Forty Rooms

7. Library Cubicle

“Hey, you’re that Soviet girl, aren’t you?”

I raised my eyes from the page. A bear of a boy in a rainbow-colored shirt was leaning on the corner of my desk, setting my towers of books to a dangerous wobble.

“I prefer ‘Russian,’” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Russian. So, how do you like it here?”

“I like it very much,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean…” He seemed vague, amiable, good-looking in a bland, healthy, entirely forgettable way. “I meant, how do you like America… You know, what do you like most about it?”

I smiled politely.

“The library,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

He had something written on his shirt. For a moment I puzzled over the meaning of the words, then grew impatient, and glanced at my book.

“Well, anyway, you’re studying. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.

I turned the page, heard his steps retreating into the silence of the stacks.

In the past few months I had been asked many things—whether it was true that Soviet children marched to school in formation and were one and all atheists, and did I know Tatiana in Leningrad, and how did I like hamburgers, fraternity parties, and freedom of speech—and while I set much stock by good manners, I did not feel the need to answer every question in the obliging spirit of upstanding national representation. That was Olga’s concern. Upon arriving in the States, she had found herself an unwitting celebrity of sorts—something to do with her timing, her being the first-ever Soviet student in the country, or maybe the first in an undergraduate program, or perhaps just the first on the East Coast—some statistical fluke, in short, which nevertheless meant that she would spend her entire fall giving interviews and visiting local schools, posing for photographers, assuring everyone that she adored freedom of speech, complaining in private that she had had by far more freedom in Russia and that the burden of being the “face of the country” was dulling her complexion.

I suspected that she was enjoying herself.

My own entry into my small southern college had passed unnoticed by comparison—a few lines in a student publication, mild curiosity from my fellow freshmen; enough to be recognized now and then and asked about hamburgers, not enough to feel that I stood for anything larger—anything other—than merely myself. For that I was grateful. It was all very well for an aspiring journalist like Olga to inhabit a political essay. As for me, I had never given much thought to the current affairs of the world.

I wanted to live in a timeless poem.

I returned to my collection of Silver Age verse but soon found my concentration flagging. I was tired, of course—it was past midnight, and I had subsisted on very little sleep for a long time—but also, I felt oddly bothered by the encounter with the boy. Had I been unnecessarily short? Rereading the same two lines over and over, I thought of the look that had settled on his face, apologetic and offended at once. When, a wasted half-hour later, I heard footsteps approaching through the stacks, I was relieved at the impending interruption. I would be friendlier when I saw him next.

But when the bookshelves parted to reveal the nearing shadow, it was not the boy in the rainbow shirt—it was the secret visitor of my Russian adolescence, strolling nonchalantly down the aisle, coming to a stop before my desk.

He was not smiling, nor was I pleased to behold him.

The last time I had seen him—well over a year before—we had quarreled. For weeks I had been studying ancient Greek tragedy till the wee hours, my mind gloriously full of heroes, oracles, and monsters. He stormed into my bedroom one night just before sunrise, wrapped in some absurd billowing sheet. I felt disturbed and elated—I was certain he would kiss me at last—but instead he pontificated about Aeschylus, quoted reams of Pindar at me, and ended by pronouncing himself the god Apollo, here to inspire me. I was appalled at how pompous he had become of late, and told him so. He threw his laurel wreath to the ground and slammed the door behind him, his only conventional exit in my memory. “Pompous and unimaginative!” I shouted in his wake.

Frowning, I considered him now.

“Asleep in a library cubicle, how embarrassing,” I muttered. “Am I drooling, I wonder. Even snoring, perhaps? Did I collapse with my face in the book, and will the print of some poem transfer to my cheek? I hope that boy doesn’t pass by again.”

“You’ve been thinking about irrelevant matters too much,” he said, and, unceremoniously sweeping the corner of my desk free of books, settled on top of it, swinging his leg. He sported a neat new haircut and was dressed in a dapper suit of spotless white linen; yet in spite of his jaunty appearance, he looked somehow diminished—smaller in the way childhood rooms seem smaller to an adult returning home after half a lifetime’s absence.

“At the risk of being smacked by this Goliath of an English–Russian dictionary, I will brave the question. How do you like America?”

His voice was dry, but I saw that there would be no mention of our last encounter, and was glad, and tried to thank him by giving an honest answer.

“I like it very much,” I said after a moment’s thought. “I like the sense of anonymity. Living here is like—like being just a story among other stories, so I have time to read my own story without peeking ahead or skipping any words, if you know what I mean. And I can access an entirely new range of experiences and feelings, and these feelings are larger somehow, as if I can now see myself and the world simultaneously from two separate vantage points instead of one—a bit like gaining entry to a new dimension… But you know, I wasn’t being glib earlier—I mean with that boy—I really do love the library the most. I more or less live in this cubicle. They let you stay all night, did you know? Actually, it wasn’t until I spent my first night here, back in September, that I realized what I’d been missing. Have you ever been to the library in Moscow? You fill out a form, then take your place at one of these communal tables in a gigantic marble room that makes you feel dwarfed, and wait until the book you’ve requested is produced from some unseen depths of the building. When your turn comes, you are summoned to a tiny window and the book is slid over to you on a tray. Of course, they have everything there, but you always have to know exactly what you want beforehand—there are no surprising discoveries, you see, no sense of exploration, no browsing. Oh, one day I’ll write an Ode to Browsing—it’s such a delightfully American concept! It’s what I do here: I walk the aisles, alone, at night, and when something catches my eye—anything new, anything exciting, anything unpredictable—I grab an armload of books, as many as I can carry back to my desk, then stay up until morning reading about Mayan glyphs, or Arctic expeditions, or the art of stained-glass windows in medieval France, or underwater archaeology in Egypt, anything and everything, but always poetry, poetry first and last—” I glanced over at him, and stopped abruptly. “Am I boring you?”

“You are being unusually loquacious tonight, my dear,” he said, staring off beyond me, into the white electric glare of the shelves. “Personally, I dislike libraries. They smell of death and oblivion. True poetry isn’t meant to be stashed away in pitiful little volumes catalogued on moldy index cards, then buried in the communal grave of the Dewey Decimal System, to be exhumed once every few years by some pimply graduate student scratching out a tedious paper that no one will ever read. True poetry is meant to be recited—or better yet, sung—thundered to the sky—danced to—made love to—celebrated… It should pulsate in your ears and your heart, but all I can hear in these repositories of dust is the clamoring of the forgotten dead on their neatly catalogued shelves, begging each visitor to resurrect them, to bring them into the light, if only for a few pale moments, grateful even for such sorry scraps of attention—”

Suddenly I laughed. “The grateful dead!”

“What’s that, my dear?”

“Oh… nothing.”

A petulant look crossed his face.

“There it is again—you are thinking about boys too much. You must be careful.”

I felt his presence to be an acute disappointment. He belonged to my Russian childhood, to the otherworldly realm of fairy tales, secrets, and revelations that—even at my eighteen years of age—was so quickly receding into the distance of both time and space that I could already see myself believing someday that half of it had been real, or perhaps half believing that all of it had been real. Here, under the even, artificial light of humming lamps, in my brand-new, rational life of class schedules, advisor meetings, and black coffee, I no longer felt the need to be gentle with my persistent dreams.

“You sound like my mother,” I said.

“Hardly. I don’t care about your getting hurt. As Catullus proved early on, wretchedness is rather good for poetry. Very few, in fact, are capable of writing well while happy in love—or indeed content with life in general. It takes a special kind of greatness to write about happiness, and, just between us, Horace himself smacks too much of a self-satisfied philistine. One might even argue that the poet’s primary function is to make the misery of the human condition more bearable by converting raw pain into the orderly music of verse… But no matter. I mean something else altogether.”

Nimbly he leapt off the desk and stood looking down at me.

“In the beginning was the Word, remember? Now, generally speaking, I’m not fond of those simpletons, but old John did know a thing or two. Listen. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” His voice rose, gaining in strength, cutting through the hush of the well-lit windowless night, multiplying in echoes, until a chorus of mighty voices seemed to be booming from everywhere around me. “The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

He fell silent, and for some moments the silence continued to widen like circles upon waters closing over a crashing boulder.

“Walk with me, my dear,” he then said mildly.

I rose, obeying the unspooling of the dream, and together we made our way into the harshly illuminated stacks, straight and orderly as hospital corridors. He walked a step or two ahead, not glancing back at me, talking all the while.

“Everyone is born as a light, a naked spirit, a pure longing to know the world. Some lights are dimmer, and some brighter; the brightest ones have the godlike capacity not only to know the world but to create it anew, time and time again. The light shines at its purest in your childhood, but as you move farther into life, it begins to fade. It doesn’t diminish, exactly, but it becomes harder to reach: every year you live through calcifies around your soul like a new ring on a tree trunk until the divine word can barely make itself heard under the buildup of earthly flesh. None of this is anything new, of course—just read some Gnostics while you go about your browsing.”

As we walked, the stacks became darker, the static humming of lamps more remote. Here and there deeper patches of twilight lay on the shelves, the book spines growing less distinct, melting into one another, escaping the alphabet’s confines.

“Unfortunately for you, my dear, a woman’s flesh tends to be… oh, shall we say, more insistent than a man’s—and thus her choices may be harder. For every human being, no matter how brilliant, has only a predetermined capacity for creation, and a child, you see, is no less a creation than a book, albeit of an entirely different order and often less lasting. Well, naturally, that depends on the book and on the child… Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth, I used to visit her namesake, one Elizabeth Heywood. You’ve never heard of her, of course, but who is to say that today you wouldn’t speak of her in the same breath with Shakespeare had she not chosen to birth, raise, and bury a child for nearly every one of his great tragedies? On the other hand, one of those children was John Donne—so one never knows how this sort of thing will turn out. There are different kinds of immortality, after all. Choosing the spirit or choosing the flesh is ever a private matter.”

We should have reached the far end of the stacks long ago, but the shelves went on stretching before us into what was now a murkiness of densely shifting shadows.

I found myself slowing my steps.

“Walk with me,” he threw over his shoulder. “Now, one of the things I find so boring about this modern age of yours is all the nonsense about women being discriminated against throughout history, beaten down by the male hierarchy, forced to do housework while their men achieve greatness. Never believe it. The Muses were all women, if you recall; Orpheus was the odd one out. But the Muses were virgins. Well, not in the technical sense of the word—I had to divert myself somehow between all the lyre-strumming bits, and now and then they did stray into some transient unions of their own. But they were never devoted wives and never committed mothers, and all their time, all their passion, was dedicated solely to their art.”

It had become so dark I could not see the shelves at all. I followed his voice blindly. Gravel or perhaps seashells crunched under my feet, and I stifled a cry when the flinty wing of some swift nocturnal creature brushed my cheek.

“Now, as always, you have a choice. You can spend your days baking cookies for your offspring, or—as ever through the ages—you can become a madwoman, a nomad, a warrior, a saint. But if you do decide to follow the way of the few, you must remember this: Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you. Here, turn around.”

He stopped with such abruptness that my face was pressed into his jacket in the instant before I felt his arms grasp my shoulders and swing me about. I could see nothing at first—it was so black I thought for a moment that I had forgotten to open my eyes—but I had a sure sense that we were in the library no longer: the darkness, though impenetrable, breathed of vastness, and the ceiling with its dead electric lamps had long given way to the cosmic circling of infinity. Then slowly, out of the void, a steady light emerged, and another, and another, until lights were floating all around me—numerous but not endless, a thousand sparks, two thousand perhaps, setting the emptiness aglow as they drew their fiery trajectories across the night, until the night itself was relieved of its oppressive blackness and other, paler lights shimmered in a faint haze of lesser constellations beyond.

“There,” he whispered. His breath was in my hair; his right hand, slipping off my shoulder, was pointing into the luminous depths. “The lights of the earth—both men and women, of course, but look at the women: in the eyes of the masses, nothing but a gathering of perversions and monstrosities, of recluses and harlots. Sappho over there—my Tenth Muse, they called her, a heartache of mine—just a handful of her lines survive today and, oh, if only you knew what beauty has been lost… Curious, is it not, that so many of them shared Sappho’s tastes and predilections—Tsvetaeva, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, numerous others… And here are the nuns, the mystics, the philosophers, the odd and the solitary and the sickly ones, the ones who never married—Teresa of Ávila, Hypatia, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson… And don’t forget all the wild ones as well as the quiet ones who gently and unswervingly eschewed convention—the two Georges, Sand and Eliot, come to mind. And most of the married ones were childless, and of the ones who did have children, so many became what the world would brand ‘unnatural mothers’—take Akhmatova and Colette, who sent their children away to be raised by relatives, or Tsvetaeva, who let her daughter starve to death in an orphanage. Heartless? Most certainly, by any human standards—but they lived and died by other, higher standards, the divine standards of art.”

His right hand was still pointing as he talked, but his left had begun to stroke my neck, ever so lightly. Waves of glowing flame swirled about me, through me, and I was aware that there was no ground under my feet. I felt queasy, and wanted to wake up.

“Alternatively…” I said, and my voice was hoarse—these were the first words I had spoken since we had abandoned the safety of my cubicle. “Alternatively, one could just marry an understanding man of means and hire a nanny.”

As soon as I spoke, his hand on my neck grew heavy and inert, as though made of marble, and the swirling lights guttered as in a gust of wind, and went out. Blackness crashed upon me, suffocating and enormous, but I had no time to feel frightened before the electric lamps whirred to an abrupt glare. Blinded, I shut my eyes. When I opened them, I expected him to be gone, but he was still there, looking down upon me as I sat at my desk—and I was shocked to see his face, for it was not as before, not handsome and hard and leering, but tranquil and beautiful, filled with a gentle radiance of autumn sunlight and, also, an odd kind of sadness.

Unable to sustain his gaze, I lowered my eyes to the floor.

“You aren’t barefoot tonight,” I mumbled, to hide my confusion.

“There was a notice on the library door,” he said flatly. “‘Shoes and shirts required.’ And don’t start thinking about that boy’s shirt again, or one day you may find yourself laundering it.”

I laughed, knowing full well that this time I was truly alone, and raised my eyes again, to discover that two or three books had fallen off my desk onto the floor; I must have pushed them with my elbow while dozing, and the crash had woken me up. I hunted in my overflowing bag for a compact mirror to check my face for any signs of drool, just in case anyone wandered by, and marveled at the unsought wealth of ideas that had sprung up in my mind fully formed, out of nowhere, while I had slept. The Cycle of Memory, I would call these new poems. There would be one about a blind girl who lived in the library and summoned ghosts of her favorite poets to life every night; and another about a compendium of immortality carelessly updated by an angel who kept drifting off to sleep in the softness of his cloud and forgetting to jot down a name or two; and yet another about a peasant in some desert discovering the missing manuscript of all of Sappho’s masterpieces—this one would weave in and out of Sappho’s lines, real and imagined, as the fellah would stumble and mumble over them before tearing the papyrus into strips to bind his aching feet—oh, and maybe one about a woman creating a marvelous, perfect poem about each child she had refused to have, though on second thought, no, I knew nothing about children… So, then, how about a Muse of Apollo—I would make her Clio, the Muse of History—who fell in love and renounced being a Muse for a spell, causing entire civilizations to be obliterated in human memory while her love affair went on—and more, and more, and more…

I felt awake and young and exhilaratingly happy.

8. Boyfriend’s Bedroom

“And while the rats were having sex in their cage,” the girl shouted over the noise, “this guy next to me actually stood up to see better. Can you imagine? And Professor Roberts noticed him and said, in front of everyone—” The music took off anew, a galloping folk tune this time, and a cluster of boys across the room roared and linked their arms and stomped about, vigorously throwing their legs up in the air, so the end of her sentence was drowned out. I watched her eyes widen with excitement in the eyeholes of her feathered mask. She leaned closer. “… so intense, you know!”

“I’m supposed to take it next semester,” I shouted back, “but I’m not sure—”

“Ah, here you are!” Lisa cried, elbowing her way through the dancers. “What are you still doing with your old drink? I brought you a new one.”

I squinted into the plastic cup she was holding out.

“It’s green,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed happily. “So finish the pink one already. They have something blue too. Embrace the rainbow.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” the girl in the mask announced unexpectedly and wandered off, walking on tiptoe, her long black hair slapping against her back.

I looked after her.

“Does she live here?” I asked.

“No. This is Hamlet’s place. She wants to be his girlfriend, I suspect. Who doesn’t, though? But he is trouble. And if you’re not going to drink that, pass it over.”

The folksy hurly-burly had given way to an Oriental whine, and a boy in an ankle-length caftan spread his arms wide and twirled about the room, keening loudly.

“Lisa, who are all these people? And what’s with the music?”

“It’s eclectic,” she said, unperturbed, and gave her cup an energetic shake; a few ice cubes leapt out and somersaulted in the air before plunking back with a green splash. “And I told you already, they’re in my theater class. You really should leave your library cubicle more often.”

For a while we watched the crowd, most of them dressed in black, the rest decked out in some outlandish garb, a few wearing masks. The lights were turned down low, but what little could be seen of the apartment—a flea-market couch, beige wall-to-wall carpeting, shelves made of crates—created a contrast I found unpleasant, as if all present here were trapped in a simple, one-dimensional story and were striving frantically, almost shrilly, to clown their way out in order to inhabit a more interesting one.

Someone thrust a potted geranium at me in passing.

“Enjoy,” he said with a beatific smile.

Feline whiskers, I saw, were scrawled across his cheeks with an orange marker.

I set the pot on a nearby crate and poured my untouched pink drink into it.

“Lisa, I’m going back to the dorm,” I said. “I’m bored. And I’m not dressed for this anyway.”

“One day, you know,” my roommate sang out, “one day you’ll look back at your youth and regret all the things you haven’t done. Talk of years wasted! Here you are, almost twenty years old, and have you ever been drunk? No. Have you ever had a proper boyfriend? No. Have you ever even—”

Quickly I interrupted, “It’s too loud, I can’t hear anything, I’ll see you later.”

I wound my way toward the doorway, swerving widely so as not to step on a python that slumbered in a woven basket in the middle of the floor, skirting some commotion; people were beginning to drag the furniture against the walls. Past the living room, the kitchen was deserted; a wet trail of bare footprints glistened across the entire length of its white linoleum floor. I followed the footprints into the hallway, in time to see a bare-legged girl, her face hidden by a soaked tangle of long, dark hair, her shoulders heaving with sobs, being draped in an oversize trench coat and gently pushed across the threshold by a tall, thin man.

The man closed the apartment door behind her and turned, and saw me.

Embarrassed to have witnessed something private and unpleasant, I squeezed past him with my face averted. In the hallway mirror, my awkward double in blue jeans and a checkered button-down shirt, her hair pulled back in an unfashionable ponytail, her face bare of any feminine artifice save a careless swipe of gloss across her lips, prodded the lock.

“Leaving already?” his voice asked softly at my back.

“I have a paper due on Monday.”

“That’s a pity. You are easily the most fascinating person here.”

I looked up at him for the first time. He stood watching me, leaning with casual elegance against the wall, dressed in a cardigan of gray cashmere, his face pale and vivid and arresting in its fierce intelligence, a gray cat draped around his shoulders. Behind him, framed by the two doorways, I could see the dim rectangle of the party room, now freed of its couch and armchairs; just then, a conga line of slender girls was undulating across it, crowned by a gigantic papier-mâché dragon’s head.

My mousy reflection nudged me with her shoulder.

“I seriously doubt it,” I said, and resumed tugging at the lock.

He glanced back into the room.

“Oh, you mean them?” he said. “No, no, they try too hard to be original. All they really do is create a background against which true originality stands out… But I see you’re anxious to go. I won’t detain you, of course, but won’t you take just a sip of this very fine whiskey for the road, so I’m not left feeling that my hospitality was wholly lacking?”

He held up his drink in a squat crystal tumbler. I heard the ice clink invitingly against the glass, and thought: No plastic cups for this one. He was looking at me over the rim, one eyebrow lifted. The cat was looking at me too. Their eyes were alike, light and cold and amused. I renewed my assault on the door.

“Thank you, but I don’t drink whiskey.”

Oh, what the hell was wrong with this thing, did it turn right or left—

The man spoke unhurriedly.

“Is this a principle of yours, or do you simply not care for the taste?”

“I’ve never tried it.”

“Then forgive me the obvious question: How do you know you don’t like it? Personally, I’m an ardent follower of the immortal lessons of Dr. Seuss.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham. You know. Try them, try them, and you may?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” I said, abandoning the lock to look at the man once again. I was intrigued by my sudden realization that he was only a year or two older than I, and yet I did not see him as a boy, the way I summarily perceived—and dismissed—all the boys in my dormitory or my classes.

“Oh, no. I thought I’d detected an accent. You must be one of those unfortunates who didn’t imbibe Dr. Seuss’s classics with their mother’s milk. This simply can’t go on, it must be remedied this instant. Please follow me.”

He had spoken without smiling, then, before I could object, turned and walked off, not pausing to check whether I followed. I did, after a moment’s hesitation. We threaded our way through the confusion of the noisy living room, to a door shut at the end of a corridor. “My humble abode,” he said with a half-bow, opening the door, sweeping me inside, closing the door behind me. The music and the stomping grew remote. I tried not to wonder about the soft click of the lock, and then forgot to wonder about it, distracted by the room in which I found myself.

It did not appear to belong to the apartment we had just crossed. It was spare and refined, furnished in uniformly muted gray tones—a soft sea-gray rug, velvety mossy-gray curtains, a thick gray throw on the bed, a slim floor lamp with a mushroom-gray shade. In spite of my profound obliviousness of, not to say distaste for, all things interior decorating, I discerned that everything here bore a mark of distinctive taste. There were architectural engravings in black and white frames on the walls, bookshelves of leather-bound volumes, and on the ceiling, for some unfathomable reason, an enormous mirror. It made me uncomfortable, this room. I felt as if I myself had strayed into someone else’s story, and I was not sure that I liked the style.

“I can only stay for a few minutes,” I announced sternly, just in case he had misinterpreted my presence.

“Yes, your paper on Monday, I remember.” He topped off his glass from a cluster of bottles on a silver tray, reached for a book, sat cross-legged on the floor, his movements leisurely yet precise. “Not to worry, it’s very short. I’ll read it to you, it’s best when read aloud.”

As I settled across from him on the carpet, the gray cat flowed off his shoulders and pooled into my lap.

“Dorian likes you,” he said. “It’s a great compliment, he doesn’t like just anyone, I assure you. Did you know that a group of domestic cats is called a pounce, and a group of wild cats a destruction? Have a sip in the meantime… Now, the happy creature here is Sam-I-am, but we never get to learn the name of the grumpy one. It used to bother me quite a bit when I was a child… What do you think, by the way?”

“Interesting. Tastes like smoke, wood, and acute angles. I can’t say I’m fond of it.”

“Well, and now you know. Here, try this, this is sweeter, a coffee liqueur.”

“I don’t really drink,” I explained.

“Oh, but this isn’t drinking. This is sampling. Purely educational in spirit.”

And so I sat on the floor in the soft gray twilight of the strange room with the cat warming my thighs, listening to the light-eyed man read about eggs and ham, and thing one and thing two, and the clocks full of tocks, and the shoes full of feet, all the while sipping from an array of plump multicolored glasses that kept appearing before me out of nowhere—this one a golden-smooth honey of almonds, that one a sharp jolt of a plunge into a cold lake at sunrise, the last a dusty mouthful of vintage lace and genteel regrets.

He laughed at that.

“I knew it,” he said with satisfaction, and touched his glass to mine. His fingers were very long and thin, an aristocrat’s fingers. “I would recognize a fellow poet anywhere. Something about the way you hold the words in your mouth a fraction of a second longer, as if tasting them. Read me some of your poems.”

“No,” I said, though I felt secretly pleased. “I don’t read my poems at parties. Words are not to be bandied about like cheap coins.”

“But parties are precisely where one’s poems should be read. Where then would you read them? Poetry seminars? Libraries? I must say I’m shocked. Next you will tell me your poems do not rhyme.”

“Sometimes they do. Not always. And I don’t read them anywhere.”

“But this is heresy!” he cried. “Poems demand to be read, otherwise they are no better than solitary trees falling in the woods.” (Didn’t someone say something much like this to me before? I could not remember, but an odd feeling of recognition started inside me, and I felt myself growing flushed with an unfamiliar thrill.) “And of course they should always rhyme properly. Their very power derives from that anguished tension between the poet’s flights of fancy and the fetters of the form within which he labors. ‘The best words in their best order,’ as Coleridge noted, ‘order’ being the crucial idea here. Rhyme imposes order on dreaming, and the greatest poets rise to true greatness by transcending that order from within, by exploding preset boundaries and clichés with beauty and passion.”

He spoke with all the fervor of conviction, but the colorless eyes in his narrow, agile face were bright with mockery, and I could not tell whether he was being earnest or making fun of me. Someone had begun to knock on the door.

“Read me some of your poems,” he repeated.

“No. They are all in Russian anyway.” I was beginning to feel rather giddy, but pleasantly so. The light was very dim now, though I had not noticed him turning it down. “Shouldn’t you see what they want?”

“No, just ignore them and they’ll give up after a while. Why don’t I read you one of mine, then, to break the ice? Though I warn you, it has nothing on Dr. Seuss.”

The knocking on the door became a pounding and a rattling, gray Dorian purred in my lap, and his low voice wove in and out in a rhythm that would soothe for a line or two, then jar with an unexpectedly jagged, urgent word, and I knew it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Then the pounding went away and I thought I heard the distant slamming of a door. It occurred to me that much time had passed since I had entered the muted gray room—an hour perhaps, perhaps two—and now the music had stopped, the party seemed over, we were alone. He had finished reciting and was looking at me, as ever with that gently mocking smile on his lips; and though I wanted to praise it, I found that I could not recollect a single word of it, for it had been just like the pungent smoke drifting from the cigarette in his hand—melting wisps of mist refusing to shape into anything tangible.

“But wait a moment,” I said, realizing something. “There was no rhyme!”

“All rules exist to be broken,” he said, and shifted closer to me across the carpet, so I took a drag on his odd hand-rolled cigarette, and coughed, and talked. I talked because I was suddenly nervous, but also, mainly, because all at once I no longer wished to be a solitary tree falling in the forest. So I told him about rhymes not being the only way of ordering poetry, and of my grand ambition to catalogue the entire human experience in poetic cycles, of which I had already completed a few: The Cycle of Exhaustion (a modern take on Tsvetaeva’s Insomnia poems), The Cycle of Home, The Cycle of Memory, The Cycle of…

“The Cycle of Love?” he suggested, studying me with his penetrating pale eyes.

“No, no,” I said, moving away a little, “nothing so banal”—and I might have felt uneasy again, but I was genuinely curious to find out what he thought of various things. Take, for example, Proust’s haunting melody that had floated in the universe until discovered and set down by a composer—or, similarly, Michelangelo’s claim that he merely rescued the already existing statues from the marble blocks in which they had been trapped—did he think that this Platonic idea could likewise be applied to poetry? Was there perhaps a treasury of perfectly resonant, universal phrases somewhere out there, waiting for their Shakespeare or Pushkin to set them into harmonious words, and if so, how would one circumvent the problem of language, languages being particular and divisive? True, the most profound, most basic poetry crossed linguistic barriers with no effort—“To be or not to be” was just as powerful in Russian, though, to be fair, I could not vouch for Finnish or Chinese—but what about more nuanced sentiments? Or was that precisely what distinguished the monolithic universality of truth from the intricate embroidery of beauty: its meaning transcended its expression?

He splashed a bit of something into my glass and said that, speaking of Shakespeare, he himself dabbled in the theater now and then, as a matter of fact he had played Hamlet in a modest production last year, had I seen it perhaps, ah, a pity. Anyway, he had been working on an amusing little theory of his own, inspired by the Bard’s “All the world’s a stage,” namely, that the playwrights of genius had touched humanity so deeply because each of them had been able to distill the essence of a wholly unique worldview into their plays, and even centuries later, all of us mere mortals unconsciously molded our own lives into would-be plays penned by this or that giant, our very natures reshaped by someone’s words and plots. Some cheated and schemed through a Molière farce, others longed for a better existence in the dreary monotony of Chekhov’s uneventful drama, still others attempted to love in tragic Shakespearean terms, and the less one said about the hapless crowds stumbling through Ionesco’s and Beckett’s worlds, the better.

“And you, you definitely belong in Oscar Wilde,” I said, laughing.

“I will take it as a reference to my taste and wit only, not to any extracurricular activities,” he said, “as I hope to have a chance of proving to you shortly.”

I opened my mouth to form some clever reply, and could think of nothing, and then he was kissing me, and his kisses were not at all like the rubber kisses of my Moscow youth. And even as I was falling into some dark, hot, dizzying swirl, a small, clear-minded part of me stated coldly: This is rather predictable, a bit of a cliché in fact, for I believe I am being seduced, which is obviously what happens often in this soft, warm, gray room with low beige lights and the mirror on the ceiling and the cat with those unnatural white eyes slinking off to stare at us from the top of the dresser. But later, when the clear part of my mind had long fallen silent, another, deeper voice continued to speak—because it was all interesting, and frightening, and intoxicating, and I felt myself changing, becoming someone new, yet staying myself, always myself in some still, secret place reached only by words, a kernel of me at the very heart of this whirlwind, this chaos, and the voice continued to speak, imposing order on the chaos, and somewhere in that small, secret place, quite apart from the world, I found myself writing a poem, my first poem in English, a poem with proper rhymes.

9. My Dorm Room

The telephone shrilled in the hush of my dorm room, jolting me out of cramped armchair sleep; I had dozed off while waiting. I let it ring another time before lifting the receiver, willing my heart to slow from a gallop to a canter, then said “Allo” with all the brightness I could muster. Lisa’s voice burst into my ear mid-laugh. She was just calling to tell me she would be spending the night at Sam’s, but oh, the funniest thing had happened to her this morning in the cafeteria, could I imagine—

“Lisa,” I interrupted, “you know I can’t tie up the line right now.”

“Oops, it’s Sunday, I forgot.” She hung up before she had finished speaking.

Carefully putting the receiver down on its cradle, I sank back into the armchair, checked the clock. It had been an hour already. Sometimes they were able to get through right away, but it often took two or three hours, longer on occasion. Too anxious to read, I thought of smoking a joint, then decided against it: I wanted my head to be clear. Music drifted through the half-open window—Constantine was readying for another party. The March breeze made the lowered shade rattle lightly against the pane.

I settled back for another stretch of expectant silence.

Every Sunday, as I waited by the telephone, I could picture them with that rare clarity for which I treasured these weekly vigils—my father at his typewriter, working with only half his usual absorption, ready to pick up the second line at a moment’s notice, my mother perched on a stool in the corridor, dialing, hearing the hateful busy signal, dialing again, hearing the busy signal, dialing again, her lips pressed taut with concentration, willing into being the operator’s curt response. Our conversations themselves were disappointing, five minutes’ worth of forced cheer shouted over static; but the hours of anticipation allowed me to convince myself that my home truly existed, that my childhood had been real—that it had not all been an invention, a fairy tale I told myself whenever I felt lonely, a heartrending song of stars and destinies, dissipating in the harsh light of days and the neon glare of nights conducted with the dry precision of a foreign language.

Sitting immobile for so long had made me stiff. I stretched, yawned, closed my eyes; when I opened them an instant later, the world had shifted: the familiar earthy smell lingered in the air—perhaps I had rolled that joint after all—and the room was flooded with silence and darkness. The silence had a different quality to it, a humming thrill of unreality, and the darkness was deepest in the armchair across from mine.

“So,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’ve decided to break it to them at last. They won’t be pleased, you know. No, don’t turn it on, or you may just see a dragon instead of a handsome youth.”

“Aren’t you getting your myths mixed up? I’m hardly Psyche, and you’re too old to be Cupid.” Still, I moved my hand away from the lamp. “In any case, I’m not worried, I know they’ll understand. I’ve sent them some of my poems.”

“Yes,” he said. “Your On the Other Side cycle. It wouldn’t have been my first choice—it’s more Dionysus than Apollo, too much raw feeling, not enough thought. And that ditty about a nun sleeping with the devil, that’s painfully obvious, really, and as close to pornography as is acceptable in civilized society. Well. You’ve practiced your arguments, I assume?”

“I’m hoping my poetry alone will be enough,” I said, a bit dryly.

“But if it isn’t?”

“Then I will tell them that going home is a predictable thing to do, and someone once taught me not to take the path of least resistance.” I paused for the sound of acknowledgment, but the darkness lay still around me. “Fine. I will tell them that I’ll be twenty-two in just a few months, but I have yet to start living. I’ve spent my entire existence until now sheltered under the parental roof, in library cubicles and dorm rooms, and my future is all mapped out for me as well: my old Moscow routine waiting to close in upon me, a short interlude of graduate school followed by a desk job in some dusty institute, a marriage to someone like Vasily, then children, then middle age, then death. It’s like one giant board of tic-tac-toe, spanning years and years, and as life crosses off one square, I’m expected to obediently put my O down in the next logical place, knowing all the while that the game can’t be won. But somewhere out there—somewhere out there are street carnivals and mountain peaks and sunlit squares, and I just want to—to get off the board for a while.”

“But what exactly will you do, my dear?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter? Maybe move to New York. Or New Orleans. Or San Francisco. Rent a studio. Wait tables in some smoky den. Learn how to mix mean cocktails and play the guitar. Master poker. Take up karate. Work at an art gallery or a post office. Get a job as a conductor on a train between the coasts. Or a backup dancer. Or a window washer. Anything. Everything. I’ve never even been anywhere. I want to throw myself into adventures. Plunge into the twentieth century before it runs out, so I can write about it in the fullness of experience. Because no one can discover anything new while staying within four walls of a bookworm’s cell, never venturing out to taste joy or pain. Art is all about stretching the limits of being human, is it not? It can’t be born of a small, predictable life.”

A night breeze swept into the room, and the shade beat a fluttering rhythm against the windowpane. I peered into the shadows. “Are you still there? Hello?”

“I wish,” he said, and I could hear him stifling a yawn, “I wish you hadn’t fallen into the trap that has claimed so many others. An artist doesn’t need to lead a life of distraction in order to create. In fact, if you are ever to prove worthy of a myth, you must devote all your time to your calling and leave the manufacturing of adventures to your future biographers. For you must remember: Limits are best stretched by going inward, not outward; pain will find you no matter how cramped the cell you hide in; and joy—joy is always only a poem away. And there are no such things as small lives, there are only small people.”

I felt a sudden flare of irritation at the smooth readiness of his maxims, at his seeming inability to understand anything about real choices in a real life.

“Noble callings, divine standards, creation with a capital C… All you ever do is talk in absolutes and abstractions.” I spoke sharply. “Don’t they say God is in the details? I want—no, I need—to experience the details, don’t you understand—the particular, gritty, wonderful details of life out there. The smell of dew and garbage trucks at dawn. The bracing taste of bitter coffee at the chipped counter of a roadside diner. The wild thrill of jazz spilling out of a basement window into a still, dark alley. These are the kinds of things I want to pin down in my poems. Things and feelings that will be unique to the here and now. Things and feelings that will be unique to me in the here and now.”

All at once conscious of shouting, I stopped. The hush in the drafty room grew hollow like the inside of a tolling bell.

When he spoke, the indifference of his drawl was a punch to the stomach.

“Sometimes, my dear, I forget what a child you still are. Oh well. Take care, while out browsing, that you don’t get lost in the stacks. I will be leaving you now.”

He sounded remote, as if already walking away to some other place, growing more distant with every word. The memories of my last days with Hamlet overtook me with unexpected violence, as they had not for months—that shrugging gesture of his, that condescending half-smile, the pale, bored eyes sliding past me obliquely…

I felt desolate once again, and bright with anger.

“So go, then!” I hissed into the orphaned darkness. “Go! I’m sick of your speeches, and I’m sick of you! Time I outgrew this juvenile little fantasy once and for all—”

I nearly screamed when his whisper brushed past my ear, so close I could feel the grazing of his hot, dry lips against my temple.

“If you make me a proper sacrifice, I may answer a prayer or two. Just this once.”

The unnatural blindness pressed on my eyelids. My throat was tight.

“What, you want me to slaughter a goat for you?”

The telephone shrilled in the hush of the room, jolting me out of cramped armchair sleep; I must have dozed off while waiting. I let it ring another time, to steady my voice before answering, but it turned out to be only my roommate Lisa, calling to tell me that she would be staying at Sam’s tonight, but oh, did she have a story for me—

“Lisa, you know I can’t talk right now,” I interrupted. “It’s Sunday.”

“Oops, sorry, I forgot!” She hung up.

Upbeat music was pulsating through the half-open window; Constantine was having another party. I turned on the lamp—night had sneaked past me somehow—and sank back into my armchair, feeling disoriented and upset. An obscure dark presence loomed at the back of my mind, as if something terrible had happened or was about to happen, yet I could not give it a name; I just felt the impending threat of its misery in my bones. I sat still for a minute, then shook my head to dissipate the lingering sogginess of sleep, and, picking up the sheaf of pages by the telephone, read the top one.

Would it prove sufficient to make my parents understand the full force of my determination to devote myself to this—this solitary quest of capturing the formlessness of living in a net of language? I leafed through the pages, plucking a line here, a couplet there, sounding them out in my mind, trying to see them as my parents would, as would a stranger; but the lines refused to coalesce with any cohesion into verses, or verses into poems. The more I read, the more I sensed, with growing horror, that the meaning I heard ringing so clearly within my being had not broken through the husks of dried words—that life was absent from the littering of adolescent sentiments and empty phrases.

The telephone rang.

“Moscow for you,” barked the operator’s voice—and then they were there.

Allo, allo, how are you, we are well, I am well, all is well! All three of us shouted, then stopped at the same time, waiting for someone to start speaking, but no one said anything for a couple of seconds, long enough for me to imagine the thick cable line stretching in the silt of the ocean floor between the continents, overgrown with mollusks, strewn with skeletons of ships, shadows of primordial monsters slithering in the green murk above.

“So… have you read the poems I sent you?”

“Yes, we have, yes.” Again they were speaking at once. My mother was laughing a little, as she did when embarrassed, saying that she hoped they were not altogether autobiographical, and something about drugs, while my father mumbled indistinctly behind her laughter. My mother stopped laughing, my father cleared his throat. Another monster floated through the murky ocean waters.

“Well, anyway, composing poetry is part of youth—who doesn’t have a few sonnets hidden in a drawer somewhere?” my father said with finality. “So, have you given more thought to graduate schools? Moscow University has several programs—”

“About that,” I said. I could feel my face burning with shame. “I thought I’d stay here for a bit longer. Another year or two.”

I heard my father’s careful breathing, the muffled clutter of my mother dropping something, her receiver perhaps. I waited for the fumbling to subside.

“Ah, so,” my mother said at last. She sounded very far away now. “Will you be applying to graduate schools in America, then?”

This would not be the moment to mention that the unfailingly perfect Olga was considering Yale Law School. “No, I just… I thought I’d get a job for a bit.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Maybe I’ll work at a post office or something. I thought—”

“But this isn’t serious,” my mother said in an injured tone.

My father said nothing.

“I mean, just for a short while. While I research graduate schools.”

“Well,” my mother said. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and we’ll discuss all the options next week. There isn’t that much time, you’re graduating in two months. This isn’t a practice run, you know, this is the only life you get.”

My father still said nothing.

When the line went dead, I looked at the room where I had spent four years’ worth of nights, minus two or three dozen library vigils and one short spring of romps with Hamlet. I looked everything over with care—I wanted to be certain. I moved my eyes over the two side-by-side desks, the schoolgirls’ bunk beds, Lisa’s posters of Klee and Kandinsky on the walls, my modest cluster of mementoes pinned in a corner, a bald spot in the middle where a Cat in the Hat postcard used to be. No, indeed, nothing real could have come of this—a diligent girl playing at being a poet in a public sandbox. My mind made up, I gathered all the pages from the floor, and, stepping over to my desk, proceeded to empty its drawers of more pages, handwritten originals all, some in Russian, some in English.

I felt quite calm.

There was a lighter in my pocket, white letters on red spelling “Siberia”; some friend of Constantine’s had brought it from one of Amsterdam’s coffee shops; I had borrowed it weeks before and forgotten to return it. It would not work right away, and the ball of my thumb grew sore with repeated attempts before I managed to cajole a small blue light into wavering being. The sink in the corner was too shallow to hold all the paper at once. A fireplace would have made for a much more poetic scene—and one should always do these sorts of things with style, I thought with bitterness, and dropped the first handful of pages into the sink; The Cycle of Solitude it was, I noticed. I was all done with cycles anyway. The top page blossomed into glowing life, as if the words had burst into flame on their own accord, from the sheer force of some inner fervor. I could not help reading them then, stark black against dazzling gold, quivering with transient beauty, in the moments before they disintegrated into dampened ash and disappeared down the drain half stopped up with clumps of Lisa’s long blond hair.

The page below lay revealed, writhing in turn, new lines flaring up with brief farewell heat. Not wanting to see any more, I dumped the rest of the papers in at once, and their dead white weight poured into the small grimy sink like cement. Nothing happened for a full minute; then smoke began to curl lazily at the edges. From the mirror above the sink, I was observed by an unfamiliar girl with a determined dash for a mouth, her gaze not bitter but lit up with a ferocious joy. I found myself hiccuping with sobs that sounded like laughter, or else laughter that sounded like sobs. There you go, Apollo, a nice little sacrifice for you—the sum of my entire existence to this day, all erased, so I can start anew, so I can create something real, something alive. There, there, can you smell the sweet rot of toy words, of dead words, rising like cloying incense to your heaven? And if I believed in you, and if I could pray, what would I ask in return? To be granted the strength to persevere, first and foremost—not to swerve from my path, not to lose my desire to capture the world bit by bit, word by word, until, in the fullness of time, my small words would number so many they would become a door opened into life as I had known it—opened to anyone who would accept my invitation to walk through. And maybe, lowering my voice to an embarrassed whisper, I would ask to meet someone new—someone I could love fully and forever, my soul mate, my missing half, if I believed in such things. And oh, I would ask you to punish the man who humiliated me so easily, in passing—you would likely find this request the most pleasing of all, for are not the gods ever thirsty for vengeance? But one should be wary of wishes fulfilled and prayers miscarried… And as the pages smoked and flared and crumbled away, I wondered at the savage-eyed girl in the mirror, then forgot all about her, thinking of a poem I would start as soon as this tedious rigmarole was over. God’s Book of Complaints and Suggestions, I would call it; it would be a polyphony of prayers, curses, and regrets, layered and contradictory as life, bits of it tragic, bits of it funny, bits of it violent, bits of it—

The fire alarm blew up above my head.

Without thinking, I turned on the water, and the room vanished in a hissing cloud of acrid steam. The alarm screamed and screamed. My door was flung open, someone ran in, and, coughing, I watched him pull up the armchair, climb to the ceiling, and unscrew something with manly efficiency.

The noise stopped.

“That’s better,” he said, stepping down. “Lucky I was passing by. What on earth were you doing?”

“Destroying compromising materials,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “Dirty photographs.” His tone was weighty with mock seriousness, and his eyes alight with laughter in his face.

“I wish,” I said. “My life is nowhere near that interesting.”

“Burning down the dorm seems interesting enough to me,” he said. “I’m on my way to a party.”

“Constantine’s?”

He nodded.

“Watch out for the ouzo, it’s deadly.”

He pushed the armchair back to the wall.

“You should air out the room properly. Need help cleaning up?”

I turned and considered the sink, choked with soggy gray paper. A charred, half-drowned shred was plastered against the enamel, a few lines still legible.

I became aware of his standing next to me, looking at the corpse of the poem, and flushed, and smeared it quickly into wet soot, and hid my blackened hands behind my back.

It had just occurred to me that I remembered every last word of my vanished poems by heart.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

Our eyes met. His face had the broad, clean planes of a Michelangelo nude, and his hair was the boyish, curly mop of a Raphael angel. His eyes were no longer laughing.

“Well, I’ll be going, then,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”

Still he stood there.

10. Studio Room

Happiness this deep is wordless.

11. Bathroom

I sat on the mattress, my sweater wrapped tightly around me, my arms wrapped around my knees. I felt chilled to the bone. Adam freed a shirt from its hanger, tossed it into the open suitcase, and threw the hanger onto a growing pile; plastic hit plastic with a dry, loud clap. He would not look at me. Through the basement’s two small street-level windows I watched the rain battering dark winter puddles. A woman’s shoes rapped past, sharp and reptilian. I made another effort to speak, though my words felt like ghostly wisps of real words, passing right through him, helpless to change anything.

“Please understand. I followed you up here because of your school, and now you want me to follow you across the ocean because of your job, and I just…”

Another hanger smashed into the pile with an angry clatter.

“Please. I don’t want to leave you. Maybe later… when you get back…”

He looked at me at last. His eyes were dark and flat.

“We were going to spend our lives together.” I could see the jaws clenching in his face. “Now, at the very last minute, I find out that you went behind my back to extend the lease on this dump, and you tell me you won’t be coming.”

“Please. Please listen… I just…”

“No,” he said, turning away. “I will finish packing and go. I will stay somewhere else tonight. I don’t know where. A hotel. I will go to the airport directly from there.” I tried to interrupt. “No,” he said again, and the force of it was like a hand clamped over my mouth. “I don’t want to say things I’ll regret later. I’ll call you from the hotel. If you change your mind, pack and join me. Otherwise—otherwise we’ll work out the details later, and I wish you well.”

Stunned, I listened to the skeletal clacking of the hangers for another minute, then stood up and, without looking at him, walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me; there was nowhere else to hide from each other in our cramped closet of a place, and, like a frightened child, I needed to close my eyes so I would become invisible to the horrible monster stalking me through the basement. But the monster got me here just as well. He had already taken his toothbrush and his razor, but in the corner of the bathtub a giant gladiolus leaned against the moldy tiles, its wilting petals stuck out like red tongues from its many maws, mocking me, mocking me.

(“By the time it dies,” Adam had said when he had brought it home a week before, “you and I will be strolling along the Seine.”

“But we don’t have a vase large enough,” I had protested. “Come to think of it, we don’t have any vases at all.”

“So let’s put it in the bathtub. It’ll make for some interesting showers.”

“Do you know, I haven’t seen one of these in years,” I had said. “I remember carrying a bouquet of gladioli on my very first day of school. I was seven, and the flowers were taller than me, and— You’re not listening.”

“I am,” he had said, but I could see that he was thinking about his music again, so I had stopped talking and he had not noticed.)

Crumpling onto the floor by the radiator, I pressed my forehead to the wall, tried to drown out the unbearable clash of the hangers. After a while the noise stopped, all was quiet for some time; then the rip of the suitcase zipper gashed my hearing, and his steps crossed the room—it took only four of his strides to reach the door from the bed.

The front door opened and closed.

Frozen with disbelief, I listened for the turning of the key. But the door flew open instead, his steps tumbled back in, and he burst into the bathroom and kneeled beside me, cupping my face between his hands in just that way he had, and his eyes were no longer dead, and as always, as ever with him, I was overtaken by the warm rush, and everything within me fell into its proper place.

“I can’t leave like this. Tell me. Do you no longer love me?”

“I love you more than I ever thought possible. More than you’ll ever know.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

“Do you remember the first night we spent together, I asked you whether you would prefer to be happy in this life or immortal after your death, and you said immortal, and I said I was the same, and we marveled at the serendipity of having found each other? Except I fell in love with you, and when I’m with you now, I just want to be happy. That is, I am happy, deliriously, astonishingly happy, but I’m also terrified of losing that happiness, and wondering whether you’re happy enough with me, and trying to make you happy, and worrying whether I’m really as happy as I seem to be or whether I’m just fooling myself into believing I’m happy because I don’t want to admit that I’m also a little sad and a little lost, and with all that fretting about happiness, as well as being so exhausted from all the odd jobs I’ve taken to help pay your bills, I barely have the energy for my poetry anymore—but for you, for you it still is all about your music. And what bothers me most is not the knowledge that I need you so much, that I love you more than you love me—although that’s pretty hard to take—but the fact that—”

“Oh, but you don’t! You can’t possibly love me more than I love you. All I want is your happiness, I don’t care about my job, I’ll call them and tell them I don’t want it—”

“Oh no, you can’t do that, it’s your future, our future, I will come with you, of course I will, all I ever wanted was to hear you say that—”

And our lips drew close together, and all was righted in the world, and in another heartbeat I did hear that key turning in the lock—he must have paused on the landing before the closed door for a long moment, perhaps likewise imagining me running after him, throwing myself into his arms, reading who knew what stilted script of unlikely, corny phrases. His steps thundered up the stairs. The springs of the outside door wheezed.

He was gone.

I did not know how much time had passed before I became aware of the deep, all-pervasive cold—at least an hour, probably longer. I was shivering. The radiator was lukewarm under my stiffened fingers, and my legs had gone numb on the icy floor. I felt that I could not move, that my body did not belong to me, and for one mad instant I was possessed by an absolute certainty that somehow, without my noticing, I had died, and was now condemned to spend a meager afterlife trapped in the grimy hell of a narrow, dim bathroom, remembering in an agony of perfect regret the light I had chosen to walk out of, the love I had chosen to lose.

I forced myself to rise and strip. Stepping into the shower, I pushed the gladiolus down into the tub and turned the water on full-blast, as hot as it would go, until it felt scalding, until the steaming stream ran red with the blood of the flower. I began to scrub myself, scrub myself hard, so hard it burned, and at last tears came, big wracking sobs, and still I kept scrubbing, scrubbing the memory of his touch off my skin, the memory of slow kisses in the dark small room, dancing naked to Bach and Django, the threadbare carpeting coarse under our bare soles, our souls always bared, breakfasts in bed at two in the afternoon, feasts of grapes and vodka at two in the morning, reciting Apollinaire and Gumilev to each other—his fluent French, my native Russian, arriving at clumsy English together—candles guttering in pewter holders picked up at a sidewalk sale, conversations intense with questing after truths, the romance of youthful poverty, a three-legged rat scratching night after night at our basement window, boots stomping past, the trembling web of moonlight on the ceiling, the abandon of nights deep and hard and raw with life, the taste of crisp green apples on his lips, the perfect exclamation point of New Year firecrackers bursting on the street outside just after I said: “Yes, yes, I will.”

In the room beyond, the telephone started to ring.

Leaping out of the shower, naked and wet, heart pounding, flinging open the bathroom door, steam pouring out, damp footprints on the grim gray carpet, not caring who peeked into the bare windows, tearing the receiver off the cradle, breathless from the cold—Hello, hello, are you there, is it you? Where are you, give me the address, stay there, don’t go anywhere, don’t go anywhere ever again, I will come right away, I love you, I will always love you, I can’t live without you—

And as I stood still in the shower, the scalding water running down my back, my breasts, my thighs, the circles of telephone rings widening on the surface of deep winter silence, I watched that other girl through the bathroom door she had left wide open behind her. I watched her flying around the room, pulling on clothes, tossing clothes into her bag, throwing on her coat, running out the door, coming back to pick up the keys she had forgotten, running out again. The girl looked frantic with the relief of happiness—happier, I knew, than I was ever likely to be now—but also somehow less real, diminished. The door closed behind her, just as it had closed behind him.

In the empty room, the telephone stopped ringing.

I turned off the water, dried myself, got dressed, and bent to fish the discolored petals of the dead gladiolus out of the tub.

“When I was seven years old,” I said aloud, “I carried a bouquet of flowers just like this on my first-ever day of school. We were all supposed to give flowers to our teachers, you see, and gladioli were traditional. I felt ridiculously proud. The teacher had all the new children come up to her one by one, hand over the flowers, and announce in front of everybody what they wanted to do when they grew up. All the boys wanted to be cosmonauts, all the girls wanted to be ballet dancers. When it was my turn, I said that I just wanted to live in a castle full of beautiful paintings and old books. The teacher was indignant. She hissed that it was dangerous bourgeois rot and that she would have to speak to my parents. She made an example out of me, and at recess all the other children called me names and laughed. I was so distressed that I became ill and spent the next two weeks in bed with a fever. My mother read me Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but my father read me poems. I fell in love with Blake’s ‘Tiger’ and Gumilev’s ‘Giraffe.’ Remember, I translated it for you—

“But ever since then I have detested gladioli.”

I finished stuffing what remained of it into the trashcan, then meticulously rinsed the dark red pollen off my hands, the last traces of the murder committed. I thought about what had bothered me most, about what I could have told him—all the things about art and fulfillment and not wanting a small life consumed by happiness. The Muses may have been women, I could have complained, but they had still inspired men, had they not? I would have lied, though, about what bothered me most.

What really bothered me was that I loved him more.

I worked the smooth golden band off my finger, scraping my hand to blood in the process. I put the ring in the empty soap dish—had he taken the soap, or were we, was I, just out? I thought of the past two years of my life—gone, gone, gone just like that—and, dull with wretchedness, wanted to cry again. So I found a stray sheet of paper in the medicine cabinet, behind some bottles of aspirin and a calcified face cream, pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket—he always laughed at the habit—and, kneeling on the floor, scribbled against the side of the bathtub.

The paper was damp and curling with steam by the time I was done. I decided to call it “The End.” It was not any good, I saw upon rereading, but one had to start somewhere. And as I sat on the cold bathroom floor, struggling to chisel the poem’s true, muscular shape out of the awkward lump of fatty phrases and petulant sentiments, I already felt—rising slowly from within the muddy misery of loneliness—the hard, bright joy of my newfound solitude.