My family members, with their magical brains that allowed them to fashion complex works of art, impossible surgeries, inventions spun out of gossamer thoughts, could not fathom how I felt, knowing I was not one of the lucky ones, deprived of supernatural gifts to springboard me into their realm of the rarefied, missing the resplendent power to make something lasting. I am certain they never sensed my pain, the jealousy that left tracks across my heart, that scalded the blood in my veins. It is a long-borne burden, knowing what you lack, and I knew what I lacked. My wrath toward them, and toward all those who soared high in their lives and accomplished the unbelievable by creating eternal works, was boundless. And I could not fathom how anyone could put their gifts in a box and walk away. My father was finding new interests, my mother had never published anything after her two collections, my brother was talking about selling his company, while my future was at a standstill, my book proposal dead. Where, I thought, was the lost and found for discarded genius, from which I could select what I desperately wanted and needed?
I swam back into “Away from Home” and learned where Robbie’s obsession about living in small spaces had come from. In the house in which she had grown up, there were too many rooms where one could get lost, where a sickened, skeletal mother could die alone in an enormous bed at the end of a long, long hall, and a sister, grieving and despondent at twenty, could find a gun inside an old shoebox inside a rarely used closet and do away with herself, hours passing before anyone noticed she was missing, found only when her blood had turned to sheets of red ice. I read the last paragraphs:
They are tired from the long post-honeymoon flight, and Luke finally agrees to sleep at Robbie’s place, saying, “Now that we’re married, we’re going to combine our lives, clothes, books, and all the rest of our crap, right?” and she closes her eyes to memorize the sweep of his mouth.
When he stirs at dawn, Robbie wills her breath shallow and steady, her eyelids still, her forehead smooth and unwrinkled. He is out of bed quickly, as always, except when they were in Bora Bora. Yellow light from the bathroom cuts the darkness, shower steam blues the air. Robbie rolls over into the imprint Luke left behind, wishing she possessed the exquisite ability of fish to transform the elements in their domain, but she doesn’t. She has been too damaged for years. She will kick him out and not return his calls, will sign the divorce papers when they come, will send them back with a note that reads: Love cannot save a single trapped soul.
Single trapped souls. I knew I was one of them, and then I was thinking about transformation, about how Ashby’s stories were taking up residence inside of me, her fictional worlds somehow truer than real life, a hurricane that turned the familiar upside down in a way that made such sense to me. If I could get my bearings, perhaps there existed a different universe in which I, too, could truly be myself. For months, the physicality of my mother’s collections had exceeded their actual dimensions in my life. I had concentrated on my interviews, on drafts of new articles, on the state of my professional life, on the state of the world, taking up with women I knew I would not love, anything to ignore Ashby’s work. But when I left my bed, with her book in my hand, I was identifying the myriad themes in Other Small Spaces, no longer keeping anything at bay.
I put the book on the coffee table and took stock of my fridge—an unopened half-and-half, jars of peanut butter and jalapeno olives, a stick of picked-at butter, a bent package of moldy bacon, the heel of a loaf of wheat bread, an old container of cream cheese. Not a single breakfast ingredient for a man weighted down by a hard penance.
In my menu drawer was a flyer from a place I’d never tried, called Lucky Star. A deeply cadenced voice answered the phone and took my order, and twenty minutes later, the delivery boy was at my door. His hair was black and brush-cut, his eyes big and round, and his clothes—pressed jeans that sat high on his waist and ended a few inches above his black-laced shoes, his socks bleached white, a collared shirt under a bright-red windbreaker with Lucky Star stamped off-kilter across the heart—were too neat for him to have been born here.
When he said, “Hello, sir,” I heard the singsong Indian uplift to his words.
“I have performed a magical feat, sir. Nestled your late breakfast or early lunch under my jacket so as to deliver it in perfect condition. Despite what is happening to the world.”
I apologized for asking for delivery in such rotten weather. “No problem at all, sir,” and he unzipped his windbreaker and handed me a bag that was hot and dry. I paid and then tried to hand him an extra five, but he shook his said. “My father would say that amount is dearly inappropriate. He would say two dollars is sufficient.”
I said, “Please take it. It’s really awful out there.”
He looked at me carefully, then said, “Very true, sir. I will no longer fight you.” He pocketed the tip and leaned over the transom, looked around slowly, as if he had no other place to be. “Very nice home, sir. It is warm, yes, and out of the cold and rain. I find it very comforting.”
I turned and looked into the immense open space of my apartment, the great room, as the real estate agent had called it when I bought the place, that lately deflated me, made me feel I was back in a shapeless adolescence, without hope for a sharply delineated future.
Light blue walls. Twin blue couches facing each other across the mirrored coffee table reflecting the dark clouds outside. My favorite blue armchair aimed at the far wall, where a red antique Chinese cabinet hid stereo, speakers, and wiring. The flat-screen television above it, flanked by large art photographs, each three feet by two feet, of a busy Istanbul marketplace, and Egyptian pyramids under a hazy, thin white moon, though I could not recall how I came to have those photographs. My desk near the front door, a long slab of wood, my laptop flat as an old vinyl record, a folder containing my rejected book proposal, folders with my failed stories, my tall shelves along the adjacent short wall, the books looking like crammed teeth, the recessed ceiling lights on low, the two standing lamps at either end of the room, the open-plan kitchen, and that entire wall of windows.
“Thanks,” I finally said.
“Yes. Very nicely furnished. I feel like I am in the sea. Comforting though, is the word that first comes to mind. A place for the making of a good life, I think.”
Such a different assessment from my own, and before I could think of a response, he pointed to Other Small Spaces on the coffee table.
“And you are reading, which is good for the brain and the soul. I will not disturb you further, except for you to know this. My name is Kartar. Call me anytime. We always deliver.”
“I will,” I said.