The Life Room, page 14
I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. I looked at him questioningly.
“Our pasts. We’ve escaped, Eleanor.”
I thought to myself, Do we ever?
He described his novel scene by scene. “It takes place in Alaska. It’s about snow. It’s a cold book. It’s about a man who can’t let go.”
I couldn’t follow the logic to the story and my mind drifted. I found it difficult to concentrate on his exact words, to stay focused when he talked. When I looked at him carefully I told myself that I wasn’t attracted to him. He was solipsistic. Self-indulgent. Provocative. Everything he said seemed to serve his own purpose. He talked the way he cooked, in a whirlwind of drama and emotion. “All I have is my work,” he said. “I’m a shallow man, Eleanor.”
I didn’t know if I believed him. It seemed as if he felt what he did was vastly important. It cloaked how fragile he seemed. “I can’t really be with a woman, until I’m on track.” He looked at me. “I’m getting there,” he said. His pants and shirt were perfectly ironed. He looked studied, like he had put too much emphasis on his exterior, and it bothered me despite how clearly attractive he was. There was something still unformed about him, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it disturbed me. And why wasn’t he married or in a committed relationship? What he said about work sounded like an excuse. He had said he wanted children, talked about how much he loved them when he asked me about my boys, told me that his best friend in Colorado had two, a boy and a girl. “Man, when I see those kids I think about what I don’t have and it spooks me.”
“You could have a child if that’s what you want.”
He looked at me strangely, as if it had never occurred to him, or that no one had been bold enough to say it.
“I have to stay focused,” he remarked flatly. He fidgeted in his chair, leaned it back and forward, making it creak as it rocked.
He realized he was talking too much about himself. He stopped. I noticed the mattress on the floor and the blanket curled at the end where he slept. I saw myself in his eyes’ reflection. I felt myself being sucked in closer, as if the rest of the world outside us had vanished. The sound of the Citroëns whirling around the corner from outside his window, the chatter of French conversation through the narrow street as people walked past, dissolved. I thought how we can have so many lives depending on the person we are with, and briefly wondered what that life would be like with Stephen, imagined the two of us living in the drafty studio, face to face with each other, inside the dramatic moment as once I had imagined the two of us together, both working on our own creative endeavors.
He asked me what I was working on. I said a study on infidelity, to make it simple.
“Is that something you know about?”
I saw him look around the room and his eyes landed on the unmade mattress.
“In Anna Karenina. You know, Tolstoy.”
He looked at me sheepishly. I saw the face of the boy I had once been drawn to but never quite understood. It was still underneath the facade he presented, and being with him, as uncomfortable as I felt, made me ache for the restless, passionate part of myself I had forgotten. As I write this I wonder if it’s going to end, this desire for something more, or is it simply being in Paris that has awakened it and once I’m home it will be forgotten, and I find myself resenting Stephen, briefly, for having revealed to me this forgotten world.
“We could do it, you know,” he said, his eyes again grazing on the mattress, and then he looked back down to the chopping board where he was peeling the apples to sauté with brown sugar and cognac. His entire body engaged in the endeavor.
“Do what?”
“You know.”
“Are you trying to put the moves on me?”
He looked at me soulfully and then went back to the orchestration of the dessert, taking an apple in his hand and, with the knife, slipping off its skin. I was stunned by the boldness of my words. “I’m always putting the moves on you,” he said, doing a sort of Fred Astaire turn in the middle of the kitchen. “You know me. It’s just that . . .” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence. I wonder what would have happened had I not questioned him. Had I simply waited and not broken the moment. Would he have tried to make love to me?
“What?” I said.
“It’s just that I’ve always found you so incredibly compelling.”
I rose to find the bathroom. It was off the kitchen.
“Hurry up,” he said.
I stared at myself in the tarnished mirror that hung over a small, cracked porcelain sink. My body was speeding up, moving ahead of myself. I needed to calm down. Was I the mother of my sons, wife to a doctor, a respected professor, or a woman on the cusp of forty, completely unknown to herself, who has kept her true desires locked up in a suitcase, the contents now spilling over? Or maybe I was just responding to the situation at hand. Wouldn’t any woman suddenly alone and face to face with a man she’d once been attracted to feel the same? Did I want him, or was it simply the intimacy of his company that made me feel for a moment that I might have, had I not been married? I told myself not to get drawn in again. You’re not that person anymore. He’s self-absorbed. Unstable, I told myself. It occurred to me that my life must have seemed charmed to him, that for the first time I had the edge.
When I came out of the bathroom he was serving the cooked apples on small, mismatched, chipped plates. I thought to myself that it was wrong to be in another man’s apartment in a foreign city and I wanted to flee. “I need to go soon,” I said.
We ate the dessert in silence. I watched how Stephen savored each bite, how it seemed as if his insatiable appetite was sublimation for something I could not name. When we finished he piled our plates into the discolored sink.
“Do you need help?” I stood up.
“From you, Eleanor.”
“I meant the dishes.”
He said he didn’t want to waste our last few hours together cleaning up. He wanted to go out again. To see more of Paris.
How vivid everything was in his presence. How alive and disordered everything felt. How wonderfully unsafe. The wine made everything around us seem as if it were coated in a soft film. I had to take his hand to keep my balance.
We walked again; it felt good to be out of the dim studio and in the freedom of the Paris air. And once outside, away from the intensity of being in a private space alone together, I felt I could trust him again. It was my last day in Paris and I wanted to buy something to take home with me. I had already bought presents for the boys and a beautiful shirt for Michael. We passed the shop again where I had seen the pitcher with the painted buds ready to break into blossom, sealed in the porcelain clay.
“It’s delicate like you are.” He shook his head as if something disturbed him, as if he were thinking of something he didn’t want to say. “It looks vulnerable. But its constitution is sturdy. You have to have it.”
“Do you think so? It’s expensive.” I had checked the price the day before and had been contemplating whether to buy it.
“Not when it is something you have to have. Not if its beauty possesses you. You can’t walk away from something like that.”
He bounced in front of me and opened the door to the shop. “Remember the woman I told you about? She’s soft and open like you, Eleanor. She’s cautious, but she still cares about me.”
“You’re not over her, are you?”
“She’s still in my life,” he conceded. “At least she is now.” He looked at me and gave me a smile that was more like a question.
I bought the pitcher. It was expensive but Stephen was right. It didn’t matter. It had already begun to represent something in my life as I suppose all objects finally do for the person that possesses them.
On the way back to my hotel we stopped along one of the bridges across the Seine and stood in an alcove overlooking the dirty water. Stephen leaned against the stone wall of the bridge and I stood next to him. I didn’t know how to hold my body. I looked at him more carefully. I saw him watching me, too. The tension made us both uncomfortable. The desires that had been with us so long ago were magnified. His eyes stopped on my eyes, my lips, then traveled to my neck. As he watched me I felt the brush of his lips on my skin, the warm heat traveling up my spine, though he hadn’t touched me. I looked at his hands. His arms were open, resting on each side of the wall next to him, and I felt drawn in the empty space his arms made but I couldn’t move. I felt awkward and turned my body away. I reached in my bag and took out my sunglasses and put them on, though the sky was already darkening. He had beautiful, textured hands; the dexterity, sensitivity, and depth of personality was apparent in his long fingers and hard knuckles, and I thought of his hands even as I turned from him.
He took out a small video camera and began to film the activity on the Seine. The city was beginning to darken. He pointed the camera at me and pressed RECORD. I know now why Paris is called the City of Light. Everything around us sparkled, even the reflection of light on the water. I touched my hair and smiled warily. I’ve hated to be photographed or videotaped, to be captured unprepared and exposed, ever since I had allowed Adam to use me for his study. Stephen stepped back, kneeled, and pointed the camera at me, zooming in, then pulling back. “That’s enough,” I said, reaching out my hand to block the camera.
He stopped a tourist walking by and thrust the camera forward.
“On your honeymoon?” the tourist asked, taking the camera from Stephen’s hands. “You make a beautiful couple.”
We both started laughing and our laughter severed the tension. Stephen put his arm around my shoulder, and we leaned against the wall like a pair of lovers and smiled for the camera.
He asked me about my father. I shrugged my shoulders. And then I began to talk about him. I wasn’t prepared to, but Stephen was the only one who knew my father and understood my childhood.
I told him about the one time before I left home when my father came home to visit. He was on his way to Europe and made a stopover in Chicago to see us. My dream in Paris had made me remember it. I told him how there was still hope then that he might return for good. My father wore a nice suit and smelled of aftershave. When he walked in the house he held my mother and me. He hugged me too tightly, crushing my chest. He was trembling. He sat down. He looked around the living room, studying each object and piece of furniture as if he were holding it in his mind, calculating what he’d lost. It was awkward. He had little to say. He reached in the pocket of his suit coat and handed me a bottle of French perfume he’d purchased in a duty-free shop at the airport. He went to the piano and lifted the wooden cover. He took off his coat. He played Chopin’s sonatas, closing his eyes, moving his body. I watched his hands dance across the keys and wondered how a man who could make the sounds he made could walk away from such beauty. In our house he seemed uncomfortable. He was formal and polite. I was fourteen. He asked me if I wanted a puppy. One of the partners in a business he had a share in was a breeder. I told him no. I didn’t trust my father. I did not want to accept any more promises that might be broken.
My father sat down on the couch next to me. He took my hands in his. I studied my father’s fingers, his carefully manicured nails, noticing how well he still took care of them. When he lived at home he wouldn’t use a hammer to hang a painting out of fear that he’d accidentally miss and damage his fingers. “Look at you,” he said. I said nothing. “Look at you,” he said again. “Daddy,” I said. “This is my daughter?” he said with a question. I saw his chest begin to tremble. I held him so he wouldn’t break. “Look at you,” he said again. “You’ve grown up.” “I know. Daddy,” I said.
My mother lit up in my father’s presence. She was another person. There was a lift in her gait as she set the table for dinner. She used the formal china. She garnished our plates with parsley. She gave my father second helpings, relished cutting him a piece of cake. “Your mother can still cook,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Eleanor, your mother was the prettiest girl in all of Chicago. At least she was in my eyes.”
I told Stephen how my mother and father flirted over the dinner table. My mother told the story of how my father had taken her to the philharmonic on their first date. My father said he wanted my mother to see that side of him. “If she didn’t have passion for music then I would know,” he said. “Know what?” I asked. “Whether I could be in love with her.” “Daddy, she still likes music,” I said, and he looked up at me and grew quiet.
When my mother went up to clear the dishes, he followed her. I saw him stand behind her at the sink, lift her hair, and kiss her neck. I went up to my room to give my parents some space. When I came back down my mother was in the kitchen. I could see that she’d been crying. My father promised that he’d be back. That he’d call us as soon as he was in Europe. “You look tired, Joseph,” my mother said when they were saying good-bye. She brushed her hand along the side of his face the way she had done when I was a child. “How long can this go on?”
I walked my father to the door. He kissed his two fingers and rubbed them on the mezuzah. “Eleanor,” my father said. “Daddy,” I said. “Eleanor, I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s okay, Daddy.”
A week went by and we didn’t hear from him. My mother hovered near the phone. A month. Nothing. Disappointment became a part of the way her lips formed words. I looked up at Stephen.
“She still thought he was coming back,” I said. “Can you believe it?”
“Mom,” I had said to her, “you know he’s not coming back.” “I know,” she said. “He’s not coming back, Mom.” I said again. “You have to forget him.” “How do you forget a man like that?” she said.
Stephen looked at me and we both laughed. Just talking about it seemed to make me feel lighter, relieved. “They’re one of a kind, our mothers,” he said.
Then Stephen began to tell his story. He asked me if I remembered when his mother left Chicago and he moved in with his father. It was to be with another man, he told me. “You can’t imagine what it was like. To watch my father make love to his young new wife, knowing my mother was all alone. But she wasn’t alone, Eleanor.”
I touched his arm. I told him I was sorry and asked how his mother was now. He said he’s stopped asking how she is. He knows the answer. “There’s never been anyone else for her,” he said. “The thing with the other man only lasted a few months. She’s never gotten over my father.” I looked at him with recognition. Stephen told me he knew I would understand. He said I was probably the only person he knew who would ever understand what it was like to know that no matter what you did it would never be enough to make your mother happy.
Stephen leaned back on the bench where we sat. And I thought that he was right. That we shared that bond. And it occurred to me that it was the very thing Michael had never understood about me. “Your blue eye is very dark,” he said. Sweat pooled on my back from the sun’s heat. Perspiration dripped down my spine. I smelled Stephen’s scent as we sat on the bench. A couple, assuming closeness between us, sat down on the empty space next to me, forcing me to move closer to Stephen. Our arms touched. We watched birds swoop down and graze across the water.
He took out a pack of matches from his pocket and lit one; I watched it spark in his hand, watched how the flame enchanted him, watched as it extinguished the minute it hit the ground. Stephen leaned over closer, so that his chest brushed mine, to tell me that there was an eyelash on my cheek. He gently took it off with his finger and asked me to make a wish on it. I can’t even write here in this journal of my most private thoughts, what I wished for. It’s too painful.
He told me that when he was in Colorado he was having trouble with a disk in his back. He wasn’t getting work. He explained that he got addicted to Vicodin. “I kept taking them to relieve the pain, and then once the pain was gone, it was another kind of pain they seemed to numb.” He said he never wanted to be in that kind of shape again. I said I was sorry. He said he was happy for me, for my life, and all that I’d accomplished.
I thought about the time years ago in my mother’s kitchen when Stephen told me his parents were separating. After he left that night I looked out the window of my bedroom into his house. When I was upstairs in my bedroom I saw his entire house, the whole expanse of it, each light turned on. I saw the shadows of Stephen and his mother and father move through the house. That night I understood his loneliness, or perhaps I projected my own loneliness on to him. Perhaps he’d been happy.
I asked him if he was okay now. And he said he had to be careful. That he had to stay focused. He looked at me with a question in his face. There was always a question in his face, as if he was looking for affirmation. There was something compelling about his disclosure, as if he was asking me to get inside the hard wire of his brain and untangle it for him. I felt a maternal connection to him. What I’d sensed earlier in the day, that I hadn’t been getting the clear picture of Stephen’s life, that he deliberately left things out, was correct. He only now began to come into focus. “You and me are one of a kind,” he said. “I’ve always known that about us.”
I was a married woman. I had two children. I suddenly resented being put in the same category as Stephen. We were nothing alike. I said it was getting late. I was eager to get back to the hotel. His behavior was puzzling. As usual my inclination was to get too involved. I had always felt that Stephen kept his fair share of secrets and the secrets had made me think about him too closely. Now I wanted to be free of him. Too often he made me uncomfortable, made me feel that it was my responsibility to help him somehow. On the way back to the hotel we walked in silence. He clasped my arm and stopped me before we arrived at my hotel.
He told me that I looked really great. He looked at me deeply as if he were trying to establish a connection again. There was something I didn’t trust in his eyes again. I could almost read it. I can still have you, his eyes said. I stared back at him firmly. If I gave an inch there was no turning back. But it also struck me with the force of revelation that there was a part of me that did want to be led away, and I had to caution myself against it.
