Forty Rooms (8 page)

As we walked, the stacks became darker, the static humming of lamps more remote. Here and there deeper patches of twilight lay on the shelves, the book spines growing less distinct, melting into one another, escaping the alphabet’s confines.

“Unfortunately for you, my dear, a woman’s flesh tends to be . . . oh, shall we say, more insistent than a man’s—and thus her choices may be harder. For every human being, no matter how brilliant, has only a predetermined capacity for creation, and a child, you see, is no less a creation than a book, albeit of an entirely different order and often less lasting. Well, naturally, that depends on the book and on the child . . . Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth, I used to visit her namesake, one Elizabeth Heywood. You’ve never heard of her, of course, but who is to say that today you wouldn’t speak of her in the same breath with Shakespeare had she not chosen to birth, raise, and bury a child for nearly every one of his great tragedies? On the other hand, one of those children was John Donne—so one never knows how this sort of thing will turn out. There are different kinds of immortality, after all. Choosing the spirit or choosing the flesh is ever a private matter.”

We should have reached the far end of the stacks long ago, but the shelves went on stretching before us into what was now a murkiness of densely shifting shadows.

I found myself slowing my steps.

“Walk with me,” he threw over his shoulder. “Now, one of the things I find so boring about this modern age of yours is all the nonsense about women being discriminated against throughout history, beaten down by the male hierarchy, forced to do housework while their men achieve greatness. Never believe it. The Muses were all women, if you recall; Orpheus was the odd one out. But the Muses were virgins. Well, not in the technical sense of the word—I had to divert myself somehow between all the lyre-strumming bits, and now and then they did stray into some transient unions of their own. But they were never devoted wives and never committed mothers, and all their time, all their passion, was dedicated solely to their art.”

It had become so dark I could not see the shelves at all. I followed his voice blindly. Gravel or perhaps seashells crunched under my feet, and I stifled a cry when the flinty wing of some swift nocturnal creature brushed my cheek.

“Now, as always, you have a choice. You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or—as ever through the ages—you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you. Here, turn around.”

He stopped with such abruptness that my face was pressed into his jacket in the instant before I felt his arms grasp my shoulders
and swing me about. I could see nothing at first—it was so black I thought for a moment that I had forgotten to open my eyes—but I had a sure sense that we were in the library no longer: the darkness, though impenetrable, breathed of vastness, and the ceiling with its dead electric lamps had long given way to the cosmic circling of infinity. Then slowly, out of the void, a steady light emerged, and another, and another, until lights were floating all around me—numerous but not endless, a thousand sparks, two thousand perhaps, setting the emptiness aglow as they drew their fiery trajectories across the night, until the night itself was relieved of its oppressive blackness and other, paler lights shimmered in a faint haze of lesser constellations beyond.

“There,” he whispered. His breath was in my hair; his right hand, slipping off my shoulder, was pointing into the luminous depths. “The lights of the earth—both men and women, of course, but look at the women: in the eyes of the masses, nothing but a gathering of perversions and monstrosities, of recluses and harlots. Sappho over there—my Tenth Muse, they called her, a heartache of mine—just a handful of her lines survive today and, oh, if only you knew what beauty has been lost . . . Curious, is it not, that so many of them shared Sappho’s tastes and predilections—Tsvetaeva, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, numerous others . . . And here are the nuns, the mystics, the philosophers, the odd and the solitary and the sickly ones, the ones who never married—Teresa of Ávila, Hypatia, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson . . . And don’t forget all the wild ones as well as the quiet ones who gently and unswervingly eschewed convention—the two Georges, Sand and Eliot, come to mind. And most of the
married ones were childless, and of the ones who did have children, so many became what the world would brand ‘unnatural mothers’—take Akhmatova and Colette, who sent their children away to be raised by relatives, or Tsvetaeva, who let her daughter starve to death in an orphanage. Heartless? Most certainly, by any human standards—but they lived and died by other, higher standards, the divine standards of art.”

His right hand was still pointing as he talked, but his left had begun to stroke my neck, ever so lightly. Waves of glowing flame swirled about me, through me, and I was aware that there was no ground under my feet. I felt queasy, and wanted to wake up.

“Alternatively . . .” I said, and my voice was hoarse—these were the first words I had spoken since we had abandoned the safety of my cubicle. “Alternatively, one could just marry an understanding man of means and hire a nanny.”

As soon as I spoke, his hand on my neck grew heavy and inert, as though made of marble, and the swirling lights guttered as in a gust of wind, and went out. Blackness crashed upon me, suffocating and enormous, but I had no time to feel frightened before the electric lamps whirred to an abrupt glare. Blinded, I shut my eyes. When I opened them, I expected him to be gone, but he was still there, looking down upon me as I sat at my desk—and I was shocked to see his face, for it was not as before, not handsome and hard and leering, but tranquil and beautiful, filled with a gentle radiance of autumn sunlight and, also, an odd kind of sadness.

Unable to sustain his gaze, I lowered my eyes to the floor.

“You aren’t barefoot tonight,” I mumbled, to hide my confusion.

“There was a notice on the library door,” he said flatly. “‘Shoes
and shirts required.’ And don’t start thinking about that boy’s shirt again, or one day you may find yourself laundering it.”

I laughed, knowing full well that this time I was truly alone, and raised my eyes again, to discover that two or three books had fallen off my desk onto the floor; I must have pushed them with my elbow while dozing, and the crash had woken me up. I hunted in my overflowing bag for a compact mirror to check my face for any signs of drool, just in case anyone wandered by, and marveled at the unsought wealth of ideas that had sprung up in my mind fully formed, out of nowhere, while I had slept. The Cycle of Memory, I would call these new poems. There would be one about a blind girl who lived in the library and summoned ghosts of her favorite poets to life every night; and another about a compendium of immortality carelessly updated by an angel who kept drifting off to sleep in the softness of his cloud and forgetting to jot down a name or two; and yet another about a peasant in some desert discovering the missing manuscript of all of Sappho’s masterpieces—this one would weave in and out of Sappho’s lines, real and imagined, as the
fellah
would stumble and mumble over them before tearing the papyrus into strips to bind his aching feet—oh, and maybe one about a woman creating a marvelous, perfect poem about each child she had refused to have, though on second thought, no, I knew nothing about children . . . So, then, how about a Muse of Apollo—I would make her Clio, the Muse of History—who fell in love and renounced being a Muse for a spell, causing entire civilizations to be obliterated in human memory while her love affair went on—and more, and more, and more . . .

I felt awake and young and exhilaratingly happy.

8. Boyfriend’s Bedroom

The First English Poem, Written at the Age of Nineteen

“And while the rats were having sex in their cage,” the girl shouted over the noise, “this guy next to me actually stood up to see better. Can you imagine? And Professor Roberts noticed him and said, in front of everyone—” The music took off anew, a galloping folk tune this time, and a cluster of boys across the room roared and linked their arms and stomped about, vigorously throwing their legs up in the air, so the end of her sentence was drowned out. I watched her eyes widen with excitement in the eyeholes of her feathered mask. She leaned closer. “. . . so intense, you know!”

“I’m supposed to take it next semester,” I shouted back, “but I’m not sure—”

“Ah, here you are!” Lisa cried, elbowing her way through the dancers. “What are you still doing with your old drink? I brought you a new one.”

I squinted into the plastic cup she was holding out.

“It’s green,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed happily. “So finish the pink one already. They have something blue too. Embrace the rainbow.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” the girl in the mask announced unexpectedly and wandered off, walking on tiptoe, her long black hair slapping against her back.

I looked after her.

“Does she live here?” I asked.

“No. This is Hamlet’s place. She wants to be his girlfriend, I suspect. Who doesn’t, though? But he is trouble. And if you’re not going to drink that, pass it over.”

The folksy hurly-burly had given way to an Oriental whine, and a boy in an ankle-length caftan spread his arms wide and twirled about the room, keening loudly.

“Lisa, who
are
all these people? And what’s with the music?”

“It’s eclectic,” she said, unperturbed, and gave her cup an energetic shake; a few ice cubes leapt out and somersaulted in the air before plunking back with a green splash. “And I told you already, they’re in my theater class. You really should leave your library cubicle more often.”

For a while we watched the crowd, most of them dressed in black, the rest decked out in some outlandish garb, a few wearing masks. The lights were turned down low, but what little could be seen of the apartment—a flea-market couch, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, shelves made of crates—created a contrast I found unpleasant, as if all present here were trapped in a simple, one-dimensional story and were striving frantically, almost shrilly, to clown their way out in order to inhabit a more interesting one.

Someone thrust a potted geranium at me in passing.

“Enjoy,” he said with a beatific smile.

Feline whiskers, I saw, were scrawled across his cheeks with an orange marker.

I set the pot on a nearby crate and poured my untouched pink drink into it.

“Lisa, I’m going back to the dorm,” I said. “I’m bored. And I’m not dressed for this anyway.”

“One day, you know,” my roommate sang out, “one day you’ll look back at your youth and regret all the things you haven’t done. Talk of years wasted! Here you are, almost twenty years old, and have you ever been drunk? No. Have you ever had a proper boyfriend? No. Have you ever even—”

Quickly I interrupted, “It’s too loud, I can’t hear anything, I’ll see you later.”

I wound my way toward the doorway, swerving widely so as not to step on a python that slumbered in a woven basket in the middle of the floor, skirting some commotion; people were beginning to drag the furniture against the walls. Past the living room, the kitchen was deserted; a wet trail of bare footprints glistened across the entire length of its white linoleum floor. I followed the footprints into the hallway, in time to see a bare-legged girl, her face hidden by a soaked tangle of long, dark hair, her shoulders heaving with sobs, being draped in an oversize trench coat and gently pushed across the threshold by a tall, thin man.

The man closed the apartment door behind her and turned, and saw me.

Embarrassed to have witnessed something private and unpleasant, I squeezed past him with my face averted. In the hallway
mirror, my awkward double in blue jeans and a checkered button-down shirt, her hair pulled back in an unfashionable ponytail, her face bare of any feminine artifice save a careless swipe of gloss across her lips, prodded the lock.

“Leaving already?” his voice asked softly at my back.

“I have a paper due on Monday.”

“That’s a pity. You are easily the most fascinating person here.”

I looked up at him for the first time. He stood watching me, leaning with casual elegance against the wall, dressed in a cardigan of gray cashmere, his face pale and vivid and arresting in its fierce intelligence, a gray cat draped around his shoulders. Behind him, framed by the two doorways, I could see the dim rectangle of the party room, now freed of its couch and armchairs; just then, a conga line of slender girls was undulating across it, crowned by a gigantic papier-mâché dragon’s head.

My mousy reflection nudged me with her shoulder.

“I seriously doubt it,” I said, and resumed tugging at the lock.

He glanced back into the room.

“Oh, you mean them?” he said. “No, no, they try too hard to be original. All they really do is create a background against which true originality stands out . . . But I see you’re anxious to go. I won’t detain you, of course, but won’t you take just a sip of this very fine whiskey for the road, so I’m not left feeling that my hospitality was wholly lacking?”

He held up his drink in a squat crystal tumbler. I heard the ice clink invitingly against the glass, and thought: No plastic cups for this one. He was looking at me over the rim, one eyebrow lifted. The cat was looking at me too. Their eyes were alike, light and cold and amused. I renewed my assault on the door.

“Thank you, but I don’t drink whiskey.”

Oh, what the hell was wrong with this thing, did it turn right or left—

The man spoke unhurriedly.

“Is this a principle of yours, or do you simply not care for the taste?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Then forgive me the obvious question: How do you know you don’t like it? Personally, I’m an ardent follower of the immortal lessons of Dr. Seuss.”