The Life Room (32 page)
Authors: Jill Bialosky
“Have you been to Café Luxemburg? I’m meeting an editor there for lunch. What about Michael’s? Do you know the place? Have you heard of the Monkey Bar?”
“You know about the Monkey Bar?”
“Yeah, I’m having a drink there later. With an old buddy from Colorado.”
She suddenly felt jealous of the life he was living without her. She imagined him and his friend going to bars and restaurants together. Maybe he would try to meet a woman. She didn’t want to be his confidante—the person who showed him his true self so that he could be free to sleep with someone else. What was she doing to herself? She wanted him to go away.
They were approaching 89th Street where he would turn to head south. They reached the corner. He stopped and they hugged awkwardly. His elbow hit her in the ribs.
“I’ll call you, Eleanor.” Pause. “Eleanor? Please answer my calls. Don’t avoid me. I need you.” He stared into her eyes. “Are you okay? Your eyes, they look funny. You look so worried.”
She looked at him, struggling to make sense of how he affected her. No words came. She was out of words.
“We’re finally in the same city. It’s happening, don’t you see?”
They started walking in opposite directions. He stopped and looked back. She wanted to run to him but she kept walking. In her mind she knew he had stopped. She thought he would follow her. After a block or two she thought about chasing after him. She was surprised he wasn’t following her. Already her mind was flooded with unanswered questions. Already she was sifting through the words to uncover the subtext, the clues. She didn’t know where to go. She stopped at a newspaper stand to regain her equilibrium. She looked at the rack of magazines. Her eye hit on
Vogue
. She studied the sexy model on the cover and read the cover lines,
SURRENDER TO YOUR MARRIAGE, HOW TO WORRY WELL. THE NEW ANTIAGING CREAMS. WRESTLING FREE OF YOUR DEMONS
. She turned to walk back uptown to pick up her kids. Her mind was racing. She turned around again, certain he’d be behind her, out of breath, trying to chase her down. “This has to stop,” she said, but he was nowhere to be found.
She logged in to her e-mail account.
From: [email protected]
Explain the Romantic tradition. The emphasis upon emotion and expressivity in art, in the writings of Wordsworth, Keats, Baudelaire, the sense of marvel and curiosity, its intense focus upon a loved person. Explain to me its downfall. Why “The End of Romanticism?” I need to know. Yrs, Eleanor
From: [email protected]
The Romantics reconnected emotion to all other important human faculties (cognition, perception, rational thought) in refreshing and complex ways. Tired of the exhaustion of reason, of truth, the Romantics embraced beauty. Under their pens, emotion—and especially passion—became the center of human existence. It expressed our most exalted state and a conduit to knowledge, morality, beauty, and meaning. At a certain point it couldn’t sustain itself. Truly, John
From: [email protected]
Why?
From: [email protected]
Emotive expression changed into a quest for formal experimentation.
From: [email protected]
The Romantic tradition gave in to emotion. The modernist tradition turned to the cerebral. But surely some artists and writers are still stuck in the Romantic tradition? How do they fit into the culture? How does Romanticism have any meaning today?
From: [email protected]
It still has meaning. Without it language and art is too cool. Glib.
From: [email protected]
What’s your definition of a post-Romantic?
From [email protected]
32Post-Romanticism combines a romantic emphasis upon beauty and passion with the modern and postmodern emphasis upon originality and experimentation. The post-Romantics would argue that without Romanticism there is no art. One grows out of the other.
The boys were in their bedroom playing with the babysitter. She should release the babysitter but instead she looked at the pitcher from Paris sitting on her bureau. Her eye ran up and down the seam where it had cracked. She rose from the bed to look for the poem. Long ago, she used to write poems on her typewriter, two sheets of paper with a carbon in between. She found poems for William but she could not find the carbon copy of the poem she had written for Stephen. She tore open files, rummaged through her desk papers, opened old shoe boxes stuffed with letters. It was as if she was looking for a piece of herself and not just a piece of paper. Michael was out of town at a medical conference he went to every year at the end of February. Usually she hated it when he was out of town but she was glad to have the house to herself.
She went into the boys’ room to speak to Rachel, the teenage babysitter. Rachel wore a crown of braids around her head. She was that age when she might write poems to boys and Eleanor almost asked her but stopped herself. “Rachel, I have to call one of my students. Would you mind putting the boys to bed before you leave?” She kissed the boys goodnight and went back into her study. She began searching again, pulling out old college papers, poems she had stuffed in folders and drawers and between her favorite books, but it was nowhere to be found. She went into the bedroom and closed the door. She couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation she’d had with Stephen the day before. She still felt agitated.
What did he want from her?
She dialed Stephen’s cell phone number.
“Eleanor?”
“What are you doing?” she asked once he’d picked up the phone.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m married.”
“If it makes you uncomfortable we don’t have to see each other.”
He was going to wiggle out of it. Her fury reduced her to silence.
“I was waiting for you to take the lead,” he said, after a few seconds passed. “I know you’re married.”
“I can’t talk about this now. Don’t you understand? I’m at home.”
“We have to talk about it sometime. I need you, Eleanor.”
After they hung up she lay down on her bed and closed her eyes. She let Stephen’s voice linger in her mind.
I was waiting for you to take the lead
. She lay down still on her back with her eyes closed. He was in the room with her. He was lying beside her and she became soft and open under his touch. She could feel his lips, first on her face, her forehead, behind her ears.
She got out of bed. She opened her top dresser drawer. She took out the prayer shawl and spread it over herself. She heard the rabbi’s voice:
Looking upon these fringes you will be reminded of the Lord and fulfill them and not be seduced by your heart or led astray by your eyes
.
She took the shawl’s tassels and braided them in her hands.
The next morning Nicholas walked into her room.
“You’re different, Mommy.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t even come in our room to say goodnight.”
His words sliced through her. “I’m not different. I’m your same mom. I was working.”
She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth, trying to push away the meaning behind her son’s words. But he was right. When she looked at herself in the mirror she saw someone she didn’t know. She saw a woman capable of having two lives, two separate identities. She thought of her father. He had recently sent her his new cell phone number on a postcard from Spain. When she came out of the bathroom she called him.
“Daddy, this is Eleanor.”
“Eleanor?”
“Daddy, it’s me. I need to see you.”
She and Stephen met in the park. Her stomach had been queasy all morning in anticipation, and she regretted that she had drunk that last cup of coffee. Why had she agreed to meet him again when she had resolved not to? The minute she had arrived in her office that morning the phone was ringing. She picked it up. “We have to talk,” Stephen had said. “You have to meet me.” She promised herself she would tell him to stop.
“I have good news,” Stephen said, once she arrived. They were sitting on a bench near a stand of bare trees in the park. It was cold, but not too cold.
“I sold my book, Eleanor. After almost twenty fucking years.” He looked like he wanted to grab her but he restrained himself. “You know how it feels. All those years of working on it alone in a vacuum. The doubts. The fears. I put it away for three years and I couldn’t even look at it. It was like a demon that possessed me. I used to think that if I hadn’t spent all those years writing I could have been living my life. I couldn’t stand myself. But I had no choice. I was compelled to do it.”
Eleanor stared at him. She squeezed his arm with her hand. “I knew it would happen.”
“This is the best day of my life.” He beamed. He paused in thought. “Wouldn’t it be great, Eleanor. Both of us writers. Both of us on the same page. Imagine what we could do together.”
She couldn’t stop smiling. They were so alike! The energy and self-satisfaction he derived from his work seemed to fill him the same way it did her. She understood what it was to devote years to something she wasn’t sure would ever amount to anything. The nights she lay awake before presenting a paper, and then the intense feeling of gratification, like no other, once the audience responded.
“When I was writing my novel in Colorado I always thought of you, Eleanor. You were my audience. It was like I was writing to connect.” He closed his eyes. “You didn’t forget about me all these years. Did you?” He opened his eyes and looked up at her slowly, taking her in, layer by layer, as if he were undressing her.
“I did forget about you.” It started to snow. She felt it lightly on her face. “You were not on my radar screen.” She thought about the first year of her marriage. She and Michael found the top-floor walk-up of an old brownstone. It was a studio with a tiny galley kitchen that overlooked a back garden. Before they moved in Michael went to the hardware store to buy detergents to clean the apartment. When he came back he held a broom in his hand. “This is our broom, Eleanor,” he said, smiling, panting after he’d walked up the five flights of stairs. He held it out to her. “This is our dustpan.”
She looked at Stephen. Snow dusted the ground. “I wondered about you from time to time. But I brushed you away like snow from my coat.”
“So you’re saying I’m like snow?”
“Yeah. You come on strong and then you melt and evaporate.”
“I think about you, Eleanor. Where does it come from? Your intensity? I was in love with it, but scared of it. I know your secret. Your emotional turmoil. I used to watch you through the window. That stuff doesn’t go away. I should know,” he said, as if he knew intimately the long hours of loneliness. “Our mothers. They are so much alike. I know what that does to a person. I know you better than you think.”
She looked at him, moved by his words.
“I fucked up. I shouldn’t have let you go that day in Colorado.”
“You could have called me. You could have tried to be in touch.”
“You got married. How could you have done that?”
“You didn’t try to stop me.”
“I wasn’t ready until now. I thought there’d be time. I didn’t know until I said good-bye to you in the hotel in Paris how much it mattered.”
She looked at the swaying trees and at the snowflakes speckling the branches. “You’re ten years too late.”
“No one will ever know me like you, Eleanor.”
“What are you telling me?”
“The attraction is still there, and you know it. You can’t walk away from something like that.”
“But you’ve done it so many times. What do you want me to do now?”
“You know what you have to do.”
He took her hands and brought them to his lips. “I need to hold you, Eleanor. We should go to the Plaza.”
“I bet you’ve used that line before.” She looked at him more closely. He was wearing a zip-up sweatshirt with a hood and a cross or dagger, she could not tell which, dangling from his neck. Over his sweatshirt he wore a black leather jacket. “Is that why you came to New York?”
He looked down at his hands and then pulled his cell phone from his pocket to read a text message.
“Is that why you came to New York?” she repeated.
“Maybe.” He zipped up his sweatshirt. “I came to New York because I had business to take care of. This is important to me, Eleanor.”
“What’s important? Your piece? Your novel?”
The snowflakes were bigger, denser. “Think what you want to think.” He was distracted suddenly “We should walk.” She brushed the flakes off her coat but they stuck. They seeped into her thin coat. “I’m trying to see if I can do it,” he said.
They both rose and walked slowly toward the gates to the park. Once they had walked out of the park and were standing at the corner, Eleanor felt as if she were inside a painting, walking through the park in the snow. She wasn’t married. She had no children. There was no thought of anyone she might hurt. They were a couple walking in the park, hand in hand, inside a painting. They had betrayed no one.
Eleanor looked into his face. He was smiling. He was the man in her painting and not an intruder in her life. “I want something to happen,” she said, not quite knowing what she was saying, and they went their separate ways.