The Life Room (24 page)

It was a Monday in June, and the halls were quiet as a morgue. Most of the students were away. She embraced her work with urgency. It was the only way she knew how to go on. She picked up her note cards where she had made some notes on
The Inferno
and reread them, still seeking answers.

Late in the day, Ursula, her assistant, handed Eleanor a pink message slip. Eleanor glanced at it before tucking it into her jacket pocket. She made a cup of tea, went into her office, and shut the door, grateful to be undisturbed. She looked again at the pink slip and studied the
S
of his name scrawled in Ursula’s loopy script.

She pictured him as he looked in Paris standing against the bridge over the Seine. She crumpled the pink message slip into a ball and tossed it into the plastic receptacle underneath her desk.

She peered out her office window at the lawn between buildings where students congregated, at the still blossoming dogwood tree, at two young people by the tree embracing, unaware that she was watching. How passionately they kissed. She went out to the hallway, walked down the hall to the women’s bathroom. In the mirror, one eye looked muted, subdued, the other was vibrant. She went back to her office and retrieved the crumpled message from the receptacle.

He answered on the first ring.

“Where are you?”

“Where are
you
?” he said.

“I’m in my office.”

“I flew in from Colorado this morning. I had a meeting with my agent. I called you earlier, Eleanor. I thought maybe we could grab lunch. Now I’m at JFK on my way back to Colorado. Where were you?” he said, as if he had expected that she should be there the minute he had called. “You were supposed to be there.” He cleared his throat to disguise the emotion in his voice.

“I went on a field trip with Noah’s class. We went to Central Park.”

“I may be spending more time in New York. I’ve been discussing a few story ideas with my agent. I have to tell you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve blossomed. You’ve taken on that kind of grace that comes with age and experience.”

“Are you saying that I look old?”

“No. I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying you look sexy.”

Her throat was dry. She coughed into the phone.

“One thing I know is that what I’ve learned about myself and love has been the longest and slowest lesson of my life.”

The memories of what had happened between them hung in the silence.

“It has?”

“I haven’t solved that part of the puzzle yet. But then, I’ve always been the late bloomer. When I’m in New York again, would you have lunch with me? I can’t get you out of my head.”

She laughed.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Right now.”

“I’m on the phone talking to you and looking out my office window.”

“Now I can see you,” he paused. “Your eyes. They haunt me. Your red hair. I can remember exactly what you were wearing when I saw you in Paris. Eleanor?”

“I’m still here.”

“I was so inept back in those days. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

There was static in the line. The call was breaking up. “I’m losing you,” Stephen said. “I’ll be in touch.”

She sat in her chair.

For the next hour she went over each word, interpreted and weighed each nuance, even the pauses between words. She couldn’t work. She packed up and left the office. Her cell phone rang; she answered and was startled to hear the sound of Michael’s voice. He asked if he needed to pick up anything for dinner. It reminded her that she lived in two worlds and it was time for her to check in to the present.

Over dinner Michael mentioned a new resident who was working under him. The resident seemed worn down in the mornings, almost hung over. He wondered whether he had a problem. “He has newborn twins,” Michael said. “He can’t afford to be acting this way.”

“What way?”

“Irresponsibly. He’s a grown-up, Eleanor.”

“Have you talked with him about it?”

“I told him he better get his act together,” Michael said.

The rest of the evening floated by. It was the blue hour, when it wasn’t quite dark. Her mind kept drifting back to her conversation with Stephen, and in spite of not wanting to think about him, she felt strangely disconnected and dreamy.

Later, she remembered the time when she visited him in Colorado. She was sure that now he would have an explanation for why he had abandoned her there. She thought that if she could frame everything just the way that it had happened, she could maybe find the meaning that had eluded her. But she did not want to think anymore about their past. By thinking about it, it was as though she was imbuing him with newer, more immediate significance than was appropriate. She wanted to forget him just as intensely as she longed to be close to him. And why was she thinking about him at all? She was married.

“Eleanor, I didn’t expect to find you in Chicago,” Stephen said. “I was looking for my mother. I thought she might be over here.” His shirt was crumpled. He hadn’t shaved. He looked tired. He dug the heel of his cowboy boot into the linoleum of her floor, leaving a scuff mark. “I’ve been driving for two days. I got on my bike and I couldn’t stop. You ever have that feeling?”

He had lost a little of his boyishness. He had broadened across the chest. His face had grown taut, and the long unruly hair he’d had when she saw him last was slicked back. Despite the fact that he looked tired, he was beautiful. The years had solidified him, so that his once boyish good looks had evolved into a cool, rugged charm. She hadn’t seen him in more than a year, since Christmas of the year she started graduate school. He sat on one of the kitchen stools on the other side of the island where she was washing the dishes. She had come home in late August to spend time with her mother before school started. It had been months since William had died. He haunted every corner of the city.

“How long are you in town? My mother said you moved to Colorado.”

“I’m not sure. Maybe a day or two. I can’t breathe here. When I’m in the mountains I feel like I’ve been freed. Maybe it’s the mountain air.”

She sat on one of the stools in the kitchen next to him. He told her about some of the journalism pieces he was working on for an outdoor magazine in Colorado and that he was writing a novel. He described it as experimental.

“It’s all about voice. When I’m writing I say the words in my head as if I’m talking to someone and I need them to listen.”

“Really? When I’m working on a paper I don’t really think about my audience. I’m thinking about my own obsessions.”

After William took his life, Eleanor thought she’d never go on, that she’d never be able to sit with another person and care about their conversation. But there were days, even weeks, when she didn’t think about William and then, out of the blue, the loss of him would seize hold and nearly paralyze her. Other times she’d think,
Okay, well, William’s gone
. She had thought she’d never be able to sit next to a man again, but now she was talking to one. Her mother phoned to say she was working late. Eleanor invited Stephen to stay for dinner.

“They’re getting old.”

“Who?”

“Our mothers.” He paused. “I wonder what my life would be like if they hadn’t gotten divorced.” He peeled the label of the beer off the bottle she had offered him, scratching the stubborn, gummy part with his thumbnail. It looked like something was bothering him.

“I think about that, too. What my life would be like if my father had stayed.”

“She never wrote to me the time she was gone.”

“Maybe she thought it would be better for you not to hear from her. Maybe she thought she’d only hurt you more.”

He looked at her as if she had betrayed him.

“I’m sorry I know it hurt you.”

“My mother told me about it. The guy from high school. I used to see his pickup in your driveway when I came to visit.”

“William.”

Stephen rose and placed his hands on her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I know you loved him.”

Tears burned her eyes. She didn’t expect to cry. For the week she’d been home she felt William all the time. She let Stephen turn her around and embrace her. She realized how stiff her body had been in her effort to stay numb. He pressed his lips against the skin of her neck and her body softened. She lifted her head and they kissed on the lips. William kissed like a boy, clumsy and tense and in a hurry. Stephen kissed slow and long and carefully. “I’ve wanted to do that ever since we were twelve.” He stopped for a moment and looked at her and shook his head, as if he were angry that he hungered for her before kissing her again. The kiss was partly sexual, partly tender, and emotional, and she pulled away from him, afraid of where the encounter was leading. She thought to herself:
I’m kissing Stephen Mason. I’m kissing the boy from the house in back of me who once lit his
playhouse on fire!
She was sure as he kissed her that he had started the fire. She remembered his smile as they watched the playhouse burn and she thought to herself that maybe burning it was his attempt to let go of the past. And then she told herself she was being silly—of course the fire was an accident.

“What made you come all the way across country? Are you still in touch with your old girlfriend?”

“Chrissy? That didn’t end well.” He looked down and then perked back up. “I like to drive. Even if there’s nowhere to go. You know. The feeling of not being stuck. Of moving. I thought I’d come see my mom. Sometimes I can’t shake it. Her alone in that house all the time. And then once I get here I can’t stand being around her.” He glanced from the back window toward his house. The light was on behind the blind in his mother’s bedroom window. “I should go,” he said reluctantly. “You know, Eleanor. I’d really like it if you visited me in Colorado sometime.”

He kissed her long and tenderly, and the kiss seemed to unlock unknown depths inside her that made her feel both exhilarated and frightened at the same time. They did not end the evening in platitudes. Stephen did not promise to call the next day, nor did she attempt to secure a promise. She assumed she would see him again before she left to go back to New York. There was something about the way that he looked at her that, though it stirred her, was also safe and familiar and left her with little doubt that he cared for her.

The next morning she drove her mother’s car to the woods behind William’s mother’s house and then wandered until she found the wall. She purposefully moved the stones that William had stacked in piles, laying them one by one on top of each other until dusk set in. The stones had begun to change and shift over time, taking on more history, depth, and dimension. She heard his voice in her head, and the voice guided her:
Eleanor, lay the stones as they would lie naturally on the ground. The wall is one version of utopia. It can be whatever you want it to be
.

She wondered if God was in the wall, the same way he was inside each living creature, in each stone. She began to think of the wall as a work of art, a tribute to what she had lost. Adam said that all anxiety was a response to grief; that art was born out of anxiety. She understood what he meant. She didn’t want to finish building the wall because finishing it would mean she was saying good-bye to William. After he died she had begun to think of him as a poet without a calling. She thought about the tenderness of his soul as she worked, how building the wall had been for him what words were for her, a need to organize thought and emotion, and it helped her to accept his death. She worked for hours at a time. Though she didn’t smoke often, she bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked one for the sake of ritual when she was finished.

The wall could go on as long as she wanted it to; it could be a continuous thing, a relationship. It was always in her mind, behind her thoughts, giving more structure to her life. Every now and then she’d have a strong impulse to take the stones apart, one by one, so that she could keep building it and never finish.

Stephen was standing on the front stoop of her house when she returned. “Eleanor, I have to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about it all day. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the other night. I saw the light on in your house, and I thought ‘This is why I came home.’”

She looked at him squarely. Was he serious? “But you didn’t know I’d be here.” She stared at the rawhide bracelet around his wrist, his boots splattered with dots of white paint from the housepainting and construction work he did to support his writing habit. She saw every flaw of his character in the way he raised one eyebrow to look at her. She thought of him at thirteen, then at sixteen, then just over a year ago at Christmas, and she began to lose her bearings.

“It’s just so good to be with you again. I remember when we were kids. When your father was around. In the summer I could hear his piano coming through your open windows. I saw him playing and you and your mom listening on the couch. You all looked so happy.”

“You remember that?”

“I’ve never forgotten.” He studied her dirty clothes. “Hey, where’ve you been? You look like you’ve been playing in the dirt.”

“I’m building a stone wall.” She was disarmed by his openness and warmth. “Don’t ask.”

“I think it’s a sign.”

“A sign?”

“Yeah, you know what I mean. Both of us being in town. I think it means something. I can feel your energy when I’m with you.” She let him kiss her again, slowly. “You know I stayed up half the night last night writing. Seeing you inspired me.” He touched the small of her back.

“What is it with us? How come we don’t stay in touch?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to be close to me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“If you want to be close to me, there’s something I have to show you.”

She let him take her hand as they walked to his mother’s house. Lilacs were in bloom. Sprinklers folded back and forth lazily over the lawns so lush they looked like paintings. The night before she’d asked him a lot of questions. He was trying to get started as a journalist. He wrote rock and music reviews for an alternative paper. He was working on a cover story about rock formations in the Colorado Rockies for a Denver magazine. He was working on a novel. But something about him didn’t seem settled. He looked preoccupied; she couldn’t put her finger on the reason.