Forty Rooms (16 page)

“What we could do,” Paul had said, “is put a swing on that porch.”

“If we bought the house,” she had said.

“If we bought the house.”

Now they stood on the damp, starkly lit veranda, and the
realtor woman jingled the keys again—it seemed to be a nervous habit of hers, almost a tic—and said, “It’s not heated, but you can think of it as a sunroom really, it would be perfect for breakfasts in warm weather.” The enthusiastic lilt in her voice did not match her eyes, which had a dull, bulging look to them, like thick bottle glass. She waved toward the shadowy corner, where three low wicker chairs with enormous pink peonies on the cushions crouched around a lopsided wicker table. “Now, the furniture doesn’t come with it, of course, it’s just to give you an idea, but do try it out, try it out!”

“No, that’s all right, thank you,” Paul said, ready, she saw, to proceed into the house; but her arms were aching from trying to restrain the squirming, sniffling bundle of blankets, so she walked over to the table and sat down. The cushions proved unpleasantly soft, and as she sank into them, further weighted down by the baby, a faint but visible cloud of dust billowed around her—either the house was not shown very often, or no one before her had ever followed the realtor’s invitation to sit down.

The baby stopped whimpering and began to wail.

“He is adorable!” the realtor woman shouted, to make herself heard over the cries. “What’s his name?”

She was struggling to quiet him, so it was Paul who replied: “Eugene.”

“A beautiful name!” exclaimed the woman. “So uncommon.”

“It’s her father’s name,” Paul said, his voice reserved. “Shall we see the rest of the house, then?”

“Yes, yes, of course, let me just find the right key . . . Do look at the doorbell chimes on your way in, they are a very nice feature,
and of course fully functional, everything in the house is fully functional, here, I’ll show you, such a distinctive sound—”

The inner door moaned on reluctantly yielding hinges. As the woman wedged it open, talking all the while, a long, mournful note that put her in mind of a departing train escaped onto the veranda, and a pale slash of autumnal light cut through the low-ceilinged murkiness beyond. She caught a whiff of stale, unused air. She had been excited by the thought of seeing the place, had felt important and capably adult in her role as a prospective buyer; she had even worn her teardrop diamond earrings and her new black shoes, whether to impress the realtor or to enter her potential house in a fashion befitting a young woman eager to take the next step in the upward progression of her life.

Now she found she did not want to go in.

“Please go ahead without me,” she called. “I’ll stay out here a bit longer, get the baby to sleep.”

The two of them paused on the threshold, looking down at her, the realtor woman smiling glassily and jingling the keys, Paul’s expression bemused. Then they vanished inside; Paul, she noticed, ducked his head as a precaution.

The door crept closed behind them.

The baby was still crying, though with less desperation now. She wound the blankets tighter around him—the veranda was chilly, with a deep, dungeonlike chill—and stared outside. The street lay empty in both directions; the trees that lined it were bare of leaves; on the other side, identical one-story houses with darkened verandas sat in the puddles of graying lawns under graying skies. She could see no signs of life. Perhaps everyone had
gone to church—wasn’t that what people did on Sunday mornings, especially in kid-friendly places where neighbors did not honk at neighbors?

“Bun-ga-low,” she said under her breath, trying out the new word. It sounded strange, almost barbaric, to her ears, and for one disorienting moment, the unremarkable suburban vista looked as foreign to her eyes as a row of grass-thatched African huts with monkeys hopping from roof to roof; it was certainly just as far removed from the vague expectations of her childhood. All at once, an overwhelming sensation of randomness struck her—why this house, why this street, why this city? (Why this country, continued a dangerously soft voice inside her, why—but she managed to hush it up before it asked anything else.) And when one stopped to think about it, how odd, how unnatural, how daunting it was to go about choosing a
house
. She had never pondered the desirable number of bathrooms or the virtues of gas stoves before. She had never owned—had never wanted to own—anything that would not fit in a small suitcase. Now the notion of waking up one day the owner of a mind-bogglingly complex conglomeration of pipes, wires, masonry, and carpentry loomed over her in a vast shadow, almost as ambiguous, thrilling, inevitable, and terrifying as motherhood itself.

Anxiously she inspected the baby’s face—she could not bring herself to call him Eugene yet. He had grown silent at last and was gazing past her with his pensive blueberry eyes. She pulled the blankets closer to his reddened nose, then looked again at the poisonous pink peonies on the dusty cushions. Something much like panic was starting to stir inside her. She reminded herself to
breathe—the peonies did not come with the house, she would be free to get different cushions or have no cushions at all, just as she pleased. But the imminent prospect of all that empty space to furnish only made her breathing quicken. For a house was not like a student dorm room or a rented apartment: in time it became a reflection of one’s being, a monolith under whose foundation one buried one’s roots, a tinted lens through which one viewed the world. It set the mood, the timbre, the pitch of one’s entire life, and for a poet, the pitch of her life would, as likely as not, vibrate through the pitch of her work. Would Byron have ever become Byron if he had resided in an elderly lady’s fussy seaside flat with flowery chintz curtains and a pug for a pet? Could Pushkin have sung the Russian countryside with such fluid simplicity if his abode had been a brooding moorland ruin full of echoes, ghosts, and massive oak cupboards? Could Shakespeare have penned his immortal tragedies if he had chosen to live in a suburban bungalow with peonies on the cushions? At sixteen, she would have replied with a resounding “Yes,” but at twenty-seven, she was no longer certain. (And wouldn’t it be fun, said a voice that never was completely silenced inside her, to compose an “architectural” poem, each verse set in a dwelling, each written in the style most suited to the dwelling itself, from a Poe-inspired wail of woe and loss describing a dilapidated gothic mansion to a cheerful couplet akin to a Mother Goose rhyme sketching a cottage in a sunlit meadow? She brushed the irrelevant thought away.) And if it were indeed true that deciding on the kind of place you would inhabit meant deciding on the kind of atmosphere that would seep into your very blood and, by osmosis, the kind of poet
you were bound to become, did she feel confident enough in her real estate acumen and her decorating skills not to fail her art?

Blankly she considered the dingy tiles of the veranda, the wet black trees across the road, the bleak symmetry of the lawns—and at last panic caught up with her and overtook her.

The baby had fallen asleep.

What if she just stood up right now, and walked away?

The door issued a moan, and the realtor woman stepped out.

“Your husband wanted me to check on you,” she said, jingling the keys. “He’s inspecting the closets. Ah, Eugene is resting nicely. He feels at home here, I see.”

She looked at the realtor mutely.

“Eugene is such a lovely name.” The woman dropped into the chair next to hers, raising another, thicker cloud of dust. “So distinctive. Personally, I’ve always been interested in his namesake Eugene of Savoy, the famous Hapsburg general, you know. But of course, there is a bit of a family connection there: my father is a direct descendant of the Hapsburgs, you know, and—”

The door moaned. Paul emerged, remembering to duck his head.

“It’s great,” he announced with gusto. “We’ll take it.”

The realtor, flustered, tried to clamber out of the chair.

“I’m joking,” he said. The woman giggled warily, and sank back down. “I’m going to whisk my wife away on a tour now, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll stay here, give you some privacy.”

Paul held the inner door open. She rose, staggering a little under the baby’s bulk.

Just before going inside, she stopped.

“Paul,” she said, and smiled up at him to make it almost resemble a joke. “Do we even need a house?”

He laughed a short belly laugh, appreciative of her sense of humor.

“If we buy it, we’ll put the swing right here,” he said, pointing, and gently prodded her over the threshold.

17. Kitchen

The Only Poem Written in Her Twenty-eighth Year

By now, the ritual had become so familiar that she kept the overhead lamp off, going through the motions in an automatic haze. At four in the morning, the kitchen looked as if underwater, the cabinets and counters lost in shadows, her progress illuminated by a succession of feeble bluish lights: the subterranean glare of the refrigerator as she squinted into its poorly stocked depths in search of the bottle, the dim oven glow flooding the pans as she pushed them aside to reach the smallest pot, the purple flickering of gas turned down low as she put the pot on the stove.

As she waited for the milk to warm up, she leaned against the counter, swaying slightly. She was never fully awake these days (these weeks, these months), her reality blurring at the edges. She was never fully asleep either, her dreams only a baby’s whimper deep. She recalled The Cycle of Exhaustion she had written at
nineteen—nearly a decade before—and choked on a sob of a laugh. The college all-nighters had possessed a bold hussar quality, a youthful devil-may-care flair, and their feel had been hard, light, and vivid in her triumphant, springing step. This sleeplessness was a wet, heavy weight, relentless and inescapable, creeping into her bones, turning the world gray, the urge to weep ever close to the surface. It filled her with an absolute despair—and, at the same time, a kind of sweet relief: it was good to give up worrying about achievements for a spell and let the weakness of her body take over—good to surrender to the inevitability of her temporary escape from destiny.

She was going to do this only once, after all.

Pale moonlight slanted through the narrow window; she could see a thin dusting of snow on the ground. She stirred the milk in the pot. Her feet were cold on the tiles. In the bedroom across the hall, her husband snored in a steady, energetic rhythm, and the baby—almost six months old now—made a meowing noise, a precursor to a bout of crying. On an impulse so vague it felt like the prompting of a dream rather than a conscious action, she bent to pull out the bottom drawer near the stove, sifted through a pile of partially unopened mail—advertisements, telephone bills, takeout menus—that nowadays seemed to drift through the house in unabated flocks, sprouting colonies in chance nooks and crannies. Underneath the envelopes lay a flat box scarcely larger than a pack of playing cards. She took it out. Plastic still clung around it, so she sliced through it with a knife, and lifted the lid.

Tiny bugs of words leapt out and ran all over the counter. She trapped them with both palms, scooped them up in handfuls,
pinned their slippery, wiggly little bodies to the door of the fridge, then played with them sleepily, sliding them about, almost at random, in the quivering of the gas flame, in the blue glimmer of the winter moon, until the words began to draw together into lines and she saw that she was making a poem of sorts, except it was like composing on the other side of the looking glass, composing backward—not the usual hum solidifying into sounds, the misty glow of meaning slowly growing more defined, until it sharpened into disparate words, but instead, timid sense trying to sneak its way into the cracks between the silly words already there.

Also, she could barely read the letters in the dark.

Feeling comforted somehow, she stood pushing the half-invisible magnets to the left, to the right, stirring the milk, nodding off now and then, until it seemed like some memory from long before, the familiar excitement in her fingertips, the baby whimpering, the kitchen floating underwater, the cold in her feet, the baby crying, the swell and fall of the snores, the baby wailing . . . Waking with a start, she abandoned whatever dream she had been pursuing, rushed to test the temperature of the milk with her little finger, quickly poured it into the bottle, and hurried out to feed him; but at seven that morning, when she entered the kitchen with the baby sniveling in her arms, she discovered Paul standing before the fridge, a half-emptied glass of orange juice in his hand, his head tilted. The poem she did not remember writing snaked in wobbly, uneven lines through a widely dispersed cloud of unused adjectives and verbs.

“When did we get this?” he said, motioning with his chin. “My sophomore roommate had one of these. I didn’t know you wrote
poetry, ha-ha!” He declaimed in a loud, exaggerated manner, grandly waving his free hand in the air:

“My cook is a drunk and my eggs are bitter

my driver is a dreamer and we always go so fast

my friend is a player and I cry all day

I have a crush on the boy

who waters the roses

he has bare pink feet

and a lovely behind

I live in the sea—”

The poem stopped abruptly.

“I would feel threatened if we had a garden,” Paul said, smiling, and finished the juice in one gulp. When he lowered the glass, there was an orange mustache above his upper lip.

“I think I was asleep,” she said.

“My turn.” He swept her lines aside, and as her five dozen words merged with the remaining two hundred, her small creation dissolved without a trace. Pushing the magnets off to the very edges of the door, he selected just three or four—she could not see which ones behind the broad expanse of his back—and arranged them in the middle of the empty space before stepping away. “Ta-da!”