The Life Room (2 page)

Eleanor worried that eventually the novelty of the obsessive, passionate, emotional person that she was would wear off and he’d wish he’d married the more conventional girlfriend from medical school. “Eleanor, I’m with you,” he said, exasperated when she forced the idea upon him. “I don’t look back.” In order to take his emotional temperature, she had to catch him off guard.

When he woke up in the morning, he checked his pager. At the hospital, he performed surgery or laparoscopic procedures guided by images on monitors. In his profession, there was no room for doubt. It was the ability to be exact that made one a good surgeon. He did not have an inner voice inside him competing for his attention. She was used to people who said one thing and did something else. Or people like her father, whose emotions overruled their intellect, who said what they meant but then could not follow through with their intentions. Michael was a new species to her, and she studied him as closely as he studied his pathology specimens.

Noah was clingy the night before she left for Paris. He prolonged his bedtime, asking to read a second book when she’d finished one, cuddling up next to her in his bed, stroking her hair. Once he’d finally fallen asleep, he awoke an hour later, complaining of a stomachache. She lay in bed with him until he quieted and fell back to sleep. Nicholas was impatient for attention. He looked at Eleanor with the angry scowl that had recently begun to dominate his expressions. “Do you still want me to read to you?” she asked. “You don’t have to,” he said. He was at that stage where he wanted more independence. Noah was an easier child by nature, and Nicholas was aware of it, and resented his brother because of it. Now that he was ten, he refused to let Eleanor lie down in bed next to him as she had done when he was small, and yet she knew he still wanted her to. Once Noah was asleep, she moved to the edge of Nicholas’s bed. “I’ll sit here until you’re asleep,” she said. “You don’t have to, Mom.” He no longer called her Mama or Mommy like he used to.

“I want to,” Eleanor said.

After the boys were asleep she went to her study to review her paper. The phone rang. It was her mother wishing her a safe trip. “Stephen Mason’s in Paris. I gave Carol the name of the hotel you’re staying. I hope he’ll look you up.” “Why?” Eleanor asked, bewildered that her mother had given Stephen’s mother the name of her hotel. “Because you’re like family,” her mother said. Eleanor hung up, and felt a little strange. She was surprised to learn that Stephen Mason was in Paris and that her mother had given his mother the name of her hotel. She pushed the thought away. It was too disturbing.

Michael was working in the kitchen. She thought again that she should cancel the trip. How could she leave her boys? She remembered the nights after her father had left. She was Nicholas’s age then. How she had missed the feel of his lips on her skin when he cradled her in his lap; how she had missed the passionate, resounding music that came out of the piano at night when he had gotten home from work, too bottled up to speak. Even though he didn’t believe in God, she knew God was inside him. She knew God had already forgiven him for his disbelief. God was his music. But she could never say those things to her father. She barely could keep track of what country he lived in.

She was selfish to go. No, of course she had to go—she was being silly. She left the study and went down the hall to check on the boys. They were sound asleep. She heard Michael’s chair scrape the kitchen floor and the creak of the wooden floors as he walked down the hall. She heard him go into the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed. She felt them all drawing from her
—one more chapter, Mommy, one more page, one more kiss
—wanting her to make the world more animate, more alive, warmer, safer. What hollowness she would feel without them.

She went into the bedroom and thought about the conversation with her mother and the fact that Stephen would be in Paris. For a second she wondered if he would call her, and then dismissed it. Michael was in bed watching the evening news. It bothered her that he liked to watch TV in bed when at the end of the night she longed only for silence. But she refrained from asking him to turn it off. She felt him waiting for her to finish undressing, his eyes on her back after she took off her blouse and pulled the T-shirt she wore to bed over her head. She remembered the times before her sons were born, when she wasn’t always so tired, when she was eager to slide into his arms, to slip her legs between his. She remembered how fascinated she had been by the completely other universe inside the body he inhabited.

She needed to finish packing, but stopped and looked at him. “Tell me the story again about the first time you felt a heart beating in your hand.”

“It was pulsing and slippery. A thing of beauty, really. After I left the pathology lab, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it takes to keep something alive. Everything is dependent upon something else in the body.”

“But does it scare you? To have someone’s destiny in your hands? For someone to be that dependent?”

“I don’t think of it that way. As a physician you have to look for the symptoms and signs of failure. You attend to them the best you can. You have to trust when it’s time to let go.”

“But what if you’re afraid?” The light from the TV created strange patterns on the dark, familiar walls.

“It’s okay,” he said. He looked at her with that look that said he wanted her to awaken something inside him. She was aware that part of her didn’t want to get too close, as if she needed to prepare for their separation, and yet another part of her longed to be as close to him as she had felt when they first fell in love.

“Are you sure you’re okay with me leaving?” she asked again.

“If you ask one more time I’m not going to let you go.” He grabbed her arms and pulled her toward the bed.

“But I have to finish packing,” she said playfully. She saw the disappointment in his face and a stirring of love for him pulled inside her. “I mean, after you’re tired of me.”

“I’m never tired of you. You know that. Is that why you’re so frightened?”

“Daddy, how many times does the heart beat in your whole life?” Noah asked at breakfast the next morning. Michael attached his beeper to the waist of his pants, and then unsuccessfully attempted to pry his stethoscope away from Noah’s sticky hand. Eleanor liked listening to his conversations with the boys, who brought out aspects of him that were still mysterious.

“The heart beats more than two and a half billion times in an average lifetime, Noah.”

“Daddy, how much does it weigh?”

“It’s about the size of a clenched fist and weighs about 9 to 11 ounces.”

“What does it sound like?”

“Every heart has its own sound. You have to listen to its particular depth and rhythm.”

Noah was still fussing with the stethoscope.

“It rests in a moistened chamber called the pericardial cavity, which is surrounded by the rib cage. The diaphragm, a tough layer of muscle, lies below. It’s one of the miracles of nature, how sound and protected it is.”

Noah hopped out of his chair and sat on her lap and put the stethoscope to her chest. “Mommy, is your heart protected?”

“You all protect it.” She kissed the top of his head and squeezed him against her body. “When I’m with you it’s like being in a sacred garden surrounded by a wall of comforting trees.”

“If it’s so comforting then why do you have to go to Paris?” Nicholas looked at her squarely.

This particular way he had of catching her off guard was something new. For a moment she could barely remember why she was going. She looked into Nicholas’s face, his penetrating blue eyes, and felt her heart catch. She said nothing, only refilled his glass of juice.

The boys ran off to collect their backpacks. She looked at Michael checking his pager and simultaneously reading an article in a medical journal. She wished he would look up and hold her in his eyes. Instead, she reached over and touched his arm. He was wearing the blue tie with the yellow stripes she had bought him for his birthday and her favorite tweed sports jacket, and his hair was a little longer in the back, the way she liked it. Sometimes when she looked at him suited up for the hospital and thought about all those responsibilities he had, apart from her and their children, it still amazed her that she was his wife. She saw him suddenly in the way that he appeared to others, not clouded by the way they interacted as a couple. He was strong and confident, possessed a sharp mind and a clear sense of purpose.

His face was still buried in the journal. “It might be a good idea to get to the airport a little ahead of schedule so you can change some money. And remember to wear shoes that are easy to slip off for when you go through security. You’ll call when you get to your hotel, won’t you?” he said, looking up at her for a moment.

“Of course I will,” she said, trying to regain her confidence about traveling alone. She looked at the three small rosebushes on the terrace. The bushes were covered with burlap sacks to keep them protected from the cold. They looked shriveled and cramped. She wanted to take off the sacks and expose their frail limbs to the elements, but it was unseasonably cold for early May and she was afraid she’d cause them undue harm.

“You won’t forget us, will you?” Michael said, closing his journal and rising from the table. She saw the spark of vulnerability in his eye that she had seen when she had first fallen in love with him. It made her want to cancel the trip.

Eleanor found her seat near the window of the jet. She pictured Noah’s face as they said good-bye. She had held him in her arms and told him she would call him every night. “Even when I’m away, you’re here,” she said, pointing to her heart. She brushed her lips against the top of his soft black hair. She thought of her father being separated from his parents in the ghetto and never seeing them again. She had learned to think that way in order to forgive him for leaving. She reminded herself that she’d be home in ten days. She was worrying too much.

Noah’s hair reflected the light, and the top of his head felt hot to the touch. His skin was delicate, white as porcelain, his eyes a shade of blue she hadn’t seen in another person. It was not quite the color of her one blue eye. It was more luminescent, clearer. He was the kind of child strangers stop on the street to admire. Nicholas was more intense looking, yet he was also striking. She was embarrassed by how much the beauty of her boys pleased her, how everything about her children was a consuming source of pleasure and delight. She thought about some of the other mothers at the boys’ school, the mothers who were there every day at drop-off and pick-up, who observed every nuance, every lost tooth, with incredible intensity, and wondered why she was different, why she still had needs separate from her children’s. She had imagined that personal dreams ended once children were born.

Noah had stubbornly pushed his face into her chest and tightened his arms around her neck. Michael had to pry his hands away, finger by finger. “Don’t go, Mommy,” he screamed, flailing his arms and legs. Nicholas stood outside the cab throwing a ball in the air and catching it with his mitt. “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?” Eleanor said, stooping down so that she was level with his eyes. He looked at her as if he could see straight through her. He was her defiant child, internal and closed off. He was her mirror.

“It’s not like you’re going away forever, Mom.”

“You can be angry. It’s okay. You’ll see, I’ll be back before you know it.”

Eleanor grew sleepy. She tried not to think about the fact that the plane was suspended above the clouds and traveling over an endless ocean. She tried not to think about her children and her fears that the plane might go down. She had never feared flying until she had children. She thought of her last day of class before the trip and the lecture she’d given to her Russian lit class on how Tolstoy’s personal views and internal world informed his fiction. Part of the lecture was research she had completed for the paper she was presenting in Paris. A. N. Wilson, in his biography of Tolstoy, wrote that Tolstoy had one of the most documented unhappy marriages in history. In the lecture Eleanor had explained that Tolstoy had multiple sexual liaisons, which he did not hide from his wife. In fact, when he was in his early forties, he gave his eighteen-year-old virgin fiancée his diaries, which were filled with his dark, sometimes vile sexual encounters and fantasies, to read on her birthday.

Marlee Reynolds, one of her favorite students, had thrown up her hand. “So, I mean, are you saying, Professor Cahn, that Tolstoy couldn’t have written
Anna Karenina
if his marriage
hadn’t
been conflicted?” Mark Zukovsky, who had been in her modern poetry seminar last semester, had that ironic look in his eye again. She steeled herself. His goal throughout the semester had been to argue with whatever point of view she put forward. “It takes 740 pages for Tolstoy to make his point. People fall in love. Love is irrational. It’s just so obvious,” he had said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get, Mark?”

“I’m just saying it’s not that complicated. I mean, Professor Cahn, you’re married, aren’t you?”

“I don’t see how my personal life is relevant,” she had said, organizing her papers in a neat stack against the podium to hide her annoyance.

“Well, did you ever wonder what might happen to you if someone like Vronsky walked into your life?”

Marlee cut in, showing off the purple polish on her nails as she raised her hand. “Mark, you’re missing the point,” she said. “Anna is far more complicated than Vronsky. If the novel were written by a woman, do you think she’d send her heroine to the grave? While Anna’s adultery is in the foreground of the novel, her brother Stiva gets off rather easy, don’t you think? It’s as if Tolstoy is saying that women’s emotions are greater or more extreme. Are even dangerous to their well-being.”

Reflecting on the class filled Eleanor with pride. Her students were intelligent and provocative. Sometimes it was a challenge to stay a step ahead of them. What would happen at the conference if questions were raised in response to her paper that she was not prepared to answer? While she knew that the paper had merit, she also worried that she’d be found out—a fraud, not quite up to the position she’d achieved in life. She told herself there was no reason for her to feel insecure, and yet something she couldn’t yet identify troubled her.