The Life Room (15 page)

By the time we finished the first bottle of wine, I began to feel tired, but I didn’t want to go up to the room yet. We had moved our party to the hotel bar by then. A few minutes later our conversation was interrupted by a Tolstoy scholar, Professor Talbot, chairman of the Comp Lit Department at UCLA. Apparently, the fire I had witnessed in my room that first day might have been an act of terrorism by an as-yet unidentified group. The fears that had mounted since 9/11 came back instantly. We stayed up drinking. None of us wanted to be alone.

I remembered the fire, how it consumed the apartment across the way, and I thought that none of us were ever safe, that our lives were threatened daily by forces we couldn’t control, and the best we could do was to find serenity in the moment. I longed to hold my sons, to make sure that they were safe.

I tried not to think about the strained conversation I’d had with Michael after I’d given the presentation. I’m in Paris, for God’s sake. We’re all tighter having spent many nights together. More relaxed in each other’s company. The erotic tension between all of us is visceral. Julie has been flirting with John since our adventure at Notre Dame. Robert continues to stare at me. I felt him watching me when I was talking to John and Julie, looking at me when I sipped my wine. Is he waiting for a signal? What does he want from me? “It’s always the woman who makes the first move,” Jordan had once told me. Robert is sweet, but even if I were single, I’m not really interested in him in that way. What am I talking about? Of course I’m not.

Robert said my paper hit on something personal for him.

We talked about love and the idea that the self cannot be complete unless someone reflects who you are back to you, unless you’ve established that deep connection. Otherwise we are alienated, unknown to ourselves. As he spoke I thought about the earlier conversation I’d had with John about Keats’s longing for a feminine counterpart in the poem “Endymion.”

Robert asked if passion makes us stronger or whether it diminishes us.

“Eleanor and Rob are getting too serious,” Dan said. “Would someone pour them another glass of wine? Passion gets me into trouble,” he said. “That’s as deep as it gets.” Quite frankly, I was relieved. Robert’s direct questioning made me uncomfortable. Again, I had begun to feel that there was something incomplete about my paper, and I wanted to forget it.

All evening I watched how Robert had attempted to control himself. Earlier in the evening after one or two drinks, he tried to abstain from drinking more. At one point he said he was tired, yawned, and remarked that he should go up to his room. It was close to midnight by then. Dan pleaded for him to stay for another drink. An hour or so later I saw him look at his watch again, noticed the ambivalence in his face because I felt the same way, pulled between two poles. Had he been thinking of his wife? Her name was Claire. She was a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, where they both taught. Robert had described her as quiet. “She’s British, you know. She has no needs.”

“Does passion make us stronger or does it fuck us up?” Robert asked again. The more he seemed to drink, the darker and more serious his countenance. “Come on, Eleanor, I need to know.” He was drunk. “Claire and I went to college together,” he explained about his wife. He said she was the first person he fell in love with. “Does that mean I’m supposed to feel passionate about her forever?”

I looked at Robert and told him that my paper was about a novel. I told him that when it came to real life I was in the dark.

I wondered whether Robert wanted to kiss me.

We stayed out late drinking, went dancing, and then resumed the party in Robert’s hotel room. The quiet and claustrophobia—the hotel rooms are so small in Europe—inside Robert’s room made me tired. Dan brought along a young grad student he had met at the disco. She was French. Her name was Genevieve. She had danced in a little circle by herself, enraptured with her own body. The two of them sat in one chair The rest of us were sitting around a small table. I felt the same feeling of discomfort I’d experienced the first time we went out drinking together, but this time I felt closer to the group, more connected, and I tried to relax. John had pulled the desk chair forward. After a scotch, Dan and Genevieve began to kiss in the chair, then got up and said goodnight. I was slightly envious of their ability to be intimate in front of others, showing that desire isn’t something to be ashamed of. John said he didn’t think we’d be seeing Dan at breakfast, and we all smiled.

I moved to sit at the edge of the bed. Robert got up and lay down on the bed beside me. He asked if we minded if he turned off the lights. We could crash on the queen bed, if we wanted to. I thought I should go to my room but I didn’t want to be alone. John rose and said he should get to bed, and then he poured himself another finger of scotch, fell back down on the bed, and closed his eyes. His body was next to mine and if I had been single I might have reached out to touch him.

Earlier in the night at the disco I had watched John as he sat uncomfortably at the bar, drinking a glass of beer and smoking while the rest of us danced. His eyes followed me as I began to loosen up on the dance floor. I could see in the way he looked at me that he wanted to relinquish himself, to let go, but he couldn’t. He was caged inside himself. I understood it. I was usually too uptight to let myself go, but it was the combination of the excitement of the paper and being in Paris among no one who really knew me that released me. Later I joined John at the bar and tried to start a conversation (I hated to think of him alone, alien to himself, drinking more to estrange him further from the world) but the music was too loud, and I was grateful not to have to try too hard. I felt strangely as if I had deserted him by dancing, that we had served a certain role for each other—we were the two older, wiser onlookers in the group and I was breaking the rules.

Julie watched as John rose to leave and I saw a grimace of disappointment in her face. And then her face relaxed when he lay back down. She filled the water glass that had been in Robert’s bathroom with another ounce of scotch. She lay down on the bed and began talking about a man she had been involved with, the chair of her department. She told us he was married. They’d slept together a few times and then he began seeing a graduate student and she had to go on pretending it didn’t bother her, seeing him in faculty meetings, running into him in the department office. Robert suggested she go on the job market.

“And let that fucker ruin my career? Let him win?” She took a sip of her scotch and looked back at us. Her eyes moistened. “I’m still in love with him,” she remarked. Her voice quivered. She cast her eyes down and sank into a private place within herself. We all grew silent. “It’s so stupid,” she said.

By then the mood had shifted, as if the intoxication of the night only seemed to show us how we had longed to let go and now we were returning back to ourselves, alone and separate.

After Julie revealed that she was in love with her chair, I thought of her differently. She’ll never marry. She’ll always see herself as a seductress, the other woman to a man. She had fallen into the role and it had come to define her personality. It was too late. She did not know how to re-create herself apart from being a woman who had been disappointed. I thought about how helpless we are to change. How our ways of being get hardwired into our personalities.

To offer comfort I confessed to a time I had been with a married man, with Adam, and saying it out loud, it occurred to me that I had never told anyone about the affair before, that it had dwelled inside me, had become almost dormant, like a silent child living within me. At that time I had told myself that Adam and Mariana had been unhappy, otherwise he would never have fallen in love with me. I blamed Adam for what had happened between us. After the affair had started, something had shifted between Adam and myself that needed to run its course. No matter how often over the years I had dismissed Adam’s infatuation with me as a middle-aged obsession, no matter how much I had denied the truth of my own feelings for him, of how I had damaged his marriage, we had shared a real connection. By revealing the affair to Robert, John, and Julie I was suddenly exposed to them as a complicated, compelling woman and not the woman I appeared to be on the surface. The mature, settled wife and mother, the academic. Something has been brewing inside me and I can’t look away from it any longer: I see myself as I truly am, rife with deep, complicated desires, a woman who might never be fully content, who will always want more attention, more connection and adventure. I see that I have married a less complicated man not only because it allows me to be whoever I want but maybe because it scares me less to be around someone who will never really understand me. I want to discount the thought, to stuff it away where my other uncomfortable thoughts live. But it is no longer possible.

I took another sip of the scotch. The liquor burned my throat as it went down. I looked at the three of them. I feared I had let loose something in my personality, that I had said too much and that in the morning when I saw them at breakfast I would not be able to look any of them in the eye. None of us would be able to. We had revealed too much of ourselves and we could not take back what we saw. Robert also made a confession. His father was sexually compulsive. He had slept with women he didn’t know, women he’d pick up in bars, in restaurants, in hotel lobbies. He said his father confessed about it when he left his mother. Robert said he felt the compulsion. He worried that he had married too young. He married his first girlfriend. He loved her. He couldn’t imagine his life without her, but he constantly looked at other women. He’d had a flirtation with a young professor in his department, but it had ended badly. The woman had grown tired of it. The relationship had reached beyond the level of flirtation and Robert had been afraid to take it one step further and the woman had accused him of leading her on.

“Maybe you’re really in love with your wife and you’re afraid,” I offered as counsel. “Maybe you’re afraid of real intimacy. Maybe what we think of as too familiar is really too intimate?” I said. Or something to that effect.

“Maybe intimacy and sex are incompatible,” Julie argued, in her deep, hoarse, woman-of-the-world voice. She had taken off her boots, Her feet with her painted toenails underneath their sheer stockings, slightly crinkled from her boots, looked exposed.

“Maybe I just don’t want to fuck my wife,” Robert said.

“I’ve never fucked a man I’ve respected or even liked,” Julie said, rolling on her side. I like how she says what’s on her mind. How definitive she is. “They’re all assholes.” We laughed. We doubled over and laughed until we cried.

“I just want to get fucked,” Robert said. “I’m a guy, aren’t I?”

We laughed harder. Once our laughter died out, silence fell over the room. I looked at Robert and I saw what he was thinking. There was a glint of relief in his eye. The moment had passed. We were four friends again. We wanted to imagine that we might seduce each other, pair off, whatever people did at conferences away from their spouses and loved ones, but we were impotent to carry it out. Julie yawned. “I’m out of here,” she said. “We’d better get a few hours of sleep or we’ll be ruined tomorrow.”

John rolled over and moaned.

I picked up my bag from the chair where I had left it and said goodnight to Robert and gave him a light hug. I kissed John on the cheek. I unlocked the room with my key, took off my clothes, and slipped into bed without washing up or brushing my teeth. The light had just begun to reveal itself, slowly, shyly, as if resisting the darkness. Once in bed I took out my notebook—how wonderfully clandestine it felt—and began to write this just before the light crested.

I awoke to the telephone ringing. My wake-up call. I was so tired I fell back to sleep. When I awoke again it was 11:00. I had arranged to meet Stephen for lunch at noon. I regretted wasting the morning in Paris lying in bed. Stephen was supposed to pick me up at the hotel. We planned to walk and then find a place to eat. I have not permitted myself to think about him since he called the day before, but I wonder as I write this whether the fact that I was supposed to see him had colored the entire evening. I asked room service to bring up a pot of coffee and a croissant and took a bath. A slight hangover dulled my head. I stayed in the bath, letting the spray from the hand-held nozzle pour down over my head until I felt revitalized. And as the warm water released the tension in my body, I began to cry. This extraordinary emotion (was it longing?) began days ago, and has been growing inside me all week, perhaps since I boarded the plane, increasing during the growing intimacy I have felt among my new friends. I’m writing this fully dressed now, staring at the clock, waiting until it is time for me to go downstairs to greet him. Why have I agreed to see Stephen? What does it matter what took place between us so many years ago? I tell myself to take Stephen at face value. Not to analyze his intentions. It isn’t as if I’ve forgotten that a long time ago we had confided in one another, had revealed ourselves to each other. I simply don’t want to indulge in those memories any longer. Whatever was between us happened years ago and has nothing to do with our present lives. And yet, the fact that my mother mentioned him to me the night before I was leaving had already set loose memories and sensations from my mind’s dark corners. Is it the very fact of knowing I might see him that has allowed me to remember William and Adam so vividly?

How much have I changed since we had last seen each other? I put on lipstick, outlined the rim of my eyes with a thin line of eyeliner pencil, and brushed mascara on my eyelashes. I let loose some strands of hair from my barrette. I changed outfits two or three times, trying on everything I had packed, and then ended up wearing the one I had started out with. I’m acting like a schoolgirl. I am no longer a teenager (why do I still feel like one?) or even a woman in her twenties. I am a thirty-eight-year-old mother who has carried and birthed two children. The scar from the caesarean section I’d had with Noah forms a smile on my bikini line. When I touch it I remember the sensation of the boys inside me before they were born. I still carry an extra tuck of flesh in my tummy from the pregnancies. My hips and breasts are bigger, my figure more womanly. But inside I am still the young, impressionable girl from childhood. This is what unnerves me. I wish I could concentrate on having fun and enjoying reconnecting with an old friend. And yet, I’ve never been the kind of person to just have fun.