Forty Rooms (12 page)

What really bothered me was that I loved him more.

I worked the smooth golden band off my finger, scraping my hand to blood in the process. I put the ring in the empty soap dish—had he taken the soap, or were we, was I, just out? I thought of the past two years of my life—gone, gone, gone just like that—and, dull with wretchedness, wanted to cry again. So I found a stray sheet of paper in the medicine cabinet, behind some bottles of aspirin and a calcified face cream, pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket—he always laughed at the habit—and, kneeling on the floor, scribbled against the side of the bathtub.

It was so cold that all my words felt frozen

and flew away, a brilliant blue cloud.

One fancy adjective sped toward a close-by chimney,

attracted—all that warmth, and noise, and smoke—

a real life, it seemed.

I watched as it went down, its tail atremble,

while we in silence sat, and then he asked

(the smell of imitation phrases musty):

“What color flowers do you like the most?”

“None,” I responded, “flowers always scared me”—

and looked away.

My fingers bled again;

my hands had never any luck, it seemed.

“I do not think I’ll come with you to Paris.”

“Oh no? A pity.”—And he sipped his coffee,

and then pulled on those leather gloves of his

that stranglers would have envied any day,

and strolled away—politely.

My night grew warmer then, and my best words

bounced back to me, my loyal, joyous pets.

They flocked into my lap, and lapped their milk,

and were at home at last—

alive and needed.

And then I knew that I had prayed for numbness—

that I had hoped to be enwrapped by winter—had wanted him

to change my mind, it seemed.

The paper was damp and curling with steam by the time I was done. I decided to call it “The End.” It was not any good, I saw upon rereading, but one had to start somewhere. And as I sat on the cold bathroom floor, struggling to chisel the poem’s true, muscular shape out of the awkward lump of fatty phrases and petulant sentiments, I already felt—rising slowly from within the muddy misery of loneliness—the hard, bright joy of my newfound solitude.

Part Three

The   Past

12. Kitchen

Apollo’s Arrow

The three large windows glowed with a perfect April sunset; its colors reminded her of a tropical drink in a glossy advertisement—something cool, sweet with fruity liqueurs, crowned by a pink paper umbrella. From up here, the rows of townhouses on the street below, with their dark tile roofs and neat arrangements of potted plants on the narrow balconies, looked clean, toylike, European somehow, and she said so, more in the spirit of indiscriminately voicing her thoughts aloud than of making conversation, for with Paul she did not much think of what she said.

“Though I’ve never been to Europe. Well, technically Moscow is Europe, but it isn’t really.
Yes, we are Scythians, yes, we are Asians with slanting, greedy eyes,
and all that.”

He looked up from slicing the mushrooms. “What was that Scythian bit?”

“Oh, just some famous lines from Blok.” She added after a beat, “A Russian Silver Age poet.”

“Ah. Poetry. Never got into it myself. Anyway, Europe. You should really go, you know.”

“Travel’s not so easy for me,” she said. “I have issues with documents—”

She could have added, “Nor do I have the money,” for in truth she was nearly destitute. She had long before quit her day job in a department store and her night job in a restaurant, and now survived by taking on occasional translation projects; the assignments, however, paid by the page, and she had proved inconveniently slow, agonizing as she did over the most trivial word choices with all the obsessiveness of a thwarted poet. Every night she jotted down her earnings (“Proposal for installing latrines in Central Asia, 3 pages, $48”) as well as her expenses (“March rent, $525; apples, $3.60; bus from the library, $1.10”; she always walked there to save the fare, but the piles of books she invariably checked out were too heavy to lug home on foot). At the end of each week, if the subtractions worked out, she would allow herself the single luxury of a cappuccino and pastry in a nearby café. She carried her poverty lightly—she believed that her upbringing had inoculated her against needing comforts or longing for possessions—but she sensed that any mention of her situation might embarrass Paul, who, after finishing business school, had landed a vague but clearly well-paid job at some management consulting firm and was now living in a furnished penthouse apartment in a finer part of the city.

Quickly she changed the subject.

“Are you sure I can’t lend you a hand?”

“I would never make a guest cook. Besides, I love cooking for people. Just sit back and enjoy your Chardonnay, dinner will be ready in no time.”

Swirling the wine in her glass, she watched him as he moved between the stove and the island with an agility unexpected in someone of his massive build, until at last she admitted to feeling surprised, and pleasantly so. Ever since they had run into each other on a street downtown (he had been leaving his new office; she, walking to the library), they met for coffee every few months, but this was the first time he had invited her over for dinner. She had, she realized, envisioned a grimy bachelor’s den and a plate of overcooked spaghetti topped with lukewarm sauce from a can (the extent of her own culinary endeavors). In the near-ascetic bareness of her life, had she fallen victim to the trite assumption that someone at ease with numbers—just as someone at ease with words—could never be altogether at ease in the physical world? It held true in her case, to be sure, yet here was Paul the math major in a white apron embroidered with grapes, wielding a knife with efficient grace as he chopped asparagus in his immaculate kitchen, exuding a sense of serenity amidst boiling pots and hissing pans and mysterious gleaming utensils at whose purpose she would not even attempt to venture a guess.

She found his capable presence relaxing.

“I hope it won’t be too rich for you,” he said as he stirred more cream into the sauce. “I haven’t tried this one before, it’s from a new cookbook—”

“Whatever it is, the smell is making me hungry . . . And just
look at all these books! I don’t have any books in my kitchen. Granted, my entire kitchen is the size of a teapot—” Wineglass in hand, she rose from the table and inspected the shelves, then, pulling a book out at random, leafed through it idly.

“But these are like poetry,” she exclaimed then. “Ossobuco Gremolada with Risotto Milanese! Marseille Bouillabaisse with Aïoli! Or how about this militant Duck Flan with Maltese Blood Orange Sauce and Shallot Confit? I don’t think I know two-thirds of these words. Can anyone actually cook these?”

“Possibly. One never knows until one tries,” he said, smiling.

“And you have two entire books of desserts! I can never pass up anything sweet, it’s my one weakness . . . Here is something called Casanova’s Delight. Mmm, it has kiwi sauce and Grand Marnier ice cream mousse.”

He stepped closer, bumping her arm. “Oh, sorry. Let me see. This one’s a little ambitious.” As always, when he stood next to her, she was startled by his football player’s bulk. “Still, let’s brave it for our next dinner, shall we?”

“So generous of you to volunteer feeding the masses.”

He resumed his place at the stove, his face reddened with the heat of cooking.

“So,” he said after a short pause, “heard from any of the old crowd lately?”

“Just Lisa.” She opened another book. “She married Sam, you know, as we all expected. They’ve just had a boy. What in the world is cardamom? . . . And Maria and Constantine split up, but I haven’t spoken to either of them since.”

“I keep in touch with them. Maria is in New York, trying to break into acting. Constantine went back to Greece and inherited
his shipping empire. And Stacy is renting her own childhood room from her parents. They are crazy as bats, she says. And, of course, the horrible thing with John . . . Not that I liked him much, always thought he was a pretentious ass, but one shouldn’t speak ill of—”

“Who?” she asked, turning a page. She was enchanted by the precisely quantified lists of exotic ingredients, the casual mentions of distant places, the pure linguistic pleasure of melodiously named concoctions—a vocabulary entirely new to her. Since Adam’s departure (fourteen months, eight days, and two hours ago now), she had barely stirred from the monastic confinement of her dim basement cell, and she felt her very soul squinting, blinded by the brightness of life out in the open, so sophisticated and varied, so full of adult things she appeared to know nothing about. It occurred to her that she was not giving the senses their proper due. It might be interesting to attempt a poem for each sense, like the verbal equivalent of one of those allegorical seventeenth-century paintings with Lady Taste licking a sugared plum, Lord Sight studying stars through a telescope, Lady Smell lifting a rose to her nose, and Lord Hearing serenading the courtly gathering on a mandolin, while Lord and Lady Touch pawed each other in the discreetly darkened bushes in the background. The Hearing poem would be the easiest, no doubt, sprinkled liberally with alliteration and onomatopoeia, but the others would present a challenge, for the trick would be to convey in words alone the unique nature of—

“John. Hamlet. Didn’t you date him at one point?”

“Oh,” she said, closing the volume. “Yes. Briefly. Did something happen to him?”

“I thought you knew.” She continued looking at him. “He—
apparently he was in some kind of accident last winter. At first they thought it was drinking or drugs, but it wasn’t. He just lost control of the car. Drove into a tree. A branch pierced his lungs . . . Sorry, that was gruesome, I shouldn’t have—”

She set her glass of wine on the table, lowered herself into the chair.

“Apollo’s arrow,” she said quietly.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” She stared out the window. Streetlamps were beginning to glow in the green twilight.
Do you not imagine sometimes, when dusk wanders through the house, that here, alongside us, lies another plane, where we lead entirely different lives . . .
She felt cold, so cold. “Paul. Do you ever feel that there is more to life than we can see, near us but just out of reach?”

“You mean like ghosts? Or . . . angels or something?”

“No, nothing so obvious. Just . . . I never tried putting it into words before, but . . . When I was younger, I sometimes felt that, just below the surface of ordinary things, there was another, secret layer of—well, not magic exactly, but forces of the universe ran deeper there, or things were brighter and had their true names, or . . . or something like that. And if you were special enough to see into that other, hidden place through the veneer of here and now, a little of its light would be yours to keep. Sort of like wishes being granted if you found the secret words with which to ask. Except sometimes you forgot it wasn’t just a child’s game, sometimes you wished for things that weren’t . . .”

She stopped, inarticulate with guilt, confused by the remnants of a half-remembered dream. The silence between them swelled
with the gauze of curtains blown into the kitchen on the breath of a sudden light breeze. In the street below, a blushing rain of petals fluttered down to the sidewalks.

“I’m not sure I follow. Everyone is special in some way. And—forgive me for being blunt—but I don’t believe in mystical mumbo-jumbo. Here is here. Now is now. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. End of story.” He sounded almost hostile. After a pause, he added, his tone softening, “I’m sorry about John.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, not looking at him. “I don’t really know what I’m saying. You just took me by surprise. It’s . . . very sad. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Of course. Here.” He splashed more wine into her glass. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.”

They talked of other things then, professors whose classes they had both attended, his job, his parents, her recent translation contract, but she was not listening to what he told her, or paying attention to what she told him, speaking mechanically, for a dark, superstitious voice muttered with increasing insistence inside her. All gifts have their price, whispered the voice. If you are indeed one of the chosen of the universe, and not just a poor deluded sap with an inflated sense of self-worth, what you ought to feel is not flattered but frightened half to death. And she knew that she was indeed frightened, deeply, irrationally frightened—frightened to leave this well-lit, solid, modern place with its polished expanses of stainless steel and its smells of good living, frightened to creep back to her underground, out-of-time life, the damp, the dark, the stillness, the solitude, the three-legged rat whom she had named Long John Silver in a reckless moment of despair, the feet always
passing by her blind, naked windows, the growing gaps of silence in her telephone conversations with her parents, the unwritten poems whose ghosts haunted her nightly, the written poems she no longer mentioned to anyone at all, the memories of her lost love shooting through the dreary fabric of her days like threads of brightly colored silk, which turned brittle and hard and drew blood if she ran them through her fingers. Hers was a small and lonely life, a rigorous servitude in preparation for a bigger life, as she tried to see it; yet now, just beneath the thinning fabric of her existence, she sensed an invisible roiling of vast, terrifying, dangerous things—things that would play with you if you pleased them, things that would kill you if you proved a disappointment.