The Woman Upstairs (6 page)

When Sirena failed to show up for Back to School Night, I wondered whether to call to remind her of our appointment at Burdick’s two days later. I decided to wait and see. I was aware that this was not only unteacherly but simply not very grown up of me. I was setting a friendship test.

She passed. She came, although she was almost fifteen minutes late, and seemed to be carrying half a dozen parcels and bags with which she breathlessly and clumsily bumped the other customers: she got one of them, an old lady drinking hot chocolate, in the back of the head.

Because I’d been waiting awhile, I’d managed to snag a table. The tables and stools there are small and close together, and they’re not comfortable, but we squeezed ourselves in and piled her packages underneath our feet. We kept our coats on, although it was warm, because we had nowhere to put them.

“Shopping?”

“Shopping, yes. It’s my husband’s birthday tomorrow.” She gave a pretty laugh. “We always give many presents. Nothing big, but lots of small things. It’s always a challenge to find the right ones. He is an—idiosyncrasy?”

“He’s idiosyncratic.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“And his work is the reason that you’re here?”

“Only for one year. He has a fellowship from the university, to write his book.”

“Interesting. What’s it about?”

“You’ll have to ask him to explain it, because I’ll do a poor job. Ethics. It’s about ethics and history. He’s interested in how we can’t tell a history truly—there’s no such thing after all—but so then we must try to tell a history ethically—and what does this mean?”

“Why can’t a history be true?”

“Because we always have only a part of a history. You can’t make a picture three hundred sixty degrees; we can’t, even in one second of a life, show everything that we experience. So how could we do such a thing for a person’s history, or a people’s history? A nation’s history? It isn’t possible.” She put her hands up in a cheerful show of despair.

“And what do you do, then? Are you a historian, or an ethics person, or whatever, also?”

“No! I could never do such things. Words are not for me.” She looked at me closely, her marbled dark eyes alight. “I’m an artist. I make things. Installations. Sometimes videos.” She said this as calmly as if she were confessing to making cakes or collecting stamps, and I knew she was for real.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Why?”

“I’m an artist, too.”

I’d lurched inside at her admission—this! Of course! we shared—but worried, from her smile, that her first impulse was patronizing. She was thinking that making art must be a hobby for me. She was thinking that I was an elementary school teacher. But she was too polite to let on. “Really,” she said. “You must tell me about your work.”

“No, no. I want to hear about yours. We can talk about me another time”—I felt bold because this presumed there might be another time—“I’m here to learn about Reza’s life; which means, about yours.”

“About ours, there’s not so much to say. But Reza: he’s very cherished because we couldn’t—I couldn’t—have any more children. Do you have brothers and sisters, Nora?”

“An older brother.”

“Then you know what it’s like, so important. I come from five children;
Skandar from three, although one of his brothers has died. But we both wanted more children, for Reza too, you know.”

“As a teacher, I have to say that only children are often at an advantage academically—”

“Yes, because we, the parents, spoil them and spend so much time. Only children, they become like a third person in the couple, do you know? They don’t get so much to be children, but little grown-ups.”

“This is your concern for Reza?”

“This is our concern. In Paris, we’ve made for him a world of children. He has cousins—not real ones, they’re in Italy—but friends as close as cousins. In our apartment building alone he has three friends, including a girl three weeks older that he’s known always. They see each other almost every day.”

“So it’s a difficult transition for him, to come here.”

“For all of us, yes, of course.”

“It’s helpful to know. Thank you.” I’d hoped for some more intimate revelation. I don’t know quite what.

“But with the bullying, you see—”

“Yes, that was horrible, I know. I’ll keep a close eye. Those were bigger kids who didn’t know him, though. In our class, he’s extremely popular. Very well liked. Boys and girls both. He’s a very kind boy.”

“Yes, kind.”

“And he’s making good progress with his English.”

“Yes. We speak only English at the dinner table now, to practice. All three of us, making mistakes. ‘Please pass,’ we say, and then ‘that thing,’ if we don’t know the word. Sometimes, we’re too tired. But Reza teaches us words now.”

“Not rude ones, I hope?”

“Those also.” She smiled.

We’d finished our coffee. The moment of recognition, the sign—it had to have a meaning.

“But about your art,” I said. “You were going to tell me about your art.”

In that first conversation, she told me about her installations, which were—as I would eventually see with my own eyes—lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carved
soap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made. I couldn’t quite picture them when she talked about them, but the idea made sense to me: visions of paradise, the otherworldly, the beautiful, and then, when you’re in them, up close, you realize that the flowers are mottled by filth and the vines crumbling and that the gleaming beetles crawling on the waxy leaves are molded bottle tops or old leather buttons with limbs. Her installations had names from fairy tales and myth—The Forest of Arden; Avalon; Oz; Elsinore—but they were, in reality, the kitchen or the laundry room, and sooner or later the viewer would realize there was an ancient sink behind the waterfall or that the boulders between the trees were a washer and dryer, blow-torched black and furred with dark lint.

She told me too that latterly she’d made videos of the installations, that the story of the videos was precisely this revelation that the beautiful world was fake, was made of garbage; but that first she had to film it in such a way that it looked wholly beautiful and that sometimes this was hard. And also, she said, narrative was hard: when you made a video, there had to be a story, and a story unfolded over time, in a different way, and didn’t always unfold as you wanted it to.

She told me all this and I could tell that on the one hand she was proud to talk about it, passionate even, but on the other, she retained a slightly world-weary air. I was a tad piqued.

“Can I see what you’re working on?” I asked.

She shook her head, looked at me through the film of her hair. “I’m supposed to build Wonderland—that’s my next project. But I have none of that here with me. Maybe I can get a video for you of the earlier stuff, though it’s not the same, really.”

“But why?”

“It’s about the space, and my tools, and my whole world there.”

“But you can’t have a year without your work!”

“No. I’d turn into a monster that neither Reza nor Skandar wanted to know. It’s what keeps me from being crazy. Too much dark, otherwise.”

“I’m the same. I need to do it, or I go mad.”

She smiled, in a real way, as if she actually wanted to hear, now.

And I told her about how I used to paint big messy pictures, but how when my mother was sick, and for all the years she was dying, one small capacity at a time, I stopped being able to paint, stopped being able to make any big gestures at all, and turned instead to little things, to rooms the size of shoe boxes, Joseph Cornell–scaled dioramas, as if these, at least, could not be taken from me—these are the fragments I have shored against my ruin. And I didn’t explain, then, about how I stopped trying to show my work, let alone to sell it, and let go of the idea of it finding a home in the world—because somehow, in that long, slow extinguishing of life, it felt as though the one way I could try to keep my mother alive was to close in, and hold on, hold on to what I made as she had made me. I worried that this would make no sense, and this is why I didn’t speak of it then. But I explained about my illuminated boxes, about making scenes and worlds in miniature, and how always, hidden somewhere, where you could barely see her or could not see her at all, there was a small gold figure that was Joy.

“It’s hard for me to believe in,” I said, “but it’s also the most important thing to make myself believe. So I put her in there no matter what. Even in the death scenes, I put her in.”

“I really understand,” she said, and I could tell that she really did, and suddenly the afternoon was worth it, the sign had meant something, and we could get up and leave our awkward little table at Burdick’s, separate into the now-dark afternoon.

As she gathered her parcels, fumbling again, her clumsiness charming to me, she said without glancing up, “I’m thinking of renting a space, but the one I like is too big, too much for me. It’s better to share. Would you have any interest?”

“Yes,” I said, before I really understood what she was offering. It was a very fast “yes.”

Outside on the sidewalk, she put her hand on my arm, in the same way her son put his small hand on my arm. Now I would know where the gesture came from. “I’ll call you,” she said. “At the weekend, you can come with me to see the studio. Maybe Saturday afternoon? Skandar and Reza can do something together then.”

“Yes,” I said, without considering that I’d promised to visit my father that day, that I’d have to call and disappoint him, a spare, gray
old man alone in an apartment in Brookline, counting the hours until I came. And when I realized this mistake, I didn’t waver, either; and I didn’t wait for Sirena to confirm, I called him up, picturing him there in his overheated lemon-yellow sitting room with its strange, plush, old rose broadloom that my mother had chosen when they moved in from Manchester, when the cards were already on the table but she was still up to such choices—the weirdness, to me, that my mother had deliberately made it an old person’s apartment, the colors and the furnishings saved from their house the ones most conducive to a powdery, grannyish atmosphere, as if, by doing so, she might will herself into old age (she wasn’t then old; she wasn’t old when she died), might keep herself going by simply setting the stage for keeping going—and always, when I spoke to him, I pictured him forlorn in this sea of pink and yellow, oblivious to it as he seemed to be. I told him something had come up; I intimated that it had to do with school. He tried to sound excited for me, thinking perhaps this might imply some professional advancement, while I tried to sound irritated about the obligation, as if I wanted nothing less than to go. We were both engaged in bonhomous deceit of such long standing that it was barely conscious; but surely he knew I wasn’t sorry enough, and I knew that he was disappointed, and I’m ashamed to admit I was so excited that I didn’t properly care.

There comes that time, that Lucy Jordan time, when your life looks small and all and always the same around you, and you don’t think anything will change, you think that hope is not for you—and if you’re me, then in that early period of awakening to your condition, you don’t even feel angry. Dismayed, maybe; shocked; but that’s just, it seems, what life is, a world in which the day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog that you will peruse in the bathroom, and where a triumph is when you take a long walk through the glorious snowbound cemetery after the first storm and somehow don’t get lost among the dead, you find your mother’s stone and kiss it, kiss her: that is a triumph. The stone leaves an icy taste upon your lips and your nose; and the sky, with its ridged clouds, is tinged with mauve. It’s a far
cry from the tony gatherings in the galleries of New York’s Meatpacking District for which you once believed yourself destined; and while it is beautiful—grief, too, can be beautiful—this small triumph doesn’t have about it any aspect of beginning. Let’s just say that the open doors in graveyards aren’t necessarily doors you want to enter.

But it looks—it is—as though that’s what there is, Death or the Garnet Hill catalog, that cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch
Law & Order
, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it—Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!—and no longer be alone.

And then, suddenly, there’s something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there’s an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn’t have imagined, and—elation!—it feels as though you’ve found the pot of gold, when you’d thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It’s enough, for a time—maybe even for a long time—to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.

7

When I went to college—to Middlebury, a small liberal arts institution known for its language studies, up in Vermont—I didn’t major in Studio Art. There didn’t seem much point in having gone to Middlebury for that. It was a battle, or rather, a discussion, I’d had with my parents before I chose the school. I’d applied to RISD, the art school in Providence, and to Pratt, in New York, as well as to traditional liberal arts colleges, and my parents had sat me down and told me they thought it would be a wasted opportunity if I went to study art. I wasn’t surprised that this was my father’s opinion; but I trusted my mother, so I listened to her.