Forty Rooms (14 page)

She stepped into the dress, instantly nervous—what if it did not fit? The neckline was modest but wide, and the straps of her red bra hung out slovenly on both sides. She shrugged the bra off, then fumbled for the buttons at her back.

“How is it going in there?” asked Mrs. Caldwell’s voice from behind the door.

“It’s beautiful, Mrs. Caldwell, I just need a few seconds,” she replied.

The buttons were tiny and sleek and slipped out from under her fingers. After a minute of panting contortions, it became clear that not only could she not reach any of the buttons in the middle—she could not manage any of the buttons she could reach. Abandoning her acrobatics, she wiggled out of the sleeves, twisted the bodice around, and, ignoring the cold air on her naked skin and the sensation of her nipples turning into raisins, hastily traveled along the row of buttons, doing them up. Finished at last, she breathed a sigh of relief, twisted the dress back into place, and found—naturally—that she could no longer squeeze her way back into it. She felt like Alice before the locked door to the Wonderland garden, with the key forever out of her reach. Cursing her stupidity under her breath, she set about undoing the buttons, which grew agile like water bugs and kept skidding away from her increasingly frantic fingers. She counted them this time: there were forty-eight, and she hated each and every one of them.

“Is everything all right, dear?” asked Mrs. Caldwell from the hallway. “Do you need help?”

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m really done, just one moment—”

It now occurred to her that she should indeed ask Paul for help; but he would not hear her shouts across the mansion, nor could she very well send Mrs. Caldwell on an errand to get him, and it would hardly do to go wandering in search of him while falling out of his grandmother’s nuptial gown. Yanking it all the way down, she stood half naked in her red wisp of a thong and bordello stockings, surveying the room, wondering where the maid had put the sweater and jeans she had worn earlier, the dress piled at her feet—and it was precisely then that Mrs. Caldwell chose to propel herself inside, saying, “Perhaps I could . . . ah, ah, so sorry!”

The door slammed with a loud bang, and Mrs. Caldwell was now gasping apologies in the hallway.

“No, no, please—” As she lunged to grab her bra off the floor, she got entangled in the gown’s silk folds and made an awkward step. There was the terrible sound of something ripping, something popping, which she hoped to all the gods was not audible outside the room. “I—I’m just having some trouble with the buttons. Please, do come in.”

By the time Mrs. Caldwell edged into the room, she had struggled anew into the imprisonment of the dress, and, her back gaping open, stood in silent mortification, crimson-faced, not meeting the mirrored eyes of Mrs. Caldwell, who for the next minute, the longest minute of her life, strained to button the buttons.

In the end, it proved much too tight.

“You couldn’t be any skinnier, my dear,” Mrs. Caldwell repeated for the third time, smiling kindly if somewhat grimly. “People were just frailer in the old days, I think, not as healthy as today . . .
We could take it to my tailor, perhaps, see what could be done . . .” There sounded another ominous creak of a seam about to split. “Oh, but we wouldn’t want to tear it. Well, we’ll think of something. Vera Wang makes lovely gowns.”

Later that night, when Paul stopped by for his—conjugally chaste—good-night kiss, she chose not to tell him of her sartorial misadventure. Later still, already in her nightshirt, she walked along the perimeter of the bed, liberating the impossibly starched, taut sheets, when she stepped on something hard and cool with her bare foot. A tiny silk button the color of spilled milk lay on the carpet. She bent to retrieve it, held it for a moment on her palm, then pushed it deep between the mattresses. She realized, of course, that Mrs. Caldwell could not have failed to notice the damage, but all the same, she did not want anyone stumbling upon the fresh evidence of her crime.

If I sleep soundly tonight, she thought as she climbed into the bed, it should put to rest my mother’s theory of royal blood in our veins. Though I rather suspect I’ve flunked my princess test already. Ah, that was awful, just awful . . . Well, but I can learn, I can attend princess evening courses, I’m sure if I iron enough curtains, I will get good grades . . . No, I must be asleep, this makes no sense—or does it? She giggled aloud, indeed surprising herself out of a shallow dream, then waded back in, smiling a little into her starched, lacy, color-coordinated pillow.

14. Living Room

Gestures of Kindness

“Do you want any help with the rest?” her mother asked without moving from the armchair.

“No, thanks. It’s embedded in my muscle memory by now.”

As her mother turned back to the window, she chose the largest parcel from the remaining pile, ripped off the schoolgirl bows and elaborate cherub-print wrapping, and from beneath it produced a hefty cardboard box, which she proceeded to carve open with a knife and from which she then extracted, like a magician from a hat, never-ending swirls of thick packing paper followed by another box, smaller but still substantial, filled with careful wisps of lavender tissue inside which she could already feel something solid, something metal.

She fumbled for a purchase, pulled, and screamed.

“Please, please keep your voice down,” her mother said in an exasperated undertone.

She glanced at the closed door to the bedroom. “Sorry, I keep forgetting,” she whispered. “But shouldn’t we wake him up already? It’s almost time to eat.”

“Did I hear a scream?” Paul popped his head in from the kitchen. “What is it now?”

“Bookends. Or maybe doorstops.” She held out a pair of weighty birds, one in each hand, grasping them by their long tails like hammers. “Unless they are weapons of marital discord. Or idols for the altar of Hera?” She consulted a floral card twined around one of the sturdy necks. “Why would your great-aunt Hazel send us two iron peacocks?”

“Pewter pheasants,” he said patiently. “They are centerpieces. For the dining table.”

“Ah,” she said. “You mean, like those glass grapes.”

“Yes.”

“And the porcelain rabbits.”

“Yes.”

“And the fake apples.”

“Honey, we don’t have to use any of it. Just put everything back in the boxes and stick them in the closet. I told you we should have had the registry. People have their own ideas of decorating.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see that now, but why—”

“Your parents’ farewell dinner is about to burn,” he said, ducking back into the kitchen.

She set the pheasants down on the overflowing table, next to the jeweled candle extinguisher, the ivory saltshaker shaped like the Taj Mahal, and the set of four fantastically ornate picture frames whose kaleidoscopic lumps of flowers, insects, leaves, and
fir cones symbolized the four seasons, and regarded everything with a sinking feeling.

“The butterfly plates are pretty,” she said doubtfully. “Perhaps you can take them back with you, Tanya might like them. Mama? Mama, are you listening?”

Her mother was still sitting in the armchair by the window, gazing out at the darkening autumnal street, her empty hands folded in her lap.

“Mama?”

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about home. What did you say?”

“Do you want to take any of these things back to Russia with you?”

They were speaking in hushed voices, to avoid waking her father.

“No, the suitcase is already packed. And you can certainly use them yourself. Give this room some personality. It looks like a hotel.”

Paul’s apartment had come fully furnished, its style contemporary and sparse, and while she had made tentative incursions into the bedroom (library books on the nightstand and pajamas shed on the bed) and the kitchen (half-drunk cups of tea in the sink and apple cores on the counter), the main room, whose glass dining table they never used and whose white leather sofa seemed too immaculate to sit on, retained the untouched sleek quality of a photograph in an interior design magazine.

“But these are all so . . . so unnecessary,” she said, and sighed, surveying the jumble of opened and unopened boxes. “All this stuff.”

She understood, of course, that underneath their patina of time and museum veneration, an ancient Egyptian spoon in the shape of a girl was still only a spoon and a Greek amphora in all its laconic glory of heroes and beasts only a vessel for oil; yet she sensed that somewhere in the amorphously defined sphere of applied arts, a thin but clear line was drawn between art and domesticity, between beauty and material ostentation—and once the line was crossed, clutter took over. She wondered how all these trifles would appear to someone far in the future. Would her distant descendants be puzzled as to the purpose of the pheasants and the grapes, would they invent their own, wildly inaccurate, explanations that would be accepted as archaeological verities by people who no longer ate at tables and thus required no centerpieces? In fact, it might be interesting to do a series of short poems, each one describing a simple common object in terms both precise and dense with its inherent mystery, with its material randomness. The titles would offer the only clues to the subjects—lines like “A child’s face floating upside down in its silver convexity” under the succinct heading “Cereal Spoon”—

Her mother had come up to the table behind her.

“You aren’t doing this right,” she said, sighing in turn. Though she was nearing sixty, her face was still beautiful, but now it often looked opaque, like a mediocre portrait of itself, missing the light that had flared in the original with dazzling, if infrequent, intensity. “Wedding presents aren’t
stuff
. They are wishes, gestures of kindness. All these people are aware of your existence, they’ve spared a thought for you, and that thought is now part of your home. It comforts me to think about it. About you not being
alone. You seemed so lost before Paul. This is the first time I’m leaving you here with my heart at rest.”

Her own heart seized with a familiar, worn-out ache.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave at all,” she said.

“Please, we’ve talked about it enough, I think.” Her mother turned to glance at the closed bedroom door. “Our life is there, you know that.”

There seemed to be nothing to say after that. For a silent minute, they listened to the practiced clatter of pots in the kitchen. The place was rich with smells of roasted potatoes, caramelized onions, rosemary, sugar, cream—a nearing feast.

“Shouldn’t we wake Papa up?” she said at last. “He asked us to. It’s past seven.”

“No, let him sleep until dinner, our flight is so early tomorrow . . . Here, why don’t I give you a hand with these.”

Together they sliced the remaining boxes open, unearthed more crystal, silver, and porcelain, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly, none of it matching. At the bottom of the pile she discovered a flat white parcel barely larger than a pack of cards, three burgundy-colored stamps with Notre Dame in the upper right corner. She stared at the words “Mrs. Paul Caldwell” written in a shockingly familiar handwriting. There was no return address. “Well, that appears to be everything,” her mother said, and busied herself with gathering up the torn cardboard and crumpled paper. She held on to the parcel’s mystery for one moment longer, not touching it, listening to the whoosh of blood in her ears, then ripped the wrapping off.

Inside she found a small, prim card of thick cream-colored
paper, typed this time, which contained only a terse “Congratulations” in its precise center, and a kit of magnetic poetry—“Original Edition”—the kind one stuck on one’s refrigerator.

There was nothing else.

“So, what are your plans, then?” her mother said, her tone insistent, as if this was not the first time she had asked the question.

“Plans?” she echoed flatly. Through the clear plastic of the lid she could see the rectangles of several words—“scream,” “how,” “you”—and an orphaned “ly.”

“Yes, plans. Have you two given any thought to children?”

She flushed with an indeterminate feeling—anger mixed with startling bitterness, and something else underneath, something very different. Jerking open the nearest drawer, she shoved the box with the insidious little words deep, deep into the sideboard’s prosperous recesses agleam with an earlier crop of useless treasures, and swung around to face her mother.

I don’t ever intend to have children, she wanted to say, fiercely. I will not live a life of platitudes, I will not sink into the plush swamp of a comfortable marriage. I will always walk the harder path. Mine will be a life free of the commonplace and drudgery, full of travel and thought, unstinted in feeling and experience—an artist’s life, do you hear me? But there was a look disturbingly like supplication in her mother’s eyes, so instead she said, her voice taut with suppressed emotion, “Mama, I’m twenty-six years old. We got back from our honeymoon three days ago. There is plenty of time for that later.”

Paul appeared on the kitchen threshold.

“Almost ready,” he announced. “Maybe you should wake the
professor. And we should eat properly this time, at the dining table, don’t you think? Although . . . uh . . .”

He looked at the absurdly cluttered table.

“It’s all right,” she said, picking up the pheasants. Anger still had not loosened its hold on her throat, and she would not look at either Paul or her mother. “It won’t take too long to clear this off.” Paul nodded and vanished into the aromatic cloud that hung over the kitchen. “Mama, why don’t you go and wake him up while I pack everything away—”

“Let’s use it,” her mother said.

“What?”

“All these things. The dessert china. The tea set. The champagne flutes. The deer and the peacocks. Let’s use them.”

“Pheasants,” she corrected mechanically. “Why would we do that?”

“Did I ever tell you about my collection of old postcards? They were my grandmother’s. My father gave them to me after her death. I was eight or nine. My grandmother had kept them stored in a striped pink-and-white hatbox, and there were theater programs and dried flowers in there as well.”