Forty Rooms (10 page)

“So,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’ve decided to break it to them at last. They won’t be pleased, you know. No, don’t turn it on, or you may just see a dragon instead of a handsome youth.”

“Aren’t you getting your myths mixed up? I’m hardly Psyche, and you’re too old to be Cupid.” Still, I moved my hand away from the lamp. “In any case, I’m not worried, I know they’ll understand. I’ve sent them some of my poems.”

“Yes,” he said. “Your On the Other Side cycle. It wouldn’t have been my first choice—it’s more Dionysus than Apollo, too much raw feeling, not enough thought. And that ditty about a nun sleeping with the devil, that’s painfully obvious, really, and as close to pornography as is acceptable in civilized society. Well. You’ve practiced your arguments, I assume?”

“I’m hoping my poetry alone will be enough,” I said, a bit dryly.

“But if it isn’t?”

“Then I will tell them that going home is a predictable thing to do, and someone once taught me not to take the path of least resistance.” I paused for the sound of acknowledgment, but the darkness lay still around me. “Fine. I will tell them that I’ll be twenty-two in just a few months, but I have yet to start living. I’ve spent my entire existence until now sheltered under the parental roof, in library cubicles and dorm rooms, and my future is all mapped out for me as well: my old Moscow routine waiting to close in upon me, a short interlude of graduate school followed by a desk job in some dusty institute, a marriage to someone like Vasily, then children, then middle age, then death. It’s like one giant board of tic-tac-toe, spanning years and years, and as life crosses off one square, I’m expected to obediently put my O down in the next logical place,
knowing all the while that the game can’t be won. But somewhere out there—somewhere out there are street carnivals and mountain peaks and sunlit squares, and I just want to—to get off the board for a while.”

“But what exactly will you do, my dear?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? Maybe move to New York. Or New Orleans. Or San Francisco. Rent a studio. Wait tables in some smoky den. Learn how to mix mean cocktails and play the guitar. Master poker. Take up karate. Work at an art gallery or a post office. Get a job as a conductor on a train between the coasts. Or a backup dancer. Or a window washer. Anything. Everything. I’ve never even
been
anywhere. I want to throw myself into adventures. Plunge into the twentieth century before it runs out, so I can write about it in the fullness of experience. Because no one can discover anything new while staying within four walls of a bookworm’s cell, never venturing out to taste joy or pain. Art is all about stretching the limits of being human, is it not? It can’t be born of a small, predictable life.”

A night breeze swept into the room, and the shade beat a fluttering rhythm against the windowpane. I peered into the shadows. “Are you still there? Hello?”

“I wish,” he said, and I could hear him stifling a yawn, “I wish you hadn’t fallen into the trap that has claimed so many others. An artist doesn’t need to lead a life of distraction in order to create. In fact, if you are ever to prove worthy of a myth, you must devote all your time to your calling and leave the manufacturing of adventures to your future biographers. For you must remember: Limits are best stretched by going inward, not outward; pain
will find you no matter how cramped the cell you hide in; and joy—joy is always only a poem away. And there are no such things as small lives, there are only small people.”

I felt a sudden flare of irritation at the smooth readiness of his maxims, at his seeming inability to understand anything about real choices in a real life.

“Noble callings, divine standards, creation with a capital C . . . All you ever do is talk in absolutes and abstractions.” I spoke sharply. “Don’t they say God is in the details? I want—no, I need—to experience the
details
, don’t you understand—the particular, gritty, wonderful details of
life
out there. The smell of dew and garbage trucks at dawn. The bracing taste of bitter coffee at the chipped counter of a roadside diner. The wild thrill of jazz spilling out of a basement window into a still, dark alley. These are the kinds of things I want to pin down in my poems. Things and feelings that will be unique to the here and now. Things and feelings that will be unique to
me
in the here and now.”

All at once conscious of shouting, I stopped. The hush in the drafty room grew hollow like the inside of a tolling bell.

When he spoke, the indifference of his drawl was a punch to the stomach.

“Sometimes, my dear, I forget what a child you still are. Oh well. Take care, while out browsing, that you don’t get lost in the stacks. I will be leaving you now.”

He sounded remote, as if already walking away to some other place, growing more distant with every word. The memories of my last days with Hamlet overtook me with unexpected violence, as they had not for months—that shrugging gesture of his, that
condescending half-smile, the pale, bored eyes sliding past me obliquely . . .

I felt desolate once again, and bright with anger.

“So go, then!” I hissed into the orphaned darkness. “Go! I’m sick of your speeches, and I’m sick of you! Time I outgrew this juvenile little fantasy once and for all—”

I nearly screamed when his whisper brushed past my ear, so close I could feel the grazing of his hot, dry lips against my temple.

“If you make me a proper sacrifice, I may answer a prayer or two. Just this once.”

The unnatural blindness pressed on my eyelids. My throat was tight.

“What, you want me to slaughter a goat for you?”

The telephone shrilled in the hush of the room, jolting me out of cramped armchair sleep; I must have dozed off while waiting. I let it ring another time, to steady my voice before answering, but it turned out to be only my roommate Lisa, calling to tell me that she would be staying at Sam’s tonight, but oh, did she have a story for me—

“Lisa, you know I can’t talk right now,” I interrupted. “It’s Sunday.”

“Oops, sorry, I forgot!” She hung up.

Upbeat music was pulsating through the half-open window; Constantine was having another party. I turned on the lamp—night had sneaked past me somehow—and sank back into my armchair, feeling disoriented and upset. An obscure dark presence loomed at the back of my mind, as if something terrible had happened or was about to happen, yet I could not give it a name;
I just felt the impending threat of its misery in my bones. I sat still for a minute, then shook my head to dissipate the lingering sogginess of sleep, and, picking up the sheaf of pages by the telephone, read the top one.

The pale angel whispered, “Hallelujah!”

But the angel was missing his left wing

And could fly in loopy circles only,

Lopsided, tilting as if tipsy to one side.

Would it prove sufficient to make my parents understand the full force of my determination to devote myself to this—this solitary quest of capturing the formlessness of living in a net of language? I leafed through the pages, plucking a line here, a couplet there, sounding them out in my mind, trying to see them as my parents would, as would a stranger; but the lines refused to coalesce with any cohesion into verses, or verses into poems. The more I read, the more I sensed, with growing horror, that the meaning I heard ringing so clearly within my being had not broken through the husks of dried words—that life was absent from the littering of adolescent sentiments and empty phrases.

The telephone rang.

“Moscow for you,” barked the operator’s voice—and then they were there.

Allo, allo, how are you, we are well, I am well, all is well! All three of us shouted, then stopped at the same time, waiting for someone to start speaking, but no one said anything for a couple of seconds, long enough for me to imagine the thick cable line
stretching in the silt of the ocean floor between the continents, overgrown with mollusks, strewn with skeletons of ships, shadows of primordial monsters slithering in the green murk above.

“So . . . have you read the poems I sent you?”

“Yes, we have, yes.” Again they were speaking at once. My mother was laughing a little, as she did when embarrassed, saying that she hoped they were not altogether autobiographical, and something about drugs, while my father mumbled indistinctly behind her laughter. My mother stopped laughing, my father cleared his throat. Another monster floated through the murky ocean waters.

“Well, anyway, composing poetry is part of youth—who doesn’t have a few sonnets hidden in a drawer somewhere?” my father said with finality. “So, have you given more thought to graduate schools? Moscow University has several programs—”

“About that,” I said. I could feel my face burning with shame. “I thought I’d stay here for a bit longer. Another year or two.”

I heard my father’s careful breathing, the muffled clutter of my mother dropping something, her receiver perhaps. I waited for the fumbling to subside.

“Ah, so,” my mother said at last. She sounded very far away now. “Will you be applying to graduate schools in America, then?”

This would not be the moment to mention that the unfailingly perfect Olga was considering Yale Law School. “No, I just . . . I thought I’d get a job for a bit.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Maybe I’ll work at a post office or something. I thought—”

“But this isn’t serious,” my mother said in an injured tone.

My father said nothing.

“I mean, just for a short while. While I research graduate schools.”

“Well,” my mother said. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and we’ll discuss all the options next week. There isn’t that much time, you’re graduating in two months. This isn’t a practice run, you know, this is the only life you get.”

My father still said nothing.

When the line went dead, I looked at the room where I had spent four years’ worth of nights, minus two or three dozen library vigils and one short spring of romps with Hamlet. I looked everything over with care—I wanted to be certain. I moved my eyes over the two side-by-side desks, the schoolgirls’ bunk beds, Lisa’s posters of Klee and Kandinsky on the walls, my modest cluster of mementoes pinned in a corner, a bald spot in the middle where a Cat in the Hat postcard used to be. No, indeed, nothing real could have come of this—a diligent girl playing at being a poet in a public sandbox. My mind made up, I gathered all the pages from the floor, and, stepping over to my desk, proceeded to empty its drawers of more pages, handwritten originals all, some in Russian, some in English.

I felt quite calm.

There was a lighter in my pocket, white letters on red spelling “Siberia”; some friend of Constantine’s had brought it from one of Amsterdam’s coffee shops; I had borrowed it weeks before and forgotten to return it. It would not work right away, and the ball of my thumb grew sore with repeated attempts before I managed to cajole a small blue light into wavering being. The sink in the
corner was too shallow to hold all the paper at once. A fireplace would have made for a much more poetic scene—and one should always do these sorts of things with style, I thought with bitterness, and dropped the first handful of pages into the sink; The Cycle of Solitude it was, I noticed. I was all done with cycles anyway. The top page blossomed into glowing life, as if the words had burst into flame on their own accord, from the sheer force of some inner fervor. I could not help reading them then, stark black against dazzling gold, quivering with transient beauty, in the moments before they disintegrated into dampened ash and disappeared down the drain half stopped up with clumps of Lisa’s long blond hair.

In the darkness of an autumn night

I imagine golden beehives of a fireplace

Where the embers’ honey slowly ripens

And a cat is snoring by the flames.

And I am, once more, my own grandmother,

I am knitting an eternal scarf,

And my life is pasted in an album

In a row of brown old-fashioned photos.

As I knit the scarf, for my granddaughter,

In the resonance of solemn hours—

It could not be me

Who is awakened

By my own moan,

By the remembrance

Of your lips.

The page below lay revealed, writhing in turn, new lines flaring up with brief farewell heat. Not wanting to see any more, I dumped the rest of the papers in at once, and their dead white weight poured into the small grimy sink like cement. Nothing happened for a full minute; then smoke began to curl lazily at the edges. From the mirror above the sink, I was observed by an unfamiliar girl with a determined dash for a mouth, her gaze not bitter but lit up with a ferocious joy. I found myself hiccuping with sobs that sounded like laughter, or else laughter that sounded like sobs. There you go, Apollo, a nice little sacrifice for you—the sum of my entire existence to this day, all erased, so I can start anew, so I can create something real, something alive. There, there, can you smell the sweet rot of toy words, of dead words, rising like cloying incense to your heaven? And if I believed in you, and if I could pray, what would I ask in return? To be granted the strength to persevere, first and foremost—not to swerve from my path, not to lose my desire to capture the world bit by bit, word by word, until, in the fullness of time, my small words would number so many they would become a door opened into life as I had known it—opened to anyone who would accept my invitation to walk through. And maybe, lowering my voice to an embarrassed whisper, I would ask to meet someone new—someone I could love fully and forever, my soul mate, my missing half, if I believed in such things. And oh, I would ask you to punish the man who humiliated me so easily, in passing—you would likely find this request the most pleasing of all, for are not the gods ever thirsty for vengeance? But one should be wary of wishes fulfilled and prayers miscarried . . . And as the pages smoked and
flared and crumbled away, I wondered at the savage-eyed girl in the mirror, then forgot all about her, thinking of a poem I would start as soon as this tedious rigmarole was over. God’s Book of Complaints and Suggestions, I would call it; it would be a polyphony of prayers, curses, and regrets, layered and contradictory as life, bits of it tragic, bits of it funny, bits of it violent, bits of it—