Forty Rooms (24 page)

Sometimes she thought: Perhaps, when I am ninety years old and my mind is failing, I will find a trunk crammed full of chiffon and glitter in the attic. I will stare at the moth-eaten gowns and the dusty shoes with dimming eyes, and I will mistake my long-ago closet fantasies for actual memories. For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one’s imagination? And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?

She had just squeezed into a full skirt of iridescent peacock-blue taffeta (she had to leave the zipper half undone) and was searching for a suitable top when the telephone shrieked. Frantic, she groped in the pile of discarded shoe boxes. One ring, two rings—and, panting, she grabbed at the receiver, gasped a breathless, slightly slurred “Hello?”

The woman’s accented voice on the other end was unfamiliar.

“Wrong number,” she said curtly, and was hanging up already when the voice resolved into Olga’s briskness.

“Did I catch you at a bad moment?” Olga asked.

Mrs. Caldwell felt a sudden surge of hostility. She has all the time in the world, she thought, so why must she intrude upon what little time I have to myself? But the house lay still; the children, mercifully, went on sleeping; she resigned herself. Clearing the nearby settee of gauzy accumulations of scarves, she settled down and, clutching her half-finished drink, spent a few minutes taking stock of her life. Paul was well, the children were fine, Emma was reading far beyond her years, Eugene enjoyed science, the twins really did have their own language, Celia had not yet begun to sleep through the night. Having dispensed with the obligatory questions, Olga plunged into chatter. Her latest relationship was over but she had just met someone new, she was planning to quit her job and travel for a while, go to Egypt, to Argentina . . . Mrs. Caldwell barely listened, as ever on the alert for the sounds of her children waking; and when, in an offhand, “Oh and I nearly forgot” manner, Olga delivered her real news at last, Mrs. Caldwell caught only the tail end of the sentence.

“What do you mean, three years ahead of schedule?” she had to ask.

“With my novel,” Olga replied. “Remember how I always said I’d write one when I was forty? Well, it’s coming out next spring.”

“Really? That’s great, congratulations . . . Oh no, the baby is crying, I must run . . . Talk soon!”

She finished the vodka tonic in one gulp and sat frowning at her half-dressed reflection in the mirror, and in another minute Paul strode in, shrugging off his jacket. She had not heard him come home.

“God, what a day!” He bent to peck her cheek. “They fired two more guys, and now Mark’s worried that—”

“Paul,” she said. “Remember how we were going to go to Thailand or Greece or China for our honeymoon, but my passport still hadn’t arrived, and anyway you had too much work, so we just went to that bed-and-breakfast in the middle of nowhere instead, and you told me we’d do the real thing later? We never did, though.”

“You got pregnant,” he said, inspecting his tie for stains.

“I know.” She glanced at her reflection, gave the skirt’s zipper a surreptitious upward tug. “Do you . . . do you ever think about that place?”

“What place?”

“The bed-and-breakfast. We were there for three days, and we never even left the room, remember, we had all our meals brought in . . . Well, no, we did drive down to the only bar in town on our first evening, but we were afraid to show our faces there again after we beat all the local high scores on their trivia machine. Oh, we had such a wonderful time—do you remember, Paul? The bed was too soft and too narrow, and it made the floors creak, but we didn’t care.” She laughed a small laugh, gave her empty glass a shake, watched the ice cubes shift and resettle. He was busy sorting through a cluster of suits. She sighed. “And the railroad, remember the railroad?”

“What railroad?”

“There were railroad tracks running just a street away, surely you remember. And I’ve never told you this, but every night, after you’d fallen asleep, I stayed awake for hours listening to the freight trains go by. They were so loud, like huge metal boxes
being dropped again and again and again. Of course, you slept through everything. But every time one of them rattled by, I wanted so badly to wake you up. I imagined us dressing in the dark and sneaking outside and hopping on one of the cars together, leaving all our luggage behind, not even bothering about the final destination, because anywhere out there would be new, anywhere would be thrilling. I never did wake you, though—I didn’t want you to think I was disappointed. But maybe I should have. I mean, who knows where we’d be now if we had really done it . . . Paul, are you even listening?”

“I’m sorry, honey, I’d love to reminisce, but with this work crisis, my mind just isn’t . . .” He had finished surveying his clothes and was now pulling shirts and jackets off hangers. “Besides, take it from me, travel is overrated.”

“Wait—are you packing your bag?”

“Honey, I’ve just explained to you, I have to go to Texas tomorrow, back on Friday . . . Shall I fix you another drink? I’m going downstairs to make one for myself in a minute. If ever I needed one—or three—”

“Sure,” she said after a moment’s pause.

When she stood, the taffeta pooled stiffly around her feet, making her stumble.

He looked up, seemed to take in her drab maternity bra and the unzipped skirt for the first time, and said smiling, “Maybe you should buy yourself some nice new clothes while I’m away. Something . . . custom-fitted.”

She winced and opened her mouth to reply and closed her mouth again.

“One vodka tonic coming right up,” he said, already walking away—and then Celia wailed as she always did, without any warning: asleep one instant, rending the air with bloodcurdling screams the next. In the blink of an eye Mrs. Caldwell wiggled out of the skirt, tossed it onto the hanger, threw on her robe, and was flying out of the closet. In the doorway she heard a faint metallic rustle and, glancing back, discovered the skirt crumpled on the floor, the hanger, bereft of its weight, swinging lightly; but she did not return to pick it up, vanishing instead around the bend of the hallway.

The woman on the other side of the mirror stared after her thoughtfully. It was sad, she considered, what some lives came to when all was said and done; yet in truth, she failed to muster much sadness on behalf of Mrs. Caldwell. She moved her eyes around the closet shelves, studying the haughty lacquer of red-soled pumps, the soft sheen of cashmere shawls, the dry luster of snakeskin clutches. What if some catastrophe erased at one go all the cushioned comforts of that woman’s oblivious life—some devastating natural disaster or, better yet, a bloody revolution? Her husband would be one of the first to get shot, and she would have to rely on herself alone to feed her brood of starving children. She would have nothing left to her name but a pile of expensive trifles, shards of a beautiful, idle life that could no longer be imagined in the new world of military fatigues, food rations, and sudden death; and she would have to trade each ruffled gown, each jeweled bag, for a crust of bread, for a spoonful of milk, for a sliver of life-giving medicine. There might be a poem here, she thought, happy as always when things shimmered with potential
in her mind; but as she glanced again around the closet, she decided against it, already bored with the meaningless clutter of the costly ephemera—bored with Mrs. Caldwell. She picked up her notebook, rubbed the bridge of her nose in a small gesture she had inherited from her father, and left to search for ideas in the wider world.

28. Exercise Room

Conversations with the Dead

“And don’t argue with me, child,” her grandmother said in that habitual tone of disapproval Mrs. Caldwell remembered so well. Whenever she lifted the cigarette to her unevenly painted lips, the pale, expressionless cameo women on her bracelet clattered down her mottled arm. “Your life is unhealthy, I tell you. At your age, you need to meet people, go places, have experiences. You need to be
greedy
.”

Again Mrs. Caldwell did not answer, hoping that such a demonstrable failure to uphold her end of the conversation might put a stop to the tedious dream. She did not remember falling asleep. She remembered herding the children to bed and mixing drinks and feeling better after the first martini and worse after the second. She remembered Paul, who had again returned from work in a foul mood, lecturing her about the state of the economy, asking whether she had not, of late, spent much too freely,
carrying on unintelligibly about mortgages, budgets, overheads and underwrites, or was it overheaders and underwriters, then glancing at her waistline mid-sentence, and glancing away just as quickly. She remembered setting her jaw, making a silent, angry resolution, abandoning her barely touched third martini to change into her workout clothes, and stumbling downstairs to the exercise room. She even remembered plopping down onto the weight bench to tighten her shoelaces—but after that there was a disconcerting blank, and now here she was, running on the treadmill, just as she had intended, except that her late grandmother was sitting on the treadmill’s handlebars, wearing her old purple robe of faded velour and felt slippers the color of dusty roses, and, in turn, lecturing her about life, pulling on her cigarette between admonitions.

“Let me tell you something, child,” her grandmother began anew. “A woman arrived among us recently, and not an old woman either, not a day over sixty—”

“Arrived where?” Mrs. Caldwell interrupted, forgetting her decision not to encourage the unnerving apparition. “Heaven?”

“Never you mind where,” her grandmother replied with irritation. “Anyway, this woman, she spent the last fifteen years of her life lying in bed. Nothing wrong with her, mind you, she just didn’t feel like getting up. Had a live-in nurse bring her meals and clean her messes and tend to her bedsores. Now she’ll be stuck where she is forever. You have to pay to move up, you know, and the currency is memories, stories of your life you must give away, like a kind of scouring, a gradual peeling of onion layers, do you see, to reveal the core within. And no, before you start to argue,
there is a
world
of difference between memories and fantasies. But anyway, this woman, she is like a potato instead of an onion, all bland and mealy inside, so she has nothing to give, nothing whatsoever.”

“Oh, is it like purgatory, then?” Mrs. Caldwell panted, curious in spite of herself.

She had finished the first mile, and was doing the second mile uphill.

Her grandmother ignored her question. “There is an even sadder case, a woman who sat on her toilet for years, refusing to stand up, until her skin actually grew around the seat. Mind-boggling, it is, but I tell you”—and she stabbed the glowing cigarette perilously close to Mrs. Caldwell’s face—“this is exactly where you are heading if you are not careful. Can’t you just stop this senseless trotting in place and listen to me? No matter how fast you run, you won’t run away from yourself, you know.”

Mrs. Caldwell clamped her lips tight, and furtively increased the speed and the incline of the treadmill, hoping that her grandmother might fall off; but the old woman held on.

“It’s not healthy, I tell you,” she repeated. “You need to learn how to drive, you need to get out of the house, you need people around you. And by ‘people’ I don’t mean anyone below the age of ten, or anyone whom you pay, either. Otherwise, before you know it, you’ll start talking to yourself or imagining things that aren’t there, or worse, not being able to tell the two apart. You’re too young to spend your life within four walls.”

At this, Mrs. Caldwell had to speak, had to object.

“I’m thirty-eight, Grandmother. Almost thirty-nine. Hardly
young.” To herself, she added: In this place, aging begins early. And earlier still when you have five kids.

“Child, you don’t have the slightest idea of what aging means. And who forced you to have five kids?” her grandmother grumbled, just as though Mrs. Caldwell had voiced her thoughts aloud. She should not have drunk that third martini, she scolded herself dully. “And did you have any of your children for the simple reason that you wanted to have them?” the old woman continued relentlessly. “Indeed you did not. You had the first one to console a sick parent, the second to provide a playfellow for the first, the next two by accident, or maybe out of some self-destructive impulse—let a council of psychiatrists puzzle over that one—and the last, the last out of guilt. Children are not some stoppers you can wedge in wherever your life springs a leak. Next you’ll be having one to fix your failing marriage.”

“My marriage isn’t failing!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with indignation.

Her grandmother was the one to stay silent now, but her silence felt full of gloating.

“Oh, what can you possibly know about it?” Mrs. Caldwell cried, nettled. “You divorced both of your husbands, and only ever had my mother, and you didn’t even raise her, you left her to Grandfather and his second wife to raise, while you went off somewhere, I suppose to have experiences and to be greedy. Well, I have all the experiences I need right here. Of course, I could have had a different life, I could have gone hopping from Paris to Rome to Vienna with that—that genius wannabe who didn’t love me nearly enough and who was so self-absorbed he probably would
never have wanted children. Instead I chose to create a real home, to have a family with a man who makes me feel safe and whole, who will always love me, no matter what—”

Her grandmother’s small eyes glittered like a crow’s, and her voice grew sharp with wicked triumph. “And if he will always love you no matter what, then tell me, my dear, why are you huffing and puffing like that on this infernal contraption?”

And all at once grief was upon her. The monstrous notion of growing old, of losing her husband’s love, of finding herself alone—of having her entire life fall apart—took hold of her roughly. Was it indeed true that she had spent her best years as a fairy-tale princess locked away in a tower—a confinement of her choosing, a confinement with many comforts, but one with barred windows and locked doors all the same? And now, seeing the gates inexplicably open, had she wandered outside, only to find herself, dazed and helpless, in the midst of a dark, frightening forest where wild beasts crouched in wait in the shadow of the night and she herself was no longer young enough, no longer pretty enough, to count on a rescue by a passing knight?