The Life Room (36 page)

It was late in the afternoon. She went home and climbed into bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she had come home in the middle of the afternoon to do nothing except lie on her bed. She had orchestrated her life so tightly, where would there ever have been time? But all she could think to do was get into bed and wait for the rest of the day to pass. Was her longing for Stephen as real as it felt or just part of her own need to connect intimately, to be stirred again? It made her feel physically sick. The hours seemed to pass slowly. She listened to the traffic outside her window, the grind of construction, the shouts from the streets.

She went into the bathroom and vomited.

The phone rang.

“Eleanor?”

“Eleanor who?”

“Eleanor, it’s your mother.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“You sound awful. What happened?”

“Nothing’s happened.”

“Everything’s happened,” her mother said. “I can hear it in your voice. Eleanor, a mother knows when something is wrong.”

“It’s my marriage.”

“What’s wrong, Eleanor?”

“You were right, Mom. It’s all falling apart.”

“Follow your heart, Eleanor.”

“I don’t trust it.”

This is where you belong. Now you can rest, Eleanor, the girl thought to herself. She took off her jeans and slipped inside the sleeping bag with William. By the time she had slipped in, the boy was naked inside the bag and had turned his body to the wall. He was almost asleep. She spooned him and they lay like that for a while and then a familiar feeling of disappointment inflated inside her chest. William wasn’t going to turn around. He wasn’t going to reach out for her body, run his hands up her thighs, touch her nipples
.

They weren’t going to kiss. Had she said something, done something to make him turn away? Why couldn’t she reach him? She slipped her hands between his thighs but he remained turned against the wall
. Don’t you love me?
she said
. Aren’t I desirable?
He didn’t answer
.

“Eleanor,” Michael said. “Aren’t you getting up? Aren’t you going to take the boys to school?”

“I’m so tired. Can you do it this morning, honey?” She could not let go of her dream. Her body was leaden.

During the afternoon she stayed in her bedroom, playing hooky from her life, canceling her classes and not telling her husband. She went to pick up her boys from school, made dinner for her family, sat patiently with her husband at night (she did not retreat to her study) while he looked into his microscope for cells no one else could see. The next day she did the same thing. She went in her bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, shut her door, drew the blinds against the oppressive light, and not one soul knew about it.

After dinner she asked, “Tell me about the heart.”

“It’s nestled between the two lungs in the center of the chest, behind the breastbone. Let me show you. It’s right here,” Michael said, rising and pressing his hand against her chest.

She fell into the foundation of his chest, the little cave where her head rested perfectly against his breastbone, and told herself this could be enough. She felt his arms around her, holding her tightly.

“It looks a little like an upside-down pear.” He broke from their embrace and took a pear from the fruit bowl on the table. “Give me your knife. I’ll show you. See this bottom segment?” He sliced it off. “It’s about the size of a clenched fist. It weighs between 300 grams and 450 grams.”

“What happens when it beats erratically? When it’s in crisis?”

“Eleanor. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

She thought about how to explain what she was feeling. She didn’t know how. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I promise.”

That night Eleanor dreamed about her father. In the dream, as always, she was trying to arouse his interest. The dream was a little confused. She was presenting a paper in an auditorium. Her father was sitting in one of the front rows. She kept glancing at him during her presentation. His eyes were closed. He was sleeping. After the presentation colleagues and students in the audience surrounded her, but she was anxiously looking for her father, afraid that he would grow impatient and leave the auditorium before saying good-bye. When she looked at the seat where she had seen him sitting throughout the presentation, she discovered that the man wasn’t her father at all, but someone else, a homeless person. He was still asleep in his seat, even in the bright lights, surrounded by soiled old plastic shopping bags. She panicked. He had to be there. There must be something she could do to find him. She scanned the audience, running her eyes up and down the lines of people already leaving. Where was he?

When she awoke she was lost and confused.

“Why is Mommy sad?” Noah asked.

“Because she’s waiting for us to take her to the park like we do every Sunday and you’re not dressed yet.” Michael scooped Noah in his arms and took him back to his room. Eleanor listened to father and son laughing and talking. She was grateful to Michael for how good he was with her boys. He would never leave them.

She e-mailed John from her office on Monday morning.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Do you think it is obsolete to live in the Romantic tradition? As a scholar, one lives inside their words, inside their ideas. One takes delight in the intricacies of a fantastic poem, the landscape of a tradition. But they pull one out of life, somehow, don’t they? The Romantics are visionary, in search of the sublime. It can be exhausting. Yrs, indefatigably,

Eleanor

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

I agree. One can get weary of visionary poems and their high rhetoric. Do you know John Clare’s poem called “Mouse Nest”? It’s about the speaker coming across a mouse nest in a field of wheat. He records what he sees. He does not turn it into a transcendent moment. The concrete, down-to-earth experience is the transcendent moment. Yrs, concretely, John

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Have you ever had an experience that lifted you out of the ordinary and left you confused, deeply rattled, ready to change your worldview, to make you believe things you hadn’t dreamed of? Yrs, exaltedly, Eleanor

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Eleanor, it’s too tiring. I’ve given it up completely. Yrs, most boringly, John

When she logged off she thought about Stephen again. She was trying to get over her anger and stop thinking about him. All weekend she had vowed to do so—but she was caving in. She rationalized the cruel way he had acted that afternoon, how in the middle of the conversation he had gotten up and checked his e-mail. She thought about what he’d said about wanting to preserve her in memory and it touched her. She told herself he was panicked. Worried about his career. Afraid for his future. For her. She thought of him alone in the sterile studio apartment with those boxes of cereal on top of the refrigerator. It reminded her of her father living in one of his hotel rooms. She couldn’t bear to think of him so alone. She called Michael from the office and said she had a faculty meeting that night.

She went to the club to see him perform. His name was in lights on the marquee, above the show’s title,
The Sorrows of Alaska
. The stage was dark. The song “North to Alaska” came rushing through the speakers. She sat in one of the red booths in the back and watched.

The stage was set up as it was at the other bar—a stool and a microphone. He wore black jeans and a black cotton pullover that was stretched out at the arms and hung over his hands. He had replaced his high-top sneakers with a pair of trendy black leather square-toed shoes, surely purchased in Soho. He was beginning to look like he belonged in New York.

He was driving again. He was out of the snow, so to speak. It was April and the grass was still frozen, but it was beginning to turn green and everything around him felt like it was thawing. Surviving the long winter made him want to call her again. But the minute his fingers went to dial he wanted to board up the windows, shut all the doors. He had been estranged from her for ten years. What would she be like? How would she look? How would he feel when he touched her? He had put hundreds of miles, millions of grams of snow between them. He wanted to push her into the snow and make love to her in the coldest, wettest part of his being. The last time he had seen her she had arrived on his doorstep looking like some kind of lost soul who needed his nourishment. His heart ached for her when he saw her. She had lost weight. When he opened the door she asked if he was happy to see her. He wanted to get in his car, to drive as far away as possible, so that he would not be the person he knew that he was, the person who wanted to destroy her.

His words cut through her. She wanted to approach him and force him to tell her why he was in New York, why he wanted to destroy her. She was not a character in his novel. Yet, she preferred being there without being observed. If she moved any closer to him she was afraid of the harm he might cause.

She went one other night that week, after the boys had gone to bed, showing up after intermission. She thought if she went to the theater one more time, she’d work him out of her system. It was good to be in the dark with him, never having to see him or touch him, just watching, knowing he was okay.

He left her a message on her voice mail.

I know I behaved badly. Here’s the deal. Listen. I remember your father. I remember watching him teach you how to ride a bike without training wheels. You were on the bike. It was pink and it had tassels hanging from the handle bars. You were screaming. I was in the playhouse watching you. I used to watch you as a kid, even when you didn’t know I was watching. You were screaming because you were afraid for your father to let go of the bike.

And then you were tearing down the street on that bike. You were fearless. After your father left, I used to think to myself, “How could he leave that little girl?” How do you expect me to walk away?

The phone rang. She lifted her head to answer it.

“Eleanor, it’s me.”

“Who?”

“Your husband. Who did you think it was?”

“I don’t know. One of my students. What is it?”

“I wanted to remind you not to forget to pick up those light fixtures we ordered for the kitchen. Eleanor?”

“I’m here.”

“Do you remember the studio we lived in when I was doing my residency and you had just started teaching? Remember how brown water came out of the kitchen faucet? Remember how you used the bathroom for a study so you wouldn’t wake me when I was working nights and sleeping during the day?”

“You said one day we would look back and laugh at how far we’ve come. I didn’t care where we lived. I was so happy,” she said. “You said any place we lived afterward would feel like a castle.”

Eleanor went downtown, to the gallery hosting Adam’s much-praised retrospective. She had read a review of it in
The New Yorker
that morning; the reviewer called it “haunting, deeply moving, and deceptively simple. The paintings strike the perfect balance between the collision of history and the personal.” She felt driven to see it, as if it were some kind of sign that would help her understand who she was. The gallery was an open room with mahogany floors; its white walls were covered with his vibrant work. The show was called “Portrait of the Artist’s Sister.” Eleanor recognized her image in each of the ten paintings in the middle gallery room. It was the work Adam painted years ago when she had modeled for him. In one painting the figure was sitting Indian style in the middle of the bed, her arms tucked underneath her head and her chest thrust out. Eleanor remembered the torture of holding the pose.

The figure in the paintings had her eyes. Her hair. The shadows underneath her eyes, her cheekbones. She saw her own disturbing essence captured. In one painting she looked angry and ornery and tough. But her eyes betrayed a woman who was vulnerable and devoted. It was haunting to see herself exposed and then to realize that it wasn’t her at all.

She was the only one in the gallery—it was still early, just noon. The series was about Adam’s obsession with his sister who had died when she was twelve, on the cusp of becoming a woman. She noticed that in each figure of the girl the color in each eye is slightly altered, one green, the other vaguely blue. Adam captured in the girl the awkwardness of being a young woman, the duality of being a girl and a woman at the same time. Of wanting to be desired and wanting to be invisible.

She sat on the long wooden bench at the center of the empty room. It was quiet and comforting to be surrounded by the familiarity of Adam’s paintings, by the woman who was like a lost friend from long ago. It was as if time stopped and she was inside the life room of her past. It crystallized in that instant, how everyone who had shaped and influenced her was dwelling inside her. They would never die. The life room was more than a physical space to occupy It was as Adam had told her: a private room filled with her own memories and associations. She could reconstruct and transform the idea of herself in any way she chose by using her fantasies and imagination. The realization came to her, filling her with energy and excitement and surprising freedom as if she now had come closer to understanding what she was meant to do.
This is me
, she thought, looking at the images in Adam’s paintings.
This is who I am
. She remembered Adam’s hands as they made their slow way up her body and she felt a twinge of nostalgia for the intensity of their connection.