Forty Rooms (32 page)

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Well, that sounds pleasant enough. Finding happiness in the small things and so on.”

He yawned and stood, brushing invisible dust off his denim-clad knee, taking a slow, lazy step away from her. All at once she knew that he was about to stroll out of her life forever, and she started out of her armchair, knocking her knitting to the floor.

“Wait,” she cried, “wait!”

He paused in the doorway, his face a statue’s eroded blank, his
eyes pale and flat and devoid of expression, like painted marble faded by centuries in the sun.

“Tell me, did you—did you kill Hamlet?”

“But my dear,” he drawled, “Hamlet is immortal. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and all that.”

“What? Oh. No. I meant John. My first lover. Did you kill him?”

The slits of his eyes darkened with sudden life. He stood absolutely still—like a panther in the instant before leaping, she had time to think just as her heart dropped somewhere, her senses snapped wide awake, and every drop of her blood, every inch of her skin, every hair on her head tingled with the old fear.

He spoke, his voice a slow hiss.

“Do you really think that you are so important and that everything that happens to you, to those around you, happens for some preordained, divine reason? They had a good word for it in the old days. Hubris, it was called. Excessive pride before the gods. Gods have better things to do than meddle in the lives of every craven little nobody.”

“Yes,” she gasped, shrinking back.

“Next you will think that gods sit around counting hairs on everyone’s head, cocking their ears for the sound of whimpering, ready to grant any prayer out of the goodness of their hearts.
Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Please make my child well. Please make my father live. Please make my lover leave. Please spare me any real pain, any real joy, any real shame, any real life—yes, please make my life as smooth, as shallow, as easy as it can get, because all I want is to tiptoe on the surface of things, composing little ditties as I do laundry, not knowing gut-wrenching love, not knowing life-shattering loss—and in return I promise I will give up my passion, the only thing that makes me any different from millions upon millions of others, I will throw away every last crumb of inspiration I am granted, every last chance of becoming an artist, I will never break out of the circle of time, I will live a silent life and die a silent death, please, oh please—”

His tone was mocking, and furious underneath. She stared at him, stunned. His face was not the smoothly attractive face of a mortal man who had come into the library an hour before, but the achingly handsome face of a wrathful angel. She stepped back, and, tripping against the armchair, crumpled into it, and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to be consumed by his burning ire. And then all was quiet, for almost an entire minute all was quiet—she could hear the rushing of blood in her ears.

She kept her eyes closed, but dared to draw a breath, to stir a little.

“Listen,” he said. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, and terrifyingly near. “Very few people are born great poets. Talents are a drachm a dozen, but nothing can be had for nothing. I told you this when you were young, but you didn’t pay attention. Or maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough. You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.”

And then, just as she cowered, fearing the rip of a barbed arrow through her heart, she sensed the smile back in his shockingly compassionate voice.

“Oh, and finding happiness in the
small
things, my dear, that’s
really nothing to brag about—it’s the last consolation of those whose imagination has failed them.”

She felt her lips lightly brushed by other, smiling lips, and their touch was ice, and their touch was fire—and she was ambushed by the memory of all the times when she had lain in bed at night, always exhausted, often pregnant, occasionally wondering about her husband’s whereabouts, and as her thoughts would stray, she would imagine the soft, sneering curve of someone’s mouth, the light, circling touch of someone’s hand on her neck, and these thoughts would spin out into a tightrope on which she would balance for some minutes over an abyss of loneliness and approaching middle age, until momentary oblivion overtook her. Why, oh why, did you stay away for so long, she thought with a sudden contraction of anguish, not daring to look at him still; and though she did not ask aloud, he whispered against her cheek, so softly she could barely hear him, his words a gentle breeze that seemed to move through her mind: “You realize, of course, that I may not actually be here and that our little chats may be only as illuminating—or as
hackneyed
—as you are able to make them yourself? And if I live in your head alone, the real question you need to ask is why you haven’t called me for so long.”

Her eyes flew open. “No, I don’t believe that—you—”

The library was deserted.

She felt that the fierceness of regret, the knowledge of all the things wasted, the sorrow of a life half lived—a life not lived—would consume her whole.

“No, wait!” she cried. “Tell me just one thing—are you saying that I got it wrong—that I could have been—”

But already she heard the maid’s footsteps in the next room, and knew that, like all revelations, this too would soon be forgotten, and she let her voice die a death of resignation in the dark-paneled, leather-padded, respectable silence of the book-filled room. Her old volume of Pushkin still lay in her lap, opened to his poem “The Prophet.” Her eyes trailed over the words, underlined, with excessive exuberance, by an elated fifteen-year-old in another place, in another age.

Exhausted by spiritual thirst,

I wandered in a gloomy desert,

And at the forking of the roads

A six-winged seraph came before me.

His fingers light as dreams,

He touched my eyes,

And the sibylline eyes unsealed

Like those of a startled she-eagle.

He touched my ears,

And clamor and ringing filled them,

And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,

And the lofty flight of angels,

And the underwater movement of sea beasts,

And the languishing of a lone vine in a valley.

And he clung to my mouth

And tore out my sinful tongue,

Given to both lies and idle chatter,

And with his bloody right hand pressed

The forked tongue of a wise serpent

Into my stilled mouth . . .

“I see you are awake now, Mrs. Caldwell,” said Rose, entering the library with the duster and vigorously setting about the books. Clouds of ancient gray pollen rose into the air; no one had touched most of these volumes in years, if not decades.

She found herself sneezing, her eyes filled with tears.

“Sorry, sorry,” said the maid. “So much dust.”

39. Home Theater

A Small Foretaste of Death

She did not want anyone to be in the house when she watched it. If she watched it at all—and she was not sure she would—she would be alone. She waited until Paul departed on another of his business trips, and Rose had finished with the afternoon chores. She ate a light supper—an apple, a handful of blueberries, she was never hungry these days—then walked through the rooms, picking up a misplaced magazine here, a teacup there; but the endless drift of books, clothes, phones, keys had ceased since the last of her children had moved away, and the house had lost its daily mutability—everything tended to stay in its place now, unchanged and unchanging for weeks on end. It was not yet eight o’clock when she found nothing but time stretching before her like an open sea—inviting, deadly. Even then, she was not sure she would watch it. She pretended not to think about it for a while, but no matter what she
occupied herself with—perusing a cookbook in search of next Sunday’s dinner, watering plants—she was always aware of the movie in its sealed case lying on the table at the foot of the staircase, waiting, waiting.

Giving up at last, she descended to the basement, scooped the movie off the table, and, tearing the plastic wrapping as she walked, proceeded to the home theater. The movie cover showed an imposing glass-walled office high up in a skyscraper, and, propped on a leather armchair behind the desk, the top half of a human-size
matryoshka
with the photograph of the famous actress playing the lead role pasted over the doll’s rouged, round-eyed face. The doll’s lower half lay tipped on its side on the plush carpet, and three or four smaller dolls had spilled out of it—the next-largest bearing the heavily made-up, obscene face of a young stripper, the smallest one that of a serious dark-eyed girl of about five. Quotations in square red letters, all the R’s backward to signify the Russianness of the proceedings, promised “
HEAЯT-STOPPING EXCITEMENT
!” and stated underneath, in less prominent print, “Original screenplay by the award-winning author of—”

She parted the curtains that separated the movie room from the rest of the basement, maneuvered through the rows of built-in chairs. When she had first seen the house, thirty-two years ago now, she had been struck dumb by the cup holders in the armrests and the golden tassels on the decadent velvet of the curtains. Now everything appeared vaguely dated, and musty, and neglected. Paul and the children had watched numerous movies here, eating the inevitable popcorn, making shadow puppets with their hands in the beam of the projector during the credits; but now the
children were gone, Paul was busy, and she herself could recall suffering through only half a dozen films in all her time in the house. She had no affinity for sitting in the dark, invisible and passive, following the peregrinations of someone else’s life—it felt to her like a small foretaste of death.

Except this time, it would not be someone else’s life: it would be her own.

For when she finally switched off the lights and settled into one of the rigid-backed chairs to watch the movie, she saw the view of the eternal construction site from the window of her Moscow apartment, and a caricature of her bearded, pipe-smoking father, who spoke in somber truisms, and a mother who collected porcelain cups and came across as superficial and insensitive, and a dacha neighbor for whom the heroine decorously pined while reading Turgenev. She stared at the screen in disbelief, her hands gripping the armrests. The actors sported laughable accents, the teenage heroine cavorted under onion domes and birch trees—and yet it was, undeniably, her childhood, her youth, at least up to a point. For after a particularly ham-fisted, cringe-worthy scene in the country, in which the heroine mused about her impending adulthood, the story veered off: the girl went on a moonlit walk with the dacha boy, and there followed her first kiss in the shade of an old oak tree and a subsequent anguished romance in the streets of Moscow, which scarred her deeply and made her swear off marriage and children, and move to America. With that, the exposition sequence over, the dreamlike sepia tone gave way to harsher colors that signified the present day and place, and the movie proper began. She found herself watching a thriller she
could not follow, its fast-paced, intricate plot involving a corrupt American politician, and the Russian mafia, and the heroine, now a courageous New York lawyer, doing something brave yet sexy with a briefcase full of incriminating documents, and a manly colleague who resembled the dacha boy just enough to justify the lengthy backstory—

She stopped the movie, backtracked, watched the beginning again. Her heart felt crammed into her chest, its every beat a painful scrape against her rib cage. When the heroine burst out of her door and ran across the dirt road, hurrying to her first assignation with the dacha neighbor, she screamed and flung the remote control hard against the wall. It broke apart with a dry plastic crack, and the screen went black.

She sat unmoving in the dark, her temples damp, her mind full of poison.

Bitch, you bitch. How could you do that to me? You think you can steal from people like that, gut them, betray them, as long as you claim to do so in the name of art? But you are no artist—just a cliché-ridden hack, driven by nothing but the urge to escape from the emptiness of your own life. Because your life
is
empty, and you are alone, you have no husband and no children and no proper home—you have nothing, you
are
nothing, nothing, nothing, do you hear me . . .

The fury wound tighter and tighter in her chest, until something within it seemed to give way, to sag sidewise. Suddenly frightened, she pressed her clammy fingers to her forehead and took a shallow, labored breath, and another. All at once the darkness of the room was stifling her, threatening her somehow; she
wanted to turn on the lights, but she felt queasy, and oddly exhausted, and the image of herself stumbling through the black void, bumping into unseen corners and edges, made her press hard into the back of her chair and close her eyes against the darkness, and for one moment give all her attention to the sweating, melting, skipping, somersaulting thing that her heart seemed to be doing against her will, of its own volition. Perhaps, she thought, I really ought to stand up and get hold of the telephone, call an ambulance or something; and the thought sent a stab of terror through her, which radiated like pain from her chest and deposited the telephone neatly in her hand. Yet when she dialed, it was not the ambulance, it was Olga’s number instead; and though she had long forgotten the number, if indeed she had ever known it, her fingers, flying over the buttons, magically summoned the right combination to life—and though the number could have changed, and though Olga was never at home, if indeed she had ever existed, she answered on the first ring.