Forty Rooms (20 page)

The last item on her holiday list: happiness. Check. And a barely visible question mark next to it.

22. Dining Room

The Ghostly Conversation

“Salad forks go on the outside,” said Paul, walking into the dining room with a stack of soup bowls and taking in the table at a glance.

“I know that,” she replied with some irritation, and, turning, saw that she had indeed set the forks wrong: the smaller ones bumped the gilded rims of the plates at crooked angles. She did not remember placing them there.

“Are you feeling all right?” Having unburdened himself of the bowls, he paused on the threshold to give her a mildly inquiring look.

“I’m fine.” She would not meet his eyes as she went around the table switching the forks. “Just a bit queasy. Something with my stomach.”

“Or it could be nerves,” he said with an easy shrug. “There’s no need to feel nervous, you know. It’s only my boss and his wife
we’re trying to impress. Only my entire future hanging in the balance. Well, I better go check on the sauce.”

He beamed at her before vanishing into the kitchen, and she heard more sizzling and banging and the oven door swinging open and the refrigerator door swinging shut. I guess that was a joke, she said wordlessly to the afterimage he had left behind, I mean your comment about the future, because isn’t all this, your partnership, this place, our children, isn’t all this supposed to be the future already? . . . The meat smells so rich . . . Oh no, there it is again, that wave of sick feeling. I suppose I’m getting ill. Or else. Or else. But I can’t think about that right now.

And she did succeed in not thinking about it while their guests arrived, and for a spell after that, give or take a nauseating stray thought. As the four of them sat around the table crowned by the radiant magnificence of the chandelier, she would turn her head to the left and converse, almost convincingly, about the merits of silk wallpaper, then turn her head to the right and discuss the Russian Revolution, all the while straining to catch the back-and-forth traipse of Mrs. Simmons, their new babysitter, on the ceiling and the hushed whimpering of Emma, who could not fall asleep. Paul’s boss, a stout, round-shouldered man in his early sixties, had a rowdy laugh and the massive jaw of a bulldog. His forty-something wife talked softly, revealing a dazzle of perfect white teeth in a frozen face framed by long tousled locks of brittle gold. “But this is divine,” the woman kept saying in a toneless voice every time she took another dainty mouthful of soup. Whenever she lifted the spoon to her mouth, her diamond bangles slid down her skinny wrist and clicked together discreetly.

They got through the soup course. She poked at the edges of her salad, unable to eat, nodding as Paul’s boss held forth on the proper ways of stocking a wine cellar. Paul brought in the steaks, explaining his personal take on béarnaise sauce. When they began to debate some incomprehensible work issue, she played a silent rhyming game she had invented to help her get through the more mind-numbing chores of the day, constructing short stacks of words in her mind, moving from the tangible and present to the abstract and remote: “Fork—cork—dork—New York. Knife—wife—strife—life. Spoon—old prune—cocoon—doom . . . Wait, the last one doesn’t fit. How did that jingle go, from the show Gene used to watch? One of these things is not like the others . . . All right, then: Big Bird—slurred—curse word—theater of the absurd—”

Paul’s boss had turned to her and was asking her something.

“I’m sorry?” She tried not to look at a speck of brown fat that glistened on his chin.

“Dacha,”
he boomed. “Tell us about your
dacha
. You have a
dacha
back home?”

He mispronounced the word—
daka
, he said—though of course she did not correct him. But when she opened her mouth to reply, something happened to the guests, to the room, even to Paul himself: everything suddenly assumed a flat, two-dimensional sleekness of unreality, like some film she was only half watching. I must be getting sick, she thought again. Or it could be nerves, I suppose. Or . . . No, do not think about that, the gods would not be so cruel . . .

She blinked, caught herself, felt the awkward silence widening
around her like a clumsy spill. All three of them were looking at her, their smiles becoming glazed.

Paul came to her rescue.

“But naturally they have a
dacha
,” he rejoined, and she felt a sharp little shock when he echoed his boss’s error, though he knew how to say it correctly. “It’s a real log cabin in the middle of a forest. No running water, and conveniences in the yard.”

“How quaint,” the wife said, sounding faintly disgusted. “Like living in a Tolstoy novel.” She stood up, her bracelets sliding and clacking.

Paul started to clear the table for dessert.

“Don’t you get frostbite when you use your outhouse in the winter?” the boss asked, his mouth remaining agape even after he finished speaking. She smiled at him in anguish. His teeth were not perfect like his wife’s, but pointed and yellowing, wolfish somehow. “Siberian winters and all that?”

“They don’t go there in winter,” Paul answered with readiness, bending to refill the man’s wineglass for the fourth time, then, after a beat of hesitation, refilling his own as well. “Of course, in the summer you must ward off the mosquitoes and the wasps, no?”

He carried the empty bottle into the kitchen.

Could it be true, she wondered, that people got just the dinner conversations they deserved? She went on smiling, terror growing inside her.

“Hell,” the boss cried, “if I were a mosquito, I would bite you!” He roared with laughter, and in the next instant she found his hand clamped around her knee. Stricken, she stared at his impeccable starched cuff, at his golden cuff link in the shape of an
anchor; but the clasp had already turned into a pat, jovial and vapid, and the wife came back in, talking about this nice little shop she knew where one could get the best guest soaps, and Paul entered with a new bottle of wine and a platter bearing Casanova’s Delight, announcing it to be the very thing that had made his wife fall in love with him, and the evening proceeded on its limping, unreal course.

After coffee, Paul offered to take their guests on a tour of the house. “But I must warn you, it’s a work in progress,” he said. “Apart from the dining room, none of it’s furnished. As you can see, we started with the most important room.”

“You should keep it this way,” said the boss’s wife, rising from her chair. “I always say one can have too many things. Don’t I, Mark? Don’t I always say to you, one should be able to waltz through one’s house without tripping over all these silly antiques?”

It was obvious from her tone that she meant precisely the opposite.

“Coming, honey?” Paul paused in the doorway, swaying a little.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I’d like to clean up a bit.”

But when she was alone, she did not move from her seat. She heard their voices echoing in the entrance hall, Paul’s boss guffawing—“And what about a bed, surely you have a bed!”—adding something she could not make out that caused the men to gargle with laughter the entire way up the stairs. Now their voices grew indistinct, and two sets of manly footsteps thumped broadly above her head, while a third set tapped like a delicate hammer driving delicate nails into her temples, which made her realize her head was throbbing, had been throbbing for some
time. Then she no longer heard them at all; but oddly enough, she continued to hear the flow of some ghostly conversation taking place just a breath away, not behind the wall but right next to her, yet sounding distant, as if reaching her ears through a thick veil. Several voices wove in and out, discussing with quiet passion things of inestimable interest and everlasting importance, though she could catch only a snippet now and again—something about a ruined temple in a tangle of vines in a jungle, and a sky over a western sea darkly aflutter with a thousand migrating storks, and a herd of wild horses running breast-deep through wind-blown steppe grasses. She listened for a long, entranced minute. Perhaps, she thought, in some parallel dimension, infinitely close and infinitely far away, another house existed alongside theirs, and in that other house lived fascinating people who did fascinating things and held fascinating talks over their dinner table—and though there was no doorway between the two places, one could occasionally stumble upon glimpses and echoes of that other, brighter place, and, for one single moment of miraculous serendipity, one could feel almost complete. She could write a poem about it . . . And she forced herself to go on, to think about the poem for another full minute; but all along she understood, of course, that what she was really doing amidst the fingerprinted crystal, the smeared china, the crusted silver—the wreckage of a sumptuous, laborious, vacuous meal—was trying to ward off her nausea, to distract herself with frantic imaginings from what, deep inside, she already knew to be true.

Presently Paul and the others returned, and soon after, their guests were taking their leave. The boss said, “A perfectly cooked
steak is so rare,” and laughed uproariously at his own pun.
(Poor thing, he thought kindly, she looks much prettier in that wedding photo Paul keeps on his desk. She seems so ill at ease, and always as if she is thinking about something else. I tried to cheer her up, but no luck. Some folks are like that, difficult to talk to. Or it could be the language barrier, I guess. But if she listens to Paul the way she listened to us, he can’t be very happy. It’s a shame all the same.)
“Look, if you ever need anything,” he said, and he sounded sincere. The boss’s wife, in parting, squeezed her hand and said, “I’m so sorry about your father,” and her voice was no longer toneless, and her eyes glistened. “Courage, my dear.”

But they are not as I thought they were, she registered with mild surprise; but she was distracted, and when the door closed, she forgot all about them. She followed Paul back to the dining room, began to stack up the cups. As Paul talked, slurring slightly, about the success of the evening, and his plans for the wine cellar, and Mark’s lake house, she thought: It won’t be real unless I say something. I don’t have to say anything. I won’t say anything. I can just pretend it’s nothing. It probably is nothing. It was just that one time at Christmas, what are the chances, I’ve been late before, I’ve been nauseated before, it doesn’t have to mean anything. I could just go to the doctor, and I don’t have to tell Paul, I won’t tell Paul, and even if it
is
something, it won’t feel like anything if I talk only to the doctor, because when they say things like “first trimester” and “estimated date of confinement” and “induced termination,” these are just words, they don’t have to mean anything, as long as no one but the doctor knows anything about it. Of course I will know about it too, but it will be all right, it’s only five
or six weeks now, if it’s anything at all, and it’s probably nothing, and in any case it will be over soon, and I too will forget all about it, it will mean nothing—just as long as nobody thinks about tiny little toes that look like pink peas, and tiny little fingers curling around one’s own finger in a surprisingly firm grip, and that sweet little fold in the back of the neck, and the warm smell of milk and sleep, and the toothless gums unsealed in their first smile—

She set the wobbling tower of cups onto the table.

“Paul?” she said. “Paul. I think I’m pregnant.”

And within the cold immensity of her terror there already glowed a small, timid kernel of joy.

23. Master Bathroom

Death and Golden Faucets

“There are columns in your bathroom,” said the plumber.

His voice sounded indifferent on the surface, as if he was just stating the fact, but she imagined she could detect hostility underneath, and meekly, almost apologetically, she offered, “We’ve only just moved in.” She wanted to add: You could fit my entire childhood apartment in here; but he looked at her with a stony expression, and she said nothing else, only smiled to hide her discomfort and sat down on the vanity bench, awaiting his verdict. She took shallow breaths to avoid gagging.

“So, no blockages, then,” the plumber said, unrolling his tools. “Just the smell.”

“Just the smell,” she confirmed, then continued in a helpful rush, “Something must be wrong with the pipes. I mean, I understand that in my condition all smells seem stronger than they really are, but you can smell it too, can’t you?”

He did not respond, did not glance up at her, did not ask about her due date, or whether she was having a boy or a girl. She had felt a little disappointed when she let him in the door, a flabby, sour-looking man past fifty with the hard bristle of a sandy mustache not quite hiding the downward turn of his mouth, and her initial assessment had proved right. The other plumber from the company, the one she had dealt with on the previous two occasions (there had been a leak in Emma’s bathroom and a dripping faucet in the kitchen), was an amiable, garrulous young fellow who would surely ask her how she was feeling and whether they’d picked a name yet. But this man went about his business in silence, tapping here, peering there, and she knew, just by looking at his stiff back, that he resented her presence in the bathroom and would have much preferred her to leave.

Pulling herself together, she made a new attempt.

“So,” she said brightly, “do you have any children?”

He grunted into his mustache, whether a “Yes” or a “No” she could not discern, and set about rolling his tools back up.
(Sean O’Reilly’s only daughter had drowned at the age of eleven. Now she often came to him at night. They walked the deserted streets of his neighborhood side by side, talking about nothing much, the weather, a new hardware shop around the corner, their old cat. Her sneakers squeaked with water, her voice never aged. The following morning his pajamas were often muddy and his heart lagged exhausted in his chest. He suspected that each nocturnal visit was shaving days, if not months, off his life, but he did not mind. Aching with hope, he wondered if she was going to come tonight, then reluctantly turned his attention to the rich lady with the slight foreign accent and needy eyes.)