The Woman Upstairs

9





I got up the next morning a new person. At least, I thought so. Replete, I looked at the self I’d been all week—all month—for months—with mild dismay, the way an ex-smoker looks at his former, needy self, and marvels. I got up, I called my father, I drove to Brookline, I took him to brunch at Zaftigs, and then I drove him to the arboretum and we walked for a long time among the trees in their young maiden green and their bursting Disney blossoms. He limped because of his bad hip, but every time I asked he said he wanted to keep going, so we did. It was cold, but we didn’t overly notice, and I could see the color of health spreading in his saggy cheeks, my dear, gray father, so nobly struggling on. I was sad to have neglected him.

He talked about the Red Sox game he was going to watch later that day—against Tampa, I think it was—and we talked about my mother’s love of flowers and blossoms, the zeal of her gardening, but we laughed at how bad-tempered she’d get when her plants died on her, when they didn’t make it through the winter. As if it were a personal insult. I said I’d always thought it was because she didn’t control anything in her life and she felt at least the plants ought to listen to her, and that her confidence was devastated when they didn’t.

My father looked at me like I was nuts. He said, “What are you talking about? Your mother controlled everything in her life, in our lives. She chose where we lived and how we lived and what we ate and when and what we wore and who we knew and how and when we saw them. She chose how many kids we had—your brother and you, she chose; I wanted six of you—and also when we had you. She controlled everything always, and that’s why gardening made her so damned mad, because she found one thing on this earth she couldn’t fully be in charge of. She was a piece of work, your mother. She was fantastic. I never knew anybody people loved so much, but my God she was a bossy so-and-so.”

I was partly shocked when my father said all this—as much by his vehemence, too, the sight of him in love, his eyes alight in their pouches, a fleck of glistening spittle on his lips—and partly also full of wonder, because I thought for the first time that it was natural, and clear, that each of us would have a different story of who Bella Eldridge was and of how it had been. It stood to reason. Sirena and I, too, would have different accounts of our shared year, and that hers wouldn’t match mine—well, that wouldn’t invalidate mine, just as my father’s picture of my mother didn’t invalidate my picture. Somehow, briefly, on that day after Being Edie, this all seemed just about believable.

I got my dad home in good time and picked him up a six-pack and a jumbo bag of extra-cheese Doritos on the way. My mother would never have allowed him those things, it was true, and my dad in his resumed bachelorhood took freedoms that I could tell excited him, as if he were a small boy getting away with something.

I’d decided not to go to the studio all weekend, which made me realize how much a reflex it had become. After I dropped off my father, I headed home over the BU bridge as if to Somerville, and realized only at Central Square what I’d done. I was almost sure Sirena would be working that afternoon, but I didn’t go to find out. If she wanted my help, she could ask for it. I went home, I went for a run, I had a shower. I’d told myself I’d read a book, but I didn’t feel like it. It seemed depressing to turn on the TV. I e-mailed a few people but tired of that, too. I called Didi but they were out and her cell was off.

Finally, in the early evening, I called Sirena: I left her a message, as professional as I could make it, confirming the date and time for the Appleton third-grade field trip. There were permission slips to get signed, I reminded her. We had to plan ahead. I made scrambled eggs on toast and went to bed at eight thirty, terribly hungry but not for food. So much for my state of repletion.



Sirena didn’t return my call. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t going to humiliate myself by asking. I held out almost a week, with every kind of crazy story in my head to explain her silence. On Thursday night, I caved. I waited till late, well after nine, before I went over to the studio. I told myself this had nothing to do with her at all, that this was about Edie and Alice and my need to get back to work on them. I’d left the Polaroids on my table, and I’d only really remembered them that day. I knew it was too late—I knew Sirena well enough to know that even if they were facedown, especially if they were facedown, she would have looked at them, scrutinized them, had opinions. I was ashamed to think of it. Maybe her silence was caused by her contempt for the photos—me, blurry in my bra; me, wild-eyed, taking pictures of myself in something like fancy dress; me, preposterous, and preposterously, inappropriately, unhumble …

Fun House Nora, the Woman Upstairs, we like her because she’s so thoughtful of others. Because she isn’t stuck up.

Which one is Nora? I can’t quite picture her …

You know, that nice third-grade teacher—not the one with the cotton-candy hair, the other one.

That’s who I’m supposed to be, the other one: “No, not the really great artist in that studio—the other one.”

“Not the beautiful woman in the knockout dress—the other one.”

“The funny one?”

“Oh yeah, I guess she’s that. The funny one.”

Sirena might think the Edie Polaroids were funny. She might think they were some sort of joke. That would be okay, if they were a joke.



So on Thursday night, I went over to see about my rooms, about my artists, to look over the photographs I’d made. I went to retrieve them, a salvage operation if you will. Unavowedly, I went to see what she’d done during the week, what progress she’d made without me. I went partly hoping that the studio would be exactly as I’d left it, that whatever had been going on—something had been going on—it would have been big enough to keep her away.

Already in the stairwell there were sounds. Wafty Eastern music, not her usual thing, chatter, banging. There was the movement of life, of lives. As I walked down the corridor, I thought maybe she was having a party; but the sounds weren’t party sounds.

They didn’t hear me come in. They were too busy. That’s not quite true: one young woman, in her mid-twenties, in a skimpy black tunic with huge eyes, a very white face and curly ringlets of that rare auburn that looks dyed even when it’s not, broke away from the huddle and came toward me.

“I’m so sorry. Is the noise bothering you?”

“This is my studio,” I said. Not nicely. I couldn’t help it. My eyes turned on my own end of the L, to my table and my things. Someone had dropped her jacket carelessly over my work chair, and had slung shopping bags and a handbag on the floor beside it; but otherwise my stuff, from a distance, looked okay. I could see the jagged pile of Polaroids on my side table: I couldn’t tell whether that was where I’d left them, or whether they’d been moved. “Who are you?” I asked, trying with only minimal success to sound less annoyed. “And what are you doing here?”

“I’ll tell Sirena you’re here—you must be Nora?” I could see from her glance—down, up, down, resting on my dowdy clogs, that I wasn’t as she’d expected. “I’m Becca,” she said. “I’m the makeup artist.”

Upon entering the studio, here’s what I saw: Sirena, at the center of a small clutch of dark-clad people, in dim light, huddled around a film camera. Sirena was the director, I guess. The camera person was a lanky guy with a shaven head and a silver bullet in his dark eyebrow. He had a dotting of stubble, like smut, across his chin, and a black T-shirt from which his long arms stuck out white in the gloom. Later, when he stood up, I’d see that he was enormously tall, at least six and a half feet. He was the only man.

Aside from Sirena and Becca, there were three or four other women. One of them seemed to be responsible for the lighting, and darted down into the Wonderland area to fuss with spotlights and two big silver reflecting screens. They were all young except for a tall, long-nosed woman in her late forties or early fifties, with big dark hair and stylish red rectangular glasses. She was a friend of Sirena’s, Marlene, a Hungarian photographer from LA, in town on a Radcliffe fellowship.

They were all focused on a woman in white, head to toe in pure white, with a funny tall white cap covering her hair, like a Smurf’s cap without the fold—it stood straight up. All you could see of her body was her face, including her ears, which stuck out, and her hands and feet, which were a lovely even light brown. She wore a long-sleeved plain white dress with an enormous skirt and white leggings. She seemed to grow out of the Astroturf like the carved flowers around her.

Becca scurried over and whispered to Sirena, who swiveled on her high stool (where, too, had that come from?) and blew me kisses with both hands. But she didn’t get up: she indicated that she couldn’t, right now; and so I put my things down and made my way over to the camera as they turned on some Eastern music, a mesmerizing sort of whiny wavering, and started filming again.

At once, the woman in white began to spin, first slowly and then at greater speed, and the vast circle of her skirt billowed out, rippling gorgeously up and down. The wind it made shook the aspirin flowers on their stalks, and they, too, danced. I could see her actually dancing, down at the end of the studio, and then, in the camera’s screen, a miniature version of her dancing also, and the two sights were the same but different. When I looked at her in real life, she seemed to me almost to create a haze around her, a visible air; but in its tiny-fying precision, the camera recorded her spinning like a science.

I stayed for more than an hour, but they were still working when I left. In fact, I left during a break in their filming before what was, Sirena told me later, the final take. She wanted—and ultimately she got—seven perfect minutes of unbroken spinning, her dervish—on hire, or a volunteer, from the local Sufi temple—twirling without cease, without stumbling, in her meditative trance, seven magical minutes. She got these minutes—Sirena never doubted that she would, even though it took almost seven hours for her to be satisfied.

When they broke for Thai food, Sirena, jolly, and public—masked!—in a way I’d never before seen, introduced me around. The cameraman was called Langley. He had a goofy manner, and was older than I’d thought, though not as old as me. Marlene seemed at first curious, at least curious enough to paste on a big smile; and then when she found out I taught elementary school, her eyes, like a lizard’s, hooded over, and she retreated into her pad thai. Sana, meanwhile, the Sufi—originally named Carolina and the rebellious daughter of Puerto Rican Catholics—stood to one side, daintily eating slices of papaya dipped in lime juice, miraculously without spilling even a drop upon her pristine garments. She produced, from within her folds, a linen handkerchief, and carefully wiped her lips and her fingers when she was done. Radiant, she barely spoke: it was, for her, a spiritual event.

This was not obviously so for Sirena: “Where’ve you been, you crazy girl, these past days?” she asked, without waiting for a reply. “You’ve missed all the excitements! It’s too bad—we’ve had such adventures. And this is the last.” She clapped her hands. “This is the centerpiece.” She turned to the beatific woman in white: “And Sana is our star!” Sirena crunched on a tiny spring roll. “But all of them have been fantastic. The little girl, the older woman—wasn’t she extraordinary, Marlene? Marlene’s been my right hand, the person to steady me—because photography, still pictures, up to now, is not so much my thing—video, but not so much the photographs.” She chewed, and even that seemed to me theatrical. “But the pictures, they’ve come out well, no? Marlene is so brilliant a photographer, it’s almost shaming to ask for your opinion”—she put her hand on Marlene’s arm in that way that I’d thought was for me—“but you were so kind as to say”—she was talking to Marlene while telling me the story—“that you thought they were good—”

“I told you, sweetie, they’re phenomenal. You know that.” And Marlene then said, as if she’d turned to look at me, but without turning at all, “She’s so full of false modesty, this one! This installation will make her name.”

“Can you come tomorrow afternoon?” Sirena asked me, fixing me properly with her gaze at last, and for the only time that evening. “I’ll show you the images—now, with the computer, it’s all right here—but you’ll say whether you agree. For the little girl, Marlene and I have different ideas.”

“She wants to have the head show, the chin and the mouth, for the expression,” said Marlene, still looking at Sirena rather than at me. “But I think it’s better without the mouth. Because then for the young woman you have the mouth, and for the middle-aged woman—”

“Don’t call her that,” said Sirena, laughing. “She’s the same age as we are!”

“And we, my darling Sirena”—somehow she rolled the “r” the way I’d always wanted to—“are also middle-aged. Be proud of it!” But surely, I thought, looking at Marlene, at the impression she gave that her meager flesh pulled wearily away from the bone—surely this woman wasn’t the same age as Sirena? Sirena wasn’t nearly so old. “Anyway, our contemporary, we see her mouth and nose, maybe even the bottom of her eyes, and then—”

“Yes, yes,” Sirena interrupted, “Nora knows: then we see all of her, of our wise woman. As she sees all of herself. Finally. Nora knows this already. We’ve talked about it.”

“Many times,” I murmured. It seemed to me I’d suggested it. The Thai feast was winding down, and Sana the refulgent Sufi had excused herself to go to the bathroom. Even mystics needed to pee. I wondered how she’d negotiate the grimy artists’ bathroom in her voluminous white skirt; but when she returned, she looked pristine as ever.



Needless to say, there was no question of my working on Edie or Alice. And there was no question that Sirena might have missed me: she’d been surrounded by disciples and helpers and colleagues, above all by Marlene—whose work, I remembered Sirena telling me, had been included in a group show at MoMA—who reminded me of what the art world was like and why I’d turned away from it. All these months had been mere housekeeping before the real guests arrived. Sirena didn’t need me at all.

I managed to smile a lot. Before she drifted back into Wonderland, I told the Sufi that she was beautiful, and she looked at me as though I’d spoken to her in Aramaic. I thanked Becca for the spring rolls, even though I’d eaten only one. As I gathered up my stuff, I discreetly swiped my Polaroids into my tote bag. Even glimpsing the fuzz of my chin and shoulder—my white bra strap—in the picture on top of the pile, I was washed with such shame that I felt sick. This amateur silliness. This self-indulgence. Who was I kidding? Had they flipped through them? Becca? Marlene? Heading out, I peered one last time through the gloom toward the distant field of light where Sana was preparing to twirl: she was lost to me. I could see nothing but a shimmering white blur.





10





The next afternoon, the people had vanished, and so too had their equipment. Sirena must have taken out the garbage, even, or had Becca do it, because there was no evidence at all of their presence—except, perhaps, that all the coffee cups were clean, which wasn’t normally the case.

“Nora!” she called as I came in, without looking up. “Come see!” She sat at her computer, and as I approached she set the video of Sana to play. “Langley sent this over just now. We can tinker, of course—but look!”

The colors were so bright—the Astroturf so green, the flowers so fully lilac, lemon, rose. And Sana, except for the lovely olivey bits of her—those hands! Those ears!—was pure, pure white. The video was completely silent, like a dream.

“What about the music?”

“No, no, you see—didn’t we discuss this? Maybe with Marlene—I’m sorry. Nowadays I can’t remember.”

“We didn’t discuss the music.”

“I want it to be silent. Completely silent. Ibn Tufail’s recluse on his desert island didn’t twirl to any music—didn’t know any music—but nature’s, or what he might have imagined in his own head. So I want it to be silent. But then my question is—and I have to decide so fast—whether also, in addition to the silence, we give them music to choose from.”

“I don’t get it.”

“So, I want each person to find, in my Wonderland, as much room as possible for her own Wonderland. You know this. For his own Wonderland, even. So what if you have no imagination, or if your dreams need help? So then, maybe, around the video room there are sets of headphones, yes?”

“Yes?”

“Maybe four—or five—maybe even seven.”

“Seven?”

“Because there are life’s seven stages, because there are seven photographs, seven veils, seven unveilings, because there are seven minutes of dancing, because seven is the most magical number there is.” She threw up her hands and then took a cigarette from an open pack on the table. They weren’t Skandar’s brand—she’d bought them on her own, for once.

“So there are seven sets of headphones. It seems like a lot. Kind of cluttered, maybe.”

Sirena shrugged. We were both watching Sana dancing on the screen. One hand was turned toward the sky, the other earthward. She moved her fingers as though they were petals in the breeze.

“So?”

“So each set is different music. Maybe not even all music. Yes, one is what Sana is actually dancing to, Omar Faruk Tekbilek. I must make sure I have the permission. But then one is surely birdsong—spring birdsong, a nightingale and a blackbird, maybe, together. Maybe one is something popular, contemporary—I’ll have to ask someone young. Maybe Maria will know? But no, she’ll listen to horrible music, for sure. And then there may be city sounds on another—New York traffic, for example.”

“That doesn’t seem so contemplative. Not exactly the sounds of enlightenment.”

“Not of itself, okay. But look at the video, look”—we both looked—“and imagine the sounds of horns and brakes and tires, the screech and racket of it. And suddenly her dancing, her prayer if you will, her resonance—suddenly the power of her Wonderland is even greater, do you see? Even more free. Because she can be transported there in her own mind, by her own thoughts, not only when the music, like Pavlov, tells her to be; or not only when the birds are singing, like in heaven; but even when the outside world is in total chaos”—she said “kah-os”—“and disarray.” She waved the cigarette at the screen and the smoke hung, for a second. “This will be beautiful,” she said. “And true.”

I waited a moment for her to go on. When she didn’t, I said, “That’s still only four.”

“Four what?”

“Sets of headphones.”

She glared at me, then cackled. “I didn’t know you could be such a rompicazzo, Nora. I like this very much. Very much.”

After I made coffee, she said: “The photographs. Before you go, you must look at the photographs. Because I’ve got to order the prints in France. As always, they should have had the order yesterday. They’re to be on muslin, very big, almost seven feet tall—even with the computers now this isn’t so easy, the size of it, on fabric, and to make seven, it takes time. There isn’t much time, now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s true. So little time.” The week before, when she’d told me the date for her show in Paris, seemed very long ago. Suddenly everything was over: the focus had changed. The Shahids were all looking away from me now. We were hurtling, or I was, toward the end of it all. The terminal patient headlong toward death. The very awareness of finitude speeding everything up, when you most wanted to slow it all. I knew that wasn’t what Sirena meant. She meant that there was so little time until her show. So little time until she was lost to me.

“Show them to me then,” I said. “Let’s get on with it.”



The little girl wasn’t so little as all that. I was almost shocked, but also deeply moved, to see her naked. It was a part of Sirena’s purpose that the child not be five or six, because there’s no shame in being naked at that age, the washboard-fronted children with their unobtrusive boy and girl genitals all but interchangeable along the beachfronts. No, the shock lay in seeing the newly awakening body of this child who must have been around eleven—who was, Sirena confirmed, eleven—the poignant, rosy puff of her breast buds, the nascent rounding of the hip below her waist, but these curves just a suggestion still upon the tight band of her torso, the long, straight perfect limbs of a still god-held child, trailing her clouds of Wordsworthian glory. And there, at the pubis, a few dark strands, the beginning of her hiddenness, but the tidy, childish split of her still frank and clear to the world. In all of them, she stood straight, leaning slightly on her left hip, her right foot slightly splayed, its angle minutely shifting from frame to frame. One hand, her left, reached toward the camera, loomed larger, its smooth square fingernails both carrying, and grasping for, the promise of adulthood. None of the photos showed her face, but the exact cropping point differed, and in some, her chin and mouth were visible. They’d pulled her hair up, so you couldn’t even tell what color it might be, and she was defined, then, by the exposure of her delicate neck, like a stalk, slightly long for the rest of her, and fragile. In one picture—the one showing most of her, that Sirena wanted to use—she bit her lip slightly, and you could discern a mere hint of tooth, pressing the perfect ridged rose of her lip. It was breathtaking.

“You see, there, you understand, yes?” Sirena said. “It is the moment of hesitation: she reaches forward, but she’s uncertain. She wishes also that she might stay. She’s relaxed, but also awkward. A child, but not.”

“Which is why you absolutely cannot use this one,” I said. “Trust the photographer. Trust your friend. She knows what she’s talking about.”

Sirena threw up her hands again and rolled her phlegmy irritation in her throat.

“You’re just using one of the girl, right? Only one picture? Don’t you see, if you use that one, it may seem clear to you what story it’s telling, but precisely because of her mouth, because of that tooth, it’s actually telling a story in a way the others aren’t. And as soon as it’s telling a story, people can interpret it however they want, they can take that picture and put their own story onto it. And even if it seems so clear to you what it says, you can’t control what they think it says. I thought that was central to your Wonderland, that each experience of it should be open, unique.”

“Yes, of course, but this picture—”

“To you it says, ‘I hesitate on the cusp of knowledge.’ And to a hundred thousand people, that’s also what it says. And then to a hundred pervs in the hundred thousand, it says, ‘That little girl wants to f*ck me. I knew it.’ ”

“But this is ridiculous—”

“Have you read Lolita? I rest my case.”

Sirena emitted more rumblings but she did not contest what I had said.

“This one,” I said, pointing to the headless version in which the girl’s neck looked most swanlike, and in which, also, the forefinger of the reaching left hand was slightly raised, and by some cast of the light, had around it a rim of shadow, accentuating also its length. It gave the photograph a slightly religious air, some echo of the gestures of medieval Madonnas. “This is the one you must use.”

“You really think so?”

“I know so.”

She sighed. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.” Which grudging comment caused me elation, until she went on, “I’ll ask Marlene to look again. She didn’t choose this one—hers is this”—she pointed at a different image—“but I see why you take this. It’s the finger, yes? You’re right about the finger. I didn’t remark it, but it’s true.”

The pictures that followed were of a twenty-two-year-old, whose moles decorated her fair skin like erotic paint splatters and whose mouth, a pretty bow-shaped mouth with a strong cleft in the upper lip, curled upward in what seemed to be barely contained amusement. There would be two of her, two of all of them henceforth, and in one she, too, stood straight to the camera, though with her hand coyly covering her privates; and in the other, half turned, with her arm extended in embrace of the air, you could apprehend in profile the ripe heft of her breast, with its sharp dark nipple, and the exuberant, even youthful, burst of pubic hair at her groin.

For midlife, Sirena had two sets of photographs. The first was of a tallish woman, slightly heavy in that ponderous, maternal way—her breasts full and unevenly drooping, their nipples pointing in faintly disparate directions like misaligned headlights. The skin of her round belly was puckered, presumably by childbearing, and this was at odds with the otherwise trunklike firmness of her, the fullness of an inhabited body, with its tracery of purpling veins upon the thighs and its scars—an appendix scar, and a seam, too, around one knee. The woman’s face was visible almost to her eyes—the strong lines from nose to mouth, the cheeks still round but less than fully plump, the incipient wattling beneath the chin. But in one of her two photographs, the one in which her strong, elegantly veined hand clasped her side, she was laughing, open-mouthed and laughing, and even without seeing her eyes you felt the strength of her, and she was beautiful.

I felt both envy and contempt for this faceless woman—forty-four years old, Sirena told me, with three children. I felt envy because my own body, for all it was younger in every aspect, for all it hewed, more closely, to some statuesque ideal—mine, I felt, was a body in waiting, a body yet unused. And while I had, at the first, an instinctive young person’s revolt at the careless blowsiness of this middle-aged body, I had also a sense of alarm that in spite of my efforts to stay young, time would ravage me also, and that like an unopened flower I might wither on the vine. Whereas this, I thought, is the open flower on the cusp of its fading: this is the fullness of life.

The second set of midlife photographs astonished me. At first I couldn’t think why they were there—why two models in this case?—but in an instant I recognized the silver chain around the neck, the curve of the nose, the clavicle with its single small mole, like a dark pearl.

“Why did you take yourself?”

“Well, this is the question. Marlene took these …” So Marlene had stood with the camera and recorded Sirena in her nakedness: somehow, for Marlene to do this was fine. “And really, she’s a better photographer than I am.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re very loyal. But the rest of the world thinks so, for a reason. So, if there are reasons to use my body—it’s the right age, I’m the artist, I’m not then asking anyone to do my nakedness for me, if you like …” She sighed. “And in such an installation, this is important, too. I want, as you say, for everyone to have their own journey in Wonderland, their own life’s journey. But I’m making this art because of where I am in my own life’s journey; so it’s the right thing to do to put my own body here, to show myself in my travels.”

“So why the hesitation?”

“It’s not about my cesarean scar, if that’s what you mean! I’m not ashamed. But it’s also not my photography. To me, this is peculiar, it’s like a shift in perspective, do you see? Am I showing the world through my eyes, or am I showing myself to the world?”

“Well, it depends.”

“Sì. It depends. So I must choose. But you must have an opinion?”

My opinion was that her nakedness was beautiful to me, that her body was at once more frail, more childlike, and yet more sturdy than I might have imagined. I hadn’t realized that her olive skin retained a youthful sheen all over, as if she were made of butter: the hip bones either side of her flat stomach were like polished knobs. I hadn’t understood, in all this time, how much higher her left shoulder was than her right. It made me happy to see her crooked tooth peeking when she smiled. “I think it’s a decision you have to make by yourself,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll have a revelation.”

“Couldn’t you use both? One of each?”

“It’s about the symmetry. I could have seven different women, otherwise. But this means more photographs; and I have no time.”

“You could set up one more shoot—”

“No,” she said, and here sounded almost bitter. “This is what Skandar says, as if there were endlessly more time. The gallery wants everything by June first. Already the place that makes the big prints on fabric, for this size, wants six weeks. There aren’t six weeks. Maybe they can rush for me, they say; but if there’s a mistake, or a problem, there’s no room for failure—there is no room!” She was very nearly shouting. “And so much to do. The heart, I wanted to cast the plastic heart here, but now it seems, to put in the pump, the best place is in Paris; but it must be done to exact specifications—I’m trying, for early next week, to get a friend of a friend to help me do it here—because I go on Thursday to New York, for the galleries, did you forget? And then I’m not back until Saturday or maybe Sunday, and another week is lost. Lost, you see?”

“I see.” It was what I was supposed to say.

“It’s not the same for you, you have no deadlines, no commitments, you have all your time, an ocean of time! But for me, it’s always running against the clock. Someone always waiting, Sirena you’re late, you’re late—here, at home, Reza, Skandar, the f*cking babysitter, the gallery in Paris shouting down the telephone—it’s always too much. And this show—it’s very important, it’s my chance. I’m getting older, and yes, there are the beginnings, I’ve had nice attention, but each time it only matters more. If I fail, it will be the end. Each time this is only more true. Unless I can really climb over the wall. I have to, this time. This matters so much.”

“I see,” I said again. I don’t need to tell you that she was flaying me alive.

“So, no more pictures. I’ll choose one or the other, by tonight. Maybe I’ll choose blind and see what comes back.” She gave a harsh laugh and daubed at her eyes. She’d gotten quite worked up. No, of course I wouldn’t know what it was to have a chance, or a life, at all. “So, we haven’t quite finished with the photographs. There’s still my wise woman, and hers are the best.”

“I’d better go in a minute.”

“No—you came to do your work. I’m sorry, to get all worked up—I’m so tired. I’m overwhelmed. My dear friend, look quickly at the photos, and then go to your work—I know you haven’t been at your table for many days now. I just want you to see my prize, the best ones.”

They were indeed, in spite of the glory of the others, the best ones. Sirena explained that the woman, aged eighty-three, was in her yoga class. She was herself a painter, as it turned out, and a child therapist who, although officially retired, still consulted. She was widowed. She had no children. Her name, not that it mattered, was Rose.

In these photos, we saw all of Rose. She had bunioned feet and fingers so badly warped by arthritis that you wondered how she could hold a pen. She had, on her diminished right breast, the white scar of a lumpectomy—breast cancer at fifty-eight—but it was barely noticeable, really. Her breasts were Tiresian withered dugs, like the breasts of native women in my history classes, breasts so far from either the erotic or the maternal that they could barely be called breasts, were more like near-empty sacks appended to her rib cage. Her skeleton was everywhere visible, almost protruding: her breastbone shimmered beneath the skin’s surface, like the shadow of mortality; her ribs; the odd, jaunty poke of her uneven hips; the knobbling of her knees … And this in spite of her amazing freckling: her skin was everywhere so mottled that you couldn’t tell foreground from background. Not the gentle smattering of moles that sprayed the young woman’s neck like kisses—Rose had a Jackson Pollock for a body, a human casing as marked as any canvas, so intense that she almost seemed dressed in her nudity. I loved that in all this, her fingernails and toenails were carefully painted, not garishly but deliberately, shell pink, an old lady’s vanity.

But ah, to see her face! After the faceless bodies of the others, to be given the gift of her face all but brought tears to my eyes. And such a face. As freckled as, or more so than, the rest of her, her pigment a mask, her wrinkles almost folds, but here, here, the spirit shone. Her pale blue eyes glittered clear, and fierce, and resoundingly joyous. Her strong, compact nose broke the ocean of her face like a ship’s prow. Her teeth, so white, reassuringly crooked. And her pure white hair, oiled and straight, impeccably parted and pulled back from her face, glowed.

In one of the two images Sirena had chosen, Rose was dancing, half a twirl, in an almost-echo of Sana’s dervish spin. In the other, the most beautiful of all the photographs, she held out both her arms to the camera, as if to a child, with a smile at once welcoming and conspiratorial, as if saying, “Come, come, and I will show you all the wonders that I know.”

You couldn’t look at Rose in her nakedness with envy, or contempt, or even sorrow: I looked at her with awe, and I thought, “Let me come with you.”

And then I thought, in spite of my fury at Sirena just then, that if she did nothing else at all for her installation, if Wonderland were only that photograph, she would have made a beautiful and inspiring thing. I thought that Marlene had been right, this would be the making of her. She hadn’t needed me to sew together the canopy of Alice dresses; she didn’t need the aspirin flowers or the broken mirrors—all of it, ultimately, otiose, however clever or beautiful. This was the real moment: this was her Wonderland.

“These are fantastic” is all I said. And she laid her hand on my arm, that way, and really looked at me, and said, “Thank you.”





11





The next week, Sirena went to New York, although not before we’d confirmed our Appleton adventure for the Monday almost two weeks hence, in the afternoon. We’d bring all the kids, but she’d film only the ones whose parents agreed it was okay. For the others, I’d provide an art project, at my end of the studio. I prepared the permission forms with two sections, and sent them home to all the parents.

In the end, Sirena would choose Anna Z as her gallerist, in what seemed at the time a bold, even risky choice—would the gallery even survive? Who knew?—but over the past years, even through the difficult times, they’ve both thrived, and the success of each has fed the other, so that now Anna is credited with having “found” Sirena, and Sirena, perhaps more accurately, with having “made” Anna.

But that was for later. Sirena was gone. Obviously, I’d known she would be. I hadn’t been at my boxes for over a week, although it felt much longer. I’d been so firmly put in my place during those days. I’d barely resisted the impulse to tear up my Polaroids—who had I thought I was? How could I have borne for anyone else to see?—but still I couldn’t look at them. I’d stuffed them in the back of my underwear drawer, as if they were racy porn, instead of sad and tame. Not only did I feel ashamed, I felt ashamed of being ashamed. Neither Alice nor Edie would have had time or patience for my prudery, silly cow that I was. The point was to be good at it—at art—and not to care. It wasn’t clear which of these was the more important, or whether simply in caring one fell at a crucial hurdle. Would it have been better not to be good and not to care? Obviously, above all—I had Rose in her splendid nudity in my mind’s eye—it was important to be good. Sirena, f*ck her, was good.

But that, I told myself, was no reason to abandon my artists and their habitats. They were good, even if I wasn’t especially—doubt! Doubt! The enemy of all life!—and I owed it to them: so when Sirena was away, I went into the studio on Thursday and again on Friday, and stayed late into the night, to select and carefully to frame under glass the perfect reduced prints of Edie that, once installed, would look down upon her in her sealed room. Even as I filed and measured and glued, I thought: What are these images, even? They aren’t new. They don’t, as Pound so wanted, make it new. A magpie cobbling, they don’t owe anything to my own efforts. Or rather: given how labor-intensive my efforts were, my failure of effort was something bigger, somehow more grandiose, a failure that I could sense, like a blind person, but couldn’t properly identify.

But why, I asked at the same time, why judge what wasn’t yet made, not yet fully itself? The dioramas aren’t in competition with anyone, with anything; they’re your expression. Yours.

Yours? How can they be yours, when they’re simply primitive homages to actual great artists of one kind or another?

But as a sequence, they have a logic—

And that logic is entirely subsidiary. It’s a follower’s logic.

But aren’t we—most of us—followers?

But do we want to be? Surely a work of art isn’t simply about what is? Do you leave a door open for what could be, what we want to be?

Even as I filed and measured and glued, I was thinking more about Sana twirling, or the girl-child reaching, or Rose embracing, than I was about my own work. I was thinking about the intimations of monstrosity in Sirena’s world, about the Jabberwock eyes, and of the film she proposed to make of the children, and of what, exactly, it might be like.



It was around ten o’clock on Friday night that I became aware, as months before, of footsteps in the corridor, of a shuffling pause on the threshold, before the inevitable knock. It was warm, and I had all the windows open, so that the rustling of the leaves outside was like a voice, whispering, and it was so calm, and astoundingly I found that I was also calm, or almost. I didn’t grab for my X-Acto knife, or bead with sweat. Besides, I recognized the knock. “Who is it?” I called, as I walked to the door; and in response, again, the particular knock.

Skandar stood outside, a smattering of greenery on one shoulder of his messy suit jacket, as though he’d walked through a bush.

“Hey.” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I felt a surge of something so strong it was almost like being sick. “Wow.”

“I was at a supper, not far away. Some Lebanese graduate students, talking a lot. Near Davis Square.” He wore the goofy smile, and surely had had a few drinks. He was carrying a paper bag. “I thought you might need a break,” he said. “I thought either a drink or a walk. So I brought a bottle of wine—it’s red, I think you like red?—and I brought—” He looked down.

“Your shoes.”

“Yes. I brought my shoes. Which I will need if we go for a walk.”

“Certainly around here,” I said, taking the bottle out of the bag. “Come on in.”

He was diffident, almost shy, his manner very different from that of his first visit, when he’d behaved as though he were my host, rather than the other way around.

“Sit down,” I said, pointing to his wife’s cushions. “I’ll get a couple of glasses.” There were only coffee cups in sight, those pretty, chipped ones, so emphatically hers. I poured red wine into two of them, and felt alluringly bohemian doing so, and wondered how much I owed to her any bohemianism, and any allure, I might have. But just then it didn’t matter. Even the thought was an anticipation of guilt. I hoped he wouldn’t comment on the cups. He didn’t.

“So,” he said, frankly sheepish. “So. Thank you.”

“Thank you.” I raised my cup in salute, drank. I was touched by his awkwardness, and by my own. There was silence for a short while, because all I could think of to say was “Who’s with Reza?” or “What news from Sirena?” and these were both things I didn’t want to say. He was looking at me, in this time, very still, like a cat. I wondered briefly how much he might have had to drink.

“Did the students feed you well?”

“Falafel. Kebabs. You know.”

“I’ve got some pasta salad left over if you want it. Whole Foods. The rotini with pesto kind.”

He made a gesture, childlike rather than wolfish, of assent. I passed him the brown box. I made a show of washing the fork at the sink before I gave him that, too.

“Anything new?” I tried again. “In the wider world?”

“Ay. In Lebanon, today, another bombing. North of Beirut.”

I hadn’t expected this sort of an answer. I’d intended the question more lightly. It took me a minute to say anything. “Did anyone die?”

“Five or six people wounded. You won’t see much about it here. It’s only worth reporting if someone dies.”

“Do they know who’s responsible?”

He kept his head down, struggled with a wayward rotino. “The elections are in three weeks. Different voices want to make themselves heard. It’s a problem.”

“Were you talking about this with the students?”

“You know how students are—”

“I know how my students are,” I said, “but they’re eight years old.”

He smiled. “Isn’t it much the same? They have their opinions and they don’t really want to hear yours, unless it coincides with theirs. It’s always the same.”

“Well, in that sense, we’re all the same.”

“I often think,” he said, “that almost everyone is a child. That if you suddenly were to take off the masks of each of us, we would all be revealed as children.”

“I didn’t know I had a soul mate so near at hand.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I say a version of that almost every day. Sometimes I tell myself, when I’m dealing with annoying adults, to picture the kid there. Because no matter how annoying the kid is, I can feel compassion for him or her.”

“Always?”

“Almost always.”

“What kind of child were you?”

“Fun,” I said, although even as I said it, I realized I was picturing my mother, not myself: my tanned, angular mother in a lime-green golf skirt and a white sleeveless polo, with beaded sandals and enormous shades, a cigarette in one hand, a G&T in the other. She was flirting with Horace Walker from down the block, and she was emphatically not a child. “I was a very fun child. And you?”

“Serious.” He stood up from the cushions, not without effort. “Do you mind if I smoke?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I was much too serious as a child, and as a consequence, not very interesting.” He downed the contents of his coffee cup in a single swallow. “I should be going,” he said.

“You just lit a cigarette,” I said.

“True.”

She was there in the room with us, even though the lights at her end were turned off. I didn’t need to name her. “Do you want to see the installation so far?”

“In a minute,” he said. We both knew I was talking about her installation, not mine. “I’d like to see what you’re working on first.”

I didn’t know that I believed him—didn’t we all really want to see her installation? I poured more wine into his coffee cup. “Fine,” I said. “Sounds good. Which one did you want to see?”

“All of them,” he said, “if possible. How many are there?”

“Three. Well, two, really. One whole, and two halves.”

“Great. Show me.”

He pored over them, one after the other, squatting down and closing one eye to peer directly in the windows, rather than looking at them from overhead. He moved very slowly and he looked very carefully, and whenever he wanted to touch anything, he looked at me first, questioningly, and waited for my permission. While he was looking, he seemed very much the serious child he claimed he’d been, and it pleased me—it excited me—how gravely he took my rooms, my artists, and how there was no gushing and no exclamation, just silent care. He took care. I loved him for it, and couldn’t help comparing him with his wife, and thinking how much steadier, how much more freely his own person he was.

When he was done at last, he stood back and he looked at me, instead, in the same serious way. “These are remarkable,” he said finally. “Quite extraordinary.” He filled his wine cup, lit another cigarette. “They are at the same time truthful, and emotional—and so small.”

“So small?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“They put so much in so small a space. It’s like a Persian miniature, painted with a single bristle: tiny, precise, here is an entire world. Everything that matters, all emotion.”

“Yes.” If that was what he meant, then okay.

“But the question is why? Why so small? To speak softly, but to tell the greatest truth? Or, like the Persian miniatures, to be portable, to be able to go everywhere, and still to show, by their beauty and intricacy, their owner’s vast wealth? Or in this case, is it because they don’t feel they’re allowed to be bigger?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why not a whole room, a life-sized room, for each of these? Why only a little box?”

I shrugged, aware of unexpected stinging behind my eyes.

“Or again: Why, when there’s so much emotion in these rooms, in these artists—why is it all sad?”

“I put Joy in each room. You only have to look for her. She’s there—a golden amulet.”

“Okay, fine. But why, one time, just one time, is she not the biggest element? Why does Joy not take the whole room?”

There were tears in my eyes. I could feel them pooling. I blinked repeatedly so he wouldn’t see them. I suddenly understood that whatever else, Sirena’s art was joyful: that it was true—even if she wasn’t necessarily true—and joyful at the same time. My art was sad, because my soul was sad. Was this right?

“Do you think my soul is sad?” I asked him.

“I think your soul is lovely,” he said, and although he was still serious—as far as I could tell, he was completely serious—I was also reminded of Didi saying, “If it looks like a maple leaf and it feels like a maple leaf and it lies under a maple tree …”

“I think that you don’t think so, but your soul is beautiful,” he went on, and he took my left hand between his two hands, which were square and fleshy and hot and dry, like a furnace, but all these things excitingly so. “And I think it has a great capacity for joy and for sadness both. You don’t need to worry for a moment about your soul. Rather, you need only to move all of your emotions out of their little boxes, and let them take up the whole room.”

“They wouldn’t just take up a room,” I said.

“I know, your insatiable ravenous wolf. But how will you know his rampaging, unless you free him from his cage?”

I was both in the moment and outside it, aware of the theater and the kitsch of it—how could I not be?—and yet wholly involved—my fingers, my skin, my heart. Inside my ear, Didi’s voice was laughing—“silly!”—and Sirena’s voice I wouldn’t even imagine, the cry of it, like pain, and my mother in the background, quietly whispering, “How dare you, Mouse? How dare you? Who do you think you are, Mouse? Who do you think you are?”

But then, the pull upon me was not who I thought I was; it was who he thought I was: not Emily, or Virginia, or Alice, or Edie, or even Sirena. Not a Woman Upstairs. Not one thing. That I did not myself know my outline did not, at that point, matter at all. To someone, I had an outline, implausibly a worthy one. When his hands moved to rest, warm, even, like hot stones upon my back, just to be nakedly Nora Eldridge seemed, briefly, as though it could be forgiven; as though it could even be enough.





12





At first, I thought it could all be okay. Skandar and I had a conversation—oblique, weird, but a conversation—about how this was meaningful but wrong, and how it couldn’t continue. I was baffled, you see: this wasn’t a story I’d lived inside my head. The bead didn’t fit my thread. And yes, I believed I could simply will it away, because I had to, because there was too much at stake otherwise.

How strange that to feel oneself clearly, transparently, compassionately seen by one precious person meant to risk vile distortion in the eyes of another. Always we tell the children it’s best to be honest; but I knew, too, when to lie, in order to be true to something greater. It hadn’t felt false, or willed, or like seduction, or like a mistake. It hadn’t felt in conflict with my friendship with Sirena, or my love—my mad love—for her.

My sadnesses were many, but there was not, among them, a sadness at what we’d done, the absolute moral value of which didn’t seem to me to be negative: if you could only separate that bead from its neighbors, take it out of time and hold it up to the light, how beautiful and clear a bead it would be. If you were to make a room for the artist Nora Eldridge, and depict in it that experience, it would be joy. I don’t know what to say about the fact that for a time we lay upon the Astroturf, among the wavering aspirin flowers. I can’t explain it; or I couldn’t then.



On Monday morning, I almost choked at the sight of Reza at his desk, in his pressed T-shirt with a lock of black hair curling straight up to the sky. Now, suddenly, I saw not so much his mother’s eyes but his father’s nose, his father’s lips. His own goofy smile. I must have looked oddly at him, as he forced, in return, a stretchy, Gumby-esque grin, the grin of someone who’s done nothing wrong but is nevertheless afraid of being accused. Even from the front of the room I could see the scar by his eye, my scar; and with the sight of it came the memory of the doctor at the hospital, sewing her fine seam.

I didn’t choke, I didn’t stop, the day was launched, the moment passed, and in the unwavering routine of 3E, in the absolute familiarity and hullabaloo of my children around me, it was the events of Friday night, rather than this, that seemed like a dream; and as the day went on, I forgot about them. And then, that afternoon, we had an Appleton-wide staff meeting—Shauna in love with the sound of her own voice, droning on about plans for the end of the school year: our talent show, our fund-raiser, our school-wide picnic—and I didn’t even try to go to the studio. I wasn’t sorry.

On Tuesday afternoon, I felt myself lacking in courage; but aware, too, that the encounter had to take place—that as with Reza, with Sirena, too, I had to step across the awkwardness and proceed to the next scenes, the scenes of her finishing Wonderland, of our excited bond over her glorious installation, over our shared understanding that hers was the art, and the life, that mattered.



The shock was to recognize from the moment I entered the room that for Sirena there was no discontinuity at all between then and now. Her blithe greeting, her fervid hair-twiddling and shawl-adjusting, all were unchanged. She was the same Sirena who’d hopped on the morning Amtrak to New York five days before, blissfully, selfishly oblivious and full of the excitements of her trip.

“It’s so hard to decide—they both are really great”—“great-e”—“and they both want me to go with them. I’ll need your help, Nora—I trust you so much. When I showed my naked ones to Anna, she had tears in her eyes. She said they were stunning—and I said to her, ‘Be careful. You must imagine them in their context, in relation to the other pieces of the installation’—and she said, ‘Sirena, that’s great, but whatever you put around them can’t make them less stunning. More so, maybe, but not less.’ ”

“And the other guy?” I couldn’t help but be excited for her, even if she was a braggart. Somehow I could feel all my feelings separately—and the cloud of guilt, too, with its inadmissible tinge of triumph; I could keep it all in my head at once.

Because even I couldn’t hide from myself that not only did I want Sirena and Reza and—now, most tangibly—Skandar (don’t ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast, breathing skin, will insist otherwise), but I also wanted Wonderland, I coveted her very imagination, and wished it were mine.

I listened to Sirena talk about the two gallerists and their spaces and the promises they’d made to her, and I was with her and not with her at the same time. It wasn’t like at school with Reza, where the everyday realities had simply supplanted and replaced the other. Here, Skandar hovered in the studio, a shadow across the windows’ bleached light; and the fact that she couldn’t see him between us didn’t make him go away. Confusingly, I didn’t love her less, or long for her less, although I envied her more. If she’d put her arms around me then—well, in some metaphorical way she did put her arms around me, she had done so from the beginning; and perhaps I’d even thought, all those months, that she could really see me; and on some level I believed it even after Skandar stopped, and looked, and actually saw—even then, so late, I believed that she could see me, and so my guilt made Skandar a shadow that I marveled that she could not see. I thought, “This is going to be hard. Harder than I realized.” But I didn’t think, “This is going to be impossible.”



That Thursday night, I went to sit for Reza. I expected it to be my first time together with all three of them at once, but Skandar wasn’t home: meetings at the university, Sirena said. Some end-of-year thing. She’d join him at the dinner party.

She was distracted, not chatty—rushing to change her clothes, almost peremptory in her list of what there was to eat, of who might call. I fought not to see her brusqueness as a sign, as ill will directed at me. You know how it is: a criminal anticipates suspicion. She reappeared in a black caftan covered with a riot of colorful embroidery, a heavy medallion at her throat. When at last she paused on her way out the door, I couldn’t resist: “Is everything okay? Have I upset you?”

“Upset me? How absurd! You could never upset me. I’m so sorry—I am—out of it. Beset by difficulties in the practical things. If I were only in Paris, I could sort these things out. I’m thinking I’ll have to get on a plane and go there—but with Reza—so complicated. Now the term at Harvard is finished, Skandar is traveling so much … So: my head is full of nonsense—like a chess game. If I move this piece, and then that piece—then, so. And if you don’t look far enough ahead, then bang, you are in trouble.”

Didn’t I know it. “If I can help …”

“You’re here, aren’t you? You’re my greatest help.”

“Put it all out of your mind for tonight. Have fun.”

“Some hotshot economics professor and his psychoanalyst wife? And that tall man with a face like a horse who’s always on the television! I’ve been stuck with him before—he’s so boring and his breath is terrible, like a dead mouse. Who has time for this bullshit? I should get Skandar a professional wife. No, you’re the lucky ones—you and my little Reza.”

And in truth, we were the lucky ones: that evening after we ate, Reza and I sat on the living room floor building a free-form spaceship out of Legos. Using pieces from a great bucket of abandoned creations, we spent over an hour at it, calculating its perfectly symmetrical rocketlike tower and finding the shapes necessary for its wide, ovoid base, complete with lights and windows and opening doors. We created detachable roomlets, some with wings, some with tank wheels; we found Lego people—stringy, hammer-headed Star Wars creatures, a couple of solid fellows who looked like farmers, a grass-skirted cannibal or two—and populated our space station. Each time we added a person, Reza invented a story for him, about where he came from, what he did, why he was there.

“When I grow up,” he said, out of the blue, “I’m going to be an architect. I want to create worlds for people. And maybe,” he said with a glint that reminded me of his father, “maybe creating worlds will create new people, too. Do you see, by changing his hat, I’ve turned this farmer guy into a heart doctor? Isn’t that cool?”



I was waiting for him to walk me home. He’d always walked me home. But this time, soon after eleven, Sirena came alone.

“I’m exhausted,” she said, as she dropped her bag and keys on the dining table. “I couldn’t stick there a minute longer. Skandar and the mouse-breath man were involved in deep conversation. I don’t know what Skandar thinks he can persuade him to do—go on CNN and insist on a two-state solution? Who is so foolish, in this country, who wishes to remain employed? So I said to him, ‘Skandar, maybe you’re going to save the world tonight, but I must get some sleep …’ ”

“It is late—”

“Yes, and you’re teaching in the morning. I’m terrible, to forget—I’m sorry. It’s raining, a bit—do you want me to call you a taxi?”

“It’s okay. I’ll walk.”

“At least take the umbrella.”

So I took from Sirena the golf-sized, striped umbrella that Skandar had more than once held gallantly over my head, and I walked myself home. The distance felt longer than it had in months. Had he stayed there on purpose? He must have. Was the dark upshot of our brief numinous hour to be the loss of so close a friend? Because, as I realized only then, after all our walks and conversations, I could have counted him as a friend.



Henceforth, inevitably, Skandar was often uppermost in my thoughts. Sometimes I’d seem to forget, and my obsessive imagination would follow its old familiar trajectory—to the imaginary Vermont farmhouse, the peaceable artistic gynocracy, where a mere hand upon the arm set the veins pumping in double-time. And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it’s not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother’s death, I’d catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.



Sometime over that weekend, Sirena decided that she needed to fly to Paris to sort out the casting of the heart for her Wonderland. It was too complicated to try to clarify things on the computer or over the telephone, she told me on Monday morning, when I called to confirm the details for the school visit that afternoon. If the heart wasn’t right—it was to be open, split in the middle, on a Lucite dais a few yards in front of the film of Sana dancing; and it was to spray out, every few minutes, a particular rosewater scent—then, as she said, the heart of her installation wasn’t right. She’d leave on Tuesday, on the late Air France flight for Paris, and said she’d be back the following weekend. So I knew that, on Monday, and maybe it affected me somehow.



The kids were hugely excited. Any field trip is a hit—you could take them to a sewage treatment plant and they’d love it—but this one was weird and free, and even more fun because of it. Kids like breaking the routine, riding the school bus in the middle of the day, the feeling of possibility. We left Appleton at eleven thirty, right after their early lunch. They were unusually rowdy in the bus: Noah climbed over three rows of seats before I could get him to sit down; Ebullience had a spat with Miles over some hand-held computer game they ought not to have had in the first place; Sophia started to cry because she said Mia had pulled her hair. I had to raise my voice and threaten to turn around and go back to school. It was that kind of a beginning.

That said, I felt good about the excursion. Almost all the parents had said yes to the filming—it must have seemed cool to think their kids would be in some kind of movie—but I’d also arranged, at my end of the studio, for us to make papier-mâché masks. I’d had the kids read an abridged version of Alice in Wonderland the previous week, and we’d looked at old illustrations of the Cheshire Cat, and the Jabberwocky, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mad Hatter: I’d told them they could make masks of any of them, or of any other character they chose. The plan was to break the kids into two groups, to have one half start making the masks while the other was running around Wonderland, and then to switch them over. The pedagogical reasoning behind the afternoon wasn’t entirely clear even to me, but none of the parents had questioned it. I figured it was pretty memorable for kids to see a real artist’s atelier.

Things started out well. When we got to the studio, the kids seemed awed by the oddity of it all, and they sat quietly in a circle on the floor in the middle of the L while Sirena explained to them who she was and what she was doing. She was pretty good at talking to kids, better than I’d have imagined, and she talked about making art as a kind of magic, and also as a kind of play. Interestingly, Reza didn’t come forward to hug her: he sat squeezed between Noah and Aristide, fidgeting and behaving like one of the boys. I remember thinking that he’d changed, that way, in the course of the year: he’d been so openly affectionate with his mother back in September. But maybe it was discomfiting to be her kid, in this big white studio, in front of everyone, even embarrassing; maybe he felt funny, too, to see me and his mom both here together, and to think that this was our shared space. I don’t know.

Sirena explained that the children were free to treat all of Wonderland as a stage, almost as if they were in a play. “I know you’ve read about Alice,” she said, “and I want you to pretend that you’ve gone down the rabbit hole too. Here you are, in this weird place, and anything can happen.” She pointed to the two cameras we’d set up weeks before, high up at either end of the Astroturf lawn. “In Alice’s Wonderland, she never knows if someone is watching her. Maybe the camera’s on, but maybe it’s not, so don’t even think about it. Think of this as an adventure, and a game. You can play in groups, or you can play alone. You can make this space what you want it to be.”

We’d hung the mirror shards on their strings from the ceiling to create glittering partitions in the space, and we’d laid out the Alice-dress sky along the ground in a swirling river of fabric that meandered the length of the room. We’d sown whole clusters of aspirin flowers, and some soap tulips, and had scattered around candies and jelly beans for the kids to find. We’d dragged her poufs onto the Astroturf lawn and draped them with burlap, so they looked like boulders. In far corners, we’d hung up several pairs of little red lights, for Jabberwock eyes, and when they flashed, an MP3 player let out roaring noises—quite scary ones, in fact.

All the children wanted to play in Wonderland. Inevitably, making masks seemed like a consolation prize. But we divided them into two groups and told them they had forty-five minutes for their first activity. Then we’d have a break for juice and cookies, and then we’d switch. The bus would be waiting outside for us at two p.m.

Reza and Noah and Aristide were all in my group first, along with three other boys and a gaggle of girls. Even though they were disappointed to have to wait for Wonderland, they were psyched by the idea that they could make masks and then play with them. I pointed out that the masks would need to dry, which made the boys feel they had to work fast. I helped all the kids shape their mask forms out of coat hanger wire: we measured their heads, and then bent the wire into noses and cheeks. Then, with relatively little acting out, the kids laid on the layers of gluey newsprint, molding the flesh devotedly around and around and around their metal bones.

Noah’s Jabberwocky came out looking like a cross between a bull and a horse, its long snout punctuated by gaping nostrils. Aristide made the Cheshire Cat, or said he had, although he hadn’t given it any ears, only an enormous smiling mouth, which was good enough. Reza chose the dormouse, a minor character, capably executed. Its nose was pointy, and he gave his mask prominent ears, but he was particularly proud of its whiskers, six dangling bits of string glued onto the end of its nose like a straggly mustache. The boys finished before the others in the group, and asked if they might cross over early into Wonderland.

They’d been so good, and it was almost time anyway, so I let them. I should have asked Sirena if it was okay with her; I hadn’t realized how involved she was with her cameras, up on ladders to adjust them so they’d track specific kids; and how little involved she was with keeping watch.

It all happened so fast. I was helping Sophia with her walrus mask—a bigger task than either of us was really fit for—when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the boys’ play was turning rough. At first I didn’t do anything, because I figured Sirena was on top of it; but then I stepped down toward the middle of the L, and realized that her back was turned and she was focused on filming Ebullience and Chastity wrapping themselves up in the Alice fabric and twirling around. Meanwhile, behind her, Reza and Noah were scuffling, and Aristide was making breathless noises of alarm; and then I distinctly saw Reza punch Noah in the jaw.

“STOP!” I shouted—and when rarely Miss Eldridge of Appleton School shouts, the world knows about it. “STOP right now!” I thundered down to where they were, wiping my gluey hands on the seat of my pants. I grabbed both boys by their shirt collars—it’s something teachers used to do a lot, but aren’t supposed to anymore—and I lost it. I felt personally disappointed by Reza—I don’t know how else to put it. He’d let me down. “What in God’s name is going on here? Reza Shahid, you have some serious explaining to do. I saw what happened, with my own eyes. What has gotten into you?”

Reza glowered, shrugged.

“Noah: you tell me. I can’t believe Reza would hit you without being provoked.”

He, too, shrugged. Then I saw clasped in his fist several aspirin flowers, dangling on their wire stalks.

“You picked the flowers?”

“Nobody said we couldn’t.” This was true: nobody had said they couldn’t. Noah went on, “And then Reza jumped on me. Like some kind of crazy guy.”

“Is that what happened, Reza?”

Reza looked angrier than I’d ever seen him, but he didn’t say anything. He scuffed his feet against the Astroturf. I had the feeling that wasn’t the whole story.

“Did Noah say something that upset you?”

Reza looked up: he looked for his mother, and found her, and some wordless exchange passed between them, to which I was not privy. He still didn’t say anything.

It was only at this point that I realized everyone had gathered round in a circle, and that Sirena was standing behind the children, watching. It wasn’t clear what she was thinking. I hadn’t considered it in the heat of the moment, but now everything seemed hideously weird: I’d been extra-angry because I felt betrayed by my own kid, my special boy, the boy who wanted to make the world better; but here, like a slap, was the reminder that he wasn’t mine. Here was his mother, and the look on her face was the look not of my friend but of his parent, if you see what I mean: whatever she was thinking, it was a mother’s reaction to seeing her son disciplined by a teacher. I was his teacher, an outsider; that’s what I was.

It was one of those moments when life’s disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is “useful to get that learned.” The only thing I could think to do was fully to take on my teacher role, and play it to the hilt. I got bossy with the kids: “Don’t stand there staring,” I said to everyone else. “This doesn’t concern all of you. Go back to your games, or your masks. Noah and Reza, you’re both going to sit over there against the wall and I don’t want to hear anything more out of either of you.”

For a moment, nobody moved. I saw some of the kids, including Reza, look at Sirena. She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. And then he went, and Noah went after him, both of them hanging their heads like convicts.

I took Aristide aside and asked him what had actually occurred. He said that Noah had said mean things about Wonderland, had called it “crappy.” He’d said, “Your mom’s idea is really dumb. Does she think we’re, like, two years old?” And then he’d quoted something from television or somewhere: Noah, obsessed with flatulence, had said, “I fart in her general direction.” He was trying to be funny, Aristide explained, but Reza couldn’t see it.

Sirena didn’t come over to talk to me straight away. Maybe she didn’t want to seem to make a big deal of it. I never told her what Noah said to Reza. I don’t imagine her son did, either. She did go over to speak to Reza for a second, as he huddled against the wall, and she looked stern, but mostly she was in a hurry to get back up her ladder and monkey with her cameras, to try to pull a decent video out of the fiasco. The kids weren’t playing so freely after that, though; it didn’t feel natural anymore. Even after their snack, after the groups switched over, there was a slight pall over the afternoon. It wasn’t the same.

As we were lining the kids up to leave, Sirena appeared at my elbow.

“I’m sorry about that scene,” I said.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “You’ve got to run your class your way. You’ve got your rules.” She sighed. “It’s a shame because it wasn’t the same, after. Kids are so sensitive, they absorb everything.” And then, “Don’t worry about coming back to clean up. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks, Sirena.” I didn’t usually call her by name like that. It seemed almost to echo in my ear.

“I think we’re saying good-bye for the week? I go to Paris tomorrow.”

“I almost forgot.” I was about to say, “I’ll keep an eye on your boys for you,” and then thought better of it. “I hope it all goes well,” I said.

“Don’t worry. It will”—she lit up for a moment, seemed more normal—“because it has to.”



Things with Reza weren’t really changed. He was remorseful—he apologized to me the next day before school started—and besides, he didn’t see the complicated ironies of the day before. He wasn’t going to tell me what had actually happened, whether because he didn’t want to be a tattletale or because he didn’t want to repeat an insult to his mother; but he felt his punishment had befit his crime. It was all finished and forgotten, for him, at least—which was a relief.



Sirena did only a half-decent job of cleaning up the studio before she went away. She put all the kids’ detritus—cups, napkins—in a garbage bag, and she swept the floor for crumbs. She rearranged her Wonderland, replanting the flowers and folding away the river of cloth; but she left all the kids’ unpainted masks higgledy-piggledy at my end of the room, and she let the papier-mâché glue harden in a bucket, which I then had to throw away. The studio was accumulating a lot of strange emotions, for me. It wasn’t so easy to be there.

I tried to tidy up some more, in anticipation of her return. I arranged things neatly but visibly, the way a cleaning lady might arrange your bureau. Once this was done, Sirena’s end of the L looked oddly forlorn, abortive, like a woman half dressed, and I had to turn my back on it. All that week I went only in the evenings, pretending to work, but really hoping to hear footsteps in the corridor, the secret knock.

He was busy, I knew. But surely also he wasn’t able to see me because of the force of his emotion. It was possible, I knew, that he didn’t want to deal with me; but I didn’t want to believe that. Better for us both to be noble, to suffer in withdrawal. I certainly wouldn’t telephone him. It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I’d sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn’t been sure whether it was mine. My fingertips could still trace the distinct coarseness of the hairs on his chest, the softness of those along his forearm. My cheeks and chin had stung, the morning after, from the evening bristle of his. And his body, his hands, his tongue: if I closed my eyes, they were still on me, in me, with me. I was always remembering him, a physical memory, like an imprint in the earth. There is, I came to realize, what the mind wants and what the body wants. The mind can excite the body, but its desires can also be false; whereas the body, the animal, wants what it wants.