The Life Room (18 page)

He took out a small video camera and began to film the activity on the Seine. The city was beginning to darken. He pointed the camera at me and pressed
RECORD
. I know now why Paris is called the City of Light. Everything around us sparkled, even the reflection of light on the water. I touched my hair and smiled warily. I’ve hated to be photographed or videotaped, to be captured unprepared and exposed, ever since I had allowed Adam to use me for his study. Stephen stepped back, kneeled, and pointed the camera at me, zooming in, then pulling back. “That’s enough,” I said, reaching out my hand to block the camera.

He stopped a tourist walking by and thrust the camera forward.

“On your honeymoon?” the tourist asked, taking the camera from Stephen’s hands. “You make a beautiful couple.”

We both started laughing and our laughter severed the tension. Stephen put his arm around my shoulder, and we leaned against the wall like a pair of lovers and smiled for the camera.

He asked me about my father. I shrugged my shoulders. And then I began to talk about him. I wasn’t prepared to, but Stephen was the only one who knew my father and understood my childhood.

I told him about the one time before I left home when my father came home to visit. He was on his way to Europe and made a stopover in Chicago to see us. My dream in Paris had made me remember it. I told him how there was still hope then that he might return for good. My father wore a nice suit and smelled of aftershave. When he walked in the house he held my mother and me. He hugged me too tightly, crushing my chest. He was trembling. He sat down. He looked around the living room, studying each object and piece of furniture as if he were holding it in his mind, calculating what he’d lost. It was awkward. He had little to say. He reached in the pocket of his suit coat and handed me a bottle of French perfume he’d purchased in a duty-free shop at the airport. He went to the piano and lifted the wooden cover. He took off his coat. He played Chopin’s sonatas, closing his eyes, moving his body. I watched his hands dance across the keys and wondered how a man who could make the sounds he made could walk away from such beauty. In our house he seemed uncomfortable. He was formal and polite. I was fourteen. He asked me if I wanted a puppy. One of the partners in a business he had a share in was a breeder. I told him no. I didn’t trust my father. I did not want to accept any more promises that might be broken.

My father sat down on the couch next to me. He took my hands in his. I studied my father’s fingers, his carefully manicured nails, noticing how well he still took care of them. When he lived at home he wouldn’t use a hammer to hang a painting out of fear that he’d accidentally miss and damage his fingers. “Look at you,” he said. I said nothing. “Look at you,” he said again. “Daddy,” I said. “This is my daughter?” he said with a question. I saw his chest begin to tremble. I held him so he wouldn’t break. “Look at you,” he said again. “You’ve grown up.” “I know. Daddy,” I said.

My mother lit up in my father’s presence. She was another person. There was a lift in her gait as she set the table for dinner. She used the formal china. She garnished our plates with parsley. She gave my father second helpings, relished cutting him a piece of cake. “Your mother can still cook,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Eleanor, your mother was the prettiest girl in all of Chicago. At least she was in my eyes.”

I told Stephen how my mother and father flirted over the dinner table. My mother told the story of how my father had taken her to the philharmonic on their first date. My father said he wanted my mother to see that side of him. “If she didn’t have passion for music then I would know,” he said. “Know what?” I asked. “Whether I could be in love with her.” “Daddy, she still likes music,” I said, and he looked up at me and grew quiet.

When my mother went up to clear the dishes, he followed her. I saw him stand behind her at the sink, lift her hair, and kiss her neck. I went up to my room to give my parents some space. When I came back down my mother was in the kitchen. I could see that she’d been crying. My father promised that he’d be back. That he’d call us as soon as he was in Europe. “You look tired, Joseph,” my mother said when they were saying good-bye. She brushed her hand along the side of his face the way she had done when I was a child. “How long can this go on?”

I walked my father to the door. He kissed his two fingers and rubbed them on the mezuzah. “Eleanor,” my father said. “Daddy,” I said. “Eleanor, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s okay, Daddy.”

A week went by and we didn’t hear from him. My mother hovered near the phone. A month. Nothing. Disappointment became a part of the way her lips formed words. I looked up at Stephen.

“She still thought he was coming back,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

“Mom,” I had said to her, “you know he’s not coming back.” “I know,” she said. “He’s not coming back, Mom.” I said again. “You have to forget him.” “How do you forget a man like that?” she said.

Stephen looked at me and we both laughed. Just talking about it seemed to make me feel lighter, relieved. “They’re one of a kind, our mothers,” he said.

Then Stephen began to tell his story. He asked me if I remembered when his mother left Chicago and he moved in with his father. It was to be with another man, he told me. “You can’t imagine what it was like. To watch my father make love to his young new wife, knowing my mother was all alone. But she wasn’t alone, Eleanor.”

I touched his arm. I told him I was sorry and asked how his mother was now. He said he’s stopped asking how she is. He knows the answer. “There’s never been anyone else for her,” he said. “The thing with the other man only lasted a few months. She’s never gotten over my father.” I looked at him with recognition. Stephen told me he knew I would understand. He said I was probably the only person he knew who would ever understand what it was like to know that no matter what you did it would never be enough to make your mother happy.

Stephen leaned back on the bench where we sat. And I thought that he was right. That we shared that bond. And it occurred to me that it was the very thing Michael had never understood about me. “Your blue eye is very dark,” he said. Sweat pooled on my back from the sun’s heat. Perspiration dripped down my spine. I smelled Stephen’s scent as we sat on the bench. A couple, assuming closeness between us, sat down on the empty space next to me, forcing me to move closer to Stephen. Our arms touched. We watched birds swoop down and graze across the water.

He took out a pack of matches from his pocket and lit one; I watched it spark in his hand, watched how the flame enchanted him, watched as it extinguished the minute it hit the ground. Stephen leaned over closer, so that his chest brushed mine, to tell me that there was an eyelash on my cheek. He gently took it off with his finger and asked me to make a wish on it. I can’t even write here in this journal of my most private thoughts, what I wished for. It’s too painful.

He told me that when he was in Colorado he was having trouble with a disk in his back. He wasn’t getting work. He explained that he got addicted to Vicodin. “I kept taking them to relieve the pain, and then once the pain was gone, it was another kind of pain they seemed to numb.” He said he never wanted to be in that kind of shape again. I said I was sorry. He said he was happy for me, for my life, and all that I’d accomplished.

I thought about the time years ago in my mother’s kitchen when Stephen told me his parents were separating. After he left that night I looked out the window of my bedroom into his house. When I was upstairs in my bedroom I saw his entire house, the whole expanse of it, each light turned on. I saw the shadows of Stephen and his mother and father move through the house. That night I understood his loneliness, or perhaps I projected my own loneliness on to him. Perhaps he’d been happy.

I asked him if he was okay now. And he said he had to be careful. That he had to stay focused. He looked at me with a question in his face. There was always a question in his face, as if he was looking for affirmation. There was something compelling about his disclosure, as if he was asking me to get inside the hard wire of his brain and untangle it for him. I felt a maternal connection to him. What I’d sensed earlier in the day, that I hadn’t been getting the clear picture of Stephen’s life, that he deliberately left things out, was correct. He only now began to come into focus. “You and me are one of a kind,” he said. “I’ve always known that about us.”

I was a married woman. I had two children. I suddenly resented being put in the same category as Stephen. We were nothing alike. I said it was getting late. I was eager to get back to the hotel. His behavior was puzzling. As usual my inclination was to get too involved. I had always felt that Stephen kept his fair share of secrets and the secrets had made me think about him too closely. Now I wanted to be free of him. Too often he made me uncomfortable, made me feel that it was my responsibility to help him somehow. On the way back to the hotel we walked in silence. He clasped my arm and stopped me before we arrived at my hotel.

He told me that I looked really great. He looked at me deeply as if he were trying to establish a connection again. There was something I didn’t trust in his eyes again. I could almost read it.
I can still have you
, his eyes said. I stared back at him firmly. If I gave an inch there was no turning back. But it also struck me with the force of revelation that there was a part of me that did want to be led away, and I had to caution myself against it.

I asked him how he expected me to look. Something about whether he expected I would look like a middle-aged housewife. He looked at me soulfully and said, “That’s not you, Eleanor. That could never be you.”

I pictured my children tucked into their beds, brushing my fingers across their foreheads the way they liked. It was what calmed Noah when he was worked up. I pictured myself slipping my hand in the crook of Michael’s arm and walking down an avenue as we had done when we’d first married, looking inside the shops, imagining the future we would have together, the life we would build that seemed to stretch before us like an endless, empty road. I had to tell myself that that life still existed. Until Michael entered my life, I’d been pulled in places I didn’t understand, had done things I regretted and had been ashamed of. Being with Michael had canceled out the ways I’d trespassed. I found purity and goodness in him that had moved me. He was the opposite of my father. Of Adam. Of William. He would never leave me. I knew that when I married him.

“But will he be enough for you?” my mother said when I told her that Michael and I were engaged. In the years that we’d been married that comment occasionally floated to the surface of my mind and then I just didn’t think about it. Only now, flying miles away from Paris, am I remembering my mother’s remark. I know I should put down my pen and sleep, try to rest before we land, but I have to record it all. There are things I need to reconsider, and by writing them down, the past seems to come to me with more clarity. I thought that Michael embodied all the characteristics my mother held dear. He could provide a good home, a family. He was generous, kind, and reliable. “I still think about the years I had with your father.” “After he left you?” I was angry. “What about those years?” “He has music inside him,” she said. I told her that he had squandered it. “He wasn’t made for this world,” she had countered. I told her she was wrong about Michael. That he was never going to leave me. “You never know what’s going to happen in life,” she said. She asked me if he made me happy. “Daddy made you happy,” I told her.

We were in my mother’s kitchen talking. I remember how I looked out at the back of the Masons’ house. I could see through the still skeletal branches of the tree to the roof, the brick chimney, the white shingles. Was Stephen a better match for me? The last time I had seen him we had been in our twenties. We had never really talked about a future together, though it existed in the air between us. But the minute I walked back into my mother’s house I pushed the thought away. I saw my mother wiping the table and putting away the dishes. Everything seemed perfectly clear. I didn’t want to have her solitary life, and I knew by marrying Michael that I was choosing a path different from the one she had chosen.

When we reached my hotel it was almost 7:30. The evening came on, and as the light receded I already began to long for what was lost of the day. It must have dawned on both of us simultaneously that we were saying good-bye, that the moment had come to a close, that we might not see each other again. What kind of relationship could we have in the present? Could Stephen and I really be friends? I doubt either of us had a chance to process what our encounter meant, and I wanted to ascribe what had happened between us to fate so as not to be accountable.

We stood in the lobby. Stephen was beside me. I could not see him—I didn’t want to see him—but I sensed his presence next to me. I was aware of his every movement as I fumbled in my purse for the key, among my wallet, cosmetics, loose pens, and scraps of paper, and I realized I was avoiding how I would say good-bye to him. I realized that we had never once talked about our severed connection, and I regretted it. The fact that I was married and had my own life allowed me to be more free and open than I had ever been before with him. Now part of me wanted to stay attached. Another part of me wanted to flee to my room so that I could begin to quiet the feelings that our confessions had unleashed.

I found my key and for a second I wondered what would happen if I invited him up to my room, as if what had transpired between us all those years ago was just starting to be remembered, as if I were a woman without attachment, and I saw in his eyes that he was waiting for me with anticipation. It was as if both of us were certain only in the moment in which we were to part that something momentous had happened between us that we could not understand. His eyes pleaded with me. I should have turned away, but I did not.

I am not the kind of woman who is unfaithful to her husband. That kind gravitated toward my father.