Forty Rooms

12. Kitchen

The three large windows glowed with a perfect April sunset; its colors reminded her of a tropical drink in a glossy advertisement—something cool, sweet with fruity liqueurs, crowned by a pink paper umbrella. From up here, the rows of townhouses on the street below, with their dark tile roofs and neat arrangements of potted plants on the narrow balconies, looked clean, toylike, European somehow, and she said so, more in the spirit of indiscriminately voicing her thoughts aloud than of making conversation, for with Paul she did not much think of what she said.

“Though I’ve never been to Europe. Well, technically Moscow is Europe, but it isn’t really. Yes, we are Scythians, yes, we are Asians with slanting, greedy eyes, and all that.”

He looked up from slicing the mushrooms. “What was that Scythian bit?”

“Oh, just some famous lines from Blok.” She added after a beat, “A Russian Silver Age poet.”

“Ah. Poetry. Never got into it myself. Anyway, Europe. You should really go, you know.”

“Travel’s not so easy for me,” she said. “I have issues with documents—”

She could have added, “Nor do I have the money,” for in truth she was nearly destitute. She had long before quit her day job in a department store and her night job in a restaurant, and now survived by taking on occasional translation projects; the assignments, however, paid by the page, and she had proved inconveniently slow, agonizing as she did over the most trivial word choices with all the obsessiveness of a thwarted poet. Every night she jotted down her earnings (“Proposal for installing latrines in Central Asia, 3 pages, $48”) as well as her expenses (“March rent, $525; apples, $3.60; bus from the library, $1.10”; she always walked there to save the fare, but the piles of books she invariably checked out were too heavy to lug home on foot). At the end of each week, if the subtractions worked out, she would allow herself the single luxury of a cappuccino and pastry in a nearby café. She carried her poverty lightly—she believed that her upbringing had inoculated her against needing comforts or longing for possessions—but she sensed that any mention of her situation might embarrass Paul, who, after finishing business school, had landed a vague but clearly well-paid job at some management consulting firm and was now living in a furnished penthouse apartment in a finer part of the city.

Quickly she changed the subject.

“Are you sure I can’t lend you a hand?”

“I would never make a guest cook. Besides, I love cooking for people. Just sit back and enjoy your Chardonnay, dinner will be ready in no time.”

Swirling the wine in her glass, she watched him as he moved between the stove and the island with an agility unexpected in someone of his massive build, until at last she admitted to feeling surprised, and pleasantly so. Ever since they had run into each other on a street downtown (he had been leaving his new office; she, walking to the library), they met for coffee every few months, but this was the first time he had invited her over for dinner. She had, she realized, envisioned a grimy bachelor’s den and a plate of overcooked spaghetti topped with lukewarm sauce from a can (the extent of her own culinary endeavors). In the near-ascetic bareness of her life, had she fallen victim to the trite assumption that someone at ease with numbers—just as someone at ease with words—could never be altogether at ease in the physical world? It held true in her case, to be sure, yet here was Paul the math major in a white apron embroidered with grapes, wielding a knife with efficient grace as he chopped asparagus in his immaculate kitchen, exuding a sense of serenity amidst boiling pots and hissing pans and mysterious gleaming utensils at whose purpose she would not even attempt to venture a guess.

She found his capable presence relaxing.

“I hope it won’t be too rich for you,” he said as he stirred more cream into the sauce. “I haven’t tried this one before, it’s from a new cookbook—”

“Whatever it is, the smell is making me hungry… And just look at all these books! I don’t have any books in my kitchen. Granted, my entire kitchen is the size of a teapot—” Wineglass in hand, she rose from the table and inspected the shelves, then, pulling a book out at random, leafed through it idly.

“But these are like poetry,” she exclaimed then. “Ossobuco Gremolada with Risotto Milanese! Marseille Bouillabaisse with Aïoli! Or how about this militant Duck Flan with Maltese Blood Orange Sauce and Shallot Confit? I don’t think I know two-thirds of these words. Can anyone actually cook these?”

“Possibly. One never knows until one tries,” he said, smiling.

“And you have two entire books of desserts! I can never pass up anything sweet, it’s my one weakness… Here is something called Casanova’s Delight. Mmm, it has kiwi sauce and Grand Marnier ice cream mousse.”

He stepped closer, bumping her arm. “Oh, sorry. Let me see. This one’s a little ambitious.” As always, when he stood next to her, she was startled by his football player’s bulk. “Still, let’s brave it for our next dinner, shall we?”

“So generous of you to volunteer feeding the masses.”

He resumed his place at the stove, his face reddened with the heat of cooking.

“So,” he said after a short pause, “heard from any of the old crowd lately?”

“Just Lisa.” She opened another book. “She married Sam, you know, as we all expected. They’ve just had a boy. What in the world is cardamom?… And Maria and Constantine split up, but I haven’t spoken to either of them since.”

“I keep in touch with them. Maria is in New York, trying to break into acting. Constantine went back to Greece and inherited his shipping empire. And Stacy is renting her own childhood room from her parents. They are crazy as bats, she says. And, of course, the horrible thing with John… Not that I liked him much, always thought he was a pretentious ass, but one shouldn’t speak ill of—”

“Who?” she asked, turning a page. She was enchanted by the precisely quantified lists of exotic ingredients, the casual mentions of distant places, the pure linguistic pleasure of melodiously named concoctions—a vocabulary entirely new to her. Since Adam’s departure (fourteen months, eight days, and two hours ago now), she had barely stirred from the monastic confinement of her dim basement cell, and she felt her very soul squinting, blinded by the brightness of life out in the open, so sophisticated and varied, so full of adult things she appeared to know nothing about. It occurred to her that she was not giving the senses their proper due. It might be interesting to attempt a poem for each sense, like the verbal equivalent of one of those allegorical seventeenth-century paintings with Lady Taste licking a sugared plum, Lord Sight studying stars through a telescope, Lady Smell lifting a rose to her nose, and Lord Hearing serenading the courtly gathering on a mandolin, while Lord and Lady Touch pawed each other in the discreetly darkened bushes in the background. The Hearing poem would be the easiest, no doubt, sprinkled liberally with alliteration and onomatopoeia, but the others would present a challenge, for the trick would be to convey in words alone the unique nature of—

“John. Hamlet. Didn’t you date him at one point?”

“Oh,” she said, closing the volume. “Yes. Briefly. Did something happen to him?”

“I thought you knew.” She continued looking at him. “He—apparently he was in some kind of accident last winter. At first they thought it was drinking or drugs, but it wasn’t. He just lost control of the car. Drove into a tree. A branch pierced his lungs… Sorry, that was gruesome, I shouldn’t have—”

She set her glass of wine on the table, lowered herself into the chair.

“Apollo’s arrow,” she said quietly.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.” She stared out the window. Streetlamps were beginning to glow in the green twilight. Do you not imagine sometimes, when dusk wanders through the house, that here, alongside us, lies another plane, where we lead entirely different lives… She felt cold, so cold. “Paul. Do you ever feel that there is more to life than we can see, near us but just out of reach?”

“You mean like ghosts? Or… angels or something?”

“No, nothing so obvious. Just… I never tried putting it into words before, but… When I was younger, I sometimes felt that, just below the surface of ordinary things, there was another, secret layer of—well, not magic exactly, but forces of the universe ran deeper there, or things were brighter and had their true names, or… or something like that. And if you were special enough to see into that other, hidden place through the veneer of here and now, a little of its light would be yours to keep. Sort of like wishes being granted if you found the secret words with which to ask. Except sometimes you forgot it wasn’t just a child’s game, sometimes you wished for things that weren’t…”

She stopped, inarticulate with guilt, confused by the remnants of a half-remembered dream. The silence between them swelled with the gauze of curtains blown into the kitchen on the breath of a sudden light breeze. In the street below, a blushing rain of petals fluttered down to the sidewalks.

“I’m not sure I follow. Everyone is special in some way. And—forgive me for being blunt—but I don’t believe in mystical mumbo-jumbo. Here is here. Now is now. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. End of story.” He sounded almost hostile. After a pause, he added, his tone softening, “I’m sorry about John.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, not looking at him. “I don’t really know what I’m saying. You just took me by surprise. It’s… very sad. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Of course. Here.” He splashed more wine into her glass. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes.”

They talked of other things then, professors whose classes they had both attended, his job, his parents, her recent translation contract, but she was not listening to what he told her, or paying attention to what she told him, speaking mechanically, for a dark, superstitious voice muttered with increasing insistence inside her. All gifts have their price, whispered the voice. If you are indeed one of the chosen of the universe, and not just a poor deluded sap with an inflated sense of self-worth, what you ought to feel is not flattered but frightened half to death. And she knew that she was indeed frightened, deeply, irrationally frightened—frightened to leave this well-lit, solid, modern place with its polished expanses of stainless steel and its smells of good living, frightened to creep back to her underground, out-of-time life, the damp, the dark, the stillness, the solitude, the three-legged rat whom she had named Long John Silver in a reckless moment of despair, the feet always passing by her blind, naked windows, the growing gaps of silence in her telephone conversations with her parents, the unwritten poems whose ghosts haunted her nightly, the written poems she no longer mentioned to anyone at all, the memories of her lost love shooting through the dreary fabric of her days like threads of brightly colored silk, which turned brittle and hard and drew blood if she ran them through her fingers. Hers was a small and lonely life, a rigorous servitude in preparation for a bigger life, as she tried to see it; yet now, just beneath the thinning fabric of her existence, she sensed an invisible roiling of vast, terrifying, dangerous things—things that would play with you if you pleased them, things that would kill you if you proved a disappointment.

And night after night she was alone with them.

“Voilà,” Paul announced, stepping away from the stove and sweeping his hand in a theatrical gesture. “Sea bass in champagne sauce. Wait, don’t get up, I’ll serve us. Or we could move to the living room if you prefer—”

“No, please, let’s stay here, I love the view. Do you know what I find so likable about you? You’re so sensible.”

“Sensible, huh. Not a very sexy quality when you’re trying to impress a girl.”

“Are you trying to impress a girl?” she asked, startled out of her thoughts. “I somehow thought you were… aren’t you with someone?”

“There was Tiffany, yes, but that’s over now.” He carried the plates to the table. “As a matter of fact,” he said, and sat down, but instantly stood up again to retrieve the bottle of wine from the counter and refill her glass; his was scarcely touched. “Cheers. So. I was thinking, you know. Maybe, you and I—do you think we could—ever—”

“Oh,” she said, putting her fork down on the table. “Paul. I’m not good at romance, it always ends badly, they stop talking to me, or I stop talking to them…” Or they die, screamed a panicking voice inside her. “I just really like having you as a friend. I have very few friends, and… and I’m counting on tasting that Casanova’s Delight someday—” She attempted a laugh, inwardly wincing at the dessert’s unfortunate name, hoping that he would make some joke in return. He was silent, and for an instant she imagined that his face bore the same look of mixed apology and hurt that she remembered having glimpsed on it six years before, in the library stacks, when he had sported longer hair and a Grateful Dead shirt. Stricken, she went on rambling. “Or… it doesn’t have to be you cooking, I can cook something for you too, though I should warn you I’m not a very good cook, in fact I’m dreadful, my rice always comes out lumpy, and I wouldn’t want you to see my place either, it’s a bit…”

“Hey,” he said, briefly covering her hand with his. “It’s all right. I’m not asking you to marry me, you know. It was just a thought. Since we are both single at present. Not a big deal.” He speared some asparagus onto her plate, at ease again, a friendly giant who could whip up a three-course gourmet meal as readily as do your taxes. “Let’s not mention it ever again. Shall we dig in?”

She picked her fork back up, took a bite.

“It’s delicious.” She felt obscurely but deeply ashamed.

“Just wait till you taste the crepes. Grandma taught me. My mom’s mom. A waif of a woman, but boy, she was like a force of nature in the kitchen. She had such a beautiful name, too—Cecilia. I don’t think there are many Cecilias nowadays, I guess it’s too old-fashioned or something. She died two years ago.”

“Tell me about her,” she asked.

While he talked, she looked out the window. It was dark now, and her reflection floated in the glass, pale and stark-eyed, distorted by slashes of shadow into a semblance of some mad medieval hermit. Beyond it, confetti of stars dotted the skies, while below, townhouse windows shone with the warm, tranquil glow of domesticity, trees rustled gently, and pavements gleamed white and soft with drifting blossoms. She remembered reading somewhere that people on mountaintops—people who enjoyed great, sweeping views—were supposed to live longer. Perhaps, she thought, if you lived in a place like this, you would get to live longer too, and you would then be more willing to forgive yourself any mistakes, any spiteful wishes, any wrong turns along the way.

You would have more time to fix everything.

13. Guest Bedroom

The Christmas gathering was still in full swing in the living room, a cluster of uncles discussing the recent election over libations, a circle of cousins inspecting old photograph albums, two or three toddlers playing with crumpled gift wrapping in the shadow of the imposing tree, when she excused herself and slipped away. The noise of the party receded quickly, became a jolly hum diffused in the succession of high-ceilinged rooms. As she crossed a sudden strip of silence, she was conscious of the blunt clatter of her heels (bought used, just for the occasion, at her neighborhood thrift shop) against the hardwood floors.

In the foyer, at the foot of the staircase, stood the second, smaller tree. When they had pulled up the driveway the night before, it had shone through the glass-paneled front door like a many-splintered, Cubist image of Christmas, each diamond-shaped pane bearing a burst of white light within a nest of dark green fir, all dusted with the snow of glass frosting. “Your parents have a glass front door?” she had cried.

Paul had laughed, but she had been too astonished to join in his laughter.

She had not known that houses like this really existed.

The foyer was deserted now save for a little boy in a plum-colored velvet suit, the son of one of Paul’s many cousins, whom she had not yet learned to distinguish. His head tilted back, he stood staring up at the tree. She was about to slip past with a vague smile when the boy turned to her.

“Our tree has lollipops on it, you can pull them off and eat them,” he said. “This tree is all grown up. Can you keep a secret? I have to whisper.”

She nodded and crouched before him. Children made her nervous. He poked at a lower branch where a pinkish angel circled slowly, its brittle wings sparkling with illusory sugar, then breathed in her ear: “Angels taste dusty.”

“Oh, but these angels are not for eating,” she said. “Every night, when everyone in the house goes to sleep, they leave their trees and fly to the bedrooms of little boys and girls to wish them sweet dreams and sing beautiful songs and—”

“You talk funny,” said the boy. “I’m hungry. I want my mom.”

She watched him waddle off, when a creak sounded above her, and, glancing up, she saw Paul on the landing, leaning over the curve of the staircase. Feeling embarrassed, as if caught in a small lie, she rose and went up to meet him. He pulled her into a bear hug, and for one instant they tottered a bit precariously at the top of the steps.

“Everyone loves you,” he sang into her hair.

Extricating herself, she inspected him in some surprise. He stood towering above her, chuckling and swaying, his shirttails untucked, his auburn hair plastered over his moistened forehead, his eyes glazed with elation that was ever so slightly unfocused. He looked very young, a bit blurry at the edges, perhaps, but just as wholesome as ever.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” she said. “You’re tipsy!”

“I’m celebrating,” he said. “You are so beautiful tonight. You should always wear diamonds. Everyone loves you. Uncle Curtis said you look like a porcelain doll.”

His inebriation had an unmistakable quality of relief to it, of exhaling after the stiffness of tense expectation. She knew, of course, that his family had been nervous about meeting her, but it had not occurred to her until now that he had been nervous as well. Her smile wavered, as she struggled to ignore a minute pinprick of disappointment.

The grandfather clock began to chime in the polished depths of the house. When the faint jingle of crystals in the chandelier overhead died in the wake of the tenth boom, she said, “I think I’ll turn in, I’m tired. I thanked your parents already. Everyone has been so kind. Come kiss me good night later if you think it’s all right.”

Paul was staying in his childhood room; she had been given the guest suite.

Once behind the closed door, she kicked off her shoes, sank down on the velvet vanity bench, and looked at the blue and silver room poised in the vanity’s mirror. The mirror room was flawless. The glossy silk duvet had not a wrinkle on it; the light blue curtains fell to the dark blue of the rug in beautifully sculpted curves; elegant flocks of lamps, vases, and clocks lined up in stately symmetry on antique tables and nightstands. It took her only one moment of contemplating the perfection to realize that things were not as she had left them. Seized by a childish suspicion, she turned around and stared at the room itself. As one would expect, the original was no different from its reflection, and therefore the silent dark-skinned woman with a feather duster whom she had encountered gliding on slippered feet in the upstairs hallway must have remade the bed she herself had made, rather haphazardly, that morning, as well as pulled the curtains closed and removed the chaos of lipsticks, tissues, and clothes she had strewn on dressers and flung among pillows while getting ready for the party some hours before.

She faced the mirror again.

The girl in the mirror, she saw, looked somehow different too, made subtly foreign by the sparkling of dainty teardrops in her ears and a brighter flash on her finger. She lowered her eyes. On the vanity’s surface, a half-dozen elaborately framed black-and-white photographs of unsmiling brides with wasplike waists stood sentry around an engraved toiletry set much like one she had once admired in the window of a fancy antique shop, with a price tag that had made her laugh. Picking up the heavy brush, she tried to read the initials but could decipher only the first, M, the other two letters choked past the point of recognition by the virulent proliferation of Victorian scrolls. She ran the brush through the tangle of her hair, once, twice, then set it back down; objects here were clearly not meant to stray too far from their allotted places. Next to the toiletry set, a round silver tray bore a precise arrangement of perfume bottles, some severely geometrical, others plump, still others twisted in flirtatious spirals, all crowded by their saffron, topaz, honey doubles in the mirror. She chose one at random, dabbed a bit in the hollow of her neck, and looked up.

“Charmed,” she said, aloud, to the mirror girl.

The mirror girl smiled back most graciously. She looked perfectly at home in her perfect Cinderella bedroom, if one paid no heed to the somewhat wild, startled look in her Scythian eyes and the pair of scuffed black pumps with soiled insoles, sprawled with all the indecency of peasant abandon in the middle of the lovely blue carpet.

The scent was sweet with vanilla, and a trifle stale—an older woman’s smell. She took a cotton ball from a gilded crystal bowl and started rubbing at her neck, thinking of a poem she could write—each verse an enigmatic vignette reflected in the same mirror, a massive Renaissance mirror that would start out in some palace in Florence or Siena five centuries before and end up in an American suburb in the present day and age—when there sounded a delicate tap on the door.

“Come in,” she called out, leaping to shove her unseemly shoes to the wall.

“I hope I’m not disturbing,” Paul’s mother said, flowing across the threshold in her queenly, straight-backed manner. “Paul told me you were going to sleep soon.”

“Thank you again, Mrs. Caldwell, the party was delightful.”

“Please.” It sounded like a sentence of its own on Mrs. Caldwell’s lips. “Call me Emma. I wanted to give you this.” Carefully she lowered a large white box onto the bed and lifted the lid. “It was my mother’s, and then mine. It’s been in storage, but I had it cleaned just before you came up. It’s only a thought, you don’t have to use it if you don’t like it, perhaps you’d rather choose your own, or maybe you have something in your family already—”

Over Mrs. Caldwell’s shoulder, she watched the creamy foam of vintage lace spill out of the box.

“No, there is nothing like this in my family,” she said quietly.

“You can see it full-length here.” Mrs. Caldwell pointed to one of the pictures on the vanity. When she moved, the sculpture of her gleaming blond hair did not move with her. “That’s my mother on her wedding day, she is nineteen here… Oh, which one? Ah, that was my grandmother, this toiletry set belonged to her, a present from my great-grandfather on her sixteenth birthday… No, no, you’re most welcome. I’ll leave it with you, unless you’d like to try it on tonight. But you’re probably too tired… Are you sure? I’ll be right outside then, just call when you’re ready.”

When Mrs. Caldwell exited the room, she hurried to strip, anxious not to make her future mother-in-law wait in the hallway. Underneath her prim black sheath, she wore a racy red bra, the tiniest of thongs, and stockings with a garter belt; earlier in the day, she had nursed a halfhearted plan of paying Paul a tiptoeing visit at two in the morning. Now the appearance of a gartered tart amidst the bedroom’s blue-and-silver refinement made her avert her eyes from the mirror with something nearing shame.

She looked again at the photographs on the vanity, at the solemn young bride in her luminous sepia fog. This must be Paul’s grandmother Cecilia, dead these three years, she thought—and felt suddenly, deeply touched. In the hazy warmth of her expanding emotion the palatial room itself appeared transformed: not a daunting museum exhibit with constellations of fussy trifles, where one was not allowed to indulge in the mess of living, but a cherished collection of family memories stored, preserved, and amplified in heirlooms made priceless with meaning. She touched the brush again, overwhelmed by a surge of affection (a poet’s affection, she said to herself) for all the old things that carried echoes of former lives. Her own family was rich in stories, of course, but theirs were mostly tales of dramatic upheavals and forbidden romance—wars, revolutions, secret trysts with gypsies and dukes—with only a few chance treasures and hardly any photographs surviving to provide illustration or offer proof; she had never even seen the faces of her great-grandparents. To her, family past was a misty realm of conjecture and imagination. The idea of mundane, practical objects—combs, vases, dresses—perpetuating the quiet remembrance of a different kind of life, the tranquil, linear progression of several generations’ worth of marriages, children, traditions, took her completely by surprise.

All at once she longed to become a part of someone’s tangible history.

The dress, when unfolded, proved long and narrow, with sleeves of intricate lace and a row of incredibly small silk-covered buttons all along the back, from the neck to well below the waist—no less than a hundred, she thought. Imagine some seamstress’s skillful hands encasing them in silk one by one, what infinite patience! She was glad, for the sake of her gratitude, to find the gown so graceful and simple, but the buttons—oh, she just fell in love with the buttons.

She stepped into the dress, instantly nervous—what if it did not fit? The neckline was modest but wide, and the straps of her red bra hung out slovenly on both sides. She shrugged the bra off, then fumbled for the buttons at her back.

“How is it going in there?” asked Mrs. Caldwell’s voice from behind the door.

“It’s beautiful, Mrs. Caldwell, I just need a few seconds,” she replied.

The buttons were tiny and sleek and slipped out from under her fingers. After a minute of panting contortions, it became clear that not only could she not reach any of the buttons in the middle—she could not manage any of the buttons she could reach. Abandoning her acrobatics, she wiggled out of the sleeves, twisted the bodice around, and, ignoring the cold air on her naked skin and the sensation of her nipples turning into raisins, hastily traveled along the row of buttons, doing them up. Finished at last, she breathed a sigh of relief, twisted the dress back into place, and found—naturally—that she could no longer squeeze her way back into it. She felt like Alice before the locked door to the Wonderland garden, with the key forever out of her reach. Cursing her stupidity under her breath, she set about undoing the buttons, which grew agile like water bugs and kept skidding away from her increasingly frantic fingers. She counted them this time: there were forty-eight, and she hated each and every one of them.

“Is everything all right, dear?” asked Mrs. Caldwell from the hallway. “Do you need help?”

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m really done, just one moment—”

It now occurred to her that she should indeed ask Paul for help; but he would not hear her shouts across the mansion, nor could she very well send Mrs. Caldwell on an errand to get him, and it would hardly do to go wandering in search of him while falling out of his grandmother’s nuptial gown. Yanking it all the way down, she stood half naked in her red wisp of a thong and bordello stockings, surveying the room, wondering where the maid had put the sweater and jeans she had worn earlier, the dress piled at her feet—and it was precisely then that Mrs. Caldwell chose to propel herself inside, saying, “Perhaps I could… ah, ah, so sorry!”

The door slammed with a loud bang, and Mrs. Caldwell was now gasping apologies in the hallway.

“No, no, please—” As she lunged to grab her bra off the floor, she got entangled in the gown’s silk folds and made an awkward step. There was the terrible sound of something ripping, something popping, which she hoped to all the gods was not audible outside the room. “I—I’m just having some trouble with the buttons. Please, do come in.”

By the time Mrs. Caldwell edged into the room, she had struggled anew into the imprisonment of the dress, and, her back gaping open, stood in silent mortification, crimson-faced, not meeting the mirrored eyes of Mrs. Caldwell, who for the next minute, the longest minute of her life, strained to button the buttons.

In the end, it proved much too tight.

“You couldn’t be any skinnier, my dear,” Mrs. Caldwell repeated for the third time, smiling kindly if somewhat grimly. “People were just frailer in the old days, I think, not as healthy as today… We could take it to my tailor, perhaps, see what could be done…” There sounded another ominous creak of a seam about to split. “Oh, but we wouldn’t want to tear it. Well, we’ll think of something. Vera Wang makes lovely gowns.”

Later that night, when Paul stopped by for his—conjugally chaste—good-night kiss, she chose not to tell him of her sartorial misadventure. Later still, already in her nightshirt, she walked along the perimeter of the bed, liberating the impossibly starched, taut sheets, when she stepped on something hard and cool with her bare foot. A tiny silk button the color of spilled milk lay on the carpet. She bent to retrieve it, held it for a moment on her palm, then pushed it deep between the mattresses. She realized, of course, that Mrs. Caldwell could not have failed to notice the damage, but all the same, she did not want anyone stumbling upon the fresh evidence of her crime.

If I sleep soundly tonight, she thought as she climbed into the bed, it should put to rest my mother’s theory of royal blood in our veins. Though I rather suspect I’ve flunked my princess test already. Ah, that was awful, just awful… Well, but I can learn, I can attend princess evening courses, I’m sure if I iron enough curtains, I will get good grades… No, I must be asleep, this makes no sense—or does it? She giggled aloud, indeed surprising herself out of a shallow dream, then waded back in, smiling a little into her starched, lacy, color-coordinated pillow.

14. Living Room

“Do you want any help with the rest?” her mother asked without moving from the armchair.

“No, thanks. It’s embedded in my muscle memory by now.”

As her mother turned back to the window, she chose the largest parcel from the remaining pile, ripped off the schoolgirl bows and elaborate cherub-print wrapping, and from beneath it produced a hefty cardboard box, which she proceeded to carve open with a knife and from which she then extracted, like a magician from a hat, never-ending swirls of thick packing paper followed by another box, smaller but still substantial, filled with careful wisps of lavender tissue inside which she could already feel something solid, something metal.

She fumbled for a purchase, pulled, and screamed.

“Please, please keep your voice down,” her mother said in an exasperated undertone.

She glanced at the closed door to the bedroom. “Sorry, I keep forgetting,” she whispered. “But shouldn’t we wake him up already? It’s almost time to eat.”

“Did I hear a scream?” Paul popped his head in from the kitchen. “What is it now?”

“Bookends. Or maybe doorstops.” She held out a pair of weighty birds, one in each hand, grasping them by their long tails like hammers. “Unless they are weapons of marital discord. Or idols for the altar of Hera?” She consulted a floral card twined around one of the sturdy necks. “Why would your great-aunt Hazel send us two iron peacocks?”

“Pewter pheasants,” he said patiently. “They are centerpieces. For the dining table.”

“Ah,” she said. “You mean, like those glass grapes.”

“Yes.”

“And the porcelain rabbits.”

“Yes.”

“And the fake apples.”

“Honey, we don’t have to use any of it. Just put everything back in the boxes and stick them in the closet. I told you we should have had the registry. People have their own ideas of decorating.”

“Yes,” she said. “I see that now, but why—”

“Your parents’ farewell dinner is about to burn,” he said, ducking back into the kitchen.

She set the pheasants down on the overflowing table, next to the jeweled candle extinguisher, the ivory saltshaker shaped like the Taj Mahal, and the set of four fantastically ornate picture frames whose kaleidoscopic lumps of flowers, insects, leaves, and fir cones symbolized the four seasons, and regarded everything with a sinking feeling.

“The butterfly plates are pretty,” she said doubtfully. “Perhaps you can take them back with you, Tanya might like them. Mama? Mama, are you listening?”

Her mother was still sitting in the armchair by the window, gazing out at the darkening autumnal street, her empty hands folded in her lap.

“Mama?”

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about home. What did you say?”

“Do you want to take any of these things back to Russia with you?”

They were speaking in hushed voices, to avoid waking her father.

“No, the suitcase is already packed. And you can certainly use them yourself. Give this room some personality. It looks like a hotel.”

Paul’s apartment had come fully furnished, its style contemporary and sparse, and while she had made tentative incursions into the bedroom (library books on the nightstand and pajamas shed on the bed) and the kitchen (half-drunk cups of tea in the sink and apple cores on the counter), the main room, whose glass dining table they never used and whose white leather sofa seemed too immaculate to sit on, retained the untouched sleek quality of a photograph in an interior design magazine.

“But these are all so… so unnecessary,” she said, and sighed, surveying the jumble of opened and unopened boxes. “All this stuff.”

She understood, of course, that underneath their patina of time and museum veneration, an ancient Egyptian spoon in the shape of a girl was still only a spoon and a Greek amphora in all its laconic glory of heroes and beasts only a vessel for oil; yet she sensed that somewhere in the amorphously defined sphere of applied arts, a thin but clear line was drawn between art and domesticity, between beauty and material ostentation—and once the line was crossed, clutter took over. She wondered how all these trifles would appear to someone far in the future. Would her distant descendants be puzzled as to the purpose of the pheasants and the grapes, would they invent their own, wildly inaccurate, explanations that would be accepted as archaeological verities by people who no longer ate at tables and thus required no centerpieces? In fact, it might be interesting to do a series of short poems, each one describing a simple common object in terms both precise and dense with its inherent mystery, with its material randomness. The titles would offer the only clues to the subjects—lines like “A child’s face floating upside down in its silver convexity” under the succinct heading “Cereal Spoon”—

Her mother had come up to the table behind her.

“You aren’t doing this right,” she said, sighing in turn. Though she was nearing sixty, her face was still beautiful, but now it often looked opaque, like a mediocre portrait of itself, missing the light that had flared in the original with dazzling, if infrequent, intensity. “Wedding presents aren’t stuff. They are wishes, gestures of kindness. All these people are aware of your existence, they’ve spared a thought for you, and that thought is now part of your home. It comforts me to think about it. About you not being alone. You seemed so lost before Paul. This is the first time I’m leaving you here with my heart at rest.”

Her own heart seized with a familiar, worn-out ache.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave at all,” she said.

“Please, we’ve talked about it enough, I think.” Her mother turned to glance at the closed bedroom door. “Our life is there, you know that.”

There seemed to be nothing to say after that. For a silent minute, they listened to the practiced clatter of pots in the kitchen. The place was rich with smells of roasted potatoes, caramelized onions, rosemary, sugar, cream—a nearing feast.

“Shouldn’t we wake Papa up?” she said at last. “He asked us to. It’s past seven.”

“No, let him sleep until dinner, our flight is so early tomorrow… Here, why don’t I give you a hand with these.”

Together they sliced the remaining boxes open, unearthed more crystal, silver, and porcelain, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly, none of it matching. At the bottom of the pile she discovered a flat white parcel barely larger than a pack of cards, three burgundy-colored stamps with Notre Dame in the upper right corner. She stared at the words “Mrs. Paul Caldwell” written in a shockingly familiar handwriting. There was no return address. “Well, that appears to be everything,” her mother said, and busied herself with gathering up the torn cardboard and crumpled paper. She held on to the parcel’s mystery for one moment longer, not touching it, listening to the whoosh of blood in her ears, then ripped the wrapping off.

Inside she found a small, prim card of thick cream-colored paper, typed this time, which contained only a terse “Congratulations” in its precise center, and a kit of magnetic poetry—“Original Edition”—the kind one stuck on one’s refrigerator.

There was nothing else.

“So, what are your plans, then?” her mother said, her tone insistent, as if this was not the first time she had asked the question.

“Plans?” she echoed flatly. Through the clear plastic of the lid she could see the rectangles of several words—“scream,” “how,” “you”—and an orphaned “ly.”

“Yes, plans. Have you two given any thought to children?”

She flushed with an indeterminate feeling—anger mixed with startling bitterness, and something else underneath, something very different. Jerking open the nearest drawer, she shoved the box with the insidious little words deep, deep into the sideboard’s prosperous recesses agleam with an earlier crop of useless treasures, and swung around to face her mother.

I don’t ever intend to have children, she wanted to say, fiercely. I will not live a life of platitudes, I will not sink into the plush swamp of a comfortable marriage. I will always walk the harder path. Mine will be a life free of the commonplace and drudgery, full of travel and thought, unstinted in feeling and experience—an artist’s life, do you hear me? But there was a look disturbingly like supplication in her mother’s eyes, so instead she said, her voice taut with suppressed emotion, “Mama, I’m twenty-six years old. We got back from our honeymoon three days ago. There is plenty of time for that later.”

Paul appeared on the kitchen threshold.

“Almost ready,” he announced. “Maybe you should wake the professor. And we should eat properly this time, at the dining table, don’t you think? Although… uh…”

He looked at the absurdly cluttered table.

“It’s all right,” she said, picking up the pheasants. Anger still had not loosened its hold on her throat, and she would not look at either Paul or her mother. “It won’t take too long to clear this off.” Paul nodded and vanished into the aromatic cloud that hung over the kitchen. “Mama, why don’t you go and wake him up while I pack everything away—”

“Let’s use it,” her mother said.

“What?”

“All these things. The dessert china. The tea set. The champagne flutes. The deer and the peacocks. Let’s use them.”

“Pheasants,” she corrected mechanically. “Why would we do that?”

“Did I ever tell you about my collection of old postcards? They were my grandmother’s. My father gave them to me after her death. I was eight or nine. My grandmother had kept them stored in a striped pink-and-white hatbox, and there were theater programs and dried flowers in there as well.”

As she talked, she began to push the many-colored glasses of sundry shapes and sizes and the plates, no three alike, into incongruously mismatched islands amidst the cornucopia of gilded fruit, arranging them on embroidered placemats and silver chargers.

“When I opened the hatbox for the first time and saw what was inside, I was enchanted. There were postcards of castles and moonlit lakes and girls in elegant dresses. The pictures themselves were black-and-white, but the girls’ lips, cheeks, and parasols were rouged red by hand. I had never seen anything like it, and it just took my breath away. But I was a secret hoarder. I didn’t want to squander my enjoyment on just any ordinary day, so I didn’t allow myself to look at anything properly, I just piled it all back into the hatbox, shut the lid, and hid it under my bed. For weeks afterward I went about, pretending nothing was there, all swollen with my secret. And every single day I was just dying to get the box out and pore over my treasure, to look at the beautiful girls, but I didn’t let myself. I thought I had plenty of time, so I would choose a perfect moment, make it a special occasion. My birthday, perhaps, or maybe New Year’s.”

She watched her mother in silence, without stopping her, without helping her. A chill was starting to creep up her spine. Her mother’s face had hardened into an unfamiliar expression of grim determination, and her movements as she darted about the table, sorting, shifting, rearranging, grew faster and faster.

“Then one day, when I was at school, my father’s new wife cleaned my room. She found a pile of old junk under the bed, and she threw it all out. So you see, I didn’t have any time, as it turned out. When you put something off to do later, it just doesn’t get done, not in the same way. Because there never is any time, there never is any later… There, all finished. Where do you keep your matches? I want to light these now.”

She stared from her mother to the table, groaning under its mad glittering, gleaming, sparkling weight, and back to her mother.

Her heart was beating slow and hard.

“Mama,” she said. “Has something happened?”

“Five minutes!” Paul trumpeted from the kitchen.

“We really should wake him up now,” her mother said.

Together they looked at the closed door of the bedroom. The candle flames bent left, bent right in an invisible breeze. The certainty of an imminent disaster hollowed out her insides. She said, “Something is wrong.”

“Yes.” Her mother stood still, her hands hanging loose by her sides, as though depleted all at once of her frenzied energy. “Don’t tell him I told you, not yet, I want tonight to be… to be like before. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you at all, and I didn’t, not before the wedding anyway, I didn’t want to ruin it for you. But it’s time now, I think. Papa is sick. Really sick. It’s cancer, and not the kind they can… That is, they don’t know how long… Well. All I wanted to tell you is, if you want Papa to see your children, you should start having them now.”

“And dinner is served!” Paul announced, carrying in a steaming tureen. “Wow, look at all that, it’s like the cave of Ali Baba!… Hey, shouldn’t you wake your dad now?”

“I’m awake, I’ve been awake,” her father said, entering the room. “I’ve just been resting a little.”

She heard him shuffling as he walked, but that was only because of Paul’s slippers, of course: they were much too big for him, weren’t they, and his own had been packed away already. She could not bring herself to look into his face at first. When she did, she saw what had escaped her in the fuss of the preceding days. He seemed much older than his sixty-eight years, and his skin had a grayish cast, and his eyelids were shadowed by exhaustion, and his mouth was thin and hard. Sorrow washed over her because she knew that she would never again be able to recall his face from before, the way it had been, that he was somehow already lost to her—and then he noticed the outrageous, clashing abundance of the table and laughed, laughed in just that contagious way in which he used to laugh when she was a child, slapping his knee with his hand, his face starting into life with a myriad of wrinkles, his eyes dark with a disarming, childish mirth; and she went all quiet inside.

The four of them sat in the festive light of a dozen candles, amidst the pewter Thanksgiving pheasants and the bronze Christmas deer and the porcelain Easter rabbits and the glass grapes, and lifted mismatched champagne flutes in a toast to the new couple’s happiness. The bubbles fizzed on her tongue, tasting of innocence and loss.

“Please, may you pass salt,” said her mother to Paul, exhausting her English.

“Don’t offend now, but this Taj Mahal thing? Is ugly,” said her father, laughing again.

Why, she thought, why hadn’t they told her before the wedding? She would not have gone through with it but would have returned home instead, would have added no more days to the careless tally of years she had already missed in her father’s life. But it was too late now, and there was only one way left to hold at bay the numbing grief that was spreading through her like a slow, viscous spill.

Gods, my gods, sometimes the harder path is the opposite of what it seems.

15. Bedroom

“Are you asleep?”

“No. Well, maybe. I guess I am. Is something wrong?”

“I just can’t sleep. I’ve been lying here thinking.”

“About?”

“Not anything in particular. Just things. Did I ever tell you about this seminar I went to in my first month in America?”

“Yes. Possibly. No.”

“I don’t remember now what the subject was, but it was one of those workshops where everyone sat in a circle, and the professor had us write down our ‘strengths,’ what we were really good at, you know, on a piece of paper, and then we went around the circle, and everyone read what they’d written. It’s the usual stuff, right, everyone has done it dozens of time, in interviews, and class discussions, and church meetings, everyone here always talks about their strongest points, their weakest points, and the answers are all a given—‘I’m creative,’ ‘I excel at multitasking,’ ‘I’m good with languages,’ ‘I’m a great team player.’ Except that I had never done it before, so I had no ready pat formulas in my head. I remember sitting there for the first minute, absolutely mortified, not having any idea what to say. Then I thought about it, I mean really thought about it, and wrote this long, earnest paragraph. I wrote that I believed I could sometimes sense the essence of things—houses, books, faces, moments in time—that I sometimes caught a whiff of their innermost souls, their unique smells, and that what I was hoping to do with my life was to render these impressions in words so vivid, so precise, that others could feel them too. Then the five minutes were up, and we started going around the circle, and all the long-haired boys said they were creative and all the foreign-exchange girls said they were good with languages. By the time my turn came—it was toward the end—I had caught on perfectly, so I too said I was good with languages. I remember feeling so relieved that I had not been the first one to give my answer… But I wonder now… It’s like life, you know: the more you learn what is expected of you, the more you fall into these patterns, these grooves, these ruts, the less unique your experiences become, the less unique you become yourself. If you didn’t know, for example, that people got married at a certain age and had children at a certain age and retired at a certain age, would you know to do any of those things, or would you do something else, something entirely different? Because it can’t all be pure biology. I mean, I know you pride yourself on believing only the things you can see, and I love that about you, it’s so reassuring, but—but don’t you have this sense sometimes that our life is essentially just the tip of the iceberg, and if you stop clinging to your puny bit of ice in fear or out of habit and just dive into the water, you will discover this luminous mass going down, deep down, and meet creatures you can’t even imagine, and have thoughts and feelings no one has ever had before… That is really why I came here in the first place, and why I stayed here, you know. I mean, I told you I stayed because of that relationship I was in at the time, and that was part of it, I suppose, but mainly, I knew what was expected of me in Russia, and I thought that here I would be able to escape it, escape having a predictable life… Well, that, and the language, of course. Because languages are like that too, you know? When you are first learning a language, you are swimming in this glorious sea of possibilities—you feel that you are free to take all these little specks of meaning floating around you and combine them into the most fantastical, gorgeous, dreamlike structures that will be yours and no one else’s, amazing castles, cathedrals, entire cities of words rising out of chaos. But then you start learning the rules, the grammar, what goes with what, and then, worst of all, all these common expressions and mass-issued turns of phrase start impressing themselves onto your brain, so that when you say ‘time,’ you think ‘valuable’ and ‘waste of’ and ‘waits for no man,’ and when you say ‘love,’ you think ‘star-crossed’ and ‘blind,’ and when you say ‘death,’ you think ‘kiss of’ and ‘bored to’ and ‘dead as a doornail’—and before you know it, your words have become these prayer beads strung together and worn-out through countless repetitions, and what original meaning there was is completely obscured… Perhaps the longer you use the language, the more in danger you are of becoming gray and trite and shallow, I thought, but if you learn a new language, you can start all over again. And I feel, I really do feel that there are these great big truths out there, or no, not truths, exactly, just these pure slabs of… of meaning, of feeling, these monumental things we contend with as humans—you know, love, death, beauty, God—and I thought, if I come to them clean and childlike and with my mind free of preconceptions, or else if I come to them using two roads at once, both the front door of my native language and the servant entrance of my adopted language—or is it the other way around, do you think?—in any case, maybe then I will actually stand a chance of stumbling upon some vast reservoir of poetry just waiting out there in the universe… Because I write poetry, you know. Whenever you see me scribbling and I tell you these are just thank-you notes or grocery lists, they aren’t really. Well, you’ve probably figured it out for yourself by now, but I wanted to tell you anyway. I wanted to tell you for a long time, but I was being… superstitious about it. I guess I felt I needed to keep my poems secret from everyone until I was ready to share them with the whole world. And I’m still not ready to do that, but I’ve been thinking about something my mother said right after our wedding, and, well… I just wanted to tell you. Because I feel happy, you know, happy about us, and the baby, of course, but I’m also scared about the baby, and so sad about Papa, and sometimes—and please don’t be upset now—but sometimes I feel a little lonely, too, so I just thought, if I told you… Hello? Hello? Oh, gods, I’m talking to myself again, aren’t I? Paul? Are you asleep?”

“What? No. Well, yes, I’m afraid I was. But I heard you saying something about a seminar and that you were good at languages… Oh, and did you say you wanted to name our son Mustard, or did I dream that?”

“Yes, actually, Mustard is an old family name on my father’s side, so I think it would be nice… Ah, you should hear your silence right now. You dreamed that.”

“Phew, I was worried for a moment there. I think I can stay awake now. Sort of. Do you want to try saying it again? Whatever it was you were saying?”

“It was nothing, really. Just go back to sleep.”

“You should get some sleep too while you can. Only three more weeks now.”

16. Covered Veranda

When the screen door banged behind them and they entered the covered veranda, her initial impression was of something narrow, gloomy, and tired.

It had appeared different the night before, when they had driven along the street for the first time, the baby asleep in the backseat. The sign “For Sale” had flashed in their headlights, and beyond it, they saw three arches aglow in the dark. The house itself was barely visible behind the trees, just a low bulky shape against the paler blackness of the sky, but the lights on the veranda made it seem cozy and warm. “Slow down, slow down!” she cried, but they had already passed. He turned around, and they crept along the street for the second time. It looked even more welcoming then, that yellow light glowing through November drizzle.

At the end of the block they realized that another car had been forced to a crawl behind them for an entire minute.

“They didn’t honk, imagine that,” Paul had said. “Looks like a nice neighborhood. Probably kid-friendly. Honey, I have a good feeling about this one.”

“Yes,” she had said; but what she had liked most about the invisible house with the shining arches was its ambiguous promise, the darkness concealing it. It did not belong to any neighborhood at all, was not pinned down to an address somewhere in the monotonous suburbs of a busy American city, but instead was all shadows and light, and one could just as easily imagine it perched on the side of a lush Caribbean mountain, frangipani trees blooming, ice clinking in the jewel-colored cocktails of a festive crowd on a terrace suspended above the immense mystery of the moonlit sea—or maybe squatting in the deep slumber of a somber medieval village in Portugal or France, all the villagers long asleep, only a solitary poet rocking back and forth on the lit-up porch, his verses slowly adopting the creaking rhythm of the rocker—or even poised as the last human habitation on the edge of a great Siberian forest, yes, a mossy little house out of some old fairy tale, where evening after evening a small, soft-spoken family gathered in the snug seclusion of light to drink tea from chipped cups and talk about birds and stars and books—a house under a timeless spell where everyone was together, and no one was ill, and everyone was happy…

“What we could do,” Paul had said, “is put a swing on that porch.”

“If we bought the house,” she had said.

“If we bought the house.”

Now they stood on the damp, starkly lit veranda, and the realtor woman jingled the keys again—it seemed to be a nervous habit of hers, almost a tic—and said, “It’s not heated, but you can think of it as a sunroom really, it would be perfect for breakfasts in warm weather.” The enthusiastic lilt in her voice did not match her eyes, which had a dull, bulging look to them, like thick bottle glass. She waved toward the shadowy corner, where three low wicker chairs with enormous pink peonies on the cushions crouched around a lopsided wicker table. “Now, the furniture doesn’t come with it, of course, it’s just to give you an idea, but do try it out, try it out!”

“No, that’s all right, thank you,” Paul said, ready, she saw, to proceed into the house; but her arms were aching from trying to restrain the squirming, sniffling bundle of blankets, so she walked over to the table and sat down. The cushions proved unpleasantly soft, and as she sank into them, further weighted down by the baby, a faint but visible cloud of dust billowed around her—either the house was not shown very often, or no one before her had ever followed the realtor’s invitation to sit down.

The baby stopped whimpering and began to wail.

“He is adorable!” the realtor woman shouted, to make herself heard over the cries. “What’s his name?”

She was struggling to quiet him, so it was Paul who replied: “Eugene.”

“A beautiful name!” exclaimed the woman. “So uncommon.”

“It’s her father’s name,” Paul said, his voice reserved. “Shall we see the rest of the house, then?”

“Yes, yes, of course, let me just find the right key… Do look at the doorbell chimes on your way in, they are a very nice feature, and of course fully functional, everything in the house is fully functional, here, I’ll show you, such a distinctive sound—”

The inner door moaned on reluctantly yielding hinges. As the woman wedged it open, talking all the while, a long, mournful note that put her in mind of a departing train escaped onto the veranda, and a pale slash of autumnal light cut through the low-ceilinged murkiness beyond. She caught a whiff of stale, unused air. She had been excited by the thought of seeing the place, had felt important and capably adult in her role as a prospective buyer; she had even worn her teardrop diamond earrings and her new black shoes, whether to impress the realtor or to enter her potential house in a fashion befitting a young woman eager to take the next step in the upward progression of her life.

Now she found she did not want to go in.

“Please go ahead without me,” she called. “I’ll stay out here a bit longer, get the baby to sleep.”

The two of them paused on the threshold, looking down at her, the realtor woman smiling glassily and jingling the keys, Paul’s expression bemused. Then they vanished inside; Paul, she noticed, ducked his head as a precaution.

The door crept closed behind them.

The baby was still crying, though with less desperation now. She wound the blankets tighter around him—the veranda was chilly, with a deep, dungeonlike chill—and stared outside. The street lay empty in both directions; the trees that lined it were bare of leaves; on the other side, identical one-story houses with darkened verandas sat in the puddles of graying lawns under graying skies. She could see no signs of life. Perhaps everyone had gone to church—wasn’t that what people did on Sunday mornings, especially in kid-friendly places where neighbors did not honk at neighbors?

“Bun-ga-low,” she said under her breath, trying out the new word. It sounded strange, almost barbaric, to her ears, and for one disorienting moment, the unremarkable suburban vista looked as foreign to her eyes as a row of grass-thatched African huts with monkeys hopping from roof to roof; it was certainly just as far removed from the vague expectations of her childhood. All at once, an overwhelming sensation of randomness struck her—why this house, why this street, why this city? (Why this country, continued a dangerously soft voice inside her, why—but she managed to hush it up before it asked anything else.) And when one stopped to think about it, how odd, how unnatural, how daunting it was to go about choosing a house. She had never pondered the desirable number of bathrooms or the virtues of gas stoves before. She had never owned—had never wanted to own—anything that would not fit in a small suitcase. Now the notion of waking up one day the owner of a mind-bogglingly complex conglomeration of pipes, wires, masonry, and carpentry loomed over her in a vast shadow, almost as ambiguous, thrilling, inevitable, and terrifying as motherhood itself.

Anxiously she inspected the baby’s face—she could not bring herself to call him Eugene yet. He had grown silent at last and was gazing past her with his pensive blueberry eyes. She pulled the blankets closer to his reddened nose, then looked again at the poisonous pink peonies on the dusty cushions. Something much like panic was starting to stir inside her. She reminded herself to breathe—the peonies did not come with the house, she would be free to get different cushions or have no cushions at all, just as she pleased. But the imminent prospect of all that empty space to furnish only made her breathing quicken. For a house was not like a student dorm room or a rented apartment: in time it became a reflection of one’s being, a monolith under whose foundation one buried one’s roots, a tinted lens through which one viewed the world. It set the mood, the timbre, the pitch of one’s entire life, and for a poet, the pitch of her life would, as likely as not, vibrate through the pitch of her work. Would Byron have ever become Byron if he had resided in an elderly lady’s fussy seaside flat with flowery chintz curtains and a pug for a pet? Could Pushkin have sung the Russian countryside with such fluid simplicity if his abode had been a brooding moorland ruin full of echoes, ghosts, and massive oak cupboards? Could Shakespeare have penned his immortal tragedies if he had chosen to live in a suburban bungalow with peonies on the cushions? At sixteen, she would have replied with a resounding “Yes,” but at twenty-seven, she was no longer certain. (And wouldn’t it be fun, said a voice that never was completely silenced inside her, to compose an “architectural” poem, each verse set in a dwelling, each written in the style most suited to the dwelling itself, from a Poe-inspired wail of woe and loss describing a dilapidated gothic mansion to a cheerful couplet akin to a Mother Goose rhyme sketching a cottage in a sunlit meadow? She brushed the irrelevant thought away.) And if it were indeed true that deciding on the kind of place you would inhabit meant deciding on the kind of atmosphere that would seep into your very blood and, by osmosis, the kind of poet you were bound to become, did she feel confident enough in her real estate acumen and her decorating skills not to fail her art?

Blankly she considered the dingy tiles of the veranda, the wet black trees across the road, the bleak symmetry of the lawns—and at last panic caught up with her and overtook her.

The baby had fallen asleep.

What if she just stood up right now, and walked away?

The door issued a moan, and the realtor woman stepped out.

“Your husband wanted me to check on you,” she said, jingling the keys. “He’s inspecting the closets. Ah, Eugene is resting nicely. He feels at home here, I see.”

She looked at the realtor mutely.

“Eugene is such a lovely name.” The woman dropped into the chair next to hers, raising another, thicker cloud of dust. “So distinctive. Personally, I’ve always been interested in his namesake Eugene of Savoy, the famous Hapsburg general, you know. But of course, there is a bit of a family connection there: my father is a direct descendant of the Hapsburgs, you know, and—”

The door moaned. Paul emerged, remembering to duck his head.

“It’s great,” he announced with gusto. “We’ll take it.”

The realtor, flustered, tried to clamber out of the chair.

“I’m joking,” he said. The woman giggled warily, and sank back down. “I’m going to whisk my wife away on a tour now, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll stay here, give you some privacy.”

Paul held the inner door open. She rose, staggering a little under the baby’s bulk.

Just before going inside, she stopped.

“Paul,” she said, and smiled up at him to make it almost resemble a joke. “Do we even need a house?”

He laughed a short belly laugh, appreciative of her sense of humor.

“If we buy it, we’ll put the swing right here,” he said, pointing, and gently prodded her over the threshold.

17. Kitchen

By now, the ritual had become so familiar that she kept the overhead lamp off, going through the motions in an automatic haze. At four in the morning, the kitchen looked as if underwater, the cabinets and counters lost in shadows, her progress illuminated by a succession of feeble bluish lights: the subterranean glare of the refrigerator as she squinted into its poorly stocked depths in search of the bottle, the dim oven glow flooding the pans as she pushed them aside to reach the smallest pot, the purple flickering of gas turned down low as she put the pot on the stove.

As she waited for the milk to warm up, she leaned against the counter, swaying slightly. She was never fully awake these days (these weeks, these months), her reality blurring at the edges. She was never fully asleep either, her dreams only a baby’s whimper deep. She recalled The Cycle of Exhaustion she had written at nineteen—nearly a decade before—and choked on a sob of a laugh. The college all-nighters had possessed a bold hussar quality, a youthful devil-may-care flair, and their feel had been hard, light, and vivid in her triumphant, springing step. This sleeplessness was a wet, heavy weight, relentless and inescapable, creeping into her bones, turning the world gray, the urge to weep ever close to the surface. It filled her with an absolute despair—and, at the same time, a kind of sweet relief: it was good to give up worrying about achievements for a spell and let the weakness of her body take over—good to surrender to the inevitability of her temporary escape from destiny.

She was going to do this only once, after all.

Pale moonlight slanted through the narrow window; she could see a thin dusting of snow on the ground. She stirred the milk in the pot. Her feet were cold on the tiles. In the bedroom across the hall, her husband snored in a steady, energetic rhythm, and the baby—almost six months old now—made a meowing noise, a precursor to a bout of crying. On an impulse so vague it felt like the prompting of a dream rather than a conscious action, she bent to pull out the bottom drawer near the stove, sifted through a pile of partially unopened mail—advertisements, telephone bills, takeout menus—that nowadays seemed to drift through the house in unabated flocks, sprouting colonies in chance nooks and crannies. Underneath the envelopes lay a flat box scarcely larger than a pack of playing cards. She took it out. Plastic still clung around it, so she sliced through it with a knife, and lifted the lid.

Tiny bugs of words leapt out and ran all over the counter. She trapped them with both palms, scooped them up in handfuls, pinned their slippery, wiggly little bodies to the door of the fridge, then played with them sleepily, sliding them about, almost at random, in the quivering of the gas flame, in the blue glimmer of the winter moon, until the words began to draw together into lines and she saw that she was making a poem of sorts, except it was like composing on the other side of the looking glass, composing backward—not the usual hum solidifying into sounds, the misty glow of meaning slowly growing more defined, until it sharpened into disparate words, but instead, timid sense trying to sneak its way into the cracks between the silly words already there.

Also, she could barely read the letters in the dark.

Feeling comforted somehow, she stood pushing the half-invisible magnets to the left, to the right, stirring the milk, nodding off now and then, until it seemed like some memory from long before, the familiar excitement in her fingertips, the baby whimpering, the kitchen floating underwater, the cold in her feet, the baby crying, the swell and fall of the snores, the baby wailing… Waking with a start, she abandoned whatever dream she had been pursuing, rushed to test the temperature of the milk with her little finger, quickly poured it into the bottle, and hurried out to feed him; but at seven that morning, when she entered the kitchen with the baby sniveling in her arms, she discovered Paul standing before the fridge, a half-emptied glass of orange juice in his hand, his head tilted. The poem she did not remember writing snaked in wobbly, uneven lines through a widely dispersed cloud of unused adjectives and verbs.

“When did we get this?” he said, motioning with his chin. “My sophomore roommate had one of these. I didn’t know you wrote poetry, ha-ha!” He declaimed in a loud, exaggerated manner, grandly waving his free hand in the air:

The poem stopped abruptly.

“I would feel threatened if we had a garden,” Paul said, smiling, and finished the juice in one gulp. When he lowered the glass, there was an orange mustache above his upper lip.

“I think I was asleep,” she said.

“My turn.” He swept her lines aside, and as her five dozen words merged with the remaining two hundred, her small creation dissolved without a trace. Pushing the magnets off to the very edges of the door, he selected just three or four—she could not see which ones behind the broad expanse of his back—and arranged them in the middle of the empty space before stepping away. “Ta-da!”

I love my honey, read the magnets.

She moved to hug him, but the baby in her arms started to cry, so, aborting the effort, she settled him in the high chair and went to get more milk. When she slammed the fridge door closed, a bit too firmly perhaps, a couple of words were dislodged and plopped down to the floor. She glared at them, bleary-eyed, light-headed with sleeplessness, then began to flick all the magnets off one by one. An unpleasant image of roadkill being scraped off the pavement came to her out of nowhere.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to put them back in their box.”

“Maybe you should leave them. They seem like fun.”

“We have enough clutter as it is, I think,” she said in a level voice.

The baby, now full, cooed happily. She looked over at him, and her heart, which had been momentarily unsettled, came to rest in its rightful place.

18. Nursery

The nursery was a cheerful room; she had painted it herself. The walls were lime green on one side and emerald green on the other, the ceiling light blue, and the windowpanes and baseboards azure. All across the green of the walls she had drawn yellow flowers with neat round petals, while the ceiling was peppered with plastic stars that glowed in the dark. When her parents had walked into the nursery for the first time, her mother had been volubly enchanted, but her father had seemed not to notice it at all—the only thing in the room he had noticed was Genie himself.

He sat in the armchair in the corner now, small and sullen, like a ruffled bird in winter. “Isn’t it time for the boy to wake up?” he asked again.

He always called Genie “the boy,” whereas her mother called him Zhenechka.

She glanced at the crib, then at the minute hand of the smiling moon on the wall.

“No,” she said, “not yet.”

He pursed his lips and resumed gazing outside with a vague frown, and immediately she felt guilty; next time he asked, she would have to wake Genie up. In his presence her father’s face became like a stained-glass window with the sun shining through. At all other times, though, a new sour look lodged itself in his eyes, in the deep crease between his eyebrows, in the lines tugging his mouth down into his beard. Whenever she glanced up at him from folding shirts or tidying toys, a sweaty hand took hold of her heart and dragged it sideways.

“So what’s beyond this street?” he asked.

“Another street just like this one,” she replied.

“And beyond that?”

“Two more streets like this, and then a highway. There is a grocery store on the other side of the highway, but it takes a while to cross with a stroller.”

“You must get a car,” he said, sounding displeased. “It’s impossible here without a car. You should learn how to drive. You never leave the house. The boy is pale.”

She started to explain about taking him out on the veranda for his daily allotment of fresh air, and about not having needed a car before they had moved here, and Paul working on weekends and never having the time to teach her, and, in any case, her not wanting to practice with a child in the backseat; but halfway through her apologetic mumbling, her father made a short, annoyed sound deep in his throat, and she fell silent. He resumed looking out the window, his face closed off. All at once she wanted to abandon the trivial, fussing tasks and the insignificant small talk on which she was squandering what little was left of their time together—she wanted to sit at his feet instead, prop her chin on his knee, stare up at him, and ask him things, the way she had done when she was a little girl. Back then she had tried to pry the mysteries of the universe out of him—“Why is the sky so black?” and “Does it hurt your shadow when you step on it?” and “Why does this song always make Mama cry?”

She had just as many questions now, though the questions had changed in nature.

Mama tells me your treatments are going well, are helping you—is that true? How much longer do you really have—how much longer do we have together? Is there enough time for me to prove myself to you? Whenever I see the way you look at Genie, I thaw inside, but I am also hurt: it’s like I have done my part and no longer matter as much. Are you disappointed in me, are you hoping that he will turn out to be more like you? Do you need someone to be like you, to preserve some echo of your life? The meaning of life as you explained it to me that one time, at the dacha, under the stars—do you still hold that to be true, and do you fear that you have not done enough, that after all the decades of unsparing work, your life has not succeeded on its own, not fully, so you want the reassurance of seeing a piece of yourself carried forth by future generations?

Are you afraid of dying?

Do you believe in the afterlife?

Do you believe in God?

Listen, Papa: I love you. I will give you more, so much more, than a grandchild. I will keep your memory alive to the outermost limits of my soul. I will write a long poem about you when I’m finally good enough as a poet to write it. That should count for something, should it not? I love you.

She went on folding Genie’s tiny shirts in silence, and her father went on sitting in the armchair, staring out the window with a deepened frown, and in another few minutes Genie woke up from his afternoon nap. He always woke up happy and alert, often rolling some recently learned word around in his mouth—“cup,” “fish”—like a delicious treat, tasting its novel sound with a surprised, pleased look on his small pink face (not pale, not pale at all, she took good care of him). Now, within seconds of opening his eyes, he bounced up, held on to the crib’s railing, and rattled it, eager to get out, eager for whatever wondrous adventures his grandfather had prepared for him that day.

Genie was blond and blue-eyed, and looked nothing like his grandfather—or, for that matter, nothing like her either.

“Today,” her father announced, beaming, as he groped for his cane, “I will teach you to hunt mushrooms. Repeat after me: grib. Try again. Grib. Now, real mushrooms grow in a forest, of course, I will take you there when you are a bit older and come to visit me at our dacha in Russia. For now, these buttons will have to do. The white ones are the best, belye griby, we call them, and the red ones—”

She wanted to intercede: the buttons did not seem safe, Genie was not yet two, he put things in his mouth, he could choke; but she looked at her father and stayed silent, just watched them hawk-eyed for the next ten minutes, while they traipsed all over the rug, Genie wobbling a little, her father’s cane tapping as he limped up and down, both crowing with excitement when they stumbled upon yet another button; and every time, her father admonished the boy to clean the stem thoroughly of leaves and dirt before they gently lowered the button into their imaginary basket.

In the suburban American room with the painted grass, painted sky, painted flowers, she remembered the smells and the sounds of the Russian woods she had walked with her father two decades before. Once, they had brought home a baby owlet, and another time had come upon a small dead fox curled up in a snowy hollow by a fallen oak. There had been that misty autumn morning, barely past sunrise, when a moose had rushed at them out of a thicket; it had been so close she could see the moist, agitated flaring of its nostrils. A quote she had read somewhere came to her mind: “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a lovesickness”—or something like it. And would it also be true, she wondered, that the bigger the lump—say, if you happen to have both sicknesses at once—the better the poem?

Her mother appeared in the hallway, seemingly shrunk in Paul’s kitchen apron.

“Zhenechka should have a snack now,” she said, but she too paused to watch them play. Genie had just spotted a button that had rolled all the way under his crib, and was gurgling, then screaming, with laughter. Her father began to laugh too, until it looked as if he was crying.

“The main regret I have in life,” her mother spoke from the doorway, “is that your father and I didn’t have another child. A child growing up alone doesn’t learn to think about others as much, and if you stay in your head all the time, talking to imaginary friends and not noticing other people, it’s harder for you to be happy in life later on.”

Her breath went out of her; she was winded with the sense of injustice. I notice other people, she wanted to shout, but aloud she just said, “I am happy.”

Her mother did not seem to hear her. “The best age difference between siblings,” she went on evenly, “is one or two years, no more than three. Then they are friends growing up, and when the older generation… that is…” She stumbled, continued in haste, “I mean they will always have each other, no matter what.” Her unspoken words hung heavy in the air of the cheerful blue-and-green nursery. “And if you had a girl, think how joyful it would make your father to spoil her… Come now, Zhenechka, let’s have some of Nana’s apple pie.”

Wildly she turned to her father, hoping that he would shrug her mother’s words away, that he would say something, at least. But he said nothing at all, just stood looking after the boy, the laughter leaking out of his face until only the traces of tears remained, and the hunger in his eyes made her lower her own.

That night, after everyone else in the house was asleep—her parents in the bedroom, relinquished to them for the duration of their visit, Paul stuffed into the Procrustean snugness of the living room couch, Eugene the younger in his crib, clutching his toy hedgehog that looked like a bear, or else a bear that looked like a hedgehog, a present from Eugene the elder—she lay awake on the unfolded nursery chair, listening to her son’s even breathing. She knew that her mother was wrong, that this could not possibly be all there was, this measured, resigned wisdom of one generation succeeding another, this somnolent song of biological fulfillment in her blood; for her childhood premonitions of the darkly dazzling mysteries that underlay her existence, the dreamtime glimpses of magic that felt so terribly real, the light-headed hum of inspiration that still coursed through her veins now and then—all these things filled her with a sharp, if fleeting, sense of immeasurable depths beneath the thin veneer of her temporary suburban masquerade. Just a corner, just an instant, just a poem away lay an unimaginably rich world where gods walked alongside the chosen few; and if you ever won your way there, your reward was meaning conferred upon your daily labors and travails by the promise of immortality, by the clarity of secret luminescence.

In her first decade of life, she had understood, albeit dimly and without reasoning, that a certain kind of inner fire was required if you were ever to see the things no one else saw. In her second decade, she had learned that work and daring were necessary also, and in her third, she had added experience—of pain and joy both—to the list. But was she discovering, on the cusp of her fourth decade, that selfishness too was an essential part of this celestial equation? In the end, when all accounts were totaled, did you become great only by disregarding the happiness of those around you—was the mark of a true genius his perfect solitude, his absolute inability to consider anything beyond his art?

If so, she would have to postpone seeking entry into heaven, for she had other, human, equations to balance first.

So listen, you up there, she thought as she lay stretched on the uncomfortable chair in her boy’s room, staring at the ceiling. If anyone is up there to hear me, and if my voice is in any way special, if I have earned my right to trickle a few words into your ear, I will make a bargain with you. I will give up my life for a while longer in exchange for my father’s life. I will do my best to make him happy, I will have another child—a girl, please, if you will be so kind to note my special request—I will even give up all thought of poetry while he lives, I swear—just please make him live, make him live—

And in another, rational, adult part of herself, she knew, of course, that she was being melodramatic and laughable, that she was addressing no one—that she had no power to bargain with the gods, that there were no gods—and still she lay in the dark of the nursery, whispering fiercely. On the ceiling above her, the greenish toy stars glowed with their pale plastic light. For a while they trembled hazily, as her eyes kept spilling over with tears; then, after some time, their stored phosphorescence began to fade away; and still she stared at them, at their pale outlines, at the places where they had been, for a long sleepless stretch, mouthing promises—and unlike the magnificent stars of her childhood, these stars did make her feel small.

19. Living Room

When they first moved in, the living room had been her least favorite place in the house. It gave her the impression of some cramped, low-ceilinged cell, like a cabin on a nighttime ship; its windows led onto the covered veranda and stayed dim even in the brightest sunlight, and the sour smell of the previous inhabitants’ feet seemed embedded in its darkened floors. She used to pass through it quickly, feeling an odd constriction in her chest, as though she were unable to take proper breaths. But as the space gradually filled with sofas, tables, and armchairs, her distaste for it just as gradually lessened, until, in their third year in the house, she found herself retreating here more and more often; the mouse-colored, well-heated room soothed her parental frustrations and domestic anxieties, made her feel grounded and calm at the end of another long day.

She had just sung Genie to sleep when she came into the living room that evening, looking forward to the ease of sofa blankets and a cup of herbal tea. A chilly draft leapt past her, ruffling the pages of the magazine in her hands—one of the windows had been cracked open, she saw, and April was trying to dance its way inside. As a rule, spring in their city lasted two or three weeks only—a cool, green breeze that swooped on light wings one clear morning, sifting drifts of petals along downtown sidewalks, turning evenings long and crisp, before departing just as lightly when the inevitable heat set in. Its flight had always saddened her in the past, but now she suddenly wished for the harsh blast of summer; the wild spring smell unsettled her, awakening an odd, teary longing for nameless, distant, unfamiliar things. She shut the window with firmness and pulled the heavy drapes closed, then, sinking into the pillows of the couch, switched on the lamp that cast a circle of seemingly solid, brown-tinted light, rearranged her belly in her lap, and, after a short hesitation, reached for the telephone.

He answered on the second ring.

“Paul Caldwell.”

“I was wondering,” she said, “whether you might be coming home soon.”

“Honey, you remember, I told you it would be a tough month. The proposal I’m writing—” She stopped listening. “Why, are you not feeling well? Is Eugene giving you trouble?”

“No, he’s just fallen asleep, and I’m fine. It’s just—” It’s just that my father is in some hospital in Moscow, and my mother keeps telling me it’s nothing, it’s only for routine observation, but I don’t know, the hospital has no direct line to the patients, so I can’t speak to him myself, and there is something about my mother’s voice I don’t like, some tightness to it. I really should go over there, you know, but I can’t leave for Russia right now, I can’t even leave for a café or a library, because I’m seven months pregnant, prescribed rest by my doctor, trapped in the suburbs with a toddler and no car, and my husband hardly ever comes home. Oh, and I don’t like to complain, but, since you ask, I will be thirty this summer, thirty, do you hear me, Lermontov was only twenty-six when he died, and Keats even younger, and Rimbaud had written all his poems by the age of twenty, and by the time Pushkin was my age, Eugene Onegin had all its best chapters, and I—I’ve written nothing for so long—

Her bitter mood took her by surprise. She closed her eyes briefly. It’s only the spring, she thought, people often feel unmoored in the spring.

“Honey, the sooner I wrap this up,” he said, “the sooner I’ll be home. I have some news—well, potential news, anyway. This proposal, it may turn out to be important—”

She stopped listening again. After he hung up, she frowned at the unopened home decorating magazine, then picked up the address book she kept by the telephone, flipped through the pages, punched in Lisa’s number. Remote ringing went on for a while before ending in a recording; she left a message, though without much hope, and leafed through the address book to another letter, and tried a new number. Maria was running late for an audition, and Stacy had a deadline, some paper due for her graduate seminar; she did not pay much attention to their explanations. After two or three more attempts, she was out of friends to bother. There was always Olga, of course, but Olga was invariably busy, and she was loath to interrupt yet another fascinating chapter in the ongoing novel that was Olga’s life: she was either packing for a trip to Venice with her boyfriend of the month or rushing to a holiday reception at her New York law firm—or to a symphony—or a museum… Time and time again, as she tried and failed to force her own life into a narrative of any kind, she understood how dreadfully ordinary and drab she must appear next to the brightly plumed companion of her childhood; yet after Olga’s self-assured voice faded away from her mind, she would remind herself that Olga’s kind of life was nothing but bubbles and baubles, transitory pleasures and illusory accomplishments, while hers was a quiet life of substance, wisdom, and reflection—a life close to the earth’s immemorial springs and rich in universal human experience, which would serve as fertile soil for her future art.

All the same, she did not feel like thinking about Olga right now.

Setting the telephone down, she picked up a pencil and absently doodled in the address book, filling a page with daffodils and balloons and birds wearing hats, wondering whether Lisa might call her back after all. Abruptly the drapes at one of the windows swelled up, startling her; the brown-colored lair of the room came alive with a fresh, cool smell. She realized she had left another window open, but was too tired to stand up, so she continued moving the pencil, drawing circles and zigzags, breathing in the clean, wonderful, troubling smells of opening buds and rushing waters that wafted past her every now and then; and when she looked down at the page some time later, she discovered verses sneaking their way through the doodles.

The baby kicked, and, uneasy, she pushed the address book away, then, reconsidering, reached for it again and tore the offending page out altogether. I’d better not meet anyone worth knowing whose name starts with G, she thought as she slipped the page into the pocket of her robe. She had always despised the notion of a poet as an inspired romantic pouring out his soul in unconscious, effortless trills; true poetry was hard work, hours and hours of mental acrobatics spent juggling sounds and walking the tightropes of meanings. This—this was not poetry at all, just scribbles and vapors, involuntary and unpremeditated like springtime birdsong.

She righted her belly, settled deeper into the halo of brown, steady light, picked up the telephone, dialed Paul’s number.

“Paul Caldwell,” said his voice, as always on the second ring.

“Do you ever leave your desk?” she asked (and one of these days I will really figure out what it is that he does all day long in his office, she promised herself with a familiar pinch of guilt, then, feeling wearied already, set the thought aside). “It’s nine o’clock. I think I’ll be going to sleep very shortly.”

“I’m almost done,” he said. “Another half an hour. If you stay up, I can—” A beep cut into his voice, then he resurfaced. “… and some ice cream…”

There was another beep.

“That’s Lisa calling me back, I should go now,” she cried. Of all her friends, Lisa alone had children, and complaining to someone who understood never failed to cheer her up. “Hello! Hello?”

The line crackled and clicked and stayed silent.

“Lisa? Is that you? Lisa? Hello?”

The silence had an odd quality to it: not the static void of a dead line but a wordless presence, it seemed to her, not quite of someone breathing, but of someone there nonetheless, so she did not hang up for another few moments, herself silent as well now, listening, listening intently, wondering at the sudden loosening of sadness coiled inside her, and the flush of warmth, of love, that seemed to surge through her entire being, listening still, until she imagined that she heard her name spoken—not aloud, but beneath the silence somehow, reaching her more as a thought—just her name, spoken once, through the silence, across the silence, in a familiar voice that sounded infinitely kind and had a smile in it.

“Papa?” she said uncertainly.

The telephone burst into irritated chirps in her hand; it must have been off the hook all along. She glanced at the clock, did quick math: it would be just past five in the morning in Moscow. Puzzled, she set it down, and waited, but it did not ring again, so she turned off the brown lamp and pulled her legs under the brown blanket, curling into the back of the brown couch. The baby shifted within her, and the echo of her name spread in ever fainter circles through her mind. She felt warm and at peace, comforted in some vast, serene knowledge that she was not alone, that she was loved. She was just dozing off—or perhaps she had fallen asleep already—when the telephone woke her.

She answered, her heart taking off in her throat.

On the other end of the line, her mother was crying.

“Mama?” she said. “Mama, is that you? Mama, speak to me! Mama, what happened?”

But she already knew.

20. Bedroom

“Paul, it’s your turn to get up.”

“Mmm…”

“Do you hear me? She is crying. It’s your turn.”

“Mmm…”

“Paul? Paul! Oh, never mind… The floor is so cold, I need slippers—or maybe a rug, maybe we should buy a rug—”

“Did you say something, honey?”

“Yes, half an hour ago. She wanted her bottle.”

“I slept through it again, did I? Sorry, you know how it is… Are you just now getting back into bed? What time is it?”

“A quarter past four.”

“Your feet are like ice. All of a sudden I’m wide awake. Hey, I can warm you up if you like—”

“I need to get some sleep, Paul.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you? You can nap with the kids during the day, you know. I have to go to work in the morning.”

“I’m not mad. I’m just exhausted. They don’t nap at the same time. Genie hardly naps at all now. Can we go back to sleep, please?”

“All right, all right… Hey, are you still awake?”

“I am.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking. The other day in the city I saw this girl walking along the street, she was pushing a stroller and she had a greyhound on a leash. She was wearing a little round fur hat, and she looked beautiful. Not as beautiful as you, of course.”

“So?”

“So maybe we should get a dog.”

“What?”

“Don’t laugh. A dog. You know. A pet? People have pets. The kids would love it.”

“Honestly, I don’t think it’s such a good idea right now.”

“Do you ever wonder if you resist any kind of change so much because of all that preconditioning in your Evil Empire childhood?”

“Look, I’m not saying we can’t ever have a dog. Maybe when the kids get a bit older… It would have to be a very small dog, though. We don’t have enough yard for a big dog.”

“And that’s another thing. This house has gotten too tight for us, I think… Hey, are you asleep?”

“No.”

“You’ve been silent for a while. Did you hear what I said? I think we should move to a bigger house.”

“Paul. We just bought this house. I’m only now beginning to get used to it.”

“So if you aren’t used to it yet, you won’t miss it. I mean, it’s nice enough, but it has only two bedrooms, Emma can’t even have her own room. With her constant crying right next to us, it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep.”

“You seem to manage with no trouble.”

“You know how it is… Anyway, about the house—”

“Paul, this house is fine.”

“You thought my one-bedroom rental was fine too.”

“And it was. People don’t just hop about from place to place every couple of years.”

“Actually, that’s exactly what they do. Did you know that an average American moves eleven or twelve times in his life?”

“Really? How terrible for the average American! That’s, what, something like sixty rooms the poor fellow has to furnish? The horrors of having to buy sixty rugs!”

“Probably more like forty—it includes dorm rooms and studios and poky little houses like ours. Which brings me back to my point. This house is too small for us.”

“Oh Paul, I don’t know. I just hate the idea of moving again. And again. And again.”

“What if we skip the remaining seven or eight moves, and just move this one time? What if we find ourselves a perfect place that we don’t ever have to leave again? Just think about it—living in your dream house.”

My dream house… Each room a different texture, a different mood, a different poem, and at its heart, a creaking ladder sliding along floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in a timeless oak-paneled room that smells of leather and eternity; and floor-to-ceiling windows that glow nightly with a soft, thrilling life, the laughter of friends and the strands of music and the sonorousness of words imbibed in the still hours before sunrise; and doors that open daily onto the world—the mountains to the north, the jungles to the south, the swaying of tall grasses to the east, and to the west, the islands of the blessed. And you can leave the house at any moment, go out into the unknown with nothing but a half-packed bag swinging lightly in your hand and a half-finished poem in your heart, and when you come back, it will all be waiting for you still, welcoming and unchanged and endlessly surprising, a warm place full of art and love and starry vistas, the volume you were reading just before you left still open to your page by your favorite armchair, your never-grown children safely tucked into their beds, your mother the mermaid in her turret singing songs and braiding her emerald hair, your father the sage eternally at work on his antiquated typewriter behind the closed door, and no one gone, and no one dead, and everything always the same and always different and always joyful. A dream house unfolding at some magical juncture of the past and the future, bypassing the dull, heartbroken, trivial present, born equally out of memory and promise…

“Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

“No. What do you mean, ‘dream house’?”

“I mean a house with two stories and a finished basement, and a real backyard. A bedroom for each of the kids and a couple of guest rooms. A master bathroom with a whirlpool bath. Large walk-in closets. A fireplace or two. A kitchen where we can turn around. A terrace where we can grill. Proper space for entertainment. Perhaps an exercise room, a media room, a wine cellar—”

“I see. You want to dispense with the forty-room requirement all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in something out of The Great Gatsby. It’s a moot point, though—you know we can’t afford it anyway. Of course you make good money, but I don’t work, and there are all your student loans, and your car, and Genie will be starting preschool in the fall, and then Emma. And I was hoping to get a car of my own someday too… Even this place is a strain. Unless your parents help us, and we’ve decided against asking them, I thought.”

“Well, but we won’t need my parents’ help. That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember when I turned in that proposal in the spring? Well, last week we actually… Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

“Sorry, I must have dozed off. You were saying?”

“I’m saying I’m likely to become full partner by the end of March. With the money we’d have we could get the perfect house. We could start looking in the summer, move in time for Christmas. Imagine having a real fire in a fireplace and the kids’ stockings hanging from the mantel. Eugene would love it, he would be four, the ideal age. And you too, you could use some happiness right now. How nice would that be?”

“That does sound nice… unrealistic but nice…”

“It will happen, you’ll see. Hey, your feet are still cold. Let me just—”

“Mmm… That’s nice… mmm… mmm… Oh, Paul… mmm… That was nice… But I really must get some sleep now… Oh. Paul? Paul! She is crying again, wake up, it’s really your turn now. Oh, no. Did you hear that? I think Genie’s up too.”

“Mama? I had a scary dream. There was a monster who ate all my socks. I’m thirsty.”

“Paul? Paul! Oh, hell… Hold on, sweetie, Mama will be right there.”

My dream house: a place where you can sleep.