But someone else can argue the opposite. And what would it do, how would it change things, if nobody were allowed to know anything about Hitler, about the war, about any of it, until first they learned about Brahms, Beethoven and Bach, about Hegel and Lessing and Fichte, about Schopenhauer, about Rilke—but all this, you had to know first. Or one thing only, the Brahms Piano Quintet in F Minor, or the Goldberg Variations, or Laocoön—one of those things you had to know and appreciate before you learned about the Nazis.”

“But the world doesn’t work like that.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He smiled in that vague way, as if amused by a joke only he had heard. “But what does it mean that it doesn’t? And what would it mean if it did?”



Skandar didn’t always—or even often—tell stories about his youth, although surely, as he insisted, it was significant that he told one of them first of all. He talked about their time in America, and global politics, and Paris, a bit; but often about Lebanon, its history—bits of history over centuries, millennia: Phoenician history, Roman history, Ottoman history. He told me that Rome’s capital in the Middle East, Heliopolis, could still be visited, a hundred kilometers over the mountains from Beirut, and he described its enormous scale, the columns reaching to the skies in the middle of an arable plain, and the snowy mountains at the horizon. He described fallen stone blocks taller than any man, scattered like so much gravel around the site, and the beautiful, dwarfing temple of Dionysius, almost intact, with its perfect mosaics and elaborate friezes—the result of hundreds of years of labor by the Romans in the time immediately after Christ. He made you think that Pontius Pilate might have walked there, or certainly his grandson.

He told me about the community of the fishermen of Tyre, who considered themselves the earliest Christians because they’d converted when Christ preached to them, well before he was crucified—so they claimed they were technically Christians before Christ himself was a Christian. He told me about attending the recent wedding of a young Palestinian friend of his at a beach club by the sea south of Beirut, more than four hundred people from all walks of life gathered with the soughing surf behind them, the stars overhead, dancing and singing and drinking orange Fanta (no alcohol at a Muslim wedding—I was shocked by that: four hundred sober people at a feast), while the bride in her resplendent finery arrived at her celebration gliding the length of a giant swimming pool on an inflatable raft draped in white satin, pushed from behind by invisible swimmers, as flaming Catherine wheels illuminated her path on either side and fire-eaters and sword-swallowers performed at the end of the pool in her honor.

“This is typical,” he said. “He’s a writer, my friend, he doesn’t have much money. His bride is a schoolteacher. But if you’re going to celebrate, in Lebanon you must do it properly. So Sirena and I, we came from Paris for the party, we sit at a table and next to us is an old couple from the camps, in traditional dress, and their daughter, very pretty, with sparkles in her hijab.

“We greet each other, but otherwise we don’t speak, and the daughter sits and smokes her nargileh, and the mother sits and chain-smokes Gauloises, filling up her dinner plate with wrinkled white cigarette ends, like grubs, and the father, who has very few teeth, drinks all the bottles of Fanta on the table, sip after sip. They don’t smile, or get up to dance, they eat barely at all. It’s hard to know what they make of it.” He paused. “I’ve been in the camps, I can picture the sort of place they live—fluorescent lightbulbs, flaking paint, mismatched chairs. The glitter in the daughter’s hijab—she will have saved for months to buy that cloth. And the father with no teeth and creases in his skin like canyons, he will have been no older than I am, although I thought of him as a grandfather. And they sit next to us, and there’s the question in my mind, who has had to travel farthest, them or us? In our lives, we span many worlds and many centuries, sometimes without taking a step.”

He said this while we were walking, and I laughed and gestured at the Cambridge streets around us, and replied, “And sometimes you take many steps and stay in just one world.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s possible, too.”

Although that was not my experience of our walks. If, in the studio, I felt free to travel to imaginary lands, and in fact to travel into someone else’s imaginary land—an altogether unforeseen adventure—then as I walked the city streets by night, I was transported out into an actual world, a world of wonders the existence of which caused me to marvel, and to dream. Suddenly, at the age of thirty-seven, I was the opposite of Lucy Jordan: all I could be certain of was that I’d been wrong to be certain of anything. Who could tell me, with any plausibility, that I’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in my hair? I walked to Heliopolis, I idled in Tyre, I f*cking built Wonderland! I felt like one of my third graders, like Chastity and Ebullience with their pet chicken, or like José when he made his exploding volcano for the Science Fair. Lili with her hidden world under Esther and Didi’s porch table had nothing on me. Not even Reza, in his little bedroom of dreams, with Zidane kicking the ball on the wall and the jazz musicians parading in the dark—even his imaginary worlds were mere villages next to the travels on which my soul was embarked that spring.



It’s no wonder that I came to dress up as Edie, to dance around the studio half drunk in my underwear. I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My everyday Appleton life, my phone calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jogs around the reservoir—what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I’d lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? I felt all this with the zeal of someone newly wakened—by God, I felt and felt and felt.

In those heady weeks it seemed clear that I owed it not only to myself, but also to my mother—that my fear (the fear that had kept me from pursuing my art more seriously, that had kept me in Boston, that had kept me employed, and surely had kept me single, also) was in fact just her fear, that I’d shouldered all her anxieties and disappointments, along with her basic good-Catholic-girl-ness, an inability, ironically, to have faith—truly to believe in the value of my own efforts, in the uniqueness of my own soul. Oh great adventure! Life there, before me, the infinite banquet lying in wait.





8





The two weeks before my mother died are branded in me, each hour of each day of her final hospitalization. I remember where her room was in the unit, how it was, and what was in it, the print on the wall, and at any time, where I was in the room and what the light was like and when my father was there and at what point Matt arrived—without Tweety and the brat, who appeared only for the funeral and seemed chiefly to have seen it as the occasion for a dark-colored shopping spree. There are times in life like that, where you know intuitively that everything hinges on this time and nothing will be the same again, when, as a consequence, your brain remembers, it notices the small things—the male orderly with splayed feet who hummed Chopin waltzes while he mopped, or the young respiratory therapist with heavy brows, who couldn’t look at you when he was explaining that your mother’s lungs, even with help, were now giving out—he looked about six inches to the right of you, as though you were a shadow of some other self that stood, just there, just beside you, which, in that strange time, felt almost possible. Your mind retained all these things of its own accord, as if they might be necessary to know—simply because it was Important. The mind will do this.

And sometimes—as with my mother dying—you have some idea of what it is that must unfold, and some inkling, however inadequate, of what it will entail. Whereas at other times—as in the last weeks of April and the beginning of May 2005, when it got warm and cold again, when it rained a great deal, it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, although I was filled with such joy—you sense the importance, but only that. What it is and what it means you may not fully understand, not for months but for years.

I can tell you that it was on a Tuesday night that I walked with Skandar all the way to Belmont and back again, and it was a night when it had rained earlier but the rain had stopped, and the dark sky was streaked with scudding clouds. There was a smell of earth about, of soil, rich and dark, as we passed the cemetery where my mother was buried, and again when we reached a neighborhood of houses, of small, square gardens that were laid out like open chocolate boxes on the modest street. The new leaves rustled in the breeze over us, and sometimes drops of water fell upon our heads.

That evening, I remember, I’d played chess with Reza after dinner, and he’d let me win—it was one of his favorite things, magnanimous child, to see his own superiority and then to relinquish it. Afterward, at bedtime, I read him an abridged Three Musketeers that he enjoyed; and when it was lights-out, he’d asked whether, instead of sitting in the hard chair as I usually did, I might lie alongside him, as his mother would if she were there. I hesitated only a moment before laying myself down, the length of his narrow bed, my arm up under my head so I could better watch him; and he rested his beautiful hand upon my other arm, just to be sure of me, so like his mother, and he closed his fine eyes and went almost immediately to sleep.

So I remember that night, that Tuesday, because it was when I took new steps in my closeness to both son and father: the same night, although they didn’t know it, one and the other.

And on my long walk with Skandar, after he and Sirena came home from their supper, it was new, because I also talked. We were passing the cemetery and I asked if he’d ever walked there, because it was so beautiful, but he hadn’t, and I told him about going to see my mother’s grave, and then I told him about her, Bella Eldridge, and her years of illness, and her admirable, grown-up combination of competence and resignation, and how furious it made me, how looking at her life I felt like a ravenous wolf, I wanted her to have had the chance to devour the world, to be greedy, to be sated. He laughed and said, “Why don’t you want these things for yourself, instead, who are here on earth to enjoy them? Don’t you think she’d want you to want them for yourself?”

“But I do,” I said, so emphatically that I almost reached to touch him. “I do want for myself. Enormously.”

“I would never have known that,” he said. “If you hadn’t told me. You seem wonderfully calm in your life, as though it’s in enviable order. As though there’s nothing extra that you would require. You don’t have messes, or make them. You’re so generous to everyone—to your school, to Reza, to Sirena—even to me. You don’t look like a ravenous wolf.”

“Well I am,” I said. “I’m starving.”

We were passing an ice-cream shop at that point, and he made a joke about how, if it were open, I could be satisfied.

“I could eat every last spoonful in that place and it wouldn’t fill a corner of my hunger,” I said.

“Then you must find a way to feed yourself.” He was quite earnest now. “You must ask for what you need.”

“Need?” I laughed. “That’s a complicated word, isn’t it? Who needs anything, really, besides some food and water? I’ve already got much more than I need.”

“But if you’re a ravenous wolf …” He looked off into the distance, smiling as ever. “I can’t think of you this way, you see. It doesn’t make sense to me. What is it that you want?”

“Life,” I said. “All of it. Everything. I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want the prison doors to close.”

“Prison doors? But really—”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense to you, who grew up with war and misery all around you, and I know terrible things have happened in your family—your brother—I know. But trust me.”

And I told him—which is odd to think, even now, because of course I hadn’t ever properly told Sirena; bits and pieces, maybe, but not the whole story—about how I’d grown up with my mother’s longing and had never found a way to fulfill it, how I’d always thought there were rules about what was possible and allowable, even though I hadn’t known, really, who’d made those rules. How in high school, art had seemed the way to break the rules, to get around them; but how it hadn’t, then, seemed properly grown up, afterward.

“Who says you have to be grown up?” he asked.

“Tell that to an elementary school teacher! I don’t know. It seemed like, who did I think I was, to think I could be an artist, you know? And it didn’t seem like I could make a living—”

“Did you try?”

“I couldn’t bear to be a failure. It seemed worse to try and fail than not to try. And then my mother, you see—”

“Yes,” he said, “I do see.”

And we walked along in silence for a while.

“Service,” he said, “is one of life’s great joys. It’s a privilege to be in service.”

“You’re joking, right? What does that even mean?” I’d always thought of my service as my enslavement.

“It’s a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. For whatever reason: out of love, or duty, or something else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don’t need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.”

“That isn’t what I meant at all.”

“I know,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it less true.”



Then, you see, I had in my head a certainty that I had to say something to Sirena. It was a time when everything was significant and related to every other thing, and when Skandar said this about the joys of service, and when he said I must find a way to feed the wolf, I understood these things to pertain to Sirena, or rather, to Sirena and me.

All that Wednesday at school, my hands trembled when they were at rest, as if I’d drunk too much coffee. It was a freakishly warm day, a summer’s day like a hot flash, and I sweated, too. My innards flipped and twisted the way they did before I took a plane. I couldn’t eat the salad I’d brought for my lunch. I couldn’t sit still. I thought about saying something to her, and I couldn’t imagine how she might react.

All my life, I’d shied away from things I couldn’t imagine. My basic feeling had been that if I couldn’t imagine it, it wasn’t a good idea. It was the same with my mother’s illness: imagine the worst and you can protect against it. If you can’t imagine it, then there’s no protection. Not good, not good.

This conviction was behind my renunciation of the artist’s life before I’d begun to live it. I couldn’t imagine how to be an artist in this world. Looking around at my fellow art school students, at the ones we all knew were going to make it, I couldn’t imagine pleasing the bigwigs from the galleries and museums, the fashion-makers who organized biennials. I couldn’t see myself schmoozing the way the class stars did, flattering older artists and seedy has-been critics to try to wangle an opening for their own advancement. I saw them at it and I couldn’t picture myself doing it. I could have rattled off the bullshit about fragmentation and identity and the tropes of gender, whatever the f*ck they are, and Roland Barthes and Judith Butler and Mieke Bal—I could do that, they taught us how to do it, that’s what art school seemed mostly to be for, but I couldn’t do it with a straight face and I couldn’t even imagine doing it with a straight face, and that’s why I went to get my master’s in Education and appeared to myself and to the world to have forsaken my one dream.

But you see, my dream in my head of being an artist, and my dream in the world of being an artist, I couldn’t—until Sirena, I couldn’t—connect them. And I forsook the world for the dream in my head, because there, and in my second bedroom off Huron Avenue, and then finally, in that blissful year in Somerville, I could have the dream that I was an artist, it could be real, without any of the bullshit that passes, in the first part of the twenty-first century in the Western world, for being an artist. I could be an Emily Dickinson of an artist.

And here’s another thing I was fretting over, as I covered the small distance between the cake shop and the studio, the sidewalk and the studio door—did I think that Sirena was a wonderful artist because I was in love with her, or was I in love with her because she was a wonderful artist, or was I in love with some idea of her that was far from the truth, in which case should I actually be asking myself what, really, in my heart I thought of her art—what did I think of her art? Maybe I didn’t know. But the moment I became aware of the question, I knew it mattered very much to me. It mattered more than almost anything: my answer to that question would surely determine whether I was at last living in reality; or whether I was still dreaming, trapped in my endless hall of mirrors.

After all that obsessive spinning on my mental gerbil wheel, after all my worrying and reconfiguring—you know, don’t you, that when I got to the studio and opened the door and called out her name in a cheery singsong, there was no reply. No sound at all. Lights off, everything still. I put down my almost cold coffee and the bag with the cake in it and my handbag and my tote bag containing the folder of highresolution shrunk-down photographs of Edie Sedgwick, and I walked from one end of the L to the other, moving more and more slowly, because I couldn’t get my head around the fact that she wasn’t there. In those few minutes, scoping the joint (and the spring afternoon light was flooding in, I remember it exactly, great dust-dancing beams of it, and the studio smelled slightly of glue and old apples, as well as of Sirena’s cigarettes), I wondered whether actually I was going nuts, losing my grip. Because I’d been so certain that she’d be there, bent over some finicky detail, or smoking by the open window, or even lying on the cushions wrapped up, like a papoose, in her scarves—I’d been so certain of my reality that the facts were at first impossible for me to accept.



The next day, I didn’t know at first whether I’d go there or not. I broke one of my rules, and asked Reza if his mother was okay.

“How do you mean?” I was struck by how good his English had gotten: his intonation was native now.

“She wasn’t in the studio yesterday, and I thought maybe …”

He laughed, a little bark. I remembered him all those months before, in the Whole Foods, with the apples. “My mother never gets sick,” he said. “Papa says she’s like a superhero. No, she went away.”

“Away?”

He was keen to get out the door. I could hear his friends agitating in the hall. “But she’s back now. She came back in the night.” He threw this over his shoulder, and was gone.

When I made my way to the studio that afternoon, it was humbly: the story in my head, my desire for some confession, my wish to activate a drama between us, to lay claim to her attention, was up against some stronger reality of hers. Whatever had taken her away like that, so suddenly, would take precedence over me. As was so often the case—we Women Upstairs!—her life would be shown to be more important than my life.

She was there, her hair in a messy bun, a streak of blue ink across her forehead. She was leaning over a large picture book when I came in, clasping one of her shawls at her breast, and when she turned she threw her hands wide, dropping her shawl, and her face opened into an enormous, natural, crooked-toothed grin, against which I had no defenses.

“Nora!” She stepped swiftly across the room, light-footed. “I have such news!”

“Everything’s all right then?”

“Everything is all right? Everything is great”—only she said “great-e,” in her particular way. She fiddled with her hair, making it fall around her face. “Let me make us some coffee—I’ll tell you—”

She eyed my bag. “I didn’t bring anything today,” I said, not telling her that I’d eaten an entire cupcake the day before because she wasn’t there, and that I’d felt so sick I had to go home.

“It’s better,” she said, fussing with the coffee, the pot, the water. “I rely too much on your sweet things.”

I flopped down on the cushions. “So what’s up?”

“You know, yesterday I was in New York.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Ah, in my busyness—I must have forgotten. Or maybe because of being nervous, I didn’t want to spoil my luck.”

I waited a moment, then asked, “So did you get lucky?”

She shrugged, smiling again. “We’ll see,” she said. “But it looks good. This week, one thing, the week after next another thing; we’ll see.”

“Come on, Sirena. Just tell me. What’s the news?”

She sat beside me, leaned in conspiratorially: “Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend of mine who is an artist, a seriously good artist, a man in his sixties—he makes sculptures—sexy also, with a deep voice—and he wanted me to meet an important art critic. A woman from the university. She’s older, very famous, and she is curating, for two years from now, an important exhibition of art by women, feminist art. It will be unlike anything before—the museum in Brooklyn is opening a new wing, a feminist wing, and this will be the first exhibition, to open the building … Exciting, no?”

“So she wanted to meet you?”

Sirena gave a laugh, a “modest” laugh. “To meet me? Ah, no, she didn’t even know that I exist-e. Frank—he’s my friend—he makes it seem a coincidence, or friendly, that we’re meeting for lunch this way. He tells her I’m looking for a gallery in New York—which is true, of course, and not next week but the one after I go two days to meet with two galleries that may be interested to represent me. So this is the official question, if there is one, for the lunch, which one of these is best, and why, or whether I should be with a different gallery, another one, so. But really, secretly, Frank wants her to think of me for her big exhibition. There will be something like forty artists, and she wants it to be international, and I?”—Sirena made a film-star face, her hands held wide on either side of her cheeks—“I am very international!”

“That’s amazing. I mean, it’d be—”

“It would be a whole new level, yes? Of exposure, recognition, standing—can you imagine?”

“Yes.” I could imagine. How far from my world she would be catapulted, and how fast. “That’s completely amazing.”

“It hasn’t happened—it may never happen, I know—but I think she liked me, we laughed a lot, we got on very well—but what a dream, no? What a dream come true if it does.”

By which I felt it was asserted, or confirmed, that the dreams that were, for each of us, to the fore, were very different; and that the imaginary conversations that had so energetically circled my mind were not, at least, for today. Today was about Sirena. Of course it was. “I wish I’d brought a cake after all,” I said brightly. “We should be celebrating.”

“Celebrating? Not yet! No! We’re waiting—not till this critic decides—that could take ages—but until the meetings in two weeks, these gallery owners—this could change everything.”

“You didn’t tell me any of this before.”

“I’m superstitious. I’m not logical—I worry about spoiling my chances, about making bad luck.”

“But you’ll tell me now.” I didn’t say it as a question. If I sounded weary, she didn’t notice.

“So I shouldn’t—I hope it’s okay with the Fates—but I’ll tell you, yes, because otherwise I might explode.” She went on to describe the two gallerists she was going to meet. One was a young woman in her early thirties who’d only recently struck out on her own, after working for ten years at an established SoHo gallery, the name of which meant something even to me; and the other, Elias, was a guy in his forties, Middle Eastern, edgier, who’d had his gallery for a while and had attracted some attention in the art world for his bold choices. He, she explained, was a friend of a friend of Skandar’s, which was good in the sense that he was somehow a known quantity, his outline made sense and his track record was good, and he’d approached her when he heard she was in the States for a year. But the young woman had written to her in Paris, at her home address, not even knowing she was in the United States, and had said that the Elsinore installation had moved her to tears and that she’d never been able to forget it, and that if Sirena didn’t yet have any American representation, then she, Anna Z, would be happy to fly to Paris to talk it over with her—“and that,” Sirena observed, “is a commitment. That’s passion.”

Sirena was full of the pros and the cons of each of these possibilities, stumbling over her words in her enthusiasm, now that she’d allowed herself to talk about it. I wasn’t jealous—how could I be, when I, with my dioramas, had turned my back so deliberately upon the Eliases and Annas of this world?—but I wished I could more clearly see that it had occurred to her—that it might however slightly have worried her—that I might be.

“What does Skandar say?” I asked eventually, and noted the familiar flicker of exasperation.

“Skandar? What do you think? He can see it this way, he can see it that way; but, he says, it’s not a matter of how he sees it at all. For all he talks, my husband sometimes doesn’t say very much. In this case, officially he has no opinion. But I know he’d like me to choose Elias. His family is Lebanese. Has Skandar given you his special talk about the fishermen of Tyre? Yes, so: from Tyre to Princeton, via the long road—this is Elias. This is what Skandar, in his heart, would want.”

“You don’t know that,” I said, mildly resentful that my thrilling conversation with Skandar had been revealed as “his special talk.”

“Believe me, I know him. I know it. And have to be careful that I don’t choose to please him, or else to displease him. I must make my choice alone.” She sighed. “I wish you could come with me. I’d like to know your opinion of these people. You see so clearly.”

“Well, maybe—depending—when do you go?”

“Thursday and Friday, the week after next. I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

“If it were in a few weeks—”

“I can’t change the meetings. It’s too bad. I’ll tell you all about it when I come back. It’s in the future. But enough: How are you, Nora my friend, in your work?”

Did she care? What I wanted was a sense of her spontaneous engagement, the feeling you have with your closest—that I have with Didi, for example, but not with Esther—that they don’t have to be careful, that their reactions are kind and genuine at the same time. Even as I say it, I realize it’s a lot to want. Maybe I’m registering an intractable discontent, born of my doubt about whether and how much she loved me, and whether, or how, I might ever know.

You’d think it would be an easy question to ask—do you love me?—but you’d think that only if you’ve never wanted to ask it yourself. That afternoon, instead of openly confessing as I’d dreamed of doing, I raised the question of departure.

“Isn’t it wild how fast the time is going?” I said. “I can’t believe you guys will be leaving before too long.”

“Wild. I know,” she said.

“When do you go? I should know, but …”

“My show opens the sixteenth.”

“July sixteenth?”

“July sixteenth?” she laughed. “In Paris? That would be like not having a show at all!”

“June sixteenth? In Paris? How did I not know that?”

“I think I haven’t been saying so out loud, to try not to be too much afraid. I’ve been pretending there is more time.”

“The sixteenth? But Appleton doesn’t get out until the twenty-third. You can’t go before then. And what about the kids? What about the kids coming here? I thought we said the end of the month.” We had already largely set up the space—the flowers, the mirror-shard strands of rain, the beginnings of the Jabberwock eyes—and we’d spent two rainy afternoons a couple of weeks before installing the video cameras for the shoot: we were, in some practical way, ready to go at the studio end. But to bring my kids there required time-consuming paperwork at Appleton: the approval of a field trip from Shauna’s office; the permission slips signed by the parents. It couldn’t be done overnight.

“Don’t be such a schoolteacher, Nora. We’ll work it all out. I can’t possibly be here when there is my opening in Paris. We haven’t yet discussed things at home. Skandar also, his plans are complicated—conferences here, in Montreal, in Washington—eh, basta. We’ll figure it out.” And with a sweep of her arms at the studio around us: “And we must bring the children, while there’s still time. That isn’t dispensable! Let’s fix the date today. So much to do before we get there—mountains to climb!”

“Wonderlands to build.”

“So, au travail!” And she was up on her light feet, her back to me, into her universe, gone.



She was so flippant about it—only two months before her Paris opening, and I’d just heard the date for the first time. When I got home that evening I took out the calendar, looked at it, all laid out on paper, the little boxes of days. Much would depend on how much she could finish in Cambridge; but she’d certainly have to leave by the beginning of June. I needed to steel myself for that. They wouldn’t pull Reza out of school, would they? Skandar would stay. Or maybe they’d ask me to look after him, if Skandar had to go for his conferences. I could feel along my arm the heat that Reza had emanated as he drifted off to sleep—I could do that, I could take care of him.

That was Thursday. Friday I knew she wasn’t coming. If I was alerted ahead of time, this wasn’t any problem. Not only kids are like this. As a teacher, I know from long experience that if you warn people beforehand, things go better. I knew I’d be alone at the studio, I planned to be there late, I took my brown cardboard salad box from the Alewife supermarket and a cheap bottle of red wine from the liquor store next door, and I gathered my mother’s Polaroid camera—this was before the film was like gold dust, so I took along plenty of it—and all my Edie paraphernalia—more of it than you might imagine your average middle-aged third-grade teacher to possess—and I went to Somerville.

I’ve told you about this. I got a bit drunk. I played the music pretty loud. I danced, and posed, and I took pictures. I was being free, and I suppose in some way it was an exorcism—surely that’s not the right word? By allowing Edie’s ghost to inhabit me, I was banishing the meek and accommodating Miss Eldridge, the calm and responsive Miss Eldridge, the good friend, good daughter, good teacher, doormat Miss Eldridge, the Miss Nobody Nothing that everyone smiles at so cheerfully and immediately forgets. I was getting rid of her.

I danced and drank and smoked and took cartridges of blurry Polaroids of myself, as if I were Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at one and the same time. And this went on until the whole bottle was empty—I drank most of it, but somehow a goodly bloody dollop ended up on the front of my Edie white T-shirt. It was a splotch on my left boob that then dribbled downward, so it looked like a bleeding heart. And then I took it off, so I was dancing in my white bra, stained in one spot by the wine.

And do you know what I did, in that dizzied state? I tiptoed into Sirena’s Wonderland forest and I lay down on the Astroturf grass with the flowers waving around and above me and casting shadows on the walls in the half-light, like dancers; and I closed my eyes and I slipped my flat hand under my waistband, and I tickled my own stomach, following with my blind fingers its declivity between my hip bones; and with my fingers seemingly independent explorers, I traced a blood-ringing, singing line down either side of me, over my hips and into the fur of my groin, and from there into the wetness between my legs; and I wasn’t, for a while, Edie or Alice or Emily or anybody but a body, or I was another Nora altogether, and with the grass prickly beneath me, and both my hands now against myself, inside myself and on my reverberating skin, all there was, was yes, yes, yes, and I was in Wonderland, and for that brief unashamed, unhidden time, I was free.