Forty Rooms (29 page)

Horrified, she looked at the blonde in the mirror.

When Paul returned from work that night, the house lay swollen with winter darkness, torpid and still.

“Hello?” he called out.

“I’m here,” she said.

He stopped on the threshold of the unlit living room, peered into the dimness, saw her sitting on the shadowy couch against the shadowy wall in the cavern of shadows.

“What are you doing in the dark?” he asked, taking off his coat.

“Waiting for you. It’s all finished. Turn on the light, go ahead—it will make you less sad.”

He flipped the switch, and saw the room, and gasped.

“Just like home,” he said; but he did not look less sad. “The piano is a perfect fit. And the buffet. And the mirror—oh no! Was the crack always there, or did the movers damage it?”

“It was always there,” she said, standing to straighten the photographs of sepia-tinted children on the side table. “But don’t worry, I’ve spoken to the restorers already. They have some period glass they can use to replace it. They are coming to do the measurements on Monday.”

As she pushed the photographs about, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, she suddenly saw, in a serious, wide-eyed, beautiful face of one of the boys, the face of the hurt man before her. She stared at it for a long moment, careful to keep her bandaged hand out of sight.

35. Bar

Conversations Between Friends and Strangers

She was barefoot when she came down, stepping softly on the wall-to-wall carpet, and he did not hear her approach. He was sitting hunched over at the bar, cradling a half-empty martini; between the scoops of his big, still hands, the glass looked fragile and small, like a cup from a child’s toy set. She stopped, feeling awkward, as if she were spying on something not meant for her eyes, invading a home not her own, and waited for him to notice her. When he did not stir, she cleared her throat.

“Oh, hey,” he said, standing up. “How long have you been there?”

In the blurred erosion of his voice, in the loose way he moved the bulk of his body, she could see that the martini before him was not his first. She wondered if she should not invent some trivial reason for entering his domain—a question to ask, a child’s activity to confirm—then quickly retreat to her upstairs quarters;
but he had already walked behind the bar and was reaching for the shaker.

“Can I make you a drink?”

She did not want a drink—she drank almost nothing these days.

“Please,” she said, tightening the belt of her robe as she climbed onto the leather perch of the stool next to his. She watched him go through the motions made fluid by hundreds, by thousands, of repetitions—watched his large hands deftly manipulate ice and crystal, watched the back of his head, his hair still abundant and dark, no trace of gray, watched his face as it appeared and disappeared in the mirror that ran behind the bar, sliced into slivers by the reflections of the bottles. He would turn fifty at the end of the month. His hair was that of a younger man, his face that of an older.

“So,” he said, sliding the martini over to her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She wanted to say: I felt lonely tonight. It’s different in the house these days—only four kids left, and the boys are seventeen and out so much, and Celia always has her nose in a book, and our baby—our baby is nine and so independent, sometimes it feels like she doesn’t need me at all. Of course, my days are still brimming over, so many things to take care of, always—but every night now, there is this odd sort of emptiness that can’t be filled, a stretch of emptiness before me, and you never even come upstairs until after I’m asleep. I just wanted to see you. To talk to you. The way we used to talk.

“I just—I felt like having a drink,” she said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” he replied without smiling.

They sat in silence for a while, drinking side by side. It was nearing midnight, she knew, but there was no clock in the bar. The lamps above the counter were turned down low, the shelves with the bottles mirrored, the wall behind the shelves mirrored as well; she kept catching oblique glimpses of the two of them at alluring or unflattering angles, reflections of reflections—a profile, a double chin, a slanted glance, a green bottle, a blue bottle, a bottle in the shape of a skull, a bottle in the shape of a bull, the dull glint of a wedding band on a hand raising a glass. An odd sensation took hold of her and grew, that of sitting in a real bar next to a real stranger; and as she neared the bottom of her drink, it stopped being a sad feeling and became one of possibility instead. She studied him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she would still find him attractive if she met him now—and then he turned to her, and immediately the sensation of strangeness dissipated, and she saw the good-natured giant of a boy who had made her feel safe all those years ago.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve always meant to ask you,” she said, as if continuing a conversation. He rose to make the next round of drinks. “The first time we met—well, not met, technically, but the first time we spoke—”

“The time in the library when you made me feel like a complete idiot.”

“Well. You wore a Grateful Dead shirt, remember? It puzzled me later, because you never seemed the type—I mean—”

“You mean that even at eighteen I was too staid and boring to listen to music or smoke pot. A management consultant as a young man. No novel there, I suppose.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—I just—”

“No, you’re right. The shirt was a gift from a girl I dated for a couple of months. I ditched it when we broke up.”

He put the freshly made drinks on the counter and sat back down.

She stared at the olive bobbing in her vodka.

“Paul,” she said. “Where did we go wrong?”

He was quiet for so long that she thought he was not going to answer.

“Do you know what I liked about you?” he said then. “Well, I liked everything about you, but you know what I liked best, why I fell in love? I loved how different you were from everyone I knew. I thought it was your foreignness at first, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that, it was something else. The way you would grow still and seem so far away, the look that would steal over your face, like you were seeing something special, even when you did something as trivial as—oh, I don’t know, writing grocery lists. You looked so beautiful then, like you knew something about life that was worth knowing. And I wanted to find out what it was you knew, but I worried it was like one of those fairy tales where the dumb prince spies on his magic princess and she turns into a swan and flies away. So I never pressed for it—I wanted you to tell me. No, that’s not even right—it wasn’t that I believed there was anything
to tell
, not like a concrete thing or anything. It was just a sense I had that you were different, marked out by something or someone, and that if I married you I would have a life that would be—I’m not sure of the right word. Deeper, I guess. Charmed. Special.”

“You told me once that everyone was special.”

“Did I? I don’t remember. Isn’t that just the lie you feed your kids when they suspect, for the first time, that they too are just like everybody else? But who knows. Maybe it’s true, maybe everyone
is
special—maybe it’s just very few who manage to do something with it. It’s not so easy to measure all the things wasted.”

“So then you haven’t,” she said softly. “You haven’t had a special life.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t. And look, this is a good life. We’ve been richer than most in our children, I’ve been luckier than most with my career, we live in a beautiful place, and you—you even iron my pajamas for me. It’s just that . . . I keep having this feeling that it could have been
more
if only you’d trusted your dumb prince with your frog skin or your swan wings or—or whatever it was you turned into when you were alone. Because our life often felt—I don’t know—less than real somehow. Like you weren’t all here.”

She was almost done with her second martini. The bottles were winking and weaving on the mirror shelves. Her head swam. She wanted to cry, to beg his forgiveness—or else pull him toward her and kiss him, kiss him deeply, to dispel the need for stiff, inadequate words. Instead she heard herself asking: “When you were a child, what did you dream of being?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I wanted to be a chef.”

“The celebrated chef Paul Caldwell!” she cried.

“No, I didn’t want to be celebrated. I didn’t have any delusions of grandeur, I just liked the idea of feeding people. My restaurant
was going to be different. There would be no menus, and every day I would serve only food that was white, or only dishes that started with the letter
p
—paellas and pumpkin pies—or only desserts, whatever mood I was in. You would come and you would never know what to expect that day, except that it would be delicious—and a surprise. I wanted to make people happy.”

“But you don’t ever cook at home,” she said. “Not like you used to.”

He shrugged. “You seem to manage so well by yourself . . . So what about you?”

“What about me?” she asked, though her heart was already skipping.

“What did you dream of being?”

She had not said certain things—not even to herself—in years, many years. She finished her drink before speaking. He waited patiently.

“Do you know, my mother once told me that women in my family liked to keep secrets. I guess that’s true. My mother had her share of secrets—I remember odd little things from when I was very small. There was, I think, another man. Maybe. Maybe not. I asked her once, after my father died, but she pretended not to hear. My grandmother had secrets too, as did my great-grandmother before her—there was something about a Grand Duke, or maybe a gypsy, I forget now . . . Anyway. I wanted a secret of my own. I wanted to have something deep and unreachable by anyone else, all to myself—a kernel of light or dark, I could never quite decide which, at the very heart of things. But I think maybe I chose the wrong thing to keep secret. It’s dangerous to make a
secret not of something you
do
but of something you
are
, because if you go about wearing a mask for years and years, you may end up becoming what you were only pretending to be all that time—you may find that there is no face under the mask.” She knew she was tipsy now, but it felt marvelous to talk, and her words flowed with the easy eloquence of an oft-imagined speech. “And as time passes, you forget you ever even had a secret. You know, like when you hide something in case there is a break-in or to keep it safe from your maid—say, you put your diamond necklace in some pocket of an old coat or some shoe you never wear—and then you completely forget where you put it, and you look for a while, but then you think, well, anyway, it’s in the house somewhere, I’ll find it some other time, except you keep putting off the search until you forget that you ever had it, because honestly, how often do you have an occasion to wear a diamond necklace? So for months you go about without remembering it even once, until a year or two later, out of the blue, in the middle of the night, you wake up from this nightmare you keep having, this dream in which your house slowly eats you, and you sit bolt upright in bed and break into a sweat and scream: Oh God, where the fuck did it go?”

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “Are you telling me you lost the necklace I gave you on our twentieth anniversary?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that. No, no, I’m sure it will turn up someday. Someday soon. I’m sorry, I think I’m a little drunk now. Anyway.” She upended the empty glass into her mouth, licked her lips. “I wanted to be a poet.”

And then she sat still for several thrilled, inebriated, frightened heartbeats, waiting, waiting for something—but the lightning
bolt did not strike, and he did not tumble off the barstool, or mock her for her failure, and the ceiling did not split open to spill out torrents of heavenly light with Apollo riding a white steed and strumming a lyre as he smote her for having squandered her gift.

“Did you?” asked the young, friendly, curious boy from the library whose smile was so kind and who was so eager to talk to her. “Did you really? How come you never told me? You actually wrote poems?”

She wanted to laugh and laugh, astonished at how simple it had been, how simple it was. “Yes!” she exclaimed, then sobered up enough to add: “A long time ago.”

He swung the barstool around to face her. Their knees jammed together.

“Read some to me.”

“I can’t,” she protested, giggling. “I don’t remember any, it was decades ago . . . But wait, I remember this—” She looked away, recited all in a rush:

“Taking a shower in small golden earrings,

Well after midnight,

Washing smoke out of my hair.”

She stopped. He waited, smiling.

When she did not speak again, he prodded her lightly. “Well, go on.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It was supposed to be a haiku, you see. It was the
first poem I ever wrote in English. Well, maybe not the first one ever, just . . . one of the first ones.” She wondered if she was blushing. “I was nineteen. And the funny thing is, I had no idea what a haiku really was, so of course the syllables turned out all wrong, and when Apollo read it, he was quite amused—”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“You said when Apollo read it—”

“Did I? God, I’m not used to drinking this much, it’s hard to keep up with you . . . I meant to say Hamlet. You remember. John. The guy who—”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.” But his face had darkened, and he appeared every bit his age again—a man of fifty with eyes grown opaque and a voice hardened by decades of success and pressure. He pushed his unfinished drink aside. “I’m sorry. Sorry things have turned out this way. But God knows, I loved you.” He was silent for a moment, looking at her. “Did you ever love me?”

And all at once her thoughts were a disturbed nest of wasps, darting around with swift menace, all dangerously capable of stinging. She thought of confessing to the shattering loss of her youthful love, and her conviction, born in the solitary darkness of the following months, that she could never again give herself fully if she wished to remain faithful to her art. She thought of telling him of that time, shortly after his mother’s death, when she had seen herself in a new, stark, ugly light and been flooded with remorse, and blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong between them. She thought of asking him about the smell of perfume on his shirts. She thought of asking for another drink.