The Life Room (12 page)

Now I must write it down, seal it on paper. Adam explained how a painter seals a canvas with a layer of gesso, that gesso used to be mixed with rabbit-skin glue and that it is used to prime a canvas before a painter begins to paint with oils. He explained that oil rots fabric, hence the reason for priming it. That always seemed an interesting irony. That oil paint, the material a painter uses to create beauty, has the capacity to rot the fabric it is applied to. As if all beauty is capable of ruin. Perhaps an idea for a story or poem.

I want to write down everything. Later I can sort it out. Louisa May Alcott kept serious diaries, and from passages in her journals novels were formed. Tolstoy kept them, too. I can’t imagine that the Brontës and Austen didn’t, as well. Given the narrowness of their experiences they would have certainly drawn from them. James did. His notebooks are often keys to his work.

It’s nearly dawn already. The light is peeking in through the curtains. Sleep.

I woke up tired and dark this morning. Barely made it to Julie’s lecture called “The Forlorn Mistress in Literature.” She opened with Marvell’s searing “To a Coy Mistress.” I thought she trembled. It was quite moving.

I went to the Louvre again after hearing Julie’s presentation. I stood in front of
Woman with a Pearl
by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. The painting is said to echo both
Mona Lisa
and Vermeer’s
Girl with a Pearl Earring
. There is the same enigma about the model, the same gaze, the same uncertainty as in da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa
. The pearl is a dark, leaf-shaped ornament attached to a light veil on the woman’s forehead. What captivates me about the portrait is not its nod to Vermeer or da Vinci but what Corot might have revealed to the model about herself she had not yet known.

I looked at myself in the mirror in the bathroom of the museum. My face was blurry and out of focus. I applied fresh lipstick. For a moment I couldn’t distinguish who I was.

Just listened to a lecture on
Portrait of a Lady
. Excruciatingly dull. But still, the lecture brought back the tragedy of the novel in its entire remarkable splendor. How little Isabel Archer knows herself at the onset; how in her desire to be free and independent she loses her freedom; how her lack of self-knowledge leads her into a marriage with the evil Osmond. Another complex yet doomed heroine whose sense of pride and duty traps her. I’ve read the novel a few times and the ending still devastates. Why does she return to the evil husband? James’s novels always have the feeling that life goes on beyond the pages. That we are only given a glimpse. The first time I read the novel I imagined that Isabel eventually leaves Osmond for Caspar Goodwood, and yet there isn’t one piece of evidence in the body of the novel—I’ve scanned it endlessly—that should have allowed me to think that way. James understood that people are trapped within themselves. We make choices that make sense at a particular instance, but why should we expect that those choices should withstand the passing of time?

Tonight I’m having dinner with John and Robert and Julie. I’m shattered. I long for just a few minutes of sleep but my mind won’t allow it.

It is 4:00 in the morning. I can’t sleep yet. I’m thinking of the night, of my new friends. None of the three of us, the three of us that are married, talked about our spouses or our children all evening. It was as if we all wanted to be free of our responsibilities and our pasts, to inhabit a foreign city, to experience, at least for a few hours, the thrill of being alive. Phoebe, who had decided to tag along, said she had to leave to wash her hair. It was midnight. She recited lines from
Midsummer Night’s Dream
. She wears high-colored lace tops and velvet blazers, long swirling skirts, and lace-up boots as if she’s stepped out of a Victorian novel or a Shakespeare play. Once she left, John called her loopy and we all laughed. At the bar John decided to do an imitation of a poet giving a poetry reading where each line ended in a question. “This poem is about trees along the Seine,” he began. “It’s called ‘The Trees Along the Seine.’ ‘The Trees Along the Seine.’ It was inspired on my walk along the Seine through the trees. Here it goes. My poem called The Trees Along the Seine.’ He paused. “The Trees Along the Seine?’” We were howling. He’s right. Poets tend to read with that tic of ending a line with a question. Julie turned to me after the laughter died down. “It’s hard to believe you have kids, Eleanor,” she said. “I can’t picture you as a mother.”

The night seemed to move slowly, as if in slow motion, but I couldn’t seem to break away and retreat to my room. I remember tugging at the end of my skirt that had hiked up just slightly over my thighs, once I caught Robert looking at my legs. I told John and Robert an anecdote about Professor Reynolds, our chair, and while I was talking I was thinking about what it would be like to kiss John. Writing this down, sealing it into memory, feels like an act of betrayal. Perhaps writing always feels like a betrayal. The hair clip that held my hair seemed suddenly too tight, and I opened its clasp. I told everyone at the table that the greatest thrill of our chair is when he finds spelling or grammar errors in published papers. He came into my office and showed me an article with two or three spelling errors that a full professor in the department had published in a journal. He was gleeful. “What does it mean to want to humiliate others, to want to be superior?” I said to my friends. “Professor Reynolds went to boarding school, then Harvard, was raised in a privileged world. He thinks spelling errors mean you’re not intelligent.” Everyone laughed. Did I really want to kiss John, or was I a little lonely away from Michael and in need of attention? What if I had allowed it? What harm could it have done, here in Paris? Is it good to keep yourself in check? To be constantly in control of every thought, every feeling, every emotion? Jordan and I had a philosophical discussion about morality after she told me about her lover. She thinks it’s immoral to withhold. To deny oneself the possibility of love, no matter the cost. She’d prefer to take the risk than to live in the limitations of self-denial and regret. She pointed out how rare it is to truly connect with another person. I looked at John. Was I attracted to him? This is crazy. Would I feel the same way if Michael were here? Of course not.

We stayed up drinking until last call. We trashed our departments, gossiped about mutual friends, analyzed movies and books. There was an edge to the conversation, a charge, a current between us. After the bar closed, we drifted to the lobby and lingered at the landing, as if we were wondering in our collective unconscious what was going to happen, who was going to pair off with whom. Once I climbed the stairs to my room I even fantasized. John might be tender. Robert, shy and sweet. Dan had come into the bar later. He likes women who surround him and draw him out. I’m the opposite. I’m always waiting to be drawn out. He’s the kind of man you could easily sleep with for the night, and then shrug it off the next morning. But I have never been able to be casual about sleeping with men. I told myself to stop thinking about them. I brushed my teeth, poured myself a glass of bottled water, took two aspirins, and got into bed. But instead of making me sleepy the alcohol acted as a stimulant. I tried to sleep, but it was hopeless. Before I turned on the light and reached for my pen and notebook I was thinking that each person is like a puzzle, filled with different pieces, conflicting tensions and opposing characteristics shaped by particular events and experiences, and that our behavior is predicted by these pieces, lost in our memory or buried because we don’t want to remember them. My mind is filled with so many thoughts. Only in writing do I seem to be able to quell the anxiety that has overtaken me. Earlier in the day a scholar from Brown quoted from the child psychologist, D. W. Winnicott, that the poet, like the child, needs “a field of privacy to rest where the self cannot be exploited.” The idea of the lecture was about the tension between the need to communicate and the need to remain hidden. Fascinating.

It is only my sixth day in Paris, but the richness of emotions it has inspired makes it seem an eternity. John Cloud gave an astonishing lecture on Keats this morning. I sat in the first few rows and was in awe of his intelligence. His calm yet arresting demeanor. He lectured on “Endymion.” He read the poem in its entirety first, and hearing those first lines again sent a chill down my spine. He quoted Keats, who said he wanted in the long poem to capture the moment when the imagination is healthy but the soul is in “ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain.” After the lecture I thought about what he’d inferred about the Romantics. Whether indeed anxiety was born out of desire in need of being expressed.

I climbed half the Eiffel Tower with Dan after the lecture and then escaped back to my room for a short break (he wanted to go out for cocktails! And it’s not yet noon). When I looked down at the Champs-Elysée I felt as if my life was still waiting to unfold. While climbing the steps I thought about the boys and how much they would have liked to climb them. How Noah would have raced to the top. I bought them postcards and snow globes with the tower inside. I thought of the people I love who are no longer in my life. Is it because I am alone and away from home that I reflect on these things?

I dreamed about my father last night. In Paris even my dreams are rich. Dramatic. I woke with the desire to record the dream, but I haven’t had time until now. I haven’t thought about him intensely in years. In my dream he appeared almost like a suitor. He was the father I remembered from my childhood. He looked innocent and sweet and vulnerable and not yet beaten down by the world. We were together in a boat and my father was rowing me down the river and it was a beautiful day and along the river a line of clapboard houses glowed pink in the rising sun. The stillness of the morning rested on the top of the water. The trees—oaks and huge maples, beeches and sycamores—bent toward us in their entire intricate splendor. They formed a kind of avenue as the rowboat passed, and their leaves sailed slowly into the air and onto the surface in ones and twos. As the sun rose, the clouds parted. In the dream it was hot and I unbuttoned the first buttons on my blouse. My father smiled at me as if I were a cherished object, as if he adored me. The dream seemed to happen in slow motion. I could feel my father looking at me with adoration, and it created a sensation of warmth and safety inside. The dream brought back what my father told me about his own childhood. I remember a line from Tolstoy. “Happiness is given to me from the beginning, drunk with my mother’s milk.” I knew as a child that I was loved. That I was cherished. It is what has sustained me. Even after my father left, I knew it. “This is what it was like in the old country,” my father said, in the dream. “There were trees and forests, Eleanor. You could run forever in the forests and never be afraid. My mother wore a scarf around her beautiful hair so it wouldn’t get caught in the wind.” Or were those words he once told me that I’ve only attributed to my dream? Do people speak to us in dreams?

In the dream my body filled with the warmth of his eyes, with his love, and when I awoke I was bereft, so lost, it was as if I were in the middle of the river in that very boat, alone without a paddle. I didn’t want to get out of bed.

Writing this I remember in detail the last time I saw my father, and it is essential I write it down. Not to forget. I’m afraid of all the things I’ve already forgotten, of all the moments I’ve cherished or that have disturbed or provoked me that I won’t remember. It’s been too painful until now. Strange how strong memories are. We were at the airport. Daddy was on his way to Europe. It was the first time he let me meet one of his girlfriends. He sent me letters describing them in detail, but he kept them all away from me. He was making a connecting flight. Her name was Gina. She was sexual and too young for him, and her presence startled me. I felt as if I were years older than she was, though I’m sure I was wrong. My father had that stupid, sheepish, I-can’t-help-who-I-am look on his face, the look that said
I know what I’ve done to you, I know what I’ve done to your mother. I know I’m weak
. I wanted to hug him. He called a week before and asked me if I would bring Nicholas and the baby. Why did he want to meet his grandsons in an airport before connecting flights? Was it so he could quickly disappear again? I remember when he called to tell me he wasn’t coming to Nicholas’s bris.
Daddy, do you know what the word means
?
It means covenant
, I wanted to say.
you’re missing the ceremony of the day my son forms his covenant with God
. But I said nothing. I didn’t want to alienate him or hurt him. I knew he knew he was disappointing me. Michael says that I expect too much from people. “Look at it from your father’s side. He’s scared, Eleanor. Can’t you see that? He knows he’s failed you and he doesn’t know how to fix it. He isn’t capable of fixing it.” Michael’s right. He’s sensible about these things—it makes me hate him. I want him to rage against my father.

I remember that the morning I went to see my father at the airport I bundled up my son. It was winter. January. I put a few diapers and bottles in my purse, hailed a cab, and we went to LaGuardia. I thought about pulling Nicholas out of school, but I decided against it. How would I explain it to his teacher? His grandfather will only see him in airports between connecting flights? My father and Gina were waiting for us at the United Airlines VIP lounge. My father was drinking scotch on the rocks. His eyes were watery.
Daddy
, it’s
the middle of the morning
, I wanted to say.
Daddy, it’s not even noon
. I looked at Gina, and I wanted to say,
What are you doing, letting him drink at this time in the morning
? He looked smaller. Slightly hunched over. There was a light brush of whiskers on his chin and underneath his cheekbones. He hadn’t shaved. Gina was sipping white wine and smoking. She was wearing tan panty hose. They looked cheap. “I know what you’re thinking,” my father said when Gina excused herself to powder her nose. “‘She’s a shiksa. My father only dates non-Jews.’ You don’t have to say it. She’s nothing like your mother, Eleanor. She’s happy all the time. Have you ever been around happiness, Eleanor? It makes you feel as if you have to be near it all the time or it will vanish. It’s like a butterfly you chase but can’t capture.” Gina was in love with my father. It was written all over her face. She was bragging about him, telling me about the companies he was looking to invest in. I’ve heard about these companies all my life. Companies that manufacture water filters, a company advertising for space in airports, a company involved in herbal teas. I nodded. I looked at my father’s hands. What happened? How did he lose his ambition for his music? How does that happen to a person? Once I asked why he never played anymore. He said it awakened too much desire. He has so few pleasures other than drinking and women and even now those pleasures seem like curses to him, as if he is destroying himself further with his pleasures. I thought his music would save him, but I was wrong. How much do I really know about my father? I remember that Noah was asleep in his Snuggli on my chest. I noticed that my father’s hand (his fingers still long and elegant and well taken care of) was on Gina’s thigh and Gina was laughing. The drinks made them happy. They were going to Amsterdam. My father was checking out a small music publisher of some sort. Gina had never been to Europe. I wanted to remind my father that he had never taken me to Europe, though he had promised he would several times. “Eleanor,” my father said. “Look at you.” Quickly I saw myself take to him again, saw myself become protective and possessive. When he embraced me, I smelled the smell of my father and I felt myself slide into it. I was nearly in love with him, forgetting all his faults and failings.