The Life Room (20 page)

Michael turned off the light, slipped the book out of her hand, and reached for her. “You haven’t told us anything about anyone you were with in Paris. The other people at the conference. Who you hung out with. What you did.”

“I told you and the boys about everywhere I went. Everything I saw.” She caught her own defensiveness, examined it, and realized that she hadn’t wanted to say a word about what the trip had meant to her, afraid to articulate her feelings.

“But you seem so secretive.”

“I’m not secretive. I’m just tired. Can I tell you more about the conference tomorrow?” She adjusted her eyes to the darkness and reached out to touch him.

“Of course you can,” he said, tenderly. He turned her toward him. “I miss you.”

“But I’m here.”

“Physically you are.” He snuggled up next to her. “But it’s like you’re not here, really.”

“I’m here,” Eleanor said again, tucking her face into his chest. Unexpected tears burned her eyes as she slowly relinquished herself to his body.

In the morning everything looked different, colored by her trip to Paris. She went about her routine dividing her time between teaching at the university, her writing, and her boys. She picked them up from school, took them for playdates, spent time with them at home before their dinner and their baths. Sometimes she took them out for pizza when Michael was working late. While at the university she looked forward to coming home, to the peace that descends on a house when children are absorbed in their rooms and Bach or Beethoven is playing on the CD player (it was a miracle, her boys and the happiness they gave her—she did not for a second take any of it for granted), but the minute she was in the comfort of her home, near that place of serenity, she found herself longing for the solitude of her office at school. She wondered why.

She experienced an urgent desire to get beyond her daily tasks, so that she would have the hour or two she needed for her imaginative life that had blossomed in Paris. But once she was alone she was paralyzed by a strange kind of fear. She was living her life day by day but she was absent from it. She couldn’t seem to heal the division she had felt in bed with her husband the night she returned, even though their bodies were so close.

Her vision and sensitivity were heightened. She could tell which couples were connected, which couples were still in love by the way they looked at each other. On the subway she watched a man squeeze his wife’s arm, saw another woman rest her head on her lover’s shoulder. She watched the way friends of theirs kissed each other on the cheek or lips at dinner; at a cocktail party for new residents at the hospital she noticed Brian, a partner in Michael’s practice, stop in the middle of a house full of guests to embrace his wife. At the party Eleanor tried to engage their friends in conversation, but she kept drifting off alone to look out the window. Sally and Marcia had wanted to hear all about Paris, but she found herself tongue-tied when she tried to explain how meaningful the trip had been, how important it was to be on her own, and instead told them about the wonderful food she’d eaten and the fashionable shops, knowing that’s what they’d want to hear. In the middle of their conversation Brian came behind Marcia again and kissed her neck. She watched how the two made eye contact, seemingly perfectly in touch with the other all evening, and it filled her with loneliness. She found Michael talking to one of the new residents and his young wife. At first Eleanor tried to enter into their conversation, but found she couldn’t connect and retreated inside herself; eventually she wandered off to find the bathroom. She didn’t understand what had happened, why she felt so empty.

Her son Nicholas was performing in a school play. They scurried about the house, getting showered and dressed. Nicholas was too nervous to eat his typical breakfast of two waffles and instead grabbed a granola bar from the kitchen cabinet. Noah had a meltdown. They had run out of milk and he couldn’t have his bowl of cereal he had every morning and he refused the bagel, the waffles, and the granola bar Eleanor offered instead. “Nicky gets what he wants but I don’t get what I want,” he said, and ran to his room and plunged his body dramatically against his pillow.

“Not everyone gets what they want,” Eleanor said.

In the bedroom she heard something crash. She went to find out what happened. The boys followed behind her. Michael looked at Eleanor sheepishly.

“I’m sorry, Eleanor. It was an accident. I’ll make it up to you.” He explained that his arm accidentally knocked over the pitcher as he was rushing to get dressed. It was broken into three large pieces on the floor.

She put her hand over her mouth. She couldn’t speak. She thought of the mornings in Paris when she had walked by the pitcher. She thought about how the buds of the crocus were brought to life in her imagination. It was as if he had smashed her dreams. How could he have been so clumsy? So unaware? She was about to say something and then her eye caught Michael’s apologetic eyes. She looked at her husband again. She looked at her beautiful boys. She was trapped inside her love for them.

“It was just an accident, Mom,” Nicholas said, standing beside Michael.

“You can glue it.” Noah ran to get the adhesive from the desk drawer.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Daddy didn’t break it on purpose.”

She kneeled down, retrieved the pieces, and glued the pitcher back together. If you looked closely you could still see the scar, like a wound down its cheek, from where the porcelain had cracked. She knew she had to hurry to get the boys to school on time but instead she sat down at the foot of her bed looking at the pitcher, remembering how it had moved her in the shop window, as if willing it fully whole in her mind. Its damaged beauty filled her with melancholy.

She pulled herself away and packed up the boys’ backpacks, coaxed Noah out the door, and they hailed a cab. She and Michael took a front-row seat in the school lunchroom where the assembly was held. Nicholas beamed on stage. Still she couldn’t stop thinking about the broken pitcher.

Michael sat in the wooden chair next to her. He put his arm around her chair and squeezed her shoulder while their son performed. They turned to look at each other proudly. She moved her hand from her lap to rest it in Michael’s hand. He took it in his mechanically. She nearly wanted to extract it, and then realized how silly she was to expect her husband to make love to her whenever they touched.

Her heart was beating too quickly. She couldn’t quite sit still, uncomfortable against the hard surface of the wooden school chair. She thought about the pitcher again, surprised by how much it bothered her that Michael had broken it.
In the company of my children is where I’ll draw sustenance
, she told herself, trying to calm down. She had been under the illusion, since Nicholas had turned ten and Noah seven, that she was suddenly freer, that her boys needed her less. She watched Nicholas recite his lines, looking directly into her face for approval. She told herself there was nothing she would need more than Nicholas’s face picking hers out in the audience or Noah’s little hand reaching behind her neck when she lifted him for a hug. All other desires she could stuff in the hidden drawers of her mind the way she shifted winter clothes to the back to make room for her light summer things. And yet something had opened inside her, leaving her slightly exposed. It was like suddenly prying open a window that had for years been sealed shut with paint.

After the assembly, Nicholas’s teacher, Miss Nightingale, stopped for a moment to say hello. “How’s Nicholas doing at school?” Eleanor asked, feeling suddenly disconnected from his life.

“He’s been a little off. But nothing to worry about. He was upset you weren’t at the last soccer game. After he scored a goal he looked for you and crumbled when he couldn’t find you.”

“I was away for work. I’ve been to all Nicholas’s games.”

“I wouldn’t worry. He just needs a little encouragement.” She and Michael walked to the subway. Eleanor saw him checking his pager. She was still disturbed about Nicholas. She could forget that underneath his confident exterior he was vulnerable. Sometimes he needed just to catch her eye in the bleachers to build his confidence when he was on the field. “Do you think my trip was hard on Nicholas?”

“He’s fine. And besides, you’re home now. I have to work late tonight. Brian and I are getting closer to developing the stent I’ve been talking to you about.”

“Couldn’t you get someone else for tonight? Nicholas will be disappointed. You know how he counts on our dinners together on Fridays.”

“Eleanor, this is big. It could save countless lives.”

She tried to shrug off her worries about Nicholas once she was in her office. Her editor called to ask if she would expand her paper into a new book. She should have been elated, but the paper still nagged at her. She said yes. She did want to expand it, and yet she wasn’t quite sure. She wrote to John—since returning from Paris she’d kept in touch with John, Julie, and Rob through e-mail—and tried to articulate what she felt her paper lacked. He wrote back that he always felt that he’d outgrown each paper, once it was either published or presented, and she felt better. She was happy she’d caught him on e-mail. She wanted to expand her thesis on the nature of love as a completion of the self in
Anna Karenina
by using other works of literature and thought she would start by rereading parts of
The Inferno
. “Do you think it is through love and our relationships with those we know intimately that we become the person we were meant to become,” she asked, startled by her words once she’d typed them. “If that’s the case, I’m in trouble,” John responded.

The phone rang. She looked at her watch. It was already noon. It was one of her graduate students whose dissertation she was advising. They quickly made a time to meet. The phone rang again. It was Stephen Mason, slightly out of breath.

He was calling from a pay phone at Charles de Gaulle Airport. “I wanted to make sure you got home okay,” he said. It had been at least three weeks since she’d been home from Paris. “It was great seeing you, Eleanor. Do you mind if I call you when I’m in New York?”

She tensed. “Of course not.” She rested the telephone receiver back in its cradle and sat motionless in her office chair, surprised that the phone call had shaken her.

She closed her copy of
The Inferno
on her desk. Dante had become remote. Memory seemed as powerful as any piece of fiction and she lost herself in it again. What one remembered, filtered through the gauze of time, felt as if it had happened to someone else, was about another character, another person; one couldn’t possibly be the person who had been so ignorant of what was to come.

She tore open the envelope. William sent her a fossil of a dragonfly inside one of the stones he’d uncovered building his wall, and wrapped around it was a note saying that he missed her and needed to see her. She was nearing the end of her first year of graduate school. She explained to Adam that she would continue to model for him but that she was going back to try again with William. Besides, he was married. She booked a ticket to Chicago for a weekend, happy that William was finally ready to see her.

“I knew you’d come.” William was in the backyard letting the dogs run free. “Eleanor, your hair smells so pretty,” he said, embracing her.

He saw his role once his father left, the last child at home, to take on the responsibilities of the house and keep his mother company. He divided his time between his mother’s and his own apartment in one of the buildings his father owned. He took Eleanor into the woods to see the progress of the stone wall, and the minute he smelled the fresh air, his face brightened as if the world had not yet pressed against him. All the laying of stone and the time he spent riding his horse had given more heft to his body.

“Do you know there’s life in a stone, Eleanor? It takes on the memory of a place.” He reached down and handed her a piece of the stone that had broken off the larger rock. She looked at the pine leaves on the ground and branches that had fallen. In the air was the moisture before rain. It was cool and she wrapped herself in William’s arms to keep warm.

“It’s so nice to be with you like we used to,” William said. “Words are never adequate. I loved you before words. When I looked at you that first day on the rink I knew. You see things in me I don’t have to express. Our words are these stones. I’m glad you came back.”

The next day he took her to his dim apartment that bordered a slum.

“I don’t like it here, William,” Eleanor said. “I don’t feel safe. Do you have to live here?”

“I’m sorry. We don’t have to stay.” He considered for a moment. “It’s why they call him a slumlord. He takes their money and lets the place go to shit. They have nowhere else to go. It’s why I can’t leave. What do you think I’ve been doing all year?”

She looked at him.

“I made out a system. I take what I can off the top of the rents each month without him knowing about it and I fix stuff for them. Mrs. C. doesn’t have hot water. Mr. B. in 5C has busted windows. Sometimes I can’t sleep trying to figure it all out.”

“You look tired.” She put back into place a lock of hair that had fallen over his eye.

“I’m just stressed. I have things to take care of, Eleanor. I can’t let them down.”

On the night before she was leaving William cooked dinner for her at his mother’s house. She wanted to tell him about how intense and interesting modeling for Adam was, about the paper she was writing, but she refrained, thinking he’d be jealous of the life she had without him. The meat was tough and she kept chewing it. “It’s great that you are trying to help those people. But what about you, William?” she said, worried about leaving him to the woods and the apartment downtown.

“I have responsibilities here.” He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. He shoved it across the table. It listed each apartment in the building, who needed what done, what repaired. “Sometimes when I brush my teeth I want to go next door and give my toothbrush to one of those kids with rotted teeth.”