Forty Rooms (19 page)

“I see. You want to dispense with the forty-room requirement all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in something out of
The Great Gatsby
. It’s a moot point, though—you know we can’t afford it anyway. Of course you make good money, but I don’t work, and there are all your student loans, and your car, and Genie will be starting preschool in the fall, and then Emma. And I was hoping to get a car of my own someday too . . . Even this place is a strain. Unless your parents help us, and we’ve decided against asking them, I thought.”

“Well, but we won’t need my parents’ help. That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember when I turned in that proposal in the spring? Well, last week we actually . . . Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

“Sorry, I must have dozed off. You were saying?”

“I’m saying I’m likely to become full partner by the end of March. With the money we’d have we could get the perfect house. We could start looking in the summer, move in time for Christmas. Imagine having a real fire in a fireplace and the kids’ stockings hanging from the mantel. Eugene would love it, he would be four, the ideal age. And you too, you could use some happiness right now. How nice would that be?”

“That does sound nice . . . unrealistic but nice . . .”

“It will happen, you’ll see. Hey, your feet are still cold. Let me just—”

“Mmm . . . That’s nice . . . mmm . . . mmm . . . Oh, Paul . . . mmm . . . That was nice . . . But I really must get some sleep
now . . . Oh. Paul? Paul! She is crying again, wake up, it’s really your turn now. Oh, no. Did you hear that? I think Genie’s up too.”

“Mama? I had a scary dream. There was a monster who ate all my socks. I’m thirsty.”

“Paul? Paul! Oh, hell . . . Hold on, sweetie, Mama will be right there.”

My dream house: a place where you can
sleep.

Part Four

The   Present

21. Ballroom

Holiday Checklist

Cards and gift baskets for Paul’s family. Check.

Tips for the mailman and the grocery man. Check.

New rug delivered. Check.

Fire burning in the fireplace. Check.

Silver garlands, bronze deer, gilded fir cones, red poinsettias, soft Christmas carols, smells of cinnamon and pine, trays of freshly baked cookies still hot to the touch, holiday cheer—all unpacked from various boxes, unwrapped, dusted off, aired out, arranged here and there. Check, check, check.

Four stockings suspended from the mantel, three of them identical, sporting names in green and red letters: “Paul,” “Eugene,” “Emma.” Paul’s was soft and worn-out, the wool, once white, graying with the accumulated soot of many Christmas fires; it had been knitted at his birth by an elderly great-aunt who was, miraculously, still alive nearly a third of a century later to present
their children with matching stockings. The fourth stocking, her own, did not match and had no name on it, but, unlike the other three, it carried a small private memory with it. On a cold, windy day in November six years before, the two of them had wandered into a neighborhood antique shop; Paul had found the stocking in the dingy back room and, maneuvering it off the hook, had turned to her and, looking uncharacteristically nervous, said, “For when we have a mantelpiece.” That evening he had asked, and, unsurprised, she had said yes. Check.

An enormous tree, the size of Paul with Gene standing on his shoulders. Check.

A room vast enough to accommodate said tree. Some months before, as they had followed the genial real estate agent on their first tour of the house, she had felt dazed by the stately succession of spaces—the entrance hall with its marble staircase, the living room with its blinding wall of windows, the expansive kitchen with the sunlit dining area separated by the curve of the granite island, the darkly paneled library, then yet another room, which appeared to be a second living room, with a spectacular chandelier she had just narrowly avoided walking into. “It’s hung a bit low, I think,” she said, flustered, and the agent laughed his agreeable laugh and said, “But naturally, there will be a table underneath.” “Oh,” she said, “I thought the dining room was back there.” “No, honey,” Paul said, smiling, “that was just the breakfast nook.” “Oh,” she said again. By then they had returned to the hall and the agent had stopped before the tall French doors on its opposite side. “And the best for last,” he said.

She fully expected that they had come to the end of the house
and would now find themselves outside, and so was unable to suppress a gasp when, after a dramatic pause, the agent pushed the double doors open.

“The ballroom,” he announced.

She thought: It’s like a house within a house—a house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like in some magic story. I will write a poem about a delighted little girl who discovers a fairy-tale ballroom, complete with candlelit mirrors and princesses twirling in a waltz, hidden in the middle of her suburban bungalow. But when she considered for another minute, she knew that there was no poem in it: the mere notion of living in a house that contained something called a “ballroom” left her too stunned for words.

“Just look at these ceilings,” Paul said, tilting his head.

(Sudden money, and not as much as they suppose, the agent thought, appraising his clients with an experienced eye; the woman especially looked all agog with greed. The agent had “Peter Boggart” printed on his expensively embossed business cards, but his real name was Bogdan Petković, and he did not like big new houses, or the people to whom he showed them. His grandfather had kept bees in a small village in the Balkan mountains, and he himself dreamed of going back there once he had set aside enough savings. Whenever he felt drained, he imagined the drowsy droning of bees above a blue meadow, and a dark-eyed girl by the village well looking at him over her shoulder with a quick, saucy smile; the vision never failed to motivate him.)

“Twenty-two by thirty-two, with a fourteen-foot ceiling,” the agent offered energetically. “You could almost fit the White House tree in here.”

Check.

(“It’s perfect,” Paul had said as soon as the agent had waved his good-bye.

“It costs much too much,” she said.

“We can afford it. As long as we budget.”

“The kids might fall down the stairs,” she said.

“We’ll set up childproof gates.”

“I wouldn’t be able to hear them at night,” she said.

“We’ll put monitors everywhere.”

“It would take all my life to clean it,” she said.

“So we’ll hire a maid. Once I get my next raise.”

“All the furniture we own would fit in that one throne room, or whatever he called it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the house,” she said.

“We can get a decorator to help you. It will be fun. Please, honey, don’t fret so much. This house is perfect for us. And we can finally get a dog. Or even two.”

She thought: God help me, I love the house.

She thought: I no longer recognize the shape of my life.

Aloud she said, “You have a solution for everything, don’t you?”—and, after a moment, remembered to smile, so it would not sound like a reproach.)

The penultimate item on her holiday checklist: a dozen children’s presents to assemble under the tree in festive piles—check, check, check. They had promised to give each other no gifts that year: she had not yet mastered driving, and the new house was even farther out than the old one, with no stores to walk to; in any case, she had argued, the house was gift enough for both
of them. On Christmas morning, still in her pajamas, she kneeled on the new rug and watched the children; four-year-old Gene whooped with excitement as he tore the paper off his puzzles, and one-and-a-half-year-old Emma lay cooing on top of a gigantic plush dog. Once all the presents had been unwrapped, dismembered, and discarded, Paul brought in mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and she gathered both children into her flannel-clad lap and sat looking at the flames, while white wintry sunlight flooded the great expanse of the bare room. There is something so peaceful about a fire in the morning, she thought. Emma grew heavy with sleep, making her right arm numb; Gene stared at the wisps of snow that darted outside the still-curtainless windows.

“Tell us one of your stories,” she asked.

Gene nodded and, not pausing to think, began: “Once upon a time a boy wanted to make a snowman, but it was fall, and there was no snow, so he made his snowman out of leaves. But in the morning he woke up, and the snowman was not there: the wind carried it away at night. But when Christmas came, the boy made another snowman out of snow, and it was so much fun. The end.”

As she listened, her habitual worry loosened its hold on her heart, and she felt certain, almost certain, that this house was just what they needed—that here Gene and Emma would be sure to have a childhood no less magical than hers had been. But magic, she knew, was not born of place alone; she too would have to try harder. When Gene fell silent, she reached for the book of Russian folktales that had been her present to him, showed him the pictures of firebirds and bears. He seemed indifferent until his eyes fell on a reproduction of a painting she had loved as a child,
which he studied in absorbed silence. “The rider has stopped at the crossroads,” she explained, pleased by his interest. “See this stone? The words on it say: ‘If you go straight, you’ll find happiness. If you go right, you’ll lose your horse. If you go left, you’ll lose your life.’ He is choosing where to go.”

Paul guffawed. “Why would anyone choose to go right or left?”

“Hmm,” she said. “I never thought of it like that. Maybe you need to be Russian to find it tempting.”

“Or maybe he can’t read,” Gene said, sounding slightly disdainful; he had learned his letters in the fall. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”

“Scary?” she repeated, surprised, and looked at the picture again—and saw the empty yellow sky, the crows and the skulls, and the horseman, his face invisible, stooped before the gravestone; and now his pose did seem to her one of deep weariness, perhaps even defeat, and the entire landscape pregnant with an evil hush of ominous forebodings.

Gene leaned over to push the book away, and spilled his mug of chocolate on the Persian rug. Emma woke up wailing as a few hot drops landed on her wrist. But of course memories and enchantments aren’t transmitted by blood, she told herself sensibly; it was only natural that their childhood magic would be different from hers. And as she rushed to take care of burns and stains, she strove to smother the dull throb of sadness deep, deep inside her.

That evening, when the exhausted, satisfied children had fallen asleep, the monitors crackling at their bedsides, she returned to the darkened ballroom and sat on the floor by the dying fire. After some minutes, Paul came to join her, a glass of spiced eggnog in one hand, a long velvet box in the other.

“A little something for you,” he said, setting the box gently in her lap.

“But Paul,” she protested. “I thought we’d agreed—”

“It’s nothing. Just a token, really. Go ahead, open it.”

Inside was a choker necklace of golden filigree.

“It’s lovely,” she said with a small sigh.

“Here, let me—the clasp has a trick to it . . .”

There sounded a sharp little snap, like a clang of rodent teeth. She looked at the shadowy woman in the nearest mirror, at all the women in all the mirrors around the room, then slowly lifted her hand to her throat. The necklace felt cold, heavy, and smooth under her fingers. She thought she saw a reflection on the edge of the crowd stand up and leave without a glance back, and was seized by a wild desire to follow.

She turned her back to the mirrors.

“This is just the way we imagined it,” Paul said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied—but as she said it, she knew that she had never imagined anything like it. She had grown up in a world where the value of jewels had been measured in stories, not carats, and the castle she had dreamed of inhabiting as a little girl had nothing to do with owning property, or with drinking eggnog on a palatial (if somewhat stained) Tabriz: it had been merely a wish to live in the daily presence of beauty—the idea of beauty, as she had understood it in her seven-year-old mind. Yet this beautiful house was not an idea, it was real—too real; and she could no longer pretend, as she had in their low-ceilinged bungalow, that it was all temporary somehow, a flimsy, hastily assembled theatrical set, a prelude to a proper life she would lead someday soon.

But perhaps she was wrong to feel so apprehensive. There was an art of poetry, true, but there was an art of living as well, and, contrary to the beliefs of the nineteenth-century romantics, one did not preclude the other, did it? Perhaps it was time she learned something of the latter. And why should she not enjoy a comfortable house with two bright, healthy children and a loving husband? She emerged from her anxious reverie to discover him kissing her neck, a little shyly, whispering about christening this rug, this room—this house, actually, even though they had now lived here for almost two months—for it had been a while, a long while, a very long while, she kept putting him off, she had not yet had a chance to visit her doctor since Emma’s birth, to talk about options, and he had grudgingly agreed that two was probably enough, yes, three would have been nice, three would have been his choice, he supposed, but he understood that two was just right for them. But maybe this time, just this one time, she could stop worrying and live in the moment, for what were the chances, and wasn’t that what she wanted, a life of spontaneity, a life of experience—and the embers were glowing so cozily in the fireplace, and the tree was tinkling and sparkling above them, and the taste of eggnog was sweet on her lips, and of course in time she would write all the poetry she meant to write, and everything, everything, would turn out just fine.