The Life Room (37 page)

She heard voices in the next room and then footsteps. Adam appeared as if out of her dream of him. He had aged. His hair was gray, but he had the same arresting presence she remembered. His eyes had deepened. The skin around his cheekbones had melted away, making his face more angular. “Eleanor,” he said.

“I read the review. I had to come.”

“I’ve thought about you. I went to pick up the phone to call you hundreds of times. Have you forgiven me?”

“You weren’t so bad.” She smiled. “Well, maybe a little. I wondered if I would bump into you. But then I remembered how much you hated seeing your work hung.”

“I see the mistakes. How it was built. Sometimes it takes me years before I can see a painting completely separate from the places in me it derived from.” He stopped. “Eleanor,” he said. “Still so innocent.”

“I’m not innocent. I wasn’t then, either. You were always looking too closely. That’s what made me uncomfortable.”

He sat next to her on the long wooden bench in the middle of the room.

“You inspired them, Eleanor.”

“They’re about your past.”

“It was what I saw in you that gave me access. Don’t twist everything so that you don’t count. You know you do that, don’t you?”

“How did you remember that about me?”

“Tell me about you now. I read an essay you wrote in the
Yale Review
. It made me so happy to see it.”

“It grew out of the paper I was writing when we were together.”

“So I was an influence?”

“It wasn’t just about you.”

He looked at her sheepishly. “And now? What are you working on?”

“I’ve started a new book. It’s still too early to talk about.” She paused. “I’m a mother, Adam. I have two sons. Nicholas and Noah. They’re a work in progress.” She laughed.

“And the boys’ father?”

“He’s a heart surgeon. And Mariana?”

“She puts up with me.”

“Remember the prayer shawl you gave me? I tried to give it to my father but he wouldn’t accept it. He won’t forgive the past.”

She looked up at the painting of the girl and her parents with the serial number carved into their wrists.

“Could you, Eleanor?”

“I suppose not.”

“Before you go, there’s another painting in the next room I want you to see.” He took her hand and led her into another room, in which was hung a single portrait of a girl, with a strand of black pearls around her neck, looking out the window at a crowning tree.

“The woman’s eyes. She looks so lost.”

“She’s not lost. She’s you. Look what I’ve called it.”

She moved forward to read the placard. “
The Interior Life of Eleanor Cahn
.”

He nodded.

“It’s like she lives inside her head, away from the real world,” she said.

“But that’s how we all live, to an extent.”

“She’s okay, then?”

He smiled. He walked her out of the gallery into the outer room. “She’s more than okay.”

A petite woman with long blond hair wearing a short, trendy skirt, black tights, and high black boots fitted to her calves walked into the gallery and took off her sunglasses. Eleanor watched as Adam became transfixed by the young woman, his gaze never leaving hers. She hooked her arm into his.

“Eleanor, this is Vicki.” Adam said, clearing his throat once he regained his composure. He took her thin, shapely arm and held it out and studied it carefully as if he were just about to paint it.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Eleanor, I tried to call you. It’s Julie. She tried to overdose. She’s in the hospital. I’m sorry to have to e-mail you something so disturbing. Remember that late night in Paris when Julie confessed that she’d been in love with Stratford, her chair at George Washington? He recently married the graduate student. Julie’s in bad shape.

Yours, John

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

John, I don’t get it. Didn’t she care about her work? Her students? How is it possible? That laugh of hers. That deeply ironic wit. Explain how the balance can tip over.

Yrs, sorrowfully, Eleanor

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Read Keats tonight. Think of “Ode on Melancholy.” Read Coleridge. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.” Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” Stay well, John.

She thought about Julie again. She was in a state of disbelief. Julie’s life was privileged. She had a good job, people who cared about her, a home. She thought of Anna Karenina. A countess, a woman of high society, married to a respectable man, the mother of a young son. Tolstoy wrote his novel over a century ago and it still didn’t really matter how you lived, or how much you had, if inside your life was in pieces.

Her message light blinked on her office phone. She hadn’t noticed it when she first walked in. She dialed her voice mail.
You have three new messages
. The first message was from her department chair reminding her that there was a lunch next week for a potential candidate in the department. The second message was from Stacy Kern, one of her graduate students, saying she wanted to schedule a conference. A third message was from Stephen.

Eleanor, they killed the piece. I thought publishing in this hip, cutting-edge magazine was going to be sexy. The reality is, it’s fucked up. It wasn’t what they wanted.

His voice on the machine, stripped of its usual persona, held no inflection. The phone rang. She picked it up, knowing it would be him.

“What happened?”

“My agent said that the editor’s vision for the piece and mine were too far apart. The bottom line is I failed to win them.” He sounded dejected.

“I see this all the time. An editor writes the piece in his or her head before they ever read a word of it. Of course they’re disappointed.”

“I’m leaving at the end of the week.”

“What about the show? Your novel?”

“It’s had its run, Eleanor. It’s over.”

“You can’t leave.” She was so stunned by his leaving that she forgot her anger.

“I can’t stay here.” A beep on the line announced another call. “That’s probably my agent. Hold for a sec.” He came back on the line. “I hgrdfwaut?pmkwhijoggnesawboyg? Howvm risk?runchtofwautgtoo thick. She thought of Michael and her sons. She needed to see them. The branches on the trees hung low to the ground and almost slashed her in the face. It was raining harder. The path was slick. She began to fall. Her feet sank into wet grass. Where was the path? Why hadn’t she been paying attention? She was panicked. She was soaking wet. She couldn’t think. And then she remembered that she had her cell phone in her bag. She took out the cell phone and dialed Michael’s number. He picked up on the first ring. When she heard his voice she took a deep breath. “I’m lost,” she said. She was panting. “I was walking home through the park. I went to the castle and I kept walking and then it started to rain and I lost my bearings. I don’t know how to get back.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Calm down, Eleanor. I’ll tell you where to go. I know the park like the back of my hand.”

“But it’s raining. And it’s getting dark.”

“Tell me where you are. What do you see in front of you? The boys and I go there all the time. It’s easy to get lost.”

The firm sound in his voice made her heart quiet. She described what was around her. She described a mass of boulders and an old oak to the north. She thought she’d heard water. Was it the reservoir? She described the long curvy path. She began to walk up an incline. Rain was hitting her sideways. She was soaking wet. The path was treacherous. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“Just tell me what you see.” He talked her through the mist, through the twisted trees, directing her toward the path. The panic began to subside. She saw the castle. “I see the steeple. I see the rounded dome with the high windows. I see the porch and the tower. It looks like a house. A house with light. The rain has stopped. I’m walking toward it. I know where I am.” She was breathless. “I think I know how to get back.”

“Can you hear me, Eleanor?” His voice was far away, nearly fading. “Eleanor, are you still with me?”

“I can hear you,” she said, now that she calmed down. “Did you ever lose your way?”

“The park is tricky at night. It could happen to anyone.”

She was glad to hear his voice and yet she still wasn’t sure she wanted to leave yet. Or that she was ready to come home.

She opened the door to her apartment.

“You’re soaking wet,” Michael said. “You frightened me. Are you okay?” He embraced her.

“Thank you for being there,” she said, kissing him. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Of course I’m here.” He moved a lock of hair hanging over her face so she could see more clearly what was in front of her. “Go change so you don’t catch cold.”

After she slipped out of her wet clothes and put on her robe she sat next to Michael in the kitchen watching a news story about a fire in a club on the Lower East Side. The camera panned to the street. She recognized the Chinese restaurant on the corner, the greengrocer across the street. The little courtyard in the back where they had spoken was consumed in a tornado of smoke.

Michael turned from the television. “What a fire,” he said. “Eleanor, are you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“I can’t believe it. So it’s real.”

“Of course it’s real. The building’s in flames.”

“It’s true. No one can stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“The destruction, once it starts.”

“Eleanor, your hands are shaking. Are you all right?”

“How is Mrs. Greenfield?” She needed to separate herself from the blaze.

“She’s in intensive care.” He paused and looked at his wife. “We’re in the prime of our lives, Eleanor. The heart gets older. It’s a sensitive organ. It gets damaged. We have to treat it better. You have to learn to calm down.”

“How’s your heart?” she whispered, a little afraid of how he would answer.

“It’s not in any imminent danger.”

“Mine is a little messed up.”

He took the stethoscope out of his jacket pocket and listened. “It sounds okay to me.”

“It’s quiet now. Other times I need to feel it throbbing or I can’t get up in the morning.”

She looked at his hands still pressing the stethoscope against her chest. She was still alive and breathing. She wasn’t going to die.

“Julie’s still in love with him,” Jordan said, sitting across the table from Eleanor. “She’s still in the hospital.” Eleanor hadn’t been sleeping or eating well since Stephen left the city. She kept looking at herself in mirrors, in reflections of the glass as she passed store windows, searching for a familiar shape in the glass. They were having an early dinner together. They had decided to try a new Indian place in the Village that had just opened. The food was spicy, but over dinner Eleanor discovered she had a voracious appetite.

“She was such a party girl,” Jordan continued. Jordan and Julie had both gone to Yale when they were undergraduates. “At Yale she had the world at her fingertips. Everyone was in love with her. She was that kind of person. You wanted to be around her. She was a force of nature.”

“How did she go off course?”

“All those years they worked side by side and she still harbored feelings for him. Imagine that kind of torture. I don’t think it dawned on her that Stratford was no longer in love with her until she found out he was getting married.”

“Poor Julie.”

“Imagine losing yourself over a man,” Jordan said. “What a waste. A man!” she exclaimed again. “Julie always had a low opinion of herself. She thinks a man is going to make her happy A man’s attention is the only way she knows how to value herself. But she’ll survive.”

“It’s more than that. It must have started so many years ago. When she was a child. That kind of pain, the loneliness. That inability to fully connect with others. Stratford was only the catalyst. Or maybe she saw something in him she wanted to heal. And it obsessed her. That she couldn’t fully reach him. It was like he had taken a piece of herself and she needed it back.” Eleanor took a bite from the chicken curry. She tasted the lamb. “What’s the spice in here?” Her face was getting hot. She was beginning to sweat.

“You know Indian food.”

“You mean I’m not hallucinating?”

“You’re so dramatic, Eleanor.”

“I wish I never saw him in Paris. I was a conduit. Someone to reflect who he was back to himself. What do I do now? I’m different. I’m not sure I can go back.” She poured herself more wine. She had realized, like anyone in the throes of love, that she had come to live for him, and now that he was gone she wondered how she would fill the emptiness.

She remembered the touch of his skin on hers when he held her arm and how he made her feel alive.
What’s in it for you?
she heard him say to her, again and again like a mantra. She took a sip from her water. In spite of the pain, she was glad he was gone. He had seemed so right for her, but in looking back, she wondered if she had also credited him with more than he deserved. Still, she wasn’t sure how to fill the opening he had left inside her. To justify her temporary insanity, she tried to tell herself that nothing had really happened. They had barely kissed. And yet everything had happened. What did it mean about herself? About her marriage? What would she do now? How would she sublimate her desires? Why couldn’t she think of any models in literature for a woman who valued her family but who still had needs apart from them? She lifted the fork to her mouth.

“Maybe he was a conduit for you?”

“But why?”

“You were working something out.”

“Then the person doesn’t really matter? It could be anyone?”