Forty Rooms

21. Ballroom

Cards and gift baskets for Paul’s family. Check.

Tips for the mailman and the grocery man. Check.

New rug delivered. Check.

Fire burning in the fireplace. Check.

Silver garlands, bronze deer, gilded fir cones, red poinsettias, soft Christmas carols, smells of cinnamon and pine, trays of freshly baked cookies still hot to the touch, holiday cheer—all unpacked from various boxes, unwrapped, dusted off, aired out, arranged here and there. Check, check, check.

Four stockings suspended from the mantel, three of them identical, sporting names in green and red letters: “Paul,” “Eugene,” “Emma.” Paul’s was soft and worn-out, the wool, once white, graying with the accumulated soot of many Christmas fires; it had been knitted at his birth by an elderly great-aunt who was, miraculously, still alive nearly a third of a century later to present their children with matching stockings. The fourth stocking, her own, did not match and had no name on it, but, unlike the other three, it carried a small private memory with it. On a cold, windy day in November six years before, the two of them had wandered into a neighborhood antique shop; Paul had found the stocking in the dingy back room and, maneuvering it off the hook, had turned to her and, looking uncharacteristically nervous, said, “For when we have a mantelpiece.” That evening he had asked, and, unsurprised, she had said yes. Check.

An enormous tree, the size of Paul with Gene standing on his shoulders. Check.

A room vast enough to accommodate said tree. Some months before, as they had followed the genial real estate agent on their first tour of the house, she had felt dazed by the stately succession of spaces—the entrance hall with its marble staircase, the living room with its blinding wall of windows, the expansive kitchen with the sunlit dining area separated by the curve of the granite island, the darkly paneled library, then yet another room, which appeared to be a second living room, with a spectacular chandelier she had just narrowly avoided walking into. “It’s hung a bit low, I think,” she said, flustered, and the agent laughed his agreeable laugh and said, “But naturally, there will be a table underneath.” “Oh,” she said, “I thought the dining room was back there.” “No, honey,” Paul said, smiling, “that was just the breakfast nook.” “Oh,” she said again. By then they had returned to the hall and the agent had stopped before the tall French doors on its opposite side. “And the best for last,” he said.

She fully expected that they had come to the end of the house and would now find themselves outside, and so was unable to suppress a gasp when, after a dramatic pause, the agent pushed the double doors open.

“The ballroom,” he announced.

She thought: It’s like a house within a house—a house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like in some magic story. I will write a poem about a delighted little girl who discovers a fairy-tale ballroom, complete with candlelit mirrors and princesses twirling in a waltz, hidden in the middle of her suburban bungalow. But when she considered for another minute, she knew that there was no poem in it: the mere notion of living in a house that contained something called a “ballroom” left her too stunned for words.

“Just look at these ceilings,” Paul said, tilting his head.

(Sudden money, and not as much as they suppose, the agent thought, appraising his clients with an experienced eye; the woman especially looked all agog with greed. The agent had “Peter Boggart” printed on his expensively embossed business cards, but his real name was Bogdan Petković, and he did not like big new houses, or the people to whom he showed them. His grandfather had kept bees in a small village in the Balkan mountains, and he himself dreamed of going back there once he had set aside enough savings. Whenever he felt drained, he imagined the drowsy droning of bees above a blue meadow, and a dark-eyed girl by the village well looking at him over her shoulder with a quick, saucy smile; the vision never failed to motivate him.)

“Twenty-two by thirty-two, with a fourteen-foot ceiling,” the agent offered energetically. “You could almost fit the White House tree in here.”

Check.

(“It’s perfect,” Paul had said as soon as the agent had waved his good-bye.

“It costs much too much,” she said.

“We can afford it. As long as we budget.”

“The kids might fall down the stairs,” she said.

“We’ll set up childproof gates.”

“I wouldn’t be able to hear them at night,” she said.

“We’ll put monitors everywhere.”

“It would take all my life to clean it,” she said.

“So we’ll hire a maid. Once I get my next raise.”

“All the furniture we own would fit in that one throne room, or whatever he called it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the house,” she said.

“We can get a decorator to help you. It will be fun. Please, honey, don’t fret so much. This house is perfect for us. And we can finally get a dog. Or even two.”

She thought: God help me, I love the house.

She thought: I no longer recognize the shape of my life.

Aloud she said, “You have a solution for everything, don’t you?”—and, after a moment, remembered to smile, so it would not sound like a reproach.)

The penultimate item on her holiday checklist: a dozen children’s presents to assemble under the tree in festive piles—check, check, check. They had promised to give each other no gifts that year: she had not yet mastered driving, and the new house was even farther out than the old one, with no stores to walk to; in any case, she had argued, the house was gift enough for both of them. On Christmas morning, still in her pajamas, she kneeled on the new rug and watched the children; four-year-old Gene whooped with excitement as he tore the paper off his puzzles, and one-and-a-half-year-old Emma lay cooing on top of a gigantic plush dog. Once all the presents had been unwrapped, dismembered, and discarded, Paul brought in mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and she gathered both children into her flannel-clad lap and sat looking at the flames, while white wintry sunlight flooded the great expanse of the bare room. There is something so peaceful about a fire in the morning, she thought. Emma grew heavy with sleep, making her right arm numb; Gene stared at the wisps of snow that darted outside the still-curtainless windows.

“Tell us one of your stories,” she asked.

Gene nodded and, not pausing to think, began: “Once upon a time a boy wanted to make a snowman, but it was fall, and there was no snow, so he made his snowman out of leaves. But in the morning he woke up, and the snowman was not there: the wind carried it away at night. But when Christmas came, the boy made another snowman out of snow, and it was so much fun. The end.”

As she listened, her habitual worry loosened its hold on her heart, and she felt certain, almost certain, that this house was just what they needed—that here Gene and Emma would be sure to have a childhood no less magical than hers had been. But magic, she knew, was not born of place alone; she too would have to try harder. When Gene fell silent, she reached for the book of Russian folktales that had been her present to him, showed him the pictures of firebirds and bears. He seemed indifferent until his eyes fell on a reproduction of a painting she had loved as a child, which he studied in absorbed silence. “The rider has stopped at the crossroads,” she explained, pleased by his interest. “See this stone? The words on it say: ‘If you go straight, you’ll find happiness. If you go right, you’ll lose your horse. If you go left, you’ll lose your life.’ He is choosing where to go.”

Paul guffawed. “Why would anyone choose to go right or left?”

“Hmm,” she said. “I never thought of it like that. Maybe you need to be Russian to find it tempting.”

“Or maybe he can’t read,” Gene said, sounding slightly disdainful; he had learned his letters in the fall. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”

“Scary?” she repeated, surprised, and looked at the picture again—and saw the empty yellow sky, the crows and the skulls, and the horseman, his face invisible, stooped before the gravestone; and now his pose did seem to her one of deep weariness, perhaps even defeat, and the entire landscape pregnant with an evil hush of ominous forebodings.

Gene leaned over to push the book away, and spilled his mug of chocolate on the Persian rug. Emma woke up wailing as a few hot drops landed on her wrist. But of course memories and enchantments aren’t transmitted by blood, she told herself sensibly; it was only natural that their childhood magic would be different from hers. And as she rushed to take care of burns and stains, she strove to smother the dull throb of sadness deep, deep inside her.

That evening, when the exhausted, satisfied children had fallen asleep, the monitors crackling at their bedsides, she returned to the darkened ballroom and sat on the floor by the dying fire. After some minutes, Paul came to join her, a glass of spiced eggnog in one hand, a long velvet box in the other.

“A little something for you,” he said, setting the box gently in her lap.

“But Paul,” she protested. “I thought we’d agreed—”

“It’s nothing. Just a token, really. Go ahead, open it.”

Inside was a choker necklace of golden filigree.

“It’s lovely,” she said with a small sigh.

“Here, let me—the clasp has a trick to it…”

There sounded a sharp little snap, like a clang of rodent teeth. She looked at the shadowy woman in the nearest mirror, at all the women in all the mirrors around the room, then slowly lifted her hand to her throat. The necklace felt cold, heavy, and smooth under her fingers. She thought she saw a reflection on the edge of the crowd stand up and leave without a glance back, and was seized by a wild desire to follow.

She turned her back to the mirrors.

“This is just the way we imagined it,” Paul said. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied—but as she said it, she knew that she had never imagined anything like it. She had grown up in a world where the value of jewels had been measured in stories, not carats, and the castle she had dreamed of inhabiting as a little girl had nothing to do with owning property, or with drinking eggnog on a palatial (if somewhat stained) Tabriz: it had been merely a wish to live in the daily presence of beauty—the idea of beauty, as she had understood it in her seven-year-old mind. Yet this beautiful house was not an idea, it was real—too real; and she could no longer pretend, as she had in their low-ceilinged bungalow, that it was all temporary somehow, a flimsy, hastily assembled theatrical set, a prelude to a proper life she would lead someday soon.

But perhaps she was wrong to feel so apprehensive. There was an art of poetry, true, but there was an art of living as well, and, contrary to the beliefs of the nineteenth-century romantics, one did not preclude the other, did it? Perhaps it was time she learned something of the latter. And why should she not enjoy a comfortable house with two bright, healthy children and a loving husband? She emerged from her anxious reverie to discover him kissing her neck, a little shyly, whispering about christening this rug, this room—this house, actually, even though they had now lived here for almost two months—for it had been a while, a long while, a very long while, she kept putting him off, she had not yet had a chance to visit her doctor since Emma’s birth, to talk about options, and he had grudgingly agreed that two was probably enough, yes, three would have been nice, three would have been his choice, he supposed, but he understood that two was just right for them. But maybe this time, just this one time, she could stop worrying and live in the moment, for what were the chances, and wasn’t that what she wanted, a life of spontaneity, a life of experience—and the embers were glowing so cozily in the fireplace, and the tree was tinkling and sparkling above them, and the taste of eggnog was sweet on her lips, and of course in time she would write all the poetry she meant to write, and everything, everything, would turn out just fine.

The last item on her holiday list: happiness. Check. And a barely visible question mark next to it.

22. Dining Room

“Salad forks go on the outside,” said Paul, walking into the dining room with a stack of soup bowls and taking in the table at a glance.

“I know that,” she replied with some irritation, and, turning, saw that she had indeed set the forks wrong: the smaller ones bumped the gilded rims of the plates at crooked angles. She did not remember placing them there.

“Are you feeling all right?” Having unburdened himself of the bowls, he paused on the threshold to give her a mildly inquiring look.

“I’m fine.” She would not meet his eyes as she went around the table switching the forks. “Just a bit queasy. Something with my stomach.”

“Or it could be nerves,” he said with an easy shrug. “There’s no need to feel nervous, you know. It’s only my boss and his wife we’re trying to impress. Only my entire future hanging in the balance. Well, I better go check on the sauce.”

He beamed at her before vanishing into the kitchen, and she heard more sizzling and banging and the oven door swinging open and the refrigerator door swinging shut. I guess that was a joke, she said wordlessly to the afterimage he had left behind, I mean your comment about the future, because isn’t all this, your partnership, this place, our children, isn’t all this supposed to be the future already?… The meat smells so rich… Oh no, there it is again, that wave of sick feeling. I suppose I’m getting ill. Or else. Or else. But I can’t think about that right now.

And she did succeed in not thinking about it while their guests arrived, and for a spell after that, give or take a nauseating stray thought. As the four of them sat around the table crowned by the radiant magnificence of the chandelier, she would turn her head to the left and converse, almost convincingly, about the merits of silk wallpaper, then turn her head to the right and discuss the Russian Revolution, all the while straining to catch the back-and-forth traipse of Mrs. Simmons, their new babysitter, on the ceiling and the hushed whimpering of Emma, who could not fall asleep. Paul’s boss, a stout, round-shouldered man in his early sixties, had a rowdy laugh and the massive jaw of a bulldog. His forty-something wife talked softly, revealing a dazzle of perfect white teeth in a frozen face framed by long tousled locks of brittle gold. “But this is divine,” the woman kept saying in a toneless voice every time she took another dainty mouthful of soup. Whenever she lifted the spoon to her mouth, her diamond bangles slid down her skinny wrist and clicked together discreetly.

They got through the soup course. She poked at the edges of her salad, unable to eat, nodding as Paul’s boss held forth on the proper ways of stocking a wine cellar. Paul brought in the steaks, explaining his personal take on béarnaise sauce. When they began to debate some incomprehensible work issue, she played a silent rhyming game she had invented to help her get through the more mind-numbing chores of the day, constructing short stacks of words in her mind, moving from the tangible and present to the abstract and remote: “Fork—cork—dork—New York. Knife—wife—strife—life. Spoon—old prune—cocoon—doom… Wait, the last one doesn’t fit. How did that jingle go, from the show Gene used to watch? One of these things is not like the others… All right, then: Big Bird—slurred—curse word—theater of the absurd—”

Paul’s boss had turned to her and was asking her something.

“I’m sorry?” She tried not to look at a speck of brown fat that glistened on his chin.

“Dacha,” he boomed. “Tell us about your dacha. You have a dacha back home?”

He mispronounced the word—daka, he said—though of course she did not correct him. But when she opened her mouth to reply, something happened to the guests, to the room, even to Paul himself: everything suddenly assumed a flat, two-dimensional sleekness of unreality, like some film she was only half watching. I must be getting sick, she thought again. Or it could be nerves, I suppose. Or… No, do not think about that, the gods would not be so cruel…

She blinked, caught herself, felt the awkward silence widening around her like a clumsy spill. All three of them were looking at her, their smiles becoming glazed.

Paul came to her rescue.

“But naturally they have a dacha,” he rejoined, and she felt a sharp little shock when he echoed his boss’s error, though he knew how to say it correctly. “It’s a real log cabin in the middle of a forest. No running water, and conveniences in the yard.”

“How quaint,” the wife said, sounding faintly disgusted. “Like living in a Tolstoy novel.” She stood up, her bracelets sliding and clacking.

Paul started to clear the table for dessert.

“Don’t you get frostbite when you use your outhouse in the winter?” the boss asked, his mouth remaining agape even after he finished speaking. She smiled at him in anguish. His teeth were not perfect like his wife’s, but pointed and yellowing, wolfish somehow. “Siberian winters and all that?”

“They don’t go there in winter,” Paul answered with readiness, bending to refill the man’s wineglass for the fourth time, then, after a beat of hesitation, refilling his own as well. “Of course, in the summer you must ward off the mosquitoes and the wasps, no?”

He carried the empty bottle into the kitchen.

Could it be true, she wondered, that people got just the dinner conversations they deserved? She went on smiling, terror growing inside her.

“Hell,” the boss cried, “if I were a mosquito, I would bite you!” He roared with laughter, and in the next instant she found his hand clamped around her knee. Stricken, she stared at his impeccable starched cuff, at his golden cuff link in the shape of an anchor; but the clasp had already turned into a pat, jovial and vapid, and the wife came back in, talking about this nice little shop she knew where one could get the best guest soaps, and Paul entered with a new bottle of wine and a platter bearing Casanova’s Delight, announcing it to be the very thing that had made his wife fall in love with him, and the evening proceeded on its limping, unreal course.

After coffee, Paul offered to take their guests on a tour of the house. “But I must warn you, it’s a work in progress,” he said. “Apart from the dining room, none of it’s furnished. As you can see, we started with the most important room.”

“You should keep it this way,” said the boss’s wife, rising from her chair. “I always say one can have too many things. Don’t I, Mark? Don’t I always say to you, one should be able to waltz through one’s house without tripping over all these silly antiques?”

It was obvious from her tone that she meant precisely the opposite.

“Coming, honey?” Paul paused in the doorway, swaying a little.

“You go ahead,” she said. “I’d like to clean up a bit.”

But when she was alone, she did not move from her seat. She heard their voices echoing in the entrance hall, Paul’s boss guffawing—“And what about a bed, surely you have a bed!”—adding something she could not make out that caused the men to gargle with laughter the entire way up the stairs. Now their voices grew indistinct, and two sets of manly footsteps thumped broadly above her head, while a third set tapped like a delicate hammer driving delicate nails into her temples, which made her realize her head was throbbing, had been throbbing for some time. Then she no longer heard them at all; but oddly enough, she continued to hear the flow of some ghostly conversation taking place just a breath away, not behind the wall but right next to her, yet sounding distant, as if reaching her ears through a thick veil. Several voices wove in and out, discussing with quiet passion things of inestimable interest and everlasting importance, though she could catch only a snippet now and again—something about a ruined temple in a tangle of vines in a jungle, and a sky over a western sea darkly aflutter with a thousand migrating storks, and a herd of wild horses running breast-deep through wind-blown steppe grasses. She listened for a long, entranced minute. Perhaps, she thought, in some parallel dimension, infinitely close and infinitely far away, another house existed alongside theirs, and in that other house lived fascinating people who did fascinating things and held fascinating talks over their dinner table—and though there was no doorway between the two places, one could occasionally stumble upon glimpses and echoes of that other, brighter place, and, for one single moment of miraculous serendipity, one could feel almost complete. She could write a poem about it… And she forced herself to go on, to think about the poem for another full minute; but all along she understood, of course, that what she was really doing amidst the fingerprinted crystal, the smeared china, the crusted silver—the wreckage of a sumptuous, laborious, vacuous meal—was trying to ward off her nausea, to distract herself with frantic imaginings from what, deep inside, she already knew to be true.

Presently Paul and the others returned, and soon after, their guests were taking their leave. The boss said, “A perfectly cooked steak is so rare,” and laughed uproariously at his own pun. (Poor thing, he thought kindly, she looks much prettier in that wedding photo Paul keeps on his desk. She seems so ill at ease, and always as if she is thinking about something else. I tried to cheer her up, but no luck. Some folks are like that, difficult to talk to. Or it could be the language barrier, I guess. But if she listens to Paul the way she listened to us, he can’t be very happy. It’s a shame all the same.) “Look, if you ever need anything,” he said, and he sounded sincere. The boss’s wife, in parting, squeezed her hand and said, “I’m so sorry about your father,” and her voice was no longer toneless, and her eyes glistened. “Courage, my dear.”

But they are not as I thought they were, she registered with mild surprise; but she was distracted, and when the door closed, she forgot all about them. She followed Paul back to the dining room, began to stack up the cups. As Paul talked, slurring slightly, about the success of the evening, and his plans for the wine cellar, and Mark’s lake house, she thought: It won’t be real unless I say something. I don’t have to say anything. I won’t say anything. I can just pretend it’s nothing. It probably is nothing. It was just that one time at Christmas, what are the chances, I’ve been late before, I’ve been nauseated before, it doesn’t have to mean anything. I could just go to the doctor, and I don’t have to tell Paul, I won’t tell Paul, and even if it is something, it won’t feel like anything if I talk only to the doctor, because when they say things like “first trimester” and “estimated date of confinement” and “induced termination,” these are just words, they don’t have to mean anything, as long as no one but the doctor knows anything about it. Of course I will know about it too, but it will be all right, it’s only five or six weeks now, if it’s anything at all, and it’s probably nothing, and in any case it will be over soon, and I too will forget all about it, it will mean nothing—just as long as nobody thinks about tiny little toes that look like pink peas, and tiny little fingers curling around one’s own finger in a surprisingly firm grip, and that sweet little fold in the back of the neck, and the warm smell of milk and sleep, and the toothless gums unsealed in their first smile—

She set the wobbling tower of cups onto the table.

“Paul?” she said. “Paul. I think I’m pregnant.”

And within the cold immensity of her terror there already glowed a small, timid kernel of joy.

23. Master Bathroom

“There are columns in your bathroom,” said the plumber.

His voice sounded indifferent on the surface, as if he was just stating the fact, but she imagined she could detect hostility underneath, and meekly, almost apologetically, she offered, “We’ve only just moved in.” She wanted to add: You could fit my entire childhood apartment in here; but he looked at her with a stony expression, and she said nothing else, only smiled to hide her discomfort and sat down on the vanity bench, awaiting his verdict. She took shallow breaths to avoid gagging.

“So, no blockages, then,” the plumber said, unrolling his tools. “Just the smell.”

“Just the smell,” she confirmed, then continued in a helpful rush, “Something must be wrong with the pipes. I mean, I understand that in my condition all smells seem stronger than they really are, but you can smell it too, can’t you?”

He did not respond, did not glance up at her, did not ask about her due date, or whether she was having a boy or a girl. She had felt a little disappointed when she let him in the door, a flabby, sour-looking man past fifty with the hard bristle of a sandy mustache not quite hiding the downward turn of his mouth, and her initial assessment had proved right. The other plumber from the company, the one she had dealt with on the previous two occasions (there had been a leak in Emma’s bathroom and a dripping faucet in the kitchen), was an amiable, garrulous young fellow who would surely ask her how she was feeling and whether they’d picked a name yet. But this man went about his business in silence, tapping here, peering there, and she knew, just by looking at his stiff back, that he resented her presence in the bathroom and would have much preferred her to leave.

Pulling herself together, she made a new attempt.

“So,” she said brightly, “do you have any children?”

He grunted into his mustache, whether a “Yes” or a “No” she could not discern, and set about rolling his tools back up. (Sean O’Reilly’s only daughter had drowned at the age of eleven. Now she often came to him at night. They walked the deserted streets of his neighborhood side by side, talking about nothing much, the weather, a new hardware shop around the corner, their old cat. Her sneakers squeaked with water, her voice never aged. The following morning his pajamas were often muddy and his heart lagged exhausted in his chest. He suspected that each nocturnal visit was shaving days, if not months, off his life, but he did not mind. Aching with hope, he wondered if she was going to come tonight, then reluctantly turned his attention to the rich lady with the slight foreign accent and needy eyes.)

“Nice faucets you’ve got here,” he said, standing up with an audible creak, brushing off his knees. His tone, once again, carried a brusque undercurrent of hostility.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your faucets. Gold-plated. Very nice.”

“These faucets are gold-plated?” she echoed, incredulous. “I had no idea.”

He gave her a sullen look and walked out of the bathroom.

“But what about the smell?”

“The pipes are fine,” he said. She waddled after him across the bedroom, down the stairs. “You’ve got a dead animal in the wall. I still have to charge you for coming out, though.”

“A dead animal? You mean, like… a mouse?”

He turned to her in the entrance hall. “Judging by the smell, something larger. A rat or a squirrel, I’d guess, maybe a raccoon.”

“A rat? But… what do I do now? Do I call an exterminator?”

“I don’t know what you people do in such cases,” he said with a shrug, and opened the front door without waiting for her help with the lock, “but I’d call one of those animal trappers. No need to exterminate anything, it’s dead already.”

“You people,” she thought, stung—what did he mean by “you people,” I don’t have any “people,” one should never judge by appearance only, my real world is far away from here… Resisting the urge to chase the dour man outside and set him straight, she locked the door behind him and puffed her way back upstairs, stopping at the bathroom threshold, peeking in. When she had first seen the house, the whirlpool bath with its swan-shaped faucets, submerged in the deep basin between the two columns, beneath the two chandeliers, had struck her as the most marvelous of all the marvels here. Now, hidden behind its lustrous gray marble lay the decomposing corpse of some rat crawling with maggots—and so troubling was the image, and so unshakable her sudden sense of the entire house weighing down upon her, demanding to be maintained in a manner she was beginning to suspect beyond her, that she found herself reeling. Crumpling onto the gorgeously veined floor, she pressed her forehead against the cool side of the bathtub and burst into tears; and as she cried, she remembered last night’s dream, heroic and primary-colored, in which she had fought in some medieval battle in a green meadow under blue skies alongside fierce youths with lions’ manes and undying courage; and the memory of the dream made her cry all the harder. But it’s nothing, it’s only hormones, stop it this minute, she thought after a moist, confused moment, all at once angry with herself.

At least she had not been cowed into giving that unpleasant man a tip.

She called Paul, but he was in a meeting.

“Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Caldwell?” his secretary asked, her voice oozing solicitude. “Do you want me to page him?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “Maybe he could call me back later?”—but just then Emma woke up from her nap and Gene needed a snack, and her free half-hour was over.

The trapper arrived on Wednesday. He was a cheerful black youth dressed in a neatly pressed khaki-colored uniform with his name, some unpronounceable combination of d’s and b’s, embroidered over the breast pocket. He took the matter in hand with great efficiency, considered the angle of the roof, even went outside and climbed a ladder to probe around the skylights. “This is where it gets in,” he said, returning to the bathroom, pointing. He spoke confidently, flashing bright teeth in a dark face agleam with sweat, his words like solid blocks of wood, sturdy with some accent she could not place. “I must break the wall to pull it out. I’m sorry I do not fix the wall for you. Your husband, he will fix it, yes? It is easy, just drywall here, then paint over.”

She made a mental note to call a handyman as soon as the trapper was gone.

“You should leave now,” the young man said merrily. “Bad smells for a lady in your state. Boy or girl, you know?”

He looked smiling at her belly, and instantly she felt a rush of gratitude so strong it made her eyes sting a little.

“Actually, it’s two boys,” she said. “Twins. Identical.”

As always, when she said it (and she did not say it often, mainly to workmen who came to the house, and only if they were curious enough), she experienced anew that heady mix of terror, disbelief, pride, and wonder—just as she had felt when the doctor, studying the small black screen on which some white cobwebby lines shifted and curved, had said, “Ah, there it is, a nice, healthy heartbeat,” and frowned slightly, sending her own heart into a frightened lurch, then, an excruciating second or two later, beamed and said, “And here, surprise, surprise, we have another heartbeat,” so that in her first moment of pure incomprehension, she said stupidly, “The baby has two heartbeats?”—and as she was saying it, realized what the doctor had meant. She wept in the taxi on the way home. That evening, when she told Paul, dry-eyed but even more panicked, she wanted him to console her; but he only whooped and grabbed her and lifted her up, as though to whirl her about, then, recalling himself, set her down gently instead as if she were porcelain. “If one of them is a boy,” he had cried, “we should name him Richard. Dad would be thrilled!”

“Twins,” the trapper said, inclining his head in what seemed a small bow. He was no older than twenty-two or twenty-three. “You are blessed, Mrs. Caldwell. Twins are special. Sacred. Poets sing songs about twins. In Africa, I am a twin also. My father was king of my tribe, and my twin brother is king now. One day I will find a poet and tell him my life, and the poet will make me and my father and my brother into songs.”

Another delusional royal, she thought with a quick flash of disdain—and then, surprising herself, opened her mouth and said, “I am a poet,” and, flushed with instant embarrassment, hastened to add: “But I’m not yet published or anything.”

“Published? But poets are not published, Mrs. Caldwell. You do not put a song in a book. Being a jali is a gift you carry to the people. You walk among your people singing them alive, keeping their roots nourished, teaching them who they are. The word jali, do you know what it means in my language? Blood. Yes. That is what it means. Poets are the true blood of their people.” He was silent for a moment, a still look on his sculpted face, as though lost in some memory. (He was seeing the night settling in the clearing, and the drums beating and beating, and his father twirling in the circle of the dancers, their eyes shining darkly in the slits of horned and feathered masks, and the wisdom of past generations deep in his being like the slow flow of rich ancestral blood, a part of him forever. The world, he knew without ever putting it into words, was so much more wondrous than most people here ever suspected.) Then his lustrous eyes rolled over her, lit up with another smile. “But now I open the wall, so you go someplace with no death, it is no good for you here.”

She wanted to continue talking to him, but of course there could be no conversation while the animal (a squirrel, not a rat, as it turned out, much to her relief) was being extracted, and in any case, she realized with a start that Emma had been screaming in her crib for quite a while now; her ability to tune things out had become truly astonishing. Well, the drywall man will be coming in a day or two, she thought as she hurried down the corridor toward her daughter’s high-pitched wails. She wondered what he would be like, and felt a small thrill of anticipation.

When the trapper left, she gave him a sizable tip.

24. Wine Cellar

Her heart flipped like a fish when she answered the doorbell.

“Please, please, come in,” she said.

He stepped inside, a bouquet of nondescript flowers in his hand.

“Not gladioli, I see,” she said with a nervous little laugh. “You haven’t changed at all.”

Adam smiled with his lips only, glanced around the entrance hall.

“Nice place,” he said, his voice flat.

His jacket was shabby, she saw, and his shoes cheap.

“Oh, would you like a tour? I’ll ask Dolores to put these in water,” she said, and, flushing for no reason, abandoned the flowers on the marble-topped console and fled ahead of him without waiting for his reply. “Please, this way. Paul likes to show people around”—she spoke over her shoulder, not wanting to fall silent, not wanting to slow down—“but he won’t be back from work for another hour. I’m having the living room redone, do watch out—oh, sorry!”

He had barely avoided stepping into one of the pans of paint her contractor had left for her to review. As she maneuvered him into the ballroom, the telephone rang, and for an insufferable minute she tried and failed to extricate herself from a discussion of cushion upholstery with Felicity, her decorator, while his level gaze pursued her through the mirrors, judging her, judging her. In the kitchen, Gene was helping Emma with a puzzle, and Squash and Pepper tangled panting in their legs. “The enthusiasm puppies have for the world!” she said, laughing, and again saw Adam’s cheap shoes, and was all at once conscious that, deep underneath the awkwardness, she was almost enjoying this chaotic display of the full, prosperous life she had managed to build for herself out of nothing. Upstairs, in the nursery, she grew likewise conscious of the fact that she had once wondered about having children with the very man who was now commenting politely on Emma’s doodles framed above the cribs; it caused her to coo over the twins in a fussy manner not her own, which made Mrs. Simmons raise her eyebrows slightly. In the bedroom, she was conscious of other things yet. To avoid lingering by the enormous king-size bed, whose elaborate carved posts Dolores was brushing just then with a duster, she pulled him into the bathroom.

“Nice place,” he said again, in that same polite, flat tone. “Orchids and swans.”

Their eyes met, and a brief silence settled between them.

“Can you believe it,” she exclaimed wildly, desperate to dispel the hush, to say anything, anything at all, “these faucets are actual gold, isn’t that silly!”

Dolores crept in, a spray in her hand, her gaze cast down with disapproval, muttering, “Excuse me, ma’am”—probably hoping to spy on us, she thought in sudden agony. (Dolores did not notice the strained pauses in the conversation between her employer and her employer’s guest. She paid no attention to them whatsoever. She was thinking of the bells ringing in an ancient bell tower in her hometown, and of herself as a fifteen-year-old girl, and of the bell ringer’s son taking her night after night up the winding staircase of the tower, and the bells ringing within the stone walls, and the two of them holding hands as they rose higher and higher, past the bells, past the roof, until they were climbing the endless celestial ladder among the stars. One time, when the bell ringer’s son was not looking, she sneaked a small star into her pocket, and when her son was born nine months later, she gave it to him. She had not seen her son in twenty years, but she was sure she would always know him, for once you touched a star, you were marked for life.)

“Why don’t I show you the wine cellar next?” she offered brightly.

“Please,” he replied, his voice reserved.

On the stairs to the basement she paused, turned to glance up at him.

“But you haven’t changed at all,” she said again, hoping that this time he would return the compliment; but, as before, he said nothing, only looked down at her evenly from a step above. In truth, she was not being entirely honest herself. In the decade since they had seen each other last (a decade—was it truly possible?), he had lived in Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Rome, had traveled through Asia and South America, had composed several well-reviewed shorter pieces and a symphony that had been performed in a concert hall in Boston, and there was talk of a teaching position at Juilliard. He looked young still, but his cheekbones had become more pronounced, imparting a sterner cast to his features; his halo of golden curls had subsided, flattened, darkened; his face had gained a deep, assured stillness over which his painfully familiar expressions skimmed lightly, without, it seemed, touching his essence—a face of someone who knew he had already accomplished something in life and was bound to accomplish much more.

She wondered what changes he saw in her, what he thought of her now, a thirty-three-year-old mother of four. She was not as thin as she used to be. Did he still find her beautiful? Was she still beautiful? Her heart caught with a small, discrete ache. Without another look at him she resumed descending the steps.

“Here it is,” she said, pushing the door open, switching on the dim overhead light. Together they stepped inside a shadowy room packed with a dry, cool smell of wood and earth, and carefully she closed the door behind them—Paul was forever reminding her to pull the door shut, to maintain the proper temperature within. “Always kept at a constant fifty-six degrees,” she said as they walked along the walls. The honeycomb of wine racks was still three-quarters empty, but was filling up at a steady pace. “Paul is really into wines nowadays, he has even taken a wine appreciation course at a local winery. The reds are here, the whites there, you see—”

They stopped, stood side by side, their shoulders close but not touching, looking at the dull gleam of the dozens of bottles before them.

“So,” he said, “this is where you invite me to taste your rare Amontillado, and while I stumble about inebriated, you chain me to the wall and abandon me to starve to death for all my sins.”

For the first time since he had crossed her threshold, his voice lost its dullness, quickened with life.

“I’m afraid the sins are all mine,” she said, starting to laugh, and the brittle sound of her laughter was like a tinkle of broken glass falling all around them.

He turned to face her.

Suddenly she was no longer laughing.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, and the long-forgotten gentleness in his voice made her heart thump, pushing into her throat, her wrists, her temples, until she felt her entire being filled with her heart’s troubled thudding. She shivered in the chill of the cellar, drawing her cardigan tighter around her shoulders.

I’m thinking: Once you love someone, how do you unlove them?

I’m thinking: Kiss me.

“I’m thinking of a poem I wrote when I was twenty,” she said. “One of the ones I burned on the day we met. I translated it for you later, though it isn’t nearly as good in English.”

He waited in silence. She too was silent for a moment, unsure whether she was going to do it. Then, meeting his eyes, she began to recite, stumbling a little, the heat of her insidious intent creeping up her neck. “In the coldness of an autumn night—no, ‘coldness’ is not right, was it ‘darkness,’ yes, I think it was ‘darkness’—

The cavernous cellar caught her voice and echoed it ever so slightly, as if adding a second dimension to the sounds, amplifying and deepening the meaning.

She broke off. She looked at the wine racks, at the tiled floor under her feet, at her hands twisting the button on her cardigan—anywhere but at him. The unfinished poem lay like a damaging secret between them, the unsaid words crowding in her throat, pushing against her lips; she felt them on her tongue, shapeless, soundless, but she could not bring herself to release them into the cool, expectant stillness of the cellar.

“I… I don’t remember any more,” she began to say, all at once frightened—but he was kissing her already.

She felt suspended for an instant, then leaned into the kiss, her eyes fluttering closed. Everything forgotten was back in the kiss—their youth, their love, their future. The smells of earth and wood in the cellar became the smells of the outside world, the smells of mushrooms and flowers, the changing of seasons, the joyful, heedless tumbling of the universe through rushing, dazzling space—for when you closed your eyes tightly and fire coursed through your soul, you were free to inhabit any place you willed into miraculous being, a place with no walls, no thermostats, no neatly arranged rows of expensive wines…

“Come away with me,” he whispered into her neck.

“How can I?” she asked, pulling away just a little so she could see his face.

And for one slow, deep-thudding heartbeat, she believed that she had truly intended it as a question—had wanted him to tell her, had hoped he could tell her.

Releasing her, he turned away, stepped back.

“I understand,” he said.

No, no, you don’t, she nearly cried out, wild with panic, kiss me again, do you hear, I want you to kiss me again—but she stood unmoving, and so did he, his face now closed, almost cruel-looking, and it was suddenly over, the moment was over, and she knew that he had not meant it, not fully, not at all. And she knew too that in that one confused, liberating, false moment she had risked robbing of meaning the entire past decade of her life—and the near loss of her past made her weak with shame.

Did you only want to pay me back for breaking your heart all those years ago? Did you want to make me feel that my marriage, my children, my life—that all of it was worthless, that nothing real had happened to me since I had left you, that I would give it all up at the drop of a hat if only you called? Well, let me tell you, I wouldn’t—you could never have given me a life like this, and I’m happy with what I have, with where I am, do you hear me? And the kiss—the kiss was nothing, nothing at all, just a moment of insecurity, do you hear—and I don’t care how handsome, how impossibly handsome, you look—

There were steps running above their heads now, and Squash, or was it Pepper, choked on excited barks, and the bottles jingled anxiously as someone—Gene—thumped down the stairs hollering, “Mama, Mama!”

Paul was home.

“We might as well pick out some wine for dinner,” she said, readjusting her cardigan as she moved to face the bottles. “We are having snapper Veracruz.”

“Could go either white or red,” he said. “The whites are over there, yes?”

The door to the cellar opened, and Paul strode in, wide-shouldered in his custom-made gray suit, his head almost touching the ceiling, his easy smile at the ready. She flew at him with an exaggerated, frantic kiss. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Paul said, laughing as he shook her off. But they already recognized each other from an anthropology class they had both attended in their sophomore year. Everyone stood smiling at everyone else with the shared consciousness of being broad-minded and civilized and mature, and achingly insincere.

“We were trying to choose a bottle for the main course,” she hastened to say into the small breach of silence. “Chardonnay, perhaps?”

“No, that’s too obvious. Why don’t we let our guest choose?”

The two men began to talk about sauces and pairings. It now transpired that Adam knew his wines every bit as well as Paul, and quite possibly better, and they soon fell into an amiable banter of old acquaintances, comparing the qualities of Pinot Noir, Chenin Blanc, and Pouilly-Fuissé. He had not cared two figs about fine wines in the past, she thought—back when they had been young, and free, and so full of joy, living in that dreary basement studio, no bigger than this cellar, spending entire days in bed, listening to jazz, reading poetry to each other, drinking whatever sour piss they could come by—

“How about Amontillado?” she said, cutting in.

Paul laughed dutifully, looking a bit puzzled, but Adam only smiled a fleeting smile without taking his eyes off the racks.

“Riesling would be another possibility,” he said smoothly.

For another minute, her heart tight as a clenched fist in her chest, she listened to the two of them discussing grapes. Then, unnoticed, she slunk away, making sure to close the door behind her, mindful of forever maintaining the steady chill of fifty-six degrees.

25. Nursery

Rich had cried so much during the night that she had moved his twin brother over to Emma’s room and had spent the hours before dawn dozing fitfully in the armchair next to Rich’s crib. Now his fever seemed to have broken, but a rash bloomed all up and down his pudgy arms. Might be roseola, she decided—she had been through enough childhood illnesses, midnight vigils, emergency room dashes, to keep a mental catalogue of various symptoms, pink eyes and earaches and inflamed throats, at a well-thumbed ready; except that this was an odd sort of rash, tiny red blotches under his skin, like pinpricks of blood. Probably nothing to worry about, just hives or a heat rash, she thought as she inspected him closer in the morning light—but worth a visit to the doctor all the same. She checked the clock above the dresser. Paul would have already left for work—vaguely she remembered his shout of “Bye, honey!” reaching her from the edges of the house—but Mrs. Simmons was due to arrive shortly. She would have to ask her to take the boy, and Mrs. Simmons would purse her lips and act all put-upon, and she would end up offering extra for Mrs. Simmons’s trouble.

Suppressing a sigh of exasperation, she reached for a fresh diaper, and Rich gave her a toothless smile and aimed a warm yellow stream at her hands, just as Emma burst through the door, wailing over a missing button on her favorite frock, the one with pink lollipops. Suppressing another sigh, she wiped her hands dry, pacified Emma with a set of wooden blocks, and, casting a wistful glance out the window—the sun lay in bright yellow slabs on the flagstones of the winding garden paths—went to get her sewing kit. No sooner had she settled in the armchair with the dress than Rich began to cry in his crib, and George woke up and joined him a room away, and Emma began to bang her blocks on the floor, not to be ignored, and when the delivery man rang the doorbell downstairs, Squash started to bark.

“Oh, be quiet!” she shouted, and, after a calming intake of breath, shouted again, “Be quiet, Squash!”—for she did not want to be the kind of mother who shouted “Be quiet!” at crying babies and peeved little girls, as much as she felt like it at times. For in truth, her exhaustion was making her irritable, not to say angry. Mrs. Simmons came to lend a hand three days a week, and Dolores helped with the cleaning every Wednesday; but even with their capable assistance, taking care of four children, two dogs, Eugene’s fish, and a house stuffed full of things that needed constant dusting, washing, updating, and repairing took its toll. It was like a never-ending sentry duty—or, as it seemed in her grimmer moments, a prison sentence with no chance of parole. Apart from an occasional dinner outing with Paul—and these were becoming increasingly rare, subject to Paul’s demanding work schedule and Mrs. Simmons’s migraines—she never even left the house, and she was never, ever alone.

(She calmed Rich and George, called the doctor, dressed Emma, explained matters to the newly arrived Mrs. Simmons.) She thought of the kiss in the cellar, half a year ago now. Troubled as it had made her feel at the time, inconsequential as it had proved to be since—Adam was back in Paris, and they were not in touch—she found herself returning to it again and again. While knowing that this chapter of her life was finished, she felt nonetheless sustained by the secret fantasy of another, happier woman who had been released into being by a different answer—“Yes!”—at that dazzled instant in the cellar and who had walked out of the chilly gloom into a full, three-dimensional existence of moonlit romance, sunlit adventure, daring art, and, yes, guilt and regret; for unlike her, this imaginary woman, whose parallel existence ran like an intermittent ghostly thread through her mind, was an unnatural mother who had abandoned her children. (Mrs. Simmons called from the doctor’s waiting room; they would be seen next. She finished reading a book to Emma, folded the laundered clothes, and commenced scrubbing the changing table.)

Still, her confinement was only temporary, of course. First would come the driving: it was essential to be able to leave the house. She was hoping to start her lessons in another month, a month or two, as soon as Eugene had adjusted to his new school routine. (The doctor’s office called; Dr. Peck’s rumbling baritone came on the line, asking her if he had her authorization to perform a simple blood test, merely a precaution, he just wanted to be sure it was nothing. Of course, of course, she said, and, hanging up, changed George’s diaper and moved on to sweeping the detritus of broken toys from under the cribs.) Yes, first the driving, then a membership at the library, a reading club, perhaps, even some classes at a local college. Not right away, for she was still needed at home—but in only four years the twins would join their older siblings at school, and she would have a glorious window of freedom, from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon five days a week (minus the holidays and the summer vacation and the spring break and the winter break and the snow days and the sick days and the dental appointments and the plumbing repairs and the visits to the vet). She would still be young then, only thirty-eight, her whole life before her, or no less than three-fifths of it, or at any rate more than half. (She gave George and Emma their snacks; the dogs needed walking.) Then Eugene would leave the house altogether to go off to college, and Emma would follow three years later, and finally the twins—and thus in seventeen years, a decade and a half, really, she would be free at last to live her life to the full. Fifty-one was nothing in this day and age, at fifty-one anything was possible still. She would travel, she would meet fascinating people, and most important, she would—she would—

Mrs. Simmons entered, carrying Rich. She leapt up from the armchair in which she had just collapsed, and rushed to take him. His face was blotchy from recent tears, and a bandage with blue balloons bulged in the crook of his plump little arm; but his forehead was cool to the touch of her lips, and his eyes had lost their dull sheen of sickness.

“I’ll let the dogs back in,” Mrs. Simmons said from the doorway, “and give lunch to Emma and George. Rich will sleep now, I think. Dr. Peck asked you to call him when you have a minute.”

(Mrs. Simmons, who had left Hungary as an eight-year-old girl well over a century before—for Mrs. Simmons was much older than she looked—still kept to the old ways. At night, in the solitude of her small apartment, empty save for the tent she had set up in the middle of the floor, she read tea leaves and peered into crystal balls and chatted with the moon; she was no longer hoping to see a handsome dark stranger in her cards, but she had some modest investments on which she liked to keep her third eye. On occasion she would receive, unasked, glimpses of other futures, intimations of other lives. Poor dear, she thought as she walked to the kitchen. The things we deem important are so fleeting. I do hope she survives the birth pangs, for if she ever comes into her own, it will be something to see. Perhaps I will stay a bit longer, help her through the pain.)

She settled Rich in a nest of fresh blankets and, still unwinding the spool of a different, brighter life in her mind—her fantasy fifty-one-year-old self sipping absinthe at a sidewalk café in Prague, her pen poised in her hand, her companion, his face rather vague, playing with her foot under the table—dialed the doctor’s number. The doctor came quickly. Too quickly. There was nothing definitive yet, he hastened to reassure her, it was only a preliminary result; they would know more in an hour. As she listened, the sidewalk café dimmed and receded, became a ghost of a wisp of a thought—and the present sped toward her, until here it was, looming large and solid, threatening to crush her below its sudden weight.

“But you shouldn’t be alarmed,” the doctor said before ringing off.

She stood with the telephone clutched in her hand, then punched in Paul’s number. “I think you better come home,” she said.

“I have a client meeting at noon. Couldn’t you just talk to the doctor when he calls? Or… do you think it might be serious?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. There was just something in Dr. Peck’s voice—”

“I’ll come,” he said.

He arrived less than an hour later; he must have run a few red lights. She was sitting on the floor, her fingers white around the receiver, her face against the bars of Rich’s crib. She was watching him sleep.

“Have you heard anything yet?” he asked.

“No, not yet,” she said.

“You know it’s probably nothing,” he said, “they just have to—”

The telephone rang in her hand.

She looked at it.

“Well, answer it, answer it!” he cried.

“Hello,” she said, and her voice sounded all tinny to her ears.

“Yes,” she said. “Speaking.”

“Oh,” she said after a minute. “Yes, I see.”

“Oh,” she said a little later. “So the oncologist will be there when?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course. We’ll be waiting for your call.”

“Yes,” she said then. “Thank you. I understand.”

But she did not understand, not at all. Her eyes still, she repeated what the doctor had told her.

“So they don’t know,” Paul said fiercely. “They don’t know for sure. Honey. Listen to me. Listen to me. This doesn’t mean—”

She sank to the floor, the telephone slipping onto the carpet. The carpet was green, and all along its border, monkeys, elephants, and giraffes with tails sticking up trudged clockwise one after another. The nursery had a jungle theme. There were blue monkeys climbing up and down the vines on the curtains, and green and orange monkeys on the sheets, and the clock was the grinning face of a lion with two thrusts of jaunty whiskers for hands. The clock showed eleven minutes past one. The lion grinned as its longer whisker moved down a notch, and now it was twelve minutes past one, and the lion’s grin looked evil, and its eyes were demented slits. Fifteen minutes, the doctor had said. Shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. Half an hour at most.

The demented lion’s whisker moved down another notch.

There was a swarming of hot wasps in her head. But I don’t understand, she thought dully. This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. This can’t— With dry, feverish eyes, she stared around the nursery, at the two matching cribs, one of them empty now, sliced in half by a slanting ray of sunlight; she could hear George’s giggles bouncing like spilled peas somewhere downstairs. In the other crib, Rich slept peacefully. His pink lips were partly open, and his shirt rose and fell with his slow, even breaths. He lay on his back, as he often did, his arms and legs spread out wide, as if he had fallen into a tranquil doze while making a snow angel—or a bed angel—or an angel soon to be.

No. This isn’t happening. Why him, why me, why? It was all a mistake. It made no sense—like opening a gift wrapped in cheerful floral-print paper to discover some rotting horror inside, something vast and nameless from the underside of reality that reared up and swallowed you whole—the nursery’s stuffed animals with their vapid button-eyed faces and blue plush hides turning on one another, tearing out one another’s innards in the hot darkness of the jungle, the reek of guts and feces in the air, the vicious pulse of life and death, and her children, her own flesh and blood, wandering lost and frightened, so sweet, so innocent, so defenseless—

Her jumbled thoughts rose to a pitch inside her, a hot silent howl. This isn’t real, if this happens, life will be over, nothing will matter, time will drag on and on from year to year, empty, empty. A phrase Hamlet liked to repeat in some unimaginable past fell like a cold little pebble into the turmoil of her mind: Art is a haven from misfortune for mankind. Some ancient had said it, Seneca or Menander, one of those stoic philosophers or sage playwrights who strode about wrapped in their neatly pressed togas, proclaiming that nothing human was alien to them. She felt she was choking. Haven from misfortune—what mockery that was, what mockery… No, if this happens, I will be silent forever, for this suffering will not fit into any words, into any poetry—who can even think of poetry when it’s Rich, my Rich, my special Rich, so full of life, so full of future, why? But the horrifying knowledge had already stirred inside her, uncoiling its slithering length. I did this. I did this. This is my punishment—my punishment for always thinking this isn’t enough, my punishment for always dreaming of a life I will lead once I am free, once I am an artist, once the children are gone. This is the gods throwing it back in my face, this is the gods, yet again, granting the most evil of my wishes, answering the darkest of my prayers. You wanted your children gone, and so they will be, one by one by one, so now go stuff yourself full of your fucking freedom, full of your fucking art…

She grew conscious then of her sobs, and of Paul on the floor next to her, gripping her shoulders, repeating, “Honey, please, honey, we don’t know for sure—” With a jolt she remembered him, her big, safe, cozy giant of a husband who always knew just what to do, whose love for her had always been there. Something deep in her seemed to give way at last, and her soul rose in her mouth, heavy with gratitude and love and terror. Gods, oh gods, I swear, if only you avert this, if only you take this cup of suffering away from me, I will be happy, I will never want anything more, I will never ask for anything more, just this life, just this small life, because it isn’t small, I understand that now, it is enough, it is all I want, this family is all I want, all I ever wanted, my husband and my children and my home, I swear, I will prove it to you, I swear, just let it be the way it was and you will see, please, please, if you let me, I will even—I will even…

They sat on the floor, holding each other, while the lion whiskers crept forward on the wall, and the telephone lay inert and deadly between them, and their baby slept in his crib with the orange monkeys, and outside the closed door their other children squealed with laughter, and spots of bright sunshine slithered like fat yellow slugs across the giraffes on the carpet, and some other, normal life slipped farther and farther away, sliding over the edge, year after year, decade after decade, falling into nothing.

The lion’s whiskers now pointed to twenty-nine minutes past one.

The telephone rang.

They looked at it.

“Paul,” she mouthed. “I can’t. Paul. Please.”

He answered, his face blank, his voice a wire.

“Yes? Yes, Dr. Peck. Yes. Yes.”

She held his free hand, crushing his fingers, watched his face split open with relief. She felt herself going slack, and hid her own face in his shoulder, and cried with happiness unlike any she had ever known. They were reprieved, the door that had cracked open onto the monstrous blackness had swung closed, this time at least—but she would never let there be another time. And when he finished telling her, and when they stopped laughing and shouting and kissing the bewildered, sleepy Rich long enough to catch their breaths, she snuggled deeper into his arms and whispered, “Let’s have another baby.”

The expression on his face was suddenly hard to read.

“We have a wonderful family already,” he said a long moment later, and leaned over to kiss her—but she knew by the way he looked at her that he would change his mind in time, that she would change his mind for him.

26. Guest Bedroom

“Naturally, these are all important decisions,” the decorator said, shutting her purse—a hard-edged affair taut with some reptile’s skin. “And while most of our options are not inexpensive, you must keep in mind that, if done properly, they will last you forever.” In the doorway she paused. “Also, Mrs. Caldwell, you should consider cutting down that tree in front, it makes the room quite dark.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Caldwell. “Thank you for coming, Felicity.”

Alone, she dreamily stroked the rise of her stomach and contemplated the two bare windows, dimmed by the oak’s giant shadow. Felicity’s right, I should call our tree service, she resolved—and was, for the briefest of moments, visited by a disorienting sensation, a memory, or perhaps a thought, brushing by her only to flee out of reach. Just then, on the exact same spot in a neighboring dimension, a woman who looked much like her, but who had no baby with glowing pink fingers close to her heart, stood gazing out of her study window, thinking about a poem she would write next. It would be a long poem set entirely in an old tree, even bigger than this one—like the magnificent oak that grew in a forest clearing beyond her childhood dacha. There would be fairies living in its vertiginous upper reaches, elegant, haughty, and treacherous, weaving subtle byzantine intrigues over sips of pollen-sweetened dew from perfumed petal cups; and nameless birds, bees, and squirrels working their lives away in the middle thicket, scurrying in and out of nests and hollows, storing honey, gathering acorns, raising their young, ensuring by the daily accretion of minute labors the eternal rotation of the seasons, the steady passage of time; and, in the damp, black interstices of the underground tunnels and roots, secret societies of gnomes pursuing with dark obsession some mysterious, closely guarded purpose of their own, and a lonely mole scribe entrusted by generations of moles before him to continue the Sacred History of the Tree, to record with diligent devotion each drought, each near strike of lightning, each furry death, each feathered birth, to write the world into existence while himself remaining blind, unappreciated, and unknown, year after year after year. But the most marvelous thing about the tree would be its leaves, for the leaves—the leaves… And just as the woman at the window of that other, haphazardly furnished, much smaller house reached for her pen, Mrs. Caldwell looked once again at the notes she had jotted down in her agenda, under the heading “Convert study into guest bedroom”:

Eugene’s school bus screeched to a stop outside their gate. But I shouldn’t rush into anything, Mrs. Caldwell thought as she set her notebook aside and went downstairs to meet him. Because whatever choices I make, these window treatments will be forever.

27. Master Closet

The large walk-in closet, upholstered in striped damask of pale beige and cream, had a satin-covered settee at one end, beneath a wall of precisely arranged shoes, and a second settee at the opposite end, by a floor-length mirror. On the left, Mr. Caldwell’s suits and shirts hung in a neat procession of muted grays and blues; on the right, somber bags of sturdy plastic concealed the bright plumage of Mrs. Caldwell’s evening dresses.

Her most recent acquisition, a long gown of crimson velvet, had matching high heels, which sparkled with tiny crystals along delicate crisscrossing straps. Mrs. Caldwell finished struggling with the left clasp and took a tentative twirl in front of the mirror. She had chosen the dress for an evening of gambling at a Monte Carlo casino: the dark red velvet would look dramatic, she thought, against the backdrop of green-clothed tables and tuxedoed men. “Shaken, not stirred,” she said in a throaty voice to her reflection, narrowing her eyes in the manner of a dangerous woman who might or might not be an enemy secret agent. After taking a few more twirls, she stepped out of the heels, pulled the gown off in fits and starts, and, somewhat flushed with the effort, ran her hands down the luxurious fabric before zipping the plastic cocoon back up. Then, sipping at her vodka tonic, she listened for baby cries or toddler steps.

All was thankfully quiet.

She looked with renewed deliberation down the long row of garment bags, selecting her next outing, her next adventure. Should she have cocktails under palm trees on a Caribbean beach (the light silk sheath hand-painted with flowers, and the pineapple-shaped bag that cost a small fortune)? Or go yachting off a Greek island (the turquoise beaded tunic, with the golden gladiator sandals)? Or indulge in a romantic evening at a Paris restaurant where soft jazz would mix with the aroma of lobster bisque and she would look so enticing in a tight black number with a plunging neckline?

Ever since Cecilia’s birth, Mrs. Caldwell found herself engaging in fervid bouts of late-night shopping, compulsively clicking the “Complete your purchase” button after Paul had gone to bed. She bought only special-occasion dresses, stiletto heels, evening bags—fancy things of useless, extravagant beauty, of which she had not the slightest need (and which hardly even fit her properly: she chose all her clothes two sizes too small, for when she was thin again). She liked to envision a specific occasion before each new acquisition, the particular place and time she would use it if she led the kind of life that called for the use of such things; and she was then free to imagine the outings in the privacy of the closet, a well-deserved drink close at hand, posing before the mirror in that short, blissful interval after her five children had fallen asleep and before Paul returned from the office and one, or two, or three of the children awoke, wailing with wordless hunger, or asking for water, or frightened by a nightmare, or needing to pee.

Sometimes she thought: Perhaps, when I am ninety years old and my mind is failing, I will find a trunk crammed full of chiffon and glitter in the attic. I will stare at the moth-eaten gowns and the dusty shoes with dimming eyes, and I will mistake my long-ago closet fantasies for actual memories. For what, after all, is the difference between a memory and a fantasy? Are not both a succession of imprecisely rendered images further obscured by imprecisely chosen words and animated only by the wistful effort of one’s imagination? And who is to say that a vividly imagined moment of happiness is not, in the end, more enriching to the spirit than a hazy semi-recollection of some pallid pastime?

She had just squeezed into a full skirt of iridescent peacock-blue taffeta (she had to leave the zipper half undone) and was searching for a suitable top when the telephone shrieked. Frantic, she groped in the pile of discarded shoe boxes. One ring, two rings—and, panting, she grabbed at the receiver, gasped a breathless, slightly slurred “Hello?”

The woman’s accented voice on the other end was unfamiliar.

“Wrong number,” she said curtly, and was hanging up already when the voice resolved into Olga’s briskness.

“Did I catch you at a bad moment?” Olga asked.

Mrs. Caldwell felt a sudden surge of hostility. She has all the time in the world, she thought, so why must she intrude upon what little time I have to myself? But the house lay still; the children, mercifully, went on sleeping; she resigned herself. Clearing the nearby settee of gauzy accumulations of scarves, she settled down and, clutching her half-finished drink, spent a few minutes taking stock of her life. Paul was well, the children were fine, Emma was reading far beyond her years, Eugene enjoyed science, the twins really did have their own language, Celia had not yet begun to sleep through the night. Having dispensed with the obligatory questions, Olga plunged into chatter. Her latest relationship was over but she had just met someone new, she was planning to quit her job and travel for a while, go to Egypt, to Argentina… Mrs. Caldwell barely listened, as ever on the alert for the sounds of her children waking; and when, in an offhand, “Oh and I nearly forgot” manner, Olga delivered her real news at last, Mrs. Caldwell caught only the tail end of the sentence.

“What do you mean, three years ahead of schedule?” she had to ask.

“With my novel,” Olga replied. “Remember how I always said I’d write one when I was forty? Well, it’s coming out next spring.”

“Really? That’s great, congratulations… Oh no, the baby is crying, I must run… Talk soon!”

She finished the vodka tonic in one gulp and sat frowning at her half-dressed reflection in the mirror, and in another minute Paul strode in, shrugging off his jacket. She had not heard him come home.

“God, what a day!” He bent to peck her cheek. “They fired two more guys, and now Mark’s worried that—”

“Paul,” she said. “Remember how we were going to go to Thailand or Greece or China for our honeymoon, but my passport still hadn’t arrived, and anyway you had too much work, so we just went to that bed-and-breakfast in the middle of nowhere instead, and you told me we’d do the real thing later? We never did, though.”

“You got pregnant,” he said, inspecting his tie for stains.

“I know.” She glanced at her reflection, gave the skirt’s zipper a surreptitious upward tug. “Do you… do you ever think about that place?”

“What place?”

“The bed-and-breakfast. We were there for three days, and we never even left the room, remember, we had all our meals brought in… Well, no, we did drive down to the only bar in town on our first evening, but we were afraid to show our faces there again after we beat all the local high scores on their trivia machine. Oh, we had such a wonderful time—do you remember, Paul? The bed was too soft and too narrow, and it made the floors creak, but we didn’t care.” She laughed a small laugh, gave her empty glass a shake, watched the ice cubes shift and resettle. He was busy sorting through a cluster of suits. She sighed. “And the railroad, remember the railroad?”

“What railroad?”

“There were railroad tracks running just a street away, surely you remember. And I’ve never told you this, but every night, after you’d fallen asleep, I stayed awake for hours listening to the freight trains go by. They were so loud, like huge metal boxes being dropped again and again and again. Of course, you slept through everything. But every time one of them rattled by, I wanted so badly to wake you up. I imagined us dressing in the dark and sneaking outside and hopping on one of the cars together, leaving all our luggage behind, not even bothering about the final destination, because anywhere out there would be new, anywhere would be thrilling. I never did wake you, though—I didn’t want you to think I was disappointed. But maybe I should have. I mean, who knows where we’d be now if we had really done it… Paul, are you even listening?”

“I’m sorry, honey, I’d love to reminisce, but with this work crisis, my mind just isn’t…” He had finished surveying his clothes and was now pulling shirts and jackets off hangers. “Besides, take it from me, travel is overrated.”

“Wait—are you packing your bag?”

“Honey, I’ve just explained to you, I have to go to Texas tomorrow, back on Friday… Shall I fix you another drink? I’m going downstairs to make one for myself in a minute. If ever I needed one—or three—”

“Sure,” she said after a moment’s pause.

When she stood, the taffeta pooled stiffly around her feet, making her stumble.

He looked up, seemed to take in her drab maternity bra and the unzipped skirt for the first time, and said smiling, “Maybe you should buy yourself some nice new clothes while I’m away. Something… custom-fitted.”

She winced and opened her mouth to reply and closed her mouth again.

“One vodka tonic coming right up,” he said, already walking away—and then Celia wailed as she always did, without any warning: asleep one instant, rending the air with bloodcurdling screams the next. In the blink of an eye Mrs. Caldwell wiggled out of the skirt, tossed it onto the hanger, threw on her robe, and was flying out of the closet. In the doorway she heard a faint metallic rustle and, glancing back, discovered the skirt crumpled on the floor, the hanger, bereft of its weight, swinging lightly; but she did not return to pick it up, vanishing instead around the bend of the hallway.

The woman on the other side of the mirror stared after her thoughtfully. It was sad, she considered, what some lives came to when all was said and done; yet in truth, she failed to muster much sadness on behalf of Mrs. Caldwell. She moved her eyes around the closet shelves, studying the haughty lacquer of red-soled pumps, the soft sheen of cashmere shawls, the dry luster of snakeskin clutches. What if some catastrophe erased at one go all the cushioned comforts of that woman’s oblivious life—some devastating natural disaster or, better yet, a bloody revolution? Her husband would be one of the first to get shot, and she would have to rely on herself alone to feed her brood of starving children. She would have nothing left to her name but a pile of expensive trifles, shards of a beautiful, idle life that could no longer be imagined in the new world of military fatigues, food rations, and sudden death; and she would have to trade each ruffled gown, each jeweled bag, for a crust of bread, for a spoonful of milk, for a sliver of life-giving medicine. There might be a poem here, she thought, happy as always when things shimmered with potential in her mind; but as she glanced again around the closet, she decided against it, already bored with the meaningless clutter of the costly ephemera—bored with Mrs. Caldwell. She picked up her notebook, rubbed the bridge of her nose in a small gesture she had inherited from her father, and left to search for ideas in the wider world.

28. Exercise Room

“And don’t argue with me, child,” her grandmother said in that habitual tone of disapproval Mrs. Caldwell remembered so well. Whenever she lifted the cigarette to her unevenly painted lips, the pale, expressionless cameo women on her bracelet clattered down her mottled arm. “Your life is unhealthy, I tell you. At your age, you need to meet people, go places, have experiences. You need to be greedy.”

Again Mrs. Caldwell did not answer, hoping that such a demonstrable failure to uphold her end of the conversation might put a stop to the tedious dream. She did not remember falling asleep. She remembered herding the children to bed and mixing drinks and feeling better after the first martini and worse after the second. She remembered Paul, who had again returned from work in a foul mood, lecturing her about the state of the economy, asking whether she had not, of late, spent much too freely, carrying on unintelligibly about mortgages, budgets, overheads and underwrites, or was it overheaders and underwriters, then glancing at her waistline mid-sentence, and glancing away just as quickly. She remembered setting her jaw, making a silent, angry resolution, abandoning her barely touched third martini to change into her workout clothes, and stumbling downstairs to the exercise room. She even remembered plopping down onto the weight bench to tighten her shoelaces—but after that there was a disconcerting blank, and now here she was, running on the treadmill, just as she had intended, except that her late grandmother was sitting on the treadmill’s handlebars, wearing her old purple robe of faded velour and felt slippers the color of dusty roses, and, in turn, lecturing her about life, pulling on her cigarette between admonitions.

“Let me tell you something, child,” her grandmother began anew. “A woman arrived among us recently, and not an old woman either, not a day over sixty—”

“Arrived where?” Mrs. Caldwell interrupted, forgetting her decision not to encourage the unnerving apparition. “Heaven?”

“Never you mind where,” her grandmother replied with irritation. “Anyway, this woman, she spent the last fifteen years of her life lying in bed. Nothing wrong with her, mind you, she just didn’t feel like getting up. Had a live-in nurse bring her meals and clean her messes and tend to her bedsores. Now she’ll be stuck where she is forever. You have to pay to move up, you know, and the currency is memories, stories of your life you must give away, like a kind of scouring, a gradual peeling of onion layers, do you see, to reveal the core within. And no, before you start to argue, there is a world of difference between memories and fantasies. But anyway, this woman, she is like a potato instead of an onion, all bland and mealy inside, so she has nothing to give, nothing whatsoever.”

“Oh, is it like purgatory, then?” Mrs. Caldwell panted, curious in spite of herself.

She had finished the first mile, and was doing the second mile uphill.

Her grandmother ignored her question. “There is an even sadder case, a woman who sat on her toilet for years, refusing to stand up, until her skin actually grew around the seat. Mind-boggling, it is, but I tell you”—and she stabbed the glowing cigarette perilously close to Mrs. Caldwell’s face—“this is exactly where you are heading if you are not careful. Can’t you just stop this senseless trotting in place and listen to me? No matter how fast you run, you won’t run away from yourself, you know.”

Mrs. Caldwell clamped her lips tight, and furtively increased the speed and the incline of the treadmill, hoping that her grandmother might fall off; but the old woman held on.

“It’s not healthy, I tell you,” she repeated. “You need to learn how to drive, you need to get out of the house, you need people around you. And by ‘people’ I don’t mean anyone below the age of ten, or anyone whom you pay, either. Otherwise, before you know it, you’ll start talking to yourself or imagining things that aren’t there, or worse, not being able to tell the two apart. You’re too young to spend your life within four walls.”

At this, Mrs. Caldwell had to speak, had to object.

“I’m thirty-eight, Grandmother. Almost thirty-nine. Hardly young.” To herself, she added: In this place, aging begins early. And earlier still when you have five kids.

“Child, you don’t have the slightest idea of what aging means. And who forced you to have five kids?” her grandmother grumbled, just as though Mrs. Caldwell had voiced her thoughts aloud. She should not have drunk that third martini, she scolded herself dully. “And did you have any of your children for the simple reason that you wanted to have them?” the old woman continued relentlessly. “Indeed you did not. You had the first one to console a sick parent, the second to provide a playfellow for the first, the next two by accident, or maybe out of some self-destructive impulse—let a council of psychiatrists puzzle over that one—and the last, the last out of guilt. Children are not some stoppers you can wedge in wherever your life springs a leak. Next you’ll be having one to fix your failing marriage.”

“My marriage isn’t failing!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with indignation.

Her grandmother was the one to stay silent now, but her silence felt full of gloating.

“Oh, what can you possibly know about it?” Mrs. Caldwell cried, nettled. “You divorced both of your husbands, and only ever had my mother, and you didn’t even raise her, you left her to Grandfather and his second wife to raise, while you went off somewhere, I suppose to have experiences and to be greedy. Well, I have all the experiences I need right here. Of course, I could have had a different life, I could have gone hopping from Paris to Rome to Vienna with that—that genius wannabe who didn’t love me nearly enough and who was so self-absorbed he probably would never have wanted children. Instead I chose to create a real home, to have a family with a man who makes me feel safe and whole, who will always love me, no matter what—”

Her grandmother’s small eyes glittered like a crow’s, and her voice grew sharp with wicked triumph. “And if he will always love you no matter what, then tell me, my dear, why are you huffing and puffing like that on this infernal contraption?”

And all at once grief was upon her. The monstrous notion of growing old, of losing her husband’s love, of finding herself alone—of having her entire life fall apart—took hold of her roughly. Was it indeed true that she had spent her best years as a fairy-tale princess locked away in a tower—a confinement of her choosing, a confinement with many comforts, but one with barred windows and locked doors all the same? And now, seeing the gates inexplicably open, had she wandered outside, only to find herself, dazed and helpless, in the midst of a dark, frightening forest where wild beasts crouched in wait in the shadow of the night and she herself was no longer young enough, no longer pretty enough, to count on a rescue by a passing knight?

Gods, my gods, how did I come to be in this desolate place, where did my sunlit garden go, did I take a wrong turn somewhere along the way—

“There, there, no need to mope like that,” her grandmother said, patting her sweaty hand. “Bad things happen whenever they get a mind to, but good things don’t happen at all unless you go looking for them. Remember the story I told you about the tree? Why did you stop with those nice little poems you used to write? You shouldn’t give up trying, you know. Go ahead and rhyme a line or two—start with your own small life if it makes you feel better, but do remember to aim higher and higher as you plod along.” She cackled, her crow’s eyes sparkling. “Why, if you take me as your guide, you could become a modern-day Dante someday. Oh, the things I could tell you about heaven and hell…”

Abruptly she ceased cackling, dropped her cigarette onto the floor, and glanced over her shoulder, looking half annoyed and half alarmed, as if she had done something wrong and someone was calling her now to come and be chastised. (In the end she would be forgiven yet again. Silly woman, God boomed in her ear, sternly but not unkindly. Why must you always run on so? You told this poor girl enough fairy tales when you were alive. Come now, Gabriel has called everyone to evening tea, and we will be serving your favorite gooseberry jam.)

Mrs. Caldwell looked where her grandmother was looking, but there was nothing there. “What tree, Grandmother?” she asked, turning back, but her grandmother was gone, and she was finishing her second mile on the treadmill, out of breath, crying for some reason, the mirrors all around the exercise room crowded with unmistakably middle-aged women who had swimming, inebriated eyes and unsubtle hints of double chins. The air held telltale traces of smoke. Mrs. Caldwell wiped away the tears with her sleeve, turned off the treadmill, and stepped down, swaying. If Paul finds out that I’ve taken up smoking, he will be upset, she thought, bending to pick the cigarette stub off the floor. Of course, I only ever smoke down here, where he never sets foot, but still… She was about to slip the stub into her pocket, to bury it in the depths of the trashcan later, when she noticed that it looked oddly unfamiliar, steely gray instead of the speckled gold of her own preferred brand, and ringed with peach-tinted lipstick. Why, oh why, did she have to start on that fourth martini? Averting her eyes, she tossed the cigarette back on the floor and pushed it under the treadmill with her foot. There, all out of sight now, and everything was well, and no reason to feel so unsettled.

She turned off the lights, and, to her relief, the middle-aged, double-chinned women vanished obediently. “So what if I’m no longer twenty,” she said aloud, arguing with an invisible someone. “So what if I’m no longer skinny. My husband will love me no matter what.”

She slammed the door on her way out.

29. Laundry

Friday was Mrs. Caldwell’s laundry day.

Unlike some things, it did not become more enjoyable with repetition.

Occasionally, as she threaded collar stays through shirt collars, buttoned cardigan buttons, and ironed creases into Paul’s pants, she pondered a certain paradox: An average woman—or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history—almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry. Without a doubt, laundry, as she had learned rather exhaustively, was in its essence not a poetic matter, and most poets were men and knew little about it; but was not imparting beauty and meaning to the mundane and the meaningless one of the most vital missions of poetry?

One day in January, after she had hurried to cram the washer full of her husband’s shirts, she tried her hand at a limerick. She stumbled almost instantly: there seemed to be nothing that rhymed with either “Moscow” or “Russia.” She grew stubborn and for a couple of minutes paced the stuffy laundry room, now and then bumping the ironing board with her hip, until the last syllable fell into place.

This, of course, was neither beautiful nor particularly meaningful; but every Friday from then on, as she folded and ironed in the small, steamy room with its stacks of damp underwear and pastel-hued seascapes on the white windowless walls, she continued to toy with words—just to while away the time—until, without writing down a line, she had half composed a collection of laundry poems across the genres.

She resolved to set them down on paper when she was done.

February she devoted to the epic and the folk song. The epic installment, written in measured Homeric rhythm, sang of the dawn of the world—rosy-fingered Eos rising over the wine-colored sea, Nausicaa and her handmaidens on the shore stretching linens and laughing, the linens fluttering in the wind, white and fresh like Nausicaa’s purity, and Odysseus, watching her, pierced with an unaccustomed regret, the sheets spotless, the virgin smiling, the words unspoken, the cool air brisk with the flapping of taut cloth, the sweetness of what might have been and what never would be: the recently violent world of war and rapine reined in by the civilizing restraint of a young girl’s domestic perfection. The folk-song fragment was a medieval dirge, the lament of a peasant woman at a half-frozen river, scraping blood off the mail shirt of a conquering Mongol who had burned down her village and slaughtered her husband. In the last week of the month, she dashed off a quick fairy-tale tribute—a happy little ditty trilled by an ever-hopeful, ever-misguided Cinderella over her tub of soapsuds.

In March, she composed some erotic couplets—a courtesan in Renaissance Venice humming to herself as she perfumed her red satin pillows—and a longer tragic poem set in Paris, the whispered prayer of a mother in a dark, rat-infested attic bending over the tiny soiled underclothes of a dead child as revolution swept through the streets outside. While in the French mood, she also amused herself with a short Molière-style comedy, in which sly maids and greedy servants exploited their masters’ bedroom secrets gleaned from love tokens unearthed at the brushing of gold-trimmed petticoats.

She rounded off the month with a quick haiku.

In April and May, she paid cursory tribute to a variety of minor genres, including:

anthropology: a fiercely rhymed chorus of old women gathered in the village square the morning after a wedding to inspect the sheets and stone the errant bride;

religion (or possibly satire, she could not decide): a meditation on Protestant ethics with a prodigal son who returned home in rags to smell milk, bread, and linen in his mother’s kitchen and fell on his knees, his face buried in her crisply ironed apron, while she admonished him gently: “Cleanliness, my boy, is next to godliness”;

and, finally, autobiography: Paul doing his first-ever laundry load, in the early days of their marriage—and, far from separating the reds from the whites, indiscriminately picking up the entire pile of dirty clothes he had dumped on the floor in the hallway and throwing it into the washer, trapping in the midst of the mess her favorite, her only, pair of black leather boots (which she had lined up neatly by the door). The boots had been ruined, and she had been vexed. She had never let him approach the washer again. Now, after having devoted what must have translated into solid weeks of time to laundry duty (a conservative calculation: at three hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, thirteen and a half years of married life: some eighty-eight days of nothing but laundry), she wondered whether the boot fiasco had been as scatterbrained, as innocent of intent, as she had supposed it in the heat of the moment. Yet the poem was devoid of any traces of anger: it had turned out oddly tender, nostalgic almost.

She did not think it one of her more successful efforts.

In the middle of June, two weeks before her fortieth birthday, she was hunting down the twins’ mismatched socks while working on a children’s song:

And it was while searching for the insistently escaping rhyme to “laundry” that she looked directly at the telltale stains on her husband’s collar, the glinting peach-colored traces resembling a woman’s lipstick—smelling of a woman’s lipstick too, as she verified in the next, unthinking moment, lifting the shirt to her nose before she could divert her attention. And, of course, she had seen them before, these now obvious signs—had glimpsed them, but had not wanted to inspect them closely, thrusting the clothes into the washer with increasingly frantic movements, explaining away the faint whiffs of perfume and the most conspicuous spots—a splash of ketchup on this sweater’s shoulder, a dash of mayonnaise on those pants’ zipper, he had always been an enthusiastic eater—and, on that January day, when she had peered an incautious instant too long at another peach-tinted smear on a shirt’s cuff and found the truth looming dangerously close, occupying her mind with a limerick, then a dirge, then a haiku…

And yet, for all her hectic poetizing of the past few months—whether an attempt to break through the mundane to a deeper reality or to escape the reality altogether—was it not telling that most of her laundry poems had ended up being love poems after all?

Her hands trembling, she pushed the shirt under other shirts, pressed the “Heavy Soil” button. “‘Laundry’—‘husbandry.’ ‘Laundry’—‘quandary,’” she repeated, but neither was a very good rhyme, and abruptly she abandoned the composition. She already knew that she would never write any of the poems down, but that was not important, not important at all. And the thing that was important, the thing that had gone so horribly, so inexplicably, wrong—it could still be fixed, could it not, it was not too late to fix it, all they needed was a fresh start, yes, she was certain that everything would be fine, everything would be back to the way it was, if only they could have something—someone—someone new and wonderful in their lives to remind them how much love there really was between them.

If only they could still—if only she could still—

30. Master Bedroom

Unhappiness this impenetrable is likewise silent, but the silence lasts longer.

31. Girls’ Room

“‘My dear children,’ said the old king, ‘I will give you three trials, and he who wins shall have the crown. The first trial is to bring me a cloth so fine that I can draw it through my golden ring…’”

It was the girls’ turn at book hour. Mrs. Caldwell had made sure that Eugene had finished his homework and Rich and George had brushed their teeth, and had settled in the girls’ room with a volume of the Brothers Grimm tales, a spiderweb and a glossy red apple on its cover. She read mechanically, pausing now and then to listen for the sounds of her husband’s arrival. She promised herself that it would be tonight. Tonight she would tell him. She had meant to tell him every night for weeks, but every time, her nerve would fail her at the last minute. He would come home late, looking harried or morose, and stomp down to the bar to mix himself a drink without checking on the sleeping children first, not asking her about her day. At times she imagined she caught wafts of floral perfume. He was never unpleasant to her—it was more like he did not remember her presence; his eyes slipped past her, his thoughts slipped past her. Tonight she would make him stop and look at her.

Tonight she would tell him.

“‘And so the king embraced his youngest son, told his servants to throw the coarse linen of the older sons into the sea, and said to his children, “For the second trial, you must bring me a little dog, so small that it will fit in a walnut shell.”’”

“Well, that’s just stupid,” Emma declared. “The first trial was not so great either, not like battling a giant or finding a sorcerer’s stone or anything, but at least you can make something useful out of cloth. Why does the king want an itty-bitty dog? It can’t hunt or defend anything. And how does your ability to find a tiny dog make you good ruler material, exactly?” She had her blanket tucked neatly under the mattress and drawn below her chin in a straight line; her bed was free of stuffed animals, and the books on her nightstand were arranged by size in perfect order. Mrs. Caldwell imagined that inside Emma’s ten-year-old mind things were just as organized and logical and uncluttered. Emma possessed a clear-eyed, levelheaded need to make sense of the world, and she usually succeeded. Mrs. Caldwell did not worry about Emma.

“It’s not stupid,” Celia said in an impassioned voice from her side of the room. Her bed barely had space for her, crowded as it was with teddy bears and dogs and elephants, her favorite one-eared bunny dressed in her old baby nightshirt. “I think the king just loved pets. Like I love Squash. Like I loved Pepper before he went to dog heaven.” Her mouth curled downward, and Mrs. Caldwell hurriedly resumed her reading.

Mrs. Caldwell worried about Celia.

She read in English because the girls did not know Russian. Eugene was the only one who understood it, albeit imperfectly, for she had sung him Russian lullabies and told him tales of her own childhood; but when she had spoken Russian to the infant Emma, Emma had cried, as if sensing something amiss, and as a toddler she had flatly refused to submit to the pointless torture of learning some made-up word that no one but her mother understood for every normal word used by everyone around her. By the time the twins were born, Mrs. Caldwell had switched fully to English.

“‘The older princes brought many pretty little dogs, but none could fit in the walnut shell…’” The room flared up in a car’s headlights, and Mrs. Caldwell paused to glance out the window; but the car did not slow down by their gates, passing out of sight down the darkened street. “‘And so the old king again embraced his youngest son, told his servants to drown all the other dogs in the sea, and—’”

“Oh, Mama, does it really say that?” Celia cried, her lips turning down once again and beginning to tremble. Mrs. Caldwell looked at her without comprehension, then ran her eyes over what she had just read. She was in the habit of softening the harsher truths of the Brothers Grimm stories, omitting certain details, changing executions to exiles and deaths to prolonged absences—when she paid sufficient attention.

“No, sweetie, of course not, I read it wrong,” she hastened to say. “The king told his servants to release all the dogs by the sea.”

“Because the dogs will enjoy playing on the beach,” Celia said, and, nodding with understanding, subsided back into the pillows.

Emma snorted.

Mrs. Caldwell gave her older daughter a warning look, and returned to the book. At the account of the third task, that of finding the most beautiful girl, her thoughts wandered again, and by the time it came to the king’s ordering the entire crowd of second-rate ladies “to be thrown into the sea and drowned,” she neglected to amend it. Celia sat up in bed, blinking.

“So ladies who aren’t beautiful are drowned? What if I’m not beautiful when I grow up?”

“You probably won’t be. To be beautiful,” Emma said helpfully, “you need to be really skinny and at least eight feet tall.”

Celia looked alarmed.

“No, no, sweetie, Emma’s joking,” Mrs. Caldwell said, snapping the book shut and turning off the lamp, then gently pushing the bunnies and the bears aside to perch on Celia’s bed. “And in any case, I’m sure all the ladies knew how to swim and were perfectly all right in the end.”

Except for the old ones and the fat ones, a voice inside her added with bitterness.

Squash growled in uneasy slumber in the hallway, and she listened for a moment, but all was quiet again. It was almost nine o’clock. The girls’ room lay shadowy and warm, illuminated softly by a single nightlight shaped like a pale pink seashell. “Why don’t I tell you some stories from my childhood instead? How your grandfather and I used to hunt mushrooms, or about the brownie who lived in our dacha attic, or—”

“I don’t want real life,” Celia said. “I want a fairy tale about a princess, but only with a happy ending.”

Mrs. Caldwell looked over at Emma, but she had already fallen asleep, probably as soon as the light had gone out. (In her dream, Emma walked through a city, barefoot, still wearing her cherry-studded pajamas. It was a place she dreamed about often. The streets were straight, the squares wide and empty, the houses made of brightly polished white stones. There were no people around, only statues dressed in what looked like cascading sheets, but Emma was happy there; it seemed to her serious and good. Whenever she found herself visiting, she tried to commit to memory the gleaming geometry of the place so she could build a city just like it when she grew up.)

“All right,” Mrs. Caldwell whispered, stretching along the edge of Celia’s bed. “There once was a princess.”

“Was she beautiful?” Celia asked, snuggling closer.

“She was. But she was not one of those silly princesses who sit in front of their mirrors all day long combing their hair. The most beautiful thing about her was her voice, and above all else in the world she loved to sing. One day the princess decided to leave her home.”

“Why? Didn’t she live in a castle? Were her parents not nice?”

“She lived in a very small castle. Her parents, the old king and queen, were kind and noble, but their kingdom was tiny, and the princess wanted to see new places and learn new things. When she went to say good-bye to her parents, her father gave her a gift—a box that looked plain on the outside but had seven precious songs inside. And he told her to treasure these songs and to keep them secret from everyone. For her voice would stay beautiful and true only as long as the songs stayed hidden, the king told her, but if she let the songs out, she would no longer be able to sing at all. So the princess took the box, thanked her father, and traveled to a distant land across the sea, and in that land she met a prince.”

“Was he nice?”

“He was very, very nice. And he lived in a lovely castle that was much bigger than the castle where the princess had grown up. The prince fell in love with the princess, and the princess loved how nice the prince was, and she loved his castle too. So they got married, and the princess felt so happy on their wedding day that she opened her secret box and sang the first song to her new husband the prince. And the next morning her treasure box had only six songs left in it, but some time later a beautiful baby boy appeared asleep in the cradle, and the princess was happy—so happy that she opened her box and sang the second song to her little son. And then she had only five songs left in the box, but some time later a beautiful baby girl appeared in her cradle.”

“And did the princess sing a song to her baby girl too?”

“She did. In fact, she sang two songs, one to her new baby girl and one to her firstborn boy, to show that she loved them both equally. And then she had two new babies, and only three songs left. And this happened two more times—two more times the princess felt so happy that she sang one of her special songs—and so in the end she had six precious children, and only one song left in her secret box.”

“Six children, how nice,” said Celia sleepily. “You only have five. And did the princess sing her last song away too?”

“No, that one she kept for herself,” Mrs. Caldwell said.

“So the last baby didn’t make her happy?”

“Oh. No, no, it’s just that she wanted to keep one song for herself.”

“So she was selfish.” Celia yawned and closed her eyes, and mumbled into her pillow, “Or maybe the last song was a bad one. Or maybe her father forgot to put it in the box and gave her only six. Or maybe the princess lost it when she opened the box the time before. Or maybe—”

Mrs. Caldwell sighed. “Maybe,” she said. Bending over the drowsy girl, she smoothed the matted blond locks on her forehead, then whispered, her lips against the child’s warm cheek: “Would you like a little sister?” Celia did not answer; she too had fallen asleep. (Celia dreamed that she lived in a house just like their house from the outside but completely different inside. There was no furniture anywhere at all, and the empty rooms had clear glass walls; through the walls she could see disappearing vistas of tantalizing, brilliantly colored places—gardens, mountains, amusement parks with the most delightful carousels—to which, however, she could discover no entrance, for when she walked through the doors, she found herself in other glass-walled rooms that were just like the rooms she had left. The floors were likewise glass, and when she peered closely, she could see roots and insects stirring in the soil under her feet, though she could not touch them through the thick transparent plate. None of the rooms had ceilings; no matter what floor she was on, wherever she looked up, she saw white curly clouds scurrying across the skies and, in one spot, a gathering thunderstorm. A few times she thought she glimpsed, through the glass of the walls, her mother passing slowly, rooms away, her eyes cast down, her face pale—but she could never get close to her. And once, a man appeared before her and looked her over thoughtfully. So you are one of the brats for whom your mother the princess has given up her songs, he said. I wonder if you’re worth it. He smiled at her then, but it was not a nice smile. She felt a little afraid, and fascinated at the same time.)

Mrs. Caldwell slipped off the bed and sat down in her reading chair to wait. All five children and the dog were sleeping now. Outside the girls’ room, the house shifted, settling deeper into its mysterious nocturnal life, filling with odd creaks, groans, and murmurs—the sock monster rummaging through the laundry basket, the cantankerous ghost of her grandmother muttering in the exercise room, two shadowy lovers embracing among the bottles down in the cellar—but inside the girls’ warmly glowing pink-and-white room there reigned a tranquil stillness, not altogether soundless, and yet separate from the rest of the world, as if they were sheltered within some luminous rosy seashell, and while the seashell hummed gently with the rumble of the ocean, the ocean’s chilled, roiling vastness was reduced in the seashell’s pearly, blushing spiral to something toylike, and soothing, and remote. Mrs. Caldwell watched her daughters sleep—Emma lying still and serene on her back, her dark hair framing the solemn clarity of her profile, Celia tossing, pulling the covers on, throwing them off, revealing the scratches on her arms and the scabs on her knees, hugging her bunny closer to her chest, muttering something with a quiet but fierce conviction—“Yes, yes, I am, I swear,” Mrs. Caldwell heard, or thought she heard. Two small, self-contained worlds, two perfect, unknowable mysteries, and down and across the hallway, three more—and she loved each of them completely, loved them more than anything else in the world, more even than her songs.

Another pair of headlights flooded the inside of the seashell with a cold, sliding glare, but this time the car did slow down, the gates glided open, gravel crunched under the tires. She did not rise to meet him—she had chosen this room for their talk, had meant to stay within its rosy safety. When his ponderous steps thumped up the stairs, she called him in an undertone, and called again, louder. The steps hesitated on the landing before turning toward her. Then he stood in the doorway—an imposing, impeccably dressed man with the heavy face of a tired stranger.

“Come,” she said, “look at them. Look how sweet they are.”

“Yes,” he said from the threshold, and was silent. She saw his face harden with a sudden resolve. He took a step into the room.

“Sit down for a minute,” she said, and while her voice was low with tenderness, her stomach lurched with worry.

She could smell whiskey on his breath from where she sat.

He remained standing, looking away from her, at the girls in their beds.

“Time has flown,” he said. She wished she could see his eyes. “It’s hard to believe Cecilia is turning five in another week. Not a baby any longer… Look, there is something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Panic split her asunder. She had prepared for their conversation with care, had watched her face in the mirror as she had practiced saying the loving words leading to the hinting words leading to the shocking words to be followed up quickly by the calming words—but there was no time for it now. He was going to tell her about the other woman, she knew, and then he was going to leave her, leave her and the children, because none of them were babies now, because they would manage—

“Wait, I have something to tell you too,” she cried. “I’m pregnant!”

The seashell nightlight glowed, the girls’ breathing was peaceful in their sleep.

He looked at her stonily, without speaking.

“I’m pregnant, Paul,” she said again, softly, and forced herself to smile.

The expressions shifted in rapid succession on his face, like a shuffled deck of cards, until the one that settled on it was anger.

“How is that possible?” he said. His tone was even, but she felt the boil of his fury beneath. Her smile flickered out. She could no longer tell what expression her own face bore. “How is that possible? It’s only been once or twice in the past few months, if that. And I thought you were taking the pill—”

Her panic grew. She had not practiced for this.

“But I am,” she pleaded, untruthfully. “Accidents happen.”

He sat down on Emma’s bed, placed his hands squarely on his knees.

“Look,” he said. “Things aren’t… We already have five children. You only ever wanted two. I wanted three. The twins—the twins were a blessing, of course, and little Celia… Well, you know I was against it, but you talked me into it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, that goes without saying, but this time… We’re both forty years old, my job security isn’t what it used to be, and—and things are different. You have to talk to your doctor—”

“Paul.” She was crying. “I can’t. I can’t now. It’s too late.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“Do you remember that night—the night your father told you he needed surgery—”

“Do you mean,” he began, and stopped, and stood back up, towering over her, staring down at her as she pressed, feeling small and frightened, into her chair. “That was almost five months ago.”

“Five months and a week,” she whispered.

“You are five months pregnant, and you haven’t told me?”

“Don’t shout, please don’t shout, you’ll wake them up… I didn’t know. Please. Paul. I didn’t know myself. I thought I was just…” (Old. Fat. Say it. The cold voice inside nudged her, but she disregarded its promptings.) “I only just found out myself. Paul. It’s going to be a girl. A healthy girl. Look at them. Look at them!”

And there were the upside-down mermaids floating on the wallpaper, and the warm seashell nightlight, and Emma’s papier-mâché model of a human heart on her desk, and Celia’s one-eared blue bunny hanging half off her bed, and two heads on the pillows, one blond, one dark. And as he stood before them, the big hulk of a man, the big husk of a man, his shoulders drooped, his mouth sagged, and she saw defeat in his eyes, and underneath it, possibly, just possibly, the touch of old warmth, of old kindness.

“Oh, honey,” he said.

And though he did not move to scoop her into his arms, but took a step back and, sitting down again, stared at the carpet, an immense exhalation of relief shook her. Her panic abated. It would be all right now, she knew. She sighed, and rose, and, going over to him, placed her hand lightly on his hair, ruffling it, willing him to raise his head and look at her, look at her, until he did at last.

“Let’s name her after your other grandmother,” she said. “It will make your dad happy. He needs all the happiness he can get right now, you know?” She smiled her tremulous relief down at him, then picked up his big, limp, unresisting hand, and pressed it to her stomach.

“Margaret,” she said.

32. Kitchen

The dining room still overflowed with the festive chaos of cutlery clicking, glasses ringing, younger children screaming with laughter as they licked the last of the pecan pie mush off their plates, but the meal was over now, the table half cleared, and the voices had already begun to spill into the living room and, from there, to fan out all over the house. Mrs. Caldwell could hear her mother’s incredulous “But how we could eat so big bird so quick!” and her mother-in-law’s decorous laughter as she replied, “It happens every time—of course, there are so many of us,” and even a room away, Mrs. Caldwell thought she detected a slight dipping in her polite voice.

They were one fewer this year: Paul’s father had died in the spring.

For a minute Mrs. Caldwell stood still in the deserted kitchen, listening to the noises from the other rooms, surveying the piles of dirty plates, the puddles of cranberry sauce and the chunks of sweet potatoes solidifying on the bottom of serving bowls, the graying remains of the turkey. She had cooked the entire feast with her own hands; since they had stopped indulging in frequent takeout meals (Paul’s new job did not pay quite as well), she had discovered in herself an unsuspected culinary talent. The dinner was a success, she thought as she rolled up her sleeves, turned on the hot water, and soaped the first plate. This was her in-laws’ special wedding china, which Paul’s mother had given them after Dick Caldwell’s passing, and it had to be washed by hand; but Mrs. Caldwell did not mind. She liked the sensation of warmth running over her fingers, liked seeing her immaculate kitchen gradually emerge from beneath the disorder, plate by gleaming plate, glass by sparkling glass, pot by scoured pot, liked hearing the sounds of her well-fed family all around her while being alone, free to—not think, exactly, for she was too full and tired to think—free, then, to feel at peace.

Of course, her solitude never lasted long. Squash and Snuggle, the new puppy, padded into the kitchen, slashing their tails back and forth in whimpering excitement, and she put a couple of greasy trays on the floor for them to nose. Celia burst in giggling, followed by Maggie, who, at two and a half, liked to hurl herself in endless, heedless pursuit of her siblings. Distracted by the sight of her mother’s legs, Maggie swerved aside and stood clutching at Mrs. Caldwell’s skirt, cooing up at her. Mrs. Caldwell’s heart dissolved. She gave the girls caramel apples, even though they had undoubtedly had enough sweets already—but this was part of Thanksgiving, was it not, everything in excess, everyone generous. They settled at the kitchen table slurping and chewing noisily, just as Eugene wandered in to ask whether she had seen his Brief History of Time. She had indeed: he had left it on top of the toaster oven during breakfast, as he was forever leaving a stream of objects behind him in his absentminded, cogitative, preoccupied progress through the house—mainly books and pencils, but also gloves and hats in winter, rocks and bugs trapped in jars in summer, and socks, and homework, and, of late, scraps of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them. “Oh, thanks,” he said, and, picking up the book, perched on the nearest stool and proceeded to read, oblivious of the clamor of cleaning all around him, oblivious too of the prospect of caramel apples. Rich and George, who had just run in, bickering about some game score (“I did!”—“You did not!”—“I did too!”—“You so didn’t!”), were not oblivious of the apples; Rich tried to take a bite from Maggie’s but she snapped her caramel-smeared teeth at him like some feral beastie, and Mrs. Caldwell hurried over to give the boys their own. Both of them, she noticed, had cranberry sauce splattered up and down their new white shirts; she chastised them out of habit, but everyone knew she did not mean it. Emma, gliding in next, the only one of the children to keep her clothes entirely spill- and spot-free after the two-hour meal, declined the apple and offered to help with the dishes instead; Mrs. Caldwell gave her the delicate task of drying the crystal. Her mother tried to take up a towel too, but Mrs. Caldwell would have none of it, bustling her over to the table with a cup of coffee, which she presently dispensed to Emma the elder as well (she had long stopped thinking of Paul’s mother as Mrs. Caldwell).

Paul was the last to enter the kitchen.

“So that’s where everyone is,” he said. “I can finish with the washing.”

“I’m almost done now,” Mrs. Caldwell said. “Here, pass me the carving knife.”

He stood behind her at the sink, surveying the crowded kitchen.

“I do believe we need a bigger house,” he said.

She whipped around, and discovered him smiling, and laughed herself, to make sure that they both knew it was a joke; for she would not be moving anywhere.

She liked this house, and she liked this life, just as they were.

Her sense of contentment had crept up on her. After Maggie’s birth, more and more often, she had felt as though she was finally growing into her days. Perhaps the house had simply been too vast for her and she had needed every last one of her children to fill its empty rooms with disarray and light, and, in doing so, to put a stop to her uneasy, strained sensation of being a grain of sand falling through chilly expanses of the hourglass in a place, in a life, not her own. At times she thought of it, half seriously, in terms of destiny: Maybe each person was intended, by God, or the position of stars, or one’s biological nature, to achieve a given number of feats, be it children or scientific discoveries or works of art or anything else of merit. Destiny was not the same as fate, of course, and one was free to fulfill it or to ignore it as one saw fit, but until—unless—all the discrete internal hollows yawning empty with potential were filled, one was bound to feel loose, restless, incomplete, not at ease in one’s own skin. Maybe, according to some mysterious reckoning, she was meant to have six children, and now that she did, she could take a deep breath at last, enjoy the fruits of her labors, embrace her hard-earned role of the capable matriarch, dispenser of food, warmth, and love, the irreplaceable heart of a large, happy family in the bosom of a welcoming house.

Or maybe she was just too busy to wallow in discontent, and too wise to yearn for the unattainable.

As for Paul, he now came home early on weekdays and stayed home on weekends, and she no longer cared to sniff his clothes, or worried about the size of her own—just as, having learned at long last how to drive, she no longer dreamed of finding a highway and disappearing into the sunset in a convertible, its roof down, the wind in her hair, but merely used her minivan to transport the children from baseball to ballet.

“I was only joking about the house,” Paul said, and she could see his mouth growing thin, as it did whenever he thought of their recent financial setbacks. He lowered his voice. “Have you spoken to your mother?”

“Not yet,” she whispered back. “I will as soon as I get her alone.”

Later that evening, when everyone else had retired upstairs, she asked her mother to join her for tea. She served it in the familiar porcelain cups of her childhood, which her mother had brought as a gift on a previous visit; though when she had first produced six misshapen bundles from her suitcase and proceeded to unwrap the thick layers of woolen stockings, all the while smiling slyly, like a magician about to bestow some momentous surprise, Mrs. Caldwell had looked at the row of hatching cups and failed to recognize them. They were not as she remembered them from the countless teatimes in the dark, tight entrapment of their Moscow kitchen. There, radiant with gold, bright with paradisiacal flowers and birds, they had stood out as something singular, something precious, that had required conscious handling and admiration amidst the mundane oppression of grimy pots and aluminum forks. Now they were only half a dozen gaudy cups, one of them chipped, lost in her light, spacious kitchen, whose every glass-paneled cabinet glittered with much finer china. All the same, she thanked her mother profusely, and afterward made sure to use the crudely painted cups whenever the two of them had tea together.

Old people, she knew, became so attached to their old things.

“Have you thought more of our proposal?” she asked, and blew on her tea. “There is no one to take care of you in Moscow, and at your age… Of course, seventy-four isn’t old, but I worry.”

“I know it makes sense,” her mother said smiling, “but I’m so settled there—it’s my whole life. Did I tell you, by the way, they finally finished with that construction across the road. Only took them half a century. It’s a giant parking garage now, lots of silver Mercedes going in and out. But I sometimes wonder: What was it supposed to be, I mean in the beginning? Something else, don’t you think? Remember, your father used to joke—”

Mrs. Caldwell waited for her chatter to subside.

“Yes, but our proposal?” she asked again.

“Well, I just hate the idea of our apartment lying empty, going to ruin, your father’s books and pipes gathering dust—”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Caldwell, “but of course the apartment would have to be sold.”

Her mother blinked at her.

“But you see, it can never be sold,” she said, speaking with exaggerated slowness, as if to someone foreign. “Because it’s our home. And then, your children—it’s all I can leave them, you see. I know it’s small and poor, nothing like this—”

Mrs. Caldwell gently moved her hand over her mother’s.

“Mama,” she said. “It’s over, that part of life, it’s just—it’s like one’s childhood or youth, you will always remember it, but you can’t, and you shouldn’t, ever go back. And my children don’t even speak Russian.”

“But I don’t understand. What do you mean?” her mother muttered, and looked at Mrs. Caldwell with frightened eyes, as though she might have misheard the entire conversation. “You want me to sell our apartment?”

“I think that would be best,” Mrs. Caldwell replied softly.

(Her mother thought: Does she not remember? Does she not know? Any place is only a place, four walls, a door, a window—it’s the accumulated living, the weight of memories, that make it magic, that make it yours. The air you breathe within your four walls is like no other air, and your past is not past, and the love you have felt all your life is bright within, and you never age, and you never, ever forget. But she left, and she has forgotten. I shouldn’t have given her my cups. No one can have a future without a past. She is only forty-three, but she has misplaced her childhood and now she looks so old.)

She looks so old, Mrs. Caldwell thought, and lowered her eyes, her chest tightening. The silence hung thick between them.

“This needs to be sweeter,” her mother said in a tone of abrupt disapproval, and put a sugar cube into her cup, and stirred it without looking up. Mrs. Caldwell waited for her to speak, but she said nothing else, just drank her tea in silence, her face askew. Having taken the last sip, she stood up, carried the empty cup to the sink, and set about carefully scraping the soggy tea leaves into the trash.

“Please, just leave everything,” Mrs. Caldwell called out. “I’ll take care of it.”

But her mother was still standing by the trash, staring into it.

“You threw away the turkey leftovers again?” she asked. “You promised not to.”

“But they were mostly bones,” Mrs. Caldwell replied with a slight shrug. “No one would have eaten them tomorrow.”

“I would have,” her mother said, and now her voice was oddly close to weeping. “Why, why must you always throw everything away? It’s not becoming. It’s a wasteful person’s habit. It’s—it’s a sin.”

“But Mama—” Mrs. Caldwell began, deeply shocked.

Without another glance at her daughter, the old woman quit the kitchen.

33. Son’s Room

As she grew older, Mrs. Caldwell noticed a curious thing: time moved differently in different parts of the house. In little-frequented rooms, where living was thin, it pooled like calm, standing water, hardly ever changing; when you peered inside, it would give you back a reflection of yourself at another age. Thus, from the ballroom’s threshold, she sometimes glimpsed a young woman, almost a girl, sitting on the floor by the flames that had turned to ashes many years before, lifting a hesitant hand to the golden choker on her neck, awed by the splendor of it all, afraid to be happy. Other places served as frames to a single bright moment, a flash of desire or pain or fear. The moments themselves were in the past, and the rooms had flowed by on the current of years, obscured by layers of subsequent, dimmer living, no longer supporting the memory precisely; the earthy gloom of the wine cellar had been banished in the glare of new fluorescent lamps, and the twins’ bedroom had long shed its giraffes and monkeys, the cribs replaced by the efficiency of bunk beds, the twins themselves gangly teenagers now. But there time had stopped in its tracks, briefly blinded, and to this day, whenever she entered the cellar to pick a bottle of Riesling for dinner or happened to glance at a clock hanging above Rich’s desk, she felt touched by an emotion—only an echo of the past emotion, to be sure, yet always there.

She preferred other rooms, where life had not gouged out a permanent scar and where several layers of time coexisted in peace: recollections overlapping, comforting her with a steady knowledge of now and then, nothing lost yet nothing over—a good life having been lived, a good life being lived still. In the girls’ room, she imagined she could see the vanished mermaid wallpaper as a playful shimmer under the current green paint, Celia’s earlier stuffed animals sharing the shelves with her later piles of books, Emma’s elaborate architectural drawings hanging over her kindergarten stick figures in their houses of squares and triangles. She thought her firstborn’s room like that too—a decade and a half of warm, innocent memories present at once, from a toddler napping cheek to cheek with his toy hedgehog to an eighteen-year-old arranging, with shy pride, his chess trophies on the dresser, all visible simultaneously in her mind’s eye, reassuring her with a sense of a happy, wholesome childhood she had helped shape and protect; and when, in his sophomore year, Eugene brought Adriana, his Romanian girlfriend of the past three months, home for a short Christmas visit, it was solely out of reluctance to muddy the memories, not out of any sense of old-fashioned propriety, that she gave Adriana the guest bedroom.

On the last night of their visit, Mrs. Caldwell went up to her son’s room. She knocked before entering, but it was a cursory knock: she had left Eugene foraging for a snack in the kitchen, and assumed the room empty. She had misplaced her glasses earlier that evening, and rather suspected that she had forgotten them on his nightstand, resting in the crook of his book, which she had leafed through in a surreptitious moment. All through his stay, she had made mildly disparaging comments about his choice of reading matter whenever she had caught him absorbed in it, and was now hoping to retrieve her glasses before he stumbled upon them, as she preferred to conceal her curiosity about the novel. Secrets, even minute, trivial ones, did not come easy when one was nearing fifty, burdened as one was with failing eyesight and increasing absentmindedness.

The telltale glasses were indeed there, on her son’s bedside table, sprawled with abandon across the open pages of Olga’s most recent book. She did not, however, notice the glasses, because Adriana was lying in a come-hither pose on top of Eugene’s faded Star Wars duvet, naked but for a tiny triangle of black lace between her startlingly white thighs. That much she had time to glimpse, her hand frozen on the doorknob, Adriana’s inviting smile frozen on her lips, before the girl began to scramble madly, grabbing for her clothes, crying, “Mrs. Caldwell!”

“I’m so sorry!” Mrs. Caldwell cried in turn, and, leaping back into the hallway, slammed the door shut. Once outside, she stood staring at the doorknob. Twenty-some years before, from the other side of a slammed door, she had assumed that Mrs. Caldwell—the original Mrs. Caldwell of the tweed suit, the pearl necklace, and the rigid haircut—had felt shock and distaste when coming upon her in a similar state of undress; yet she herself felt neither. She was saddened by the loss of the room where stuffed hedgehogs had lived in the shadow of a peeling solar system, and, at the same time, relieved that her bookish, abstracted boy was progressing through life’s stages in a manner befitting a self-sufficient adult male. Then, too, she could not help feeling a bit jealous at being supplanted in her son’s affections, as well as fleetingly bitter—because at her age of forty-six she knew that she would never again inspire that tug of desire in a man, because her days of lolling about in skimpy lingerie had been over before she had known to treasure them fully…

And every single one of these feelings is a cliché, she thought as she stood in the hallway, staring and staring at the doorknob. In our youth we believe ourselves so unique and our stories so original, yet we are all stuck running like hamsters on the wheel of time, all acting in the same play, and the roles of the play stay the same, only the actors switch places: one minute you are an ingénue charming an affable heir—the next, a matron used for comic relief in a scene of which you are no longer the protagonist. Emma Caldwell must have known it, just as this lovely girl will know it in her own Mrs. Caldwell moment two or three decades from now.

And yet maturity offered other consolations, so much so that Mrs. Caldwell supposed she would choose not to relive her twenties if presented with the option. Among the varied advantages of middle age, you knew enough to accept being ordinary and to find much comfort in it, just as you knew enough to recognize the clichés for what they were and be able to laugh at them. For of course the thing was funny, too funny. She waited another minute, twisting and retwisting her string of pearls. All was silent within the room now, but she sensed that the girl was standing still on the other side of the door, straining to hear the sound of retreating footsteps. Poor thing, she must be mortified, thought Mrs. Caldwell; but she too will learn to take life lightly, given time.

With a slight sigh, she turned and walked down the hall, making sure to stomp, debating whether to find Eugene and allude to the incident. But she suspected that the girl would keep quiet about it, just as she herself had kept quiet about her mishap nearly a quarter of a century before; and in any case, by the time she reached her bedroom she had already set her heart on a long, lazy soak with an aromatic candle and a glass of red wine, and so let the matter rest.

Family life was fraught with minor embarrassments, and some things were better forgotten.

34. Living Room

The Steinway had made her anxious—would the angles of the room accommodate it, she had wondered on more than one sleepless night—but when the movers stepped aside, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“Almost done, ma’am,” said the man with the chipped front tooth. “Are you sure you don’t need help unpacking the boxes? We can do it in five minutes flat and haul away all the trash for you.”

“No, no,” she said, “just set them down here, I’ll go through them myself.”

She was rather looking forward to unearthing all the treasures from their padded cocoons. Again she glanced at her watch, impatient for the men to leave; she had only two hours remaining until the first of the school buses returned. The electrician, she saw, had just finished with the last sconce. It would all be ready by the time Paul came home.

“Well, all right, then,” said the man with the tooth. “If everything is to your satisfaction, sign on the line here, please… Ah now, thank you, ma’am, your kindness is much appreciated.”

Alone at last, she slit the boxes open, taking a quick inventory—silver here, china there, lampshades separate from the lamps, everything as it should be. She set to work. As she handled the precious objects, inspecting them one by one with subdued flurries of something approaching delight, her thoughts drifted and she found herself wondering about time. Like a train taking off from a station, which, after an initial leisurely stretch, starts gathering speed, time now passed more and more quickly, and the landscapes outside the windows flickered with increasing vagueness until merging at last into an indistinct blur, perceived in the most general of terms: a city, a field, a forest—school projects, home projects, the dizzying succession of holidays and birthdays, the smooth running of the household, the middle span of middle age—until life just flew by, reduced to unmemorable and unremembered, albeit pleasant, routine brightened by discrete flashes of rare events. (And “brightened” was really the wrong word, Mrs. Caldwell reproved herself as she discarded the last empty box; for at her age the events themselves had become predictable and rather sad, consisting mainly of departures: the younger generation setting off toward life, the older generation leaving in the opposite direction, for regions unknown, the middle generation seeing off both, struggling to stay in place amidst the flux.) Did it not seem like mere months since they had shared that happy Thanksgiving meal with Paul’s mother? Yet here they were, five years later, and Emma was gone, and the Caldwells’ stately ancestral furniture had just been installed in her own living room.

The living room was her concession to Paul’s grief. The Caldwells’ New England house had been sold and most of its contents auctioned off, but his parents’ living room held a special place in Paul’s childhood memories, and he had wished to preserve it in its entirety, down to every candlestick on every table, every cushion on every chair, every photograph on every console, all of which had thus been carefully dismantled, boxed up, and dispatched to them in a behemoth of a truck. Some weeks earlier, in preparation for its eventual arrival, Mrs. Caldwell had stripped her own meticulously assembled living room bare. She had been sad to see her lamps and pictures dispersed and swallowed up by random corners of the house, and her adored green sofa carted off altogether; but, sensitive to Paul’s feelings, she raised no objections, of course, despite being quite upset every time she chanced to glimpse the dismaying eyesore of a void gouged out at the heart of her beautiful home.

Yet now, as she stood surveying the handsome new layout of the room, she had to admit that the overall effect was rather pleasing. The dark mahogany antiques lent an air of blue-blood distinction. She found herself, to her surprise, loving the faded Aubusson rug, the richly tasseled French draperies, the magnificent collection of Cecilia Caldwell’s Meissen in the ceiling-high buffet; and the enormous Venetian mirror in its eighteenth-century frame made her feel almost giddy. She paused before it now, smiling at her well-coiffed, recently blond reflection—and was startled to see a tall, dusky shape rise behind her. For the duration of one wild heartbeat, she imagined that the mirror held an olive-skinned gypsy in swirls of fiery skirts, but when she swung around, the vision resolved into Mrs. Simmons in her somber widow’s clothes, standing just past the threshold, her old-fashioned black handbag in the crook of her arm.

“I didn’t hear you come in!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with a flustered laugh. She had forgotten that it was a Thursday, had thought herself alone in the house. “You move like a cat. Are you on your way out?”

Paying no heed to Mrs. Caldwell’s question, the housekeeper in turn studied the room. “It looks different,” she said at last, her austere, thin-lipped, long-nosed face without expression. “The furniture is fancier. And there is more of it.”

“This is really a memorial to Paul’s parents,” said Mrs. Caldwell.

Her heart still had not subsided all the way.

Keeping firm hold on her bag, Mrs. Simmons walked over to a painting on the far wall, touched the top edge of its gilded frame, peered at her darkened finger.

“Lots of new knickknacks to dust,” she said.

Mrs. Caldwell noted disapproval in her housekeeper’s voice. On Mondays and Thursdays, ten to two, it would indeed fall to Mrs. Simmons to do the dusting, and Mrs. Caldwell felt a light itching of guilt, which, however, she was able to dismiss with relative ease: Mrs. Simmons received more than adequate wages.

“I’m certain it can be managed,” she said, a little dryly.

Without looking at her, Mrs. Simmons moved about the room, prodding here, poking there. “Do you ever wonder why it is so hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven?” she suddenly said. Mrs. Caldwell stared at her. “It’s because the rich have so little time. Time, you know, is what you give up to own all the things you own. Because every new thing you let into your life eats a tiny bit of your life away. The rugs need cleaning, the chairs upholstering, the silver polishing, the china washing—and even if you do none of it yourself, maids and handymen need supervising and keeping in line.”

“I believe I’ve always treated you with fairness,” Mrs. Caldwell said stiffly. She had never heard Mrs. Simmons offer any opinions on anything other than household matters, or say more than a few words at a time, and she was beginning to feel quite appalled.

Mrs. Simmons did not appear to have heard her. “So the more things you have,” she continued, and her ordinarily imperceptible accent came and went, making some of her words sound harsher, more foreign, “the faster your time runs through your fingers. In case you were ever wondering why that was. And then you have no time left to think about things that are distant and hard. Like God. Or death. Or poetry.” Mrs. Caldwell looked at her sharply, but the old woman seemed busy inspecting the sconces. “Well, but it must be worth it to you, or things would be different.”

Completing the circle of the room, she stopped in front of the mirror.

“What—what do you mean by that, Mrs. Simmons?” Mrs. Caldwell managed.

“Please, I’m no more Mrs. Simmons than you are Mrs. Caldwell,” the housekeeper said with growing irritation. “And you know perfectly well what I mean.”

For a moment their eyes met within the silvery pool of the priceless mirror. In spite of the old woman’s ill-tempered tone, her direct black gaze held no strife, only sadness and, underneath, some vast, vast disappointment. Mrs. Caldwell saw what the old woman was seeing—a plump, beautifully dressed forty-eight-year-old blonde with large pearls in her ears; the blonde’s painted mouth appeared to be working in soundless outrage, chewing, chewing on itself…

Mrs. Caldwell’s eyes thrashed and leapt away, like two slippery fish twisting free of their hooks and falling back into the rippled depths.

The old woman shrugged and, turning away, began to rummage through her monstrous black bag. “I’ve watched you for years and years, you know. And every day I kept expecting you to do something different. Just waiting for you to wake up one day and say: Now. Today. But you didn’t, and you haven’t, and you won’t. I must have misread your fortune, happens to the best of us—”

Mrs. Caldwell drew herself tall. Even at full height, she was a good head shorter than the old woman. “You forget yourself,” she said.

“No, I fear it’s you who forgot yourself,” said Mrs. Simmons, not glancing up from her bag. “Well, tell the children I love them. Especially Celia. She’s a bright little spirit, I’ll miss her. I’ll miss them all. Now, where in the world did I put them—”

“Are you giving notice, Mrs. Simmons?”

“Yes, I believe I am, Mrs. Caldwell… Ah, there they are. I will leave them right here for you.”

Mrs. Caldwell lunged to intercept the keys before they scratched the surface of the seventeenth-century table, and caught herself in mid-motion, and drew back, biting her lip. The old woman was looking straight at her, and her face was severe, and her eyes young and knowing. Mrs. Caldwell grew hot inside.

“I will send you your monthlong severance by mail,” she said.

“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Simmons whose name was not Mrs. Simmons.

Mrs. Caldwell heard the front door open and close, but she did not move to see the housekeeper off. She was shaking. There had been an instant when their eyes had met within the mirror and she had felt seen—and felt, too, that in that one instant she had seen herself, seen herself with an absolute, pitiless clarity, and had found herself lacking, and had shrunk back from the fullness of her knowledge.

She turned to the mirror.

Had her longing for art and beauty somehow, without her noticing, become a longing for Aubusson rugs and Venetian mirrors? Or had it been that all along? Had her first-grade teacher been right after all—had her childhood yearning for a fairy-tale palace been nothing but bourgeois rot? Was that why she had chosen to trade her home, her language, her aging parents, for the land of walk-in closets and golden faucets? Was that why she had left the man she had left, and married the man she had married? And later, after her marriage had become what it became, was that why she had not let her husband go, binding him tighter to herself with yet another child?

Horrified, she looked at the blonde in the mirror.

When Paul returned from work that night, the house lay swollen with winter darkness, torpid and still.

“Hello?” he called out.

“I’m here,” she said.

He stopped on the threshold of the unlit living room, peered into the dimness, saw her sitting on the shadowy couch against the shadowy wall in the cavern of shadows.

“What are you doing in the dark?” he asked, taking off his coat.

“Waiting for you. It’s all finished. Turn on the light, go ahead—it will make you less sad.”

He flipped the switch, and saw the room, and gasped.

“Just like home,” he said; but he did not look less sad. “The piano is a perfect fit. And the buffet. And the mirror—oh no! Was the crack always there, or did the movers damage it?”

“It was always there,” she said, standing to straighten the photographs of sepia-tinted children on the side table. “But don’t worry, I’ve spoken to the restorers already. They have some period glass they can use to replace it. They are coming to do the measurements on Monday.”

As she pushed the photographs about, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, she suddenly saw, in a serious, wide-eyed, beautiful face of one of the boys, the face of the hurt man before her. She stared at it for a long moment, careful to keep her bandaged hand out of sight.

35. Bar

She was barefoot when she came down, stepping softly on the wall-to-wall carpet, and he did not hear her approach. He was sitting hunched over at the bar, cradling a half-empty martini; between the scoops of his big, still hands, the glass looked fragile and small, like a cup from a child’s toy set. She stopped, feeling awkward, as if she were spying on something not meant for her eyes, invading a home not her own, and waited for him to notice her. When he did not stir, she cleared her throat.

“Oh, hey,” he said, standing up. “How long have you been there?”

In the blurred erosion of his voice, in the loose way he moved the bulk of his body, she could see that the martini before him was not his first. She wondered if she should not invent some trivial reason for entering his domain—a question to ask, a child’s activity to confirm—then quickly retreat to her upstairs quarters; but he had already walked behind the bar and was reaching for the shaker.

“Can I make you a drink?”

She did not want a drink—she drank almost nothing these days.

“Please,” she said, tightening the belt of her robe as she climbed onto the leather perch of the stool next to his. She watched him go through the motions made fluid by hundreds, by thousands, of repetitions—watched his large hands deftly manipulate ice and crystal, watched the back of his head, his hair still abundant and dark, no trace of gray, watched his face as it appeared and disappeared in the mirror that ran behind the bar, sliced into slivers by the reflections of the bottles. He would turn fifty at the end of the month. His hair was that of a younger man, his face that of an older.

“So,” he said, sliding the martini over to her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She wanted to say: I felt lonely tonight. It’s different in the house these days—only four kids left, and the boys are seventeen and out so much, and Celia always has her nose in a book, and our baby—our baby is nine and so independent, sometimes it feels like she doesn’t need me at all. Of course, my days are still brimming over, so many things to take care of, always—but every night now, there is this odd sort of emptiness that can’t be filled, a stretch of emptiness before me, and you never even come upstairs until after I’m asleep. I just wanted to see you. To talk to you. The way we used to talk.

“I just—I felt like having a drink,” she said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” he replied without smiling.

They sat in silence for a while, drinking side by side. It was nearing midnight, she knew, but there was no clock in the bar. The lamps above the counter were turned down low, the shelves with the bottles mirrored, the wall behind the shelves mirrored as well; she kept catching oblique glimpses of the two of them at alluring or unflattering angles, reflections of reflections—a profile, a double chin, a slanted glance, a green bottle, a blue bottle, a bottle in the shape of a skull, a bottle in the shape of a bull, the dull glint of a wedding band on a hand raising a glass. An odd sensation took hold of her and grew, that of sitting in a real bar next to a real stranger; and as she neared the bottom of her drink, it stopped being a sad feeling and became one of possibility instead. She studied him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she would still find him attractive if she met him now—and then he turned to her, and immediately the sensation of strangeness dissipated, and she saw the good-natured giant of a boy who had made her feel safe all those years ago.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve always meant to ask you,” she said, as if continuing a conversation. He rose to make the next round of drinks. “The first time we met—well, not met, technically, but the first time we spoke—”

“The time in the library when you made me feel like a complete idiot.”

“Well. You wore a Grateful Dead shirt, remember? It puzzled me later, because you never seemed the type—I mean—”

“You mean that even at eighteen I was too staid and boring to listen to music or smoke pot. A management consultant as a young man. No novel there, I suppose.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—I just—”

“No, you’re right. The shirt was a gift from a girl I dated for a couple of months. I ditched it when we broke up.”

He put the freshly made drinks on the counter and sat back down.

She stared at the olive bobbing in her vodka.

“Paul,” she said. “Where did we go wrong?”

He was quiet for so long that she thought he was not going to answer.

“Do you know what I liked about you?” he said then. “Well, I liked everything about you, but you know what I liked best, why I fell in love? I loved how different you were from everyone I knew. I thought it was your foreignness at first, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that, it was something else. The way you would grow still and seem so far away, the look that would steal over your face, like you were seeing something special, even when you did something as trivial as—oh, I don’t know, writing grocery lists. You looked so beautiful then, like you knew something about life that was worth knowing. And I wanted to find out what it was you knew, but I worried it was like one of those fairy tales where the dumb prince spies on his magic princess and she turns into a swan and flies away. So I never pressed for it—I wanted you to tell me. No, that’s not even right—it wasn’t that I believed there was anything to tell, not like a concrete thing or anything. It was just a sense I had that you were different, marked out by something or someone, and that if I married you I would have a life that would be—I’m not sure of the right word. Deeper, I guess. Charmed. Special.”

“You told me once that everyone was special.”

“Did I? I don’t remember. Isn’t that just the lie you feed your kids when they suspect, for the first time, that they too are just like everybody else? But who knows. Maybe it’s true, maybe everyone is special—maybe it’s just very few who manage to do something with it. It’s not so easy to measure all the things wasted.”

“So then you haven’t,” she said softly. “You haven’t had a special life.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t. And look, this is a good life. We’ve been richer than most in our children, I’ve been luckier than most with my career, we live in a beautiful place, and you—you even iron my pajamas for me. It’s just that… I keep having this feeling that it could have been more if only you’d trusted your dumb prince with your frog skin or your swan wings or—or whatever it was you turned into when you were alone. Because our life often felt—I don’t know—less than real somehow. Like you weren’t all here.”

She was almost done with her second martini. The bottles were winking and weaving on the mirror shelves. Her head swam. She wanted to cry, to beg his forgiveness—or else pull him toward her and kiss him, kiss him deeply, to dispel the need for stiff, inadequate words. Instead she heard herself asking: “When you were a child, what did you dream of being?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I wanted to be a chef.”

“The celebrated chef Paul Caldwell!” she cried.

“No, I didn’t want to be celebrated. I didn’t have any delusions of grandeur, I just liked the idea of feeding people. My restaurant was going to be different. There would be no menus, and every day I would serve only food that was white, or only dishes that started with the letter p—paellas and pumpkin pies—or only desserts, whatever mood I was in. You would come and you would never know what to expect that day, except that it would be delicious—and a surprise. I wanted to make people happy.”

“But you don’t ever cook at home,” she said. “Not like you used to.”

He shrugged. “You seem to manage so well by yourself… So what about you?”

“What about me?” she asked, though her heart was already skipping.

“What did you dream of being?”

She had not said certain things—not even to herself—in years, many years. She finished her drink before speaking. He waited patiently.

“Do you know, my mother once told me that women in my family liked to keep secrets. I guess that’s true. My mother had her share of secrets—I remember odd little things from when I was very small. There was, I think, another man. Maybe. Maybe not. I asked her once, after my father died, but she pretended not to hear. My grandmother had secrets too, as did my great-grandmother before her—there was something about a Grand Duke, or maybe a gypsy, I forget now… Anyway. I wanted a secret of my own. I wanted to have something deep and unreachable by anyone else, all to myself—a kernel of light or dark, I could never quite decide which, at the very heart of things. But I think maybe I chose the wrong thing to keep secret. It’s dangerous to make a secret not of something you do but of something you are, because if you go about wearing a mask for years and years, you may end up becoming what you were only pretending to be all that time—you may find that there is no face under the mask.” She knew she was tipsy now, but it felt marvelous to talk, and her words flowed with the easy eloquence of an oft-imagined speech. “And as time passes, you forget you ever even had a secret. You know, like when you hide something in case there is a break-in or to keep it safe from your maid—say, you put your diamond necklace in some pocket of an old coat or some shoe you never wear—and then you completely forget where you put it, and you look for a while, but then you think, well, anyway, it’s in the house somewhere, I’ll find it some other time, except you keep putting off the search until you forget that you ever had it, because honestly, how often do you have an occasion to wear a diamond necklace? So for months you go about without remembering it even once, until a year or two later, out of the blue, in the middle of the night, you wake up from this nightmare you keep having, this dream in which your house slowly eats you, and you sit bolt upright in bed and break into a sweat and scream: Oh God, where the fuck did it go?”

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “Are you telling me you lost the necklace I gave you on our twentieth anniversary?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that. No, no, I’m sure it will turn up someday. Someday soon. I’m sorry, I think I’m a little drunk now. Anyway.” She upended the empty glass into her mouth, licked her lips. “I wanted to be a poet.”

And then she sat still for several thrilled, inebriated, frightened heartbeats, waiting, waiting for something—but the lightning bolt did not strike, and he did not tumble off the barstool, or mock her for her failure, and the ceiling did not split open to spill out torrents of heavenly light with Apollo riding a white steed and strumming a lyre as he smote her for having squandered her gift.

“Did you?” asked the young, friendly, curious boy from the library whose smile was so kind and who was so eager to talk to her. “Did you really? How come you never told me? You actually wrote poems?”

She wanted to laugh and laugh, astonished at how simple it had been, how simple it was. “Yes!” she exclaimed, then sobered up enough to add: “A long time ago.”

He swung the barstool around to face her. Their knees jammed together.

“Read some to me.”

“I can’t,” she protested, giggling. “I don’t remember any, it was decades ago… But wait, I remember this—” She looked away, recited all in a rush:

She stopped. He waited, smiling.

When she did not speak again, he prodded her lightly. “Well, go on.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It was supposed to be a haiku, you see. It was the first poem I ever wrote in English. Well, maybe not the first one ever, just… one of the first ones.” She wondered if she was blushing. “I was nineteen. And the funny thing is, I had no idea what a haiku really was, so of course the syllables turned out all wrong, and when Apollo read it, he was quite amused—”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“You said when Apollo read it—”

“Did I? God, I’m not used to drinking this much, it’s hard to keep up with you… I meant to say Hamlet. You remember. John. The guy who—”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.” But his face had darkened, and he appeared every bit his age again—a man of fifty with eyes grown opaque and a voice hardened by decades of success and pressure. He pushed his unfinished drink aside. “I’m sorry. Sorry things have turned out this way. But God knows, I loved you.” He was silent for a moment, looking at her. “Did you ever love me?”

And all at once her thoughts were a disturbed nest of wasps, darting around with swift menace, all dangerously capable of stinging. She thought of confessing to the shattering loss of her youthful love, and her conviction, born in the solitary darkness of the following months, that she could never again give herself fully if she wished to remain faithful to her art. She thought of telling him of that time, shortly after his mother’s death, when she had seen herself in a new, stark, ugly light and been flooded with remorse, and blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong between them. She thought of asking him about the smell of perfume on his shirts. She thought of asking for another drink.

She became aware of the silence spreading wider and wider between them.

“Of course I did,” she said, speaking with something much like desperation—and, just like that, the wasps fell silent, and she knew it to be the absolute truth. “Of course I did. I still do. It’s almost as if—you know how you don’t choose your parents or your children? Well, after twenty-three years of marriage you don’t choose your spouse either.”

“Such passion,” he said, but he was smiling now, and as he put his hand over hers, she thought: And this too was easy, and it’s not too late, nothing is too late—and for another minute they sat, no longer drinking, in companionable silence, until she brushed his cheek, quickly, almost shyly, and said: “I’m going back upstairs. Join me soon, before I fall asleep.”

In the shadowy mirror above the bar, among the splintered reflections of tumblers and decanters, the dimly glimpsed middle-aged couple were having a conversation of their own. They talked about Rich’s difficult adolescence—they suspected him of dabbling in drugs, there was trouble at school. He was in favor of harsh disciplinary measures, but she wondered whether they shouldn’t take a family trip instead. They had never done it; of course, for years money had been tight, the house had sucked away everything, but they could try to do it now, could they not? Granted, his inheritance was not quite what he had expected, but wouldn’t it be worth a one-time splurge, it might bring them all closer together. He did not think much of the idea; how quick she was to spend his parents’ money, he said, what little there was of it. Hurriedly, before things veered off in an unpleasant direction, she mentioned Emma’s being less communicative of late, not returning her phone calls with the usual promptness, which she found a bit worrisome. Must she always be so oppressive, he said—the girl was entitled to cut loose in her college years. So they moved on to Eugene’s girlfriend; things were clearly serious between the two. She thought Adriana lovely, but he said that he doubted she’d make their son happy; she might be nothing but an Eastern European gold digger, he said. Conversation lapsed briefly after that, until she thought to mention her mother’s fragile health. She was hoping, she said, that they could persuade her to leave Russia and move in with them at last. He did not reply. She nursed her one drink. He was drinking steadily. His eyes were becoming bloodshot. After a while, he started to talk, staring directly ahead, past the bar, past the bottles, at whatever he saw in the mirror, beyond the mirror. Much of what he said made little sense to her, but he seemed to imply that her life had been easy, that he wished he too could stay home all day long drifting from room to room, playing peekaboo with babies, overseeing the domestics. She could not begin to imagine the stress of providing for a wife and six children, he said, she took things for granted, she took him for granted, she never asked about his work, did she even know what he did, she found him boring, he supposed—but she should take a long, hard look at herself instead. She held on to her silence with the tenacity of a drowning woman clinging to a log, until she could stand it no longer, until she found herself crying out that he—that he should drink less.

He turned to consider her, his reddened eyes bulging.

“When did you stop dyeing your hair?” he asked, his tongue slow in his mouth. “You are showing your age.”

She stood up and walked away, leaving him hunched over the bar—the man who had made her feel safe, the man whom she loved. In the doorway, she paused to look at him. His back was toward her, the broad back of an aging athlete, obscuring the martini glass she knew to be trapped between his hands. He was, she realized, still wearing his suit and tie. They will be wrinkled tomorrow, she thought, I’ll need to drop them off at the dry cleaner’s in the morning, I must remember to defrost the chicken too, I know I should try harder, but everything will be fine in the end, we just need to work on some things.

As she trudged up the stairs, she wondered which of the two conversations had been real—or had it been both, or had it been neither? She found she could not decide; though she had her suspicions, of course.

36. Garage

1. Things that will be used someday soon (if, that is, one doesn’t forget they are there): spare batteries, extra lightbulbs, extension cords, a shriveled-up pair of gardening gloves, a second hose, a box of candles, a tower of plastic cups. One tends to think of them as reserves maintained against the gray forces of entropy—if something breaks or runs out or gets lost in the house, there is a replacement waiting in the wings; yet as time passes and the batteries and cords turn dusty and drab, becoming an ingrown part of the garage shelves and corners, they may end up contributing to the encroachment of entropy rather than holding it at bay. But not if they get used first, of course.

2. Things that don’t appear to be of much use in the foreseeable future but may come in handy next year, or at some point thereafter: three and a half cans of Paris Rain paint (in case they repainted the since repainted guest bedroom in the old color), converter plugs (in case they decided to take that trip overseas after all), portable heaters (in case the furnace malfunctioned) and fans (in case the air-conditioning broke down), a guide to the restaurants of Venice (see above), a giant fish tank, a yoga mat, a ski mask, a pair of hiking boots, a set of golf clubs, and on, and on. True, they do take up space, but one can’t just throw perfectly good things away. And one never knows.

3. Things that are broken but may be fixed someday: an old vacuum cleaner, four or five expired computers, two maimed bicycles, a box full of cameras and phones, a microscope, a flashlight, a nineteenth-century porcelain cup with its handle knocked off and preserved in two separate pieces.

4. Things that are ontological mysteries: nuts that fit unknown bolts, keys that open no doors, an unlabeled homemade videotape that gets stuck every time one tries to play it. Throwing them away would be tantamount to admitting that one no longer expects anything unexpected to happen in life. Though that may be a good thing.

5. Things that will be discarded in due time, but not just yet: a baby monitor, a toddler’s bib, a child’s bike helmet, a child’s pair of goggles, a child’s telescope, a hedgehog that looks like a bear, its nose spilling plush of a muddy brown color, once beloved by a boy who got married last March; a saltshaker in the shape of the Taj Mahal; an empty plastic case that once housed magnetic poetry tiles. On second thought, the last item is best tossed out without further delay. Even clutter has its limits.

6. Things that are the only remains of one’s childhood home (sold last year, gone decades before that), brought over by one’s mother, not yet sorted: a shoebox filled with papers, and a duffel bag containing a handful of pipes wrapped in a thick gray-and-white sweater. These are, for the moment, relegated to the darkest corner of the garage, behind a battalion of cleaning supplies. There is no need to rush, there will be time enough to decide where to put them later—once one is able to look at them properly, without breaking into tears at the sight of the familiar handwriting, at the ghostly smell of tobacco, reaching one from another country, another century, another life.

37. Deck

There were sixteen large flowerpots on the covered deck, positioned at regular intervals along the wall, and a separate tray with cooking herbs on the table. They had been her mother’s pet project: upon moving in with them two years before, she had declared their house too much like a museum, no greenery anywhere, and had set out to remedy the situation by assiduous gardening. Unwilling to brave the steep stairs down to the yard, she had spent most of her days on the deck, pruning and clipping and talking to herself.

Nearly three full weeks after her mother’s death, she remembered that she had neglected to water the plants, and came out to look at them. Most were, indeed, beginning to turn brown, especially the ones at the deck’s western edge, inundated as they were for hours with the afternoon sun. The farthest on the right was the only one that appeared to be healthy; it had even sprouted a disturbingly glossy, plastic-like red growth—could it be a flower?—amidst the swollen protuberances of its leaves. But the third from the left seemed dead, all black and brittle, and a few others fared almost as poorly. She stared at them for a long blank minute, then dragged the hose over and flooded each pot with water. She had no idea what any of them were, or how much moisture they needed.

When she returned to check on them some hours later, evening had already fallen. Here and there water was still standing in the pots, glistening with the pink of the sunset. The plants looked worse than before—dead with a final kind of deadness. She dropped into the nearest chair and began to cry.

“There, there,” said her mother’s voice. She lifted her eyes to see her mother bending over the pots at the far edge of the deck, hazily outlined by the setting sun.

She stopped crying, squinted against the light.

“Mama?” Oddly, she wasn’t surprised. “Is that really you?”

Her mother was wearing her bright green gardening gloves. She did not look up, busy poking the crumbling plants with a rubber finger.

“Forty days,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

“Have you forgotten all of your people’s traditions? Spirits loiter in places of their past for forty days, to say good-bye to all the things they loved before finally moving on. Or at least that’s the idea. I suppose if one’s spirit has nowhere better to go, it may hover about forever, or at least until it figures things out. But not me. I’ve always hated good-byes. Forty days—and I’m off.”

Dimly she remembered the subdued gathering held on the fortieth day after her grandmother’s passing; she had been ten at the time. “Yes, I knew that,” she muttered, shielding her eyes; the brightness was spreading across the sky. Her mother was wielding a large pair of shears now, snipping in silence; it was difficult to see her expression clearly in the sunset’s shimmering glow, but she seemed peaceful, smiling a little to herself, perhaps even happy—happier than she had looked in years.

Mama has come to say good-bye to her plants but not to me, she thought; after all, it’s merely by accident that I happen to be here. But then, it shouldn’t seem so very out of character—hadn’t she spent more time with her pots than with her own daughter while she was alive? Or—was it perhaps my own failure to pay more attention to her, to let her reminisce about the past as she tried to once or twice, when I had no time to sit and listen—when I had a roast burning in the oven or Paul’s shirts to iron or Maggie’s homework to check? Oh God, she talked to the flowers, she must have been lonely… And because her eyes were beginning to brim over again and she was suddenly afraid that she might fall apart, or worse, speak harshly, she asked the first irrelevant thing that came into her mind: “So… why forty? Why forty days?”

“It’s always forty,” her mother replied, snipping, smiling. “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean—Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, forty years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

They were silent for a minute. Her mother would not stop her puttering, her back bent, her hands always moving, strands of white hair falling over her face, so she could never see her clearly, could never meet her eyes directly. In the evening stillness, the gardening shears went on making sharp little sounds, unpleasant like the clicking of teeth, the scraping of claws. Bits of greenery rained onto the floorboards.

“You’ve made a terrible mess of my little garden,” her mother said at last, not altogether kindly, as she stepped back to survey the plants. “You are at an age where it would do you good to learn some particulars about the world. Making things grow is a kind of immortality too. But that’s the trouble with people who prize words above all else—you don’t know anything practical, anything useful. Your father is just like that too. Philosophy this and truth that, but I don’t believe he could ever tell a cactus from a begonia. The world becomes obscure and remote when you look at it through a mesh of words, you know. Like those semi-transparent sheets of paper they used to put over illustrations in old books, to protect them—it just ended up turning the picture all hazy so you could barely make out what it was supposed to be in the first place.”

And this was just like her mother too—she had never seemed to comprehend the urge to create things that had no tangibility to them, things that were not flowers or feasts or offspring.

“Words don’t make things hazy,” she said, feeling defensive. “They clarify.”

“Well,” her mother said tranquilly, “I suppose that depends on the words. The words that clarify don’t seem to be your kinds of words. Too small for you, aren’t they? What is this plant called, for instance?”

She looked at the spiky monstrosity in the pot, almost hoping that its name might pop into her head of its own accord, as if the name was its perfect essence, the summation of its nature, to be revealed to those who studied it closely. Hadn’t Adam and Eve guessed at the right, God-given names of all the creatures and plants in the Garden through mere contemplation?

“I don’t know,” she admitted at last.

“You see my point,” said her mother triumphantly. “Not everything is soul and love and art and happiness. In fact, very often, the bigger the word, the smaller the kernel of substance within it—it’s been rubbed flat, worn-out by all the use. Maybe that’s why it’s harder to be a great poet than a great novelist. A novel can be full of little words, as fresh and particular and unlike one another as a meadow of forget-me-nots.”

“I bet Olga would agree with you there,” she mumbled, all at once disconsolate.

“Who?”

“Olga. You know. My best friend in Russia.”

“Every other girl in Russia is named Olga,” her mother remarked with a shrug, and turned her attention back to the plants.

She sighed, recalling how distressed she had been a year before by the very same conversation, the first sign of her mother’s rapidly nearing senility: the first sign of many to come. She had mentioned Olga in passing over dinner, and her mother claimed not to have known her. “But you must remember!” she had cried in exasperation. “She came over scores of times. The two of us even spent three or four days at the dacha right after high school graduation, you and Papa drove us there, remember?” Her mother had given her a withering look. “Aren’t you a bit old for imaginary friends?” she had said. “I remember perfectly well. After graduation, you went to the dacha alone. We dropped you off. That was your present—you told us you wanted a taste of adult life. I was against it, but your father said fine, it would be good for you. There was some boy you liked across the street, so naturally I worried, but nothing came of it. I remember. I’m not yet senile.” Her mother’s insistence had made her very upset; she had even gone up to Eugene’s room to retrieve a couple of Olga’s novels she had seen on his shelf, but the novels had gotten somewhere, and her mother had acted so stubborn and tight-lipped about the whole thing that she had quickly dropped the matter, just as she hastened to drop it now.

The shears continued to click, click-click, click-click, beginning to sound like the ticking of some rusty old clock. She wanted to ask her mother so many questions—about God, and death, and life, and whether she had ever been truly happy with Papa—but the sun sank lower and lower until it was gone from the sky, and as the halo around the borders of things dulled into shadows, her mother seemed to fade ever so slightly, and then a bit more. She was still there, fussing and clucking, humming under her breath, but now it was possible to see her only out of the corner of one’s eye, moving on the very edge of one’s vision, for when one turned to face her directly, she quietly passed out of sight, like the flame of a candle at the moment of flickering out, only to appear again, a vague afterimage of a frail old woman in green gardening gloves, when one looked away.

She kept very still, her face averted, to prolong her mother’s faint presence.

“Do you mind if I snip off a bit of parsley?” her mother asked.

Her voice too was growing more distant, coming in and going out.

“What?”

“Parsley. I thought I’d make your father some roasted chicken when I see him in a couple of weeks—you remember, don’t you, it’s his favorite dish. I’m afraid the parsley’s wilted, but it will have to do. Do you mind?”

Surprised, she turned, and her mother was gone. She rose, walked over to the row of plants. There were no snippets of leaves on the deck, and the darkened water was still standing in the pots, already beginning to look stagnant, to smell of decay—and yet she felt comforted, almost joyful, as if the world made better sense, after all, than she had any right to expect. For maybe, just maybe, the world is really like that, she thought, the way we imagine it as children, before we stop seeing: now it may seem only a mundane, finite place, but there are things moving just out of sight, at the very limits of our adult vision, and these things are every bit as real. And maybe big words do obscure ordinary things, but for these other things—the hints of things, the elusive presences of things, the great things we can’t easily define—for these kinds of things, only big words will do. Maybe that is precisely the magic of true poetry: it looks at these retreating things directly and pins them down with big words before they can dart out of sight, making them visible, if only for the duration of a few verses. And maybe, after all my decades of blindness, I too will be able to see them at last—to see them again: maybe I just need to complete my own trial, my own forty—oh, not forty years, I’ll be fifty-five next month, it’s too late for that, and in any case, my trial would not be carried out on such an epic scale, it would be small, like my small life, a life within four walls… So perhaps—yes, wasn’t there something about the average person inhabiting forty rooms in his lifetime? And didn’t someone close to God, some saint or prophet, say that the soul has many rooms? So perhaps that is the desert through which I am destined to wander—forty rooms, each a test for my soul, a pocket-size passion play, a small yet vital choice, a minute step toward becoming fully awake, fully human; and by the time I have crossed my own wilderness of forty rooms, I too will be able to see the world as it really is—

With a start, she woke up from an unpremeditated nap on the deck of a large house, or else a small mansion. Her back was sore, and she was groggy from her dreamless sleep. She rose from the chair, walked over to the table with the herbs. The water, she saw, was still standing in the pots. Obeying some vague impulse, she took the plastic container with parsley in her bejeweled hands, rubbed the dying herb, smelled her fingers—and, amidst the chill of desolation, felt an inexplicable bloom of comfort.

Setting the parsley down, she wiped her eyes, and went inside to finish packing her mother’s cheap, synthetic dresses, to be picked up by a local charity in the morning. When she was done, the clothes had not filled even half a suitcase. Prompted by another dim impulse, she flew to her own closet, scooped up, without looking, as many hangers as she could carry, and stuffed her own glittering garments, all the silk, all the velvet, into the suitcase as well, until it was crammed full. The zipper caught on something—a dress, or was it a skirt, of peacock-blue taffeta—but she jerked once or twice and freed it.

The suitcase zipped, she stood still for a moment, thinking, then ran to get another, bigger suitcase and returned to her closet.

38. Library

She was dozing in her favorite armchair, a volume of Pushkin and a half-knitted scarf in her lap, when he strolled into the room. She had heard no approaching footsteps: one moment she was alone, the next he was there. She had forgotten him decades before, and, in the years since, had forgotten that she had ever forgotten anything at all; it took her a long, squinting moment to place him. He was still the same age as when she had seen him last, around forty, give or take a millennium; from the vantage point of her fifty-seven years, he appeared surprisingly young. He was dressed in nondescript clothes—gray jeans, a grayish shirt, graying sneakers; he was also rather less good-looking, less dangerous-looking, than she remembered, his features bland and smooth. He moved uncurious eyes over the imposing bookcases that lined the walls, nodded at her in a casual manner, as though they had parted only yesterday, and sat down in the armchair across from hers, throwing one leg over the other, crossing his arms behind his head.

“So,” he said, “have you figured it all out yet?”

“I suppose I’ve figured out some things,” she said mildly.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “the last time we saw each other, you chose not to go back home, so you could be free. You were oh-so-eager to escape a conventional life. How did that work out for you?”

She smiled, secure in her elderly wisdom, happy with knowing her limitations at last. “Well, it didn’t work out as I expected, but it worked out fine all the same. I believe I would have had this kind of life—an indoors kind, you know, marriage, children, home—no matter where I ended up. And yes, there were times, in my twenties, in my thirties, when it felt claustrophobic. The endless encroachment of stuff, it felt like, at times—things to take care of, people to take care of, the relentless thickening of matter… I used to wonder: Does it happen to others as well—do their lives change bit by bit, a new table here, a new baby there, until one day they wake up and look around and recognize nothing of their past in their present? But I grew into it. Learned to count my blessings. Learned to appreciate the small things. In fact, the older I get, the more I suspect that what we mistake for small things are really the things that matter. A child’s happy smile on Christmas morning, that sort of thing. And it’s not ‘settling’ if you are truly at peace.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Do remind me, though—unless I’m getting you confused with someone else—didn’t you want immortality or something?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but those talks we used to have—oh, it was heady stuff for a girl of thirteen, but at my age I find that kind of fortune-cookie philosophy rather… hackneyed. Someone once wrote that the memory of man was the most likely location of heaven. If so, a mother of six is ensured her place among the angels, at least for a generation or two. And beyond that—well, no one who isn’t Homer or Shakespeare has a right to hope for more anyway.”

“All possibly true. Still, I thought you aimed a little higher than half a page in a grandchild’s photo album.”

She wondered whether she would tell him; she felt reluctant to revisit the follies of her youth. “Do you remember that time when I burned all my poems?” she asked at last, sighing. “Almost forty years ago?”

He nodded noncommittally, sprawled in the chair, his eyes half closed.

“It was only a dramatic gesture, you know, because I remembered them word for word. But I never wrote them down again. I believed them engraved upon my soul and I thought I would never forget them. But memory is such a funny thing. I did, of course—I forgot them with time, forgot them entirely, give or take a few lines. And as gradually as I forgot the words, I began to believe that they had been something special.” She glanced at him for a reaction, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. “All the poems I wrote later, after my little bonfire, never felt quite… quite in earnest. When I looked at them with their ink still fresh, I always made excuses for myself: they were drafts to be reworked later, or mindless doodles, or prefabricated magnetic jingles, or rough translations from the original Russian. Oh, I knew myself capable of absolute brilliance, of course—the poems I had burned, now, those—those had been amazing…”

She was silent for so long that he opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Well?”

She studied her hands in her lap. “Well, after my mother’s death, I finally got around to sorting through her things in the garage. I found two bundles of poems in a shoebox. Turns out my parents had saved the poems I had sent them while I was in college—”

“Ah, yes. On the Other Side.”

She cringed. “Yes. So I sat on the floor of the garage and read through them right there and then. And see, I had remembered them as something luminous, something rare, something so much more than the sum of mere words on a page. But they were just stringent, hysterical, derivative little verses about nuns and angels and devils. And here is the truth: I was never very good, was I? I was nothing special.” Again she looked over at him for a sign—a confirmation, or maybe, just maybe, an objection—but he only watched her politely, one eyebrow cocked, expecting her to go on; so, ignoring the slightest ache that had started somewhere deep in the hollow of her chest, she went on. “Which seemed a painful discovery when I first made it, but in the end, it’s a relief, of course—I would hate to have wasted something real. As it is, my life has turned out to be just the right size for me—it simply took me a while to recognize it. Now that I’m too old to believe myself the center of the world, I’d much rather be a happy woman than a mediocre poet, and it’s enough to know that the world is full of beauty made by others.”

She nodded at the volume of Pushkin in her lap.

“Didn’t you say there were two bundles of poems in the shoebox?”

“Yes. The poems in the second bundle weren’t mine, but those—those were beautiful. Quiet, and wise, and—heartbreaking, really. They were about ordinary things: falling in love, falling out of love, children, death… They were in my mother’s handwriting.” She paused. She wanted to tell him how certain she felt that they had been written by the mermaid she had once met in her mother’s bedroom, but his exaggerated nonchalance stopped her. He was inspecting his fingernails, seemingly indifferent to what she was saying. Something caught in her throat.

“Wait,” she said. “Did you—you didn’t by any chance know her?”

“Not closely. I can’t quite recall. One meets so many people—”

There was something in his careless tone, in the glib readiness of his reply, in his refusal to meet her eyes, that made her heart throb. Since his eyes were cast down, she felt at liberty to inspect his face closely for the first time, to wonder, wildly, what it would look like if it ever had a mustache—but already, not wanting to see, she averted her gaze.

“Listen,” he began.

His subdued voice was that of someone about to make amends; but just then Rose, the new maid, walked into the library with a feather duster and waved it once or twice at the nearest books before glancing over at her armchair and tiptoeing back out—and yet in that moment something had changed in the air between them.

“So,” he said brightly, “what now? What will you do with the rest of… whatever you call this?”

She sighed. “I’m going to see Maggie off,” she said, attempting to hide her disappointment in idle chatter. “She’ll be finishing high school next spring, she has already been accepted at—”

He seemed dutifully interested if slightly bored, a well-meaning uncle; when he asked further questions, she found herself glad to return to the firm ground of her love for her husband and her children. She told him about Paul’s recent successes at work; and Celia dropping out in her junior year of college to depart on a journey of self-discovery through the jungles of Asia, driving her mad with worry; and George striking it rich with some newfangled technology idea; and Rich about to graduate from divinity school, such a good boy he had turned out to be, steady as a rock; and Eugene and Adriana moving to Romania, due for a visit at Thanksgiving; and Emma surprising everyone with her marriage and, mere months later, a baby girl, imagine that, she was a grandmother now, she had even taken up knitting—

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Well, that sounds pleasant enough. Finding happiness in the small things and so on.”

He yawned and stood, brushing invisible dust off his denim-clad knee, taking a slow, lazy step away from her. All at once she knew that he was about to stroll out of her life forever, and she started out of her armchair, knocking her knitting to the floor.

“Wait,” she cried, “wait!”

He paused in the doorway, his face a statue’s eroded blank, his eyes pale and flat and devoid of expression, like painted marble faded by centuries in the sun.

“Tell me, did you—did you kill Hamlet?”

“But my dear,” he drawled, “Hamlet is immortal. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and all that.”

“What? Oh. No. I meant John. My first lover. Did you kill him?”

The slits of his eyes darkened with sudden life. He stood absolutely still—like a panther in the instant before leaping, she had time to think just as her heart dropped somewhere, her senses snapped wide awake, and every drop of her blood, every inch of her skin, every hair on her head tingled with the old fear.

He spoke, his voice a slow hiss.

“Do you really think that you are so important and that everything that happens to you, to those around you, happens for some preordained, divine reason? They had a good word for it in the old days. Hubris, it was called. Excessive pride before the gods. Gods have better things to do than meddle in the lives of every craven little nobody.”

“Yes,” she gasped, shrinking back.

“Next you will think that gods sit around counting hairs on everyone’s head, cocking their ears for the sound of whimpering, ready to grant any prayer out of the goodness of their hearts. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Please make my child well. Please make my father live. Please make my lover leave. Please spare me any real pain, any real joy, any real shame, any real life—yes, please make my life as smooth, as shallow, as easy as it can get, because all I want is to tiptoe on the surface of things, composing little ditties as I do laundry, not knowing gut-wrenching love, not knowing life-shattering loss—and in return I promise I will give up my passion, the only thing that makes me any different from millions upon millions of others, I will throw away every last crumb of inspiration I am granted, every last chance of becoming an artist, I will never break out of the circle of time, I will live a silent life and die a silent death, please, oh please—”

His tone was mocking, and furious underneath. She stared at him, stunned. His face was not the smoothly attractive face of a mortal man who had come into the library an hour before, but the achingly handsome face of a wrathful angel. She stepped back, and, tripping against the armchair, crumpled into it, and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to be consumed by his burning ire. And then all was quiet, for almost an entire minute all was quiet—she could hear the rushing of blood in her ears.

She kept her eyes closed, but dared to draw a breath, to stir a little.

“Listen,” he said. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, and terrifyingly near. “Very few people are born great poets. Talents are a drachm a dozen, but nothing can be had for nothing. I told you this when you were young, but you didn’t pay attention. Or maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough. You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.”

And then, just as she cowered, fearing the rip of a barbed arrow through her heart, she sensed the smile back in his shockingly compassionate voice.

“Oh, and finding happiness in the small things, my dear, that’s really nothing to brag about—it’s the last consolation of those whose imagination has failed them.”

She felt her lips lightly brushed by other, smiling lips, and their touch was ice, and their touch was fire—and she was ambushed by the memory of all the times when she had lain in bed at night, always exhausted, often pregnant, occasionally wondering about her husband’s whereabouts, and as her thoughts would stray, she would imagine the soft, sneering curve of someone’s mouth, the light, circling touch of someone’s hand on her neck, and these thoughts would spin out into a tightrope on which she would balance for some minutes over an abyss of loneliness and approaching middle age, until momentary oblivion overtook her. Why, oh why, did you stay away for so long, she thought with a sudden contraction of anguish, not daring to look at him still; and though she did not ask aloud, he whispered against her cheek, so softly she could barely hear him, his words a gentle breeze that seemed to move through her mind: “You realize, of course, that I may not actually be here and that our little chats may be only as illuminating—or as hackneyed—as you are able to make them yourself? And if I live in your head alone, the real question you need to ask is why you haven’t called me for so long.”

Her eyes flew open. “No, I don’t believe that—you—”

The library was deserted.

She felt that the fierceness of regret, the knowledge of all the things wasted, the sorrow of a life half lived—a life not lived—would consume her whole.

“No, wait!” she cried. “Tell me just one thing—are you saying that I got it wrong—that I could have been—”

But already she heard the maid’s footsteps in the next room, and knew that, like all revelations, this too would soon be forgotten, and she let her voice die a death of resignation in the dark-paneled, leather-padded, respectable silence of the book-filled room. Her old volume of Pushkin still lay in her lap, opened to his poem “The Prophet.” Her eyes trailed over the words, underlined, with excessive exuberance, by an elated fifteen-year-old in another place, in another age.

“I see you are awake now, Mrs. Caldwell,” said Rose, entering the library with the duster and vigorously setting about the books. Clouds of ancient gray pollen rose into the air; no one had touched most of these volumes in years, if not decades.

She found herself sneezing, her eyes filled with tears.

“Sorry, sorry,” said the maid. “So much dust.”

39. Home Theater

She did not want anyone to be in the house when she watched it. If she watched it at all—and she was not sure she would—she would be alone. She waited until Paul departed on another of his business trips, and Rose had finished with the afternoon chores. She ate a light supper—an apple, a handful of blueberries, she was never hungry these days—then walked through the rooms, picking up a misplaced magazine here, a teacup there; but the endless drift of books, clothes, phones, keys had ceased since the last of her children had moved away, and the house had lost its daily mutability—everything tended to stay in its place now, unchanged and unchanging for weeks on end. It was not yet eight o’clock when she found nothing but time stretching before her like an open sea—inviting, deadly. Even then, she was not sure she would watch it. She pretended not to think about it for a while, but no matter what she occupied herself with—perusing a cookbook in search of next Sunday’s dinner, watering plants—she was always aware of the movie in its sealed case lying on the table at the foot of the staircase, waiting, waiting.

Giving up at last, she descended to the basement, scooped the movie off the table, and, tearing the plastic wrapping as she walked, proceeded to the home theater. The movie cover showed an imposing glass-walled office high up in a skyscraper, and, propped on a leather armchair behind the desk, the top half of a human-size matryoshka with the photograph of the famous actress playing the lead role pasted over the doll’s rouged, round-eyed face. The doll’s lower half lay tipped on its side on the plush carpet, and three or four smaller dolls had spilled out of it—the next-largest bearing the heavily made-up, obscene face of a young stripper, the smallest one that of a serious dark-eyed girl of about five. Quotations in square red letters, all the R’s backward to signify the Russianness of the proceedings, promised “HEAЯT-STOPPING EXCITEMENT!” and stated underneath, in less prominent print, “Original screenplay by the award-winning author of—”

She parted the curtains that separated the movie room from the rest of the basement, maneuvered through the rows of built-in chairs. When she had first seen the house, thirty-two years ago now, she had been struck dumb by the cup holders in the armrests and the golden tassels on the decadent velvet of the curtains. Now everything appeared vaguely dated, and musty, and neglected. Paul and the children had watched numerous movies here, eating the inevitable popcorn, making shadow puppets with their hands in the beam of the projector during the credits; but now the children were gone, Paul was busy, and she herself could recall suffering through only half a dozen films in all her time in the house. She had no affinity for sitting in the dark, invisible and passive, following the peregrinations of someone else’s life—it felt to her like a small foretaste of death.

Except this time, it would not be someone else’s life: it would be her own.

For when she finally switched off the lights and settled into one of the rigid-backed chairs to watch the movie, she saw the view of the eternal construction site from the window of her Moscow apartment, and a caricature of her bearded, pipe-smoking father, who spoke in somber truisms, and a mother who collected porcelain cups and came across as superficial and insensitive, and a dacha neighbor for whom the heroine decorously pined while reading Turgenev. She stared at the screen in disbelief, her hands gripping the armrests. The actors sported laughable accents, the teenage heroine cavorted under onion domes and birch trees—and yet it was, undeniably, her childhood, her youth, at least up to a point. For after a particularly ham-fisted, cringe-worthy scene in the country, in which the heroine mused about her impending adulthood, the story veered off: the girl went on a moonlit walk with the dacha boy, and there followed her first kiss in the shade of an old oak tree and a subsequent anguished romance in the streets of Moscow, which scarred her deeply and made her swear off marriage and children, and move to America. With that, the exposition sequence over, the dreamlike sepia tone gave way to harsher colors that signified the present day and place, and the movie proper began. She found herself watching a thriller she could not follow, its fast-paced, intricate plot involving a corrupt American politician, and the Russian mafia, and the heroine, now a courageous New York lawyer, doing something brave yet sexy with a briefcase full of incriminating documents, and a manly colleague who resembled the dacha boy just enough to justify the lengthy backstory—

She stopped the movie, backtracked, watched the beginning again. Her heart felt crammed into her chest, its every beat a painful scrape against her rib cage. When the heroine burst out of her door and ran across the dirt road, hurrying to her first assignation with the dacha neighbor, she screamed and flung the remote control hard against the wall. It broke apart with a dry plastic crack, and the screen went black.

She sat unmoving in the dark, her temples damp, her mind full of poison.

Bitch, you bitch. How could you do that to me? You think you can steal from people like that, gut them, betray them, as long as you claim to do so in the name of art? But you are no artist—just a cliché-ridden hack, driven by nothing but the urge to escape from the emptiness of your own life. Because your life is empty, and you are alone, you have no husband and no children and no proper home—you have nothing, you are nothing, nothing, nothing, do you hear me…

The fury wound tighter and tighter in her chest, until something within it seemed to give way, to sag sidewise. Suddenly frightened, she pressed her clammy fingers to her forehead and took a shallow, labored breath, and another. All at once the darkness of the room was stifling her, threatening her somehow; she wanted to turn on the lights, but she felt queasy, and oddly exhausted, and the image of herself stumbling through the black void, bumping into unseen corners and edges, made her press hard into the back of her chair and close her eyes against the darkness, and for one moment give all her attention to the sweating, melting, skipping, somersaulting thing that her heart seemed to be doing against her will, of its own volition. Perhaps, she thought, I really ought to stand up and get hold of the telephone, call an ambulance or something; and the thought sent a stab of terror through her, which radiated like pain from her chest and deposited the telephone neatly in her hand. Yet when she dialed, it was not the ambulance, it was Olga’s number instead; and though she had long forgotten the number, if indeed she had ever known it, her fingers, flying over the buttons, magically summoned the right combination to life—and though the number could have changed, and though Olga was never at home, if indeed she had ever existed, she answered on the first ring.

Why did you do it to me? Mrs. Caldwell demanded, not bothering with small talk; for there was no time for that. Is it because your father drank, your mother slapped you, your childhood was a low-ceilinged, dismal trap? Did you think the poverty of your life gave you the right to steal from me, as you have done for years—for I see everything now, all those books of yours with their ballet dancers and precious heirlooms and cuckoo clocks, even the names, even the faces, you used my friends, you used my family, you used me, turned me into a cipher on a page, on a screen—why, why? Was it not enough for you to have taken the boy I liked all those years ago, must you now try to take my past as well? Olga sounded apologetic but firm, sure of herself. She talked about art, no, Art—Mrs. Caldwell could hear the solemn rise in her tone each time she said it—and the illusory nature of memory, and the purgative power of the autobiographical impulse, and the greater artistic truths revealed sometimes by borrowing, sometimes by distorting, what might be called reality; not to mention the fact that whatever she might have borrowed from Mrs. Caldwell was now immortalized, an indelible footprint in the sands of time—

But already, tiring of the imaginary conversation, she released her immaterial hold on the nonexistent receiver, and briefly opened her eyes—and the darkness of the room crowded her still, and the dizzying pain was still there; so, closing her eyes, she thought, fighting through the chaos of her mind: But this does not matter, this isn’t important, I shouldn’t waste another moment thinking about it, for no one can take my past away from me, it’s mine alone, and it’s here, it has always been here, and if I float away from this pain that has narrowed and sharpened until it has become the piercing needle on whose tip the universe is spinning so quickly—if I walk away into this glowing mist, into this welcoming warmth, I will once again feel the trickle of lukewarm water down my back, and hear my grandmother’s voice, and smell the sweet tang of the soap, and see the tree, the great ancient tree at the heart of the world, and sense the boundless promise of the future unfolding before me, and no one, no one, will ever take that away from me…

Overwhelmed by confusion, I stare at Mrs. Caldwell slumped over in her chair. I do not quite know how I got to my feet, nor do I remember turning on the lights, yet I see things so surely, down to the smallest of details—the beige carpet stained by countless soda spills, the tassels on the velvet curtains tied into messy knots by the busy hands of restless children, the strands of Mrs. Caldwell’s hair plastered over her moist forehead. Everything is bright and clear and precise and, at the same time, slightly off, as though every object has moved an inch to the side and now shimmers with a doubled contour—the way things appear sometimes when your eyes are brimming over with tears, in the second before you blink them away.

For a moment my world totters on the brink of falling over, as vast, invisible things strain to burst into light. Then the moment moves on. I am overtaken by a marvelous sense of an unexpected, unhoped-for liberation. I am free, I am somehow—finally!—free of this woman who is not me, who has never been me—free of the complacent, materialistic, dim oppression of her timid spirit. Light-headed with the immensity, with the joy, of this new freedom, I look again at Mrs. Caldwell. She continues to sit slumped over in her chair, her face covered by the fallen hair. She is, I imagine, still fuming over the irrelevant movie, insisting that her past is hers alone, planning perhaps to set her husband’s lawyer on her treacherous friend… I am wondering if I should speak to her, when I am seized with a sharp, almost animal panic at the thought of lingering another instant in her oddly immobile, heavy-limbed presence.

Jerking my eyes away from the woman, I pass out of the room.

I feel another, lighter prick of panic when I realize that I cannot recall having parted the pompous curtains as I stepped over the threshold, but I dispel my fear quickly: I am, it is true, a little hazy about what has happened—about what is happening—to me, yet I am certain there will be plenty of time to sort it out later. For now, it is enough to know I am free. I am ready to go and live fully at last. I have so many plans, I think in a fever of joyous agitation. I will leave this house, I will travel, I will cross unfamiliar roads and turn blind corners without trepidation, I will look up old friends and talk to strangers, I will capture every moment of joy, every crumb of discovery, as I write all the poetry I have ever meant to write.

I do not remember the last time I felt so alive.

40. Entrance Hall

And so I have made up my mind to leave. I told Paul I intended to go to Russia for a while, spend a few months in the countryside reliving my childhood, and he did not raise a single objection; in fact, he appeared distraught about something and did not seem to hear me at all. His indifference saddened me a little, but I reminded myself of the journey ahead and felt restored to happiness. I will not go to Russia just yet; I will save it for last. For now, I will follow religious processions through the ancient streets of Spanish towns, I will sit on mud floors in African huts listening to the midnight roar of lions, I will taste unknown fruits in the floating markets of Asia. I will walk through the mountains, the valleys, the forests of the world, all-seeing and all-hearing, greedy for every tiny morsel of life. Perhaps I will come back, perhaps not.

I have already decided what to bring with me on my travels. I will take almost nothing—just a thick sweater, a pair of sturdy walking shoes, my passport with its pages virginally clear of stamps, a handful of pens, a notebook, my dog-eared volume of Annensky, and Celia’s lopsided blue bunny. I have not actually packed—in truth, things have developed a somewhat disconcerting tendency to pass through my fingers, but I choose not to dwell on such matters; I cannot leave just yet, in any case. Three and a half decades of maternal habits cannot be discarded so easily, and there are still a few loose ends to tie up before I can go: the birth of my second grandchild in February, followed by Eugene’s homecoming over Easter, followed by another reunion in July—

In between family visits, I wander the house. As often as not, I end up in the entrance hall, and there I sit, going over the packing list in my mind, dreaming of escaping soon, so soon, almost any day now. The entrance hall is a grand space inscribed into the stately arc of the marble staircase, crowded with stuffy, lion-pawed chairs and consoles. One’s entrance hall—my decorator told me once, a third of a century ago now—should serve as a perfect introduction to the house that follows; to the world of people forever kept on its doorstep, peering wistfully over the homeowner’s shoulder (a delivery man, a gardener, a Jehovah’s Witness, God visiting incognito), it should offer a tantalizing hint of the wonders that await the lucky few allowed within. When we first saw the house, I remember the awed sense I had upon entering—that of an immense place, full of possibilities, unfolding inward, like that magic house from a childhood fairy tale that was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Now I know it to be the other way around. On the inside, the house is much, much smaller than its sprawling, many-columned façade would lead one to believe.

As I sit in the entrance hall, revising my list (I will not, after all, need that sweater), I stare at the enormous double doors of brilliantly polished oak reflected in the expanse of the brilliantly polished marble floors. I never throw the doors open, for fear that temptation will move me to make a dash for it before I have quite disposed of the last of my matriarchal obligations. Sometimes I do feel a surge of frustration, as though I am a clockwork toy that has been wound up and cannot act of its own accord until it completes the predetermined range of its mechanical motions. In other, darker moments, my throat tightens with panic—what if it is simply too late, what if over the years I have sprouted such thick roots that I will be unable to walk away? But such thoughts are only signs of weakness, so I force myself to breathe, and busy my mind with shaving more unnecessary items off the list (I decide I do not want the walking shoes either), and muse on my past, on the decisions I have made in my life, on the roads I have followed and not followed. I imagine having had five children, or two, or none; I imagine having left Paul or never having married him; I imagine having gone to Paris with Adam; I imagine not having stayed in America, or not having left Russia; I imagine having crossed that dirt road and kissed that boy; I imagine having never given up my poetry. I remember a little girl who lived in a faraway country with long, cold winters and bright summer stars—a girl who had a mermaid for a mother, a sage for a father, a god for a guide—a girl who loved life and played with words and looked out of the small window of her small room to behold the whole world. And when my memories start crowding my chest with something much like sobs, I distract my attention with the comings and goings of people around me.

For the house, even as it lies fallow during Paul’s business trips, between my children’s and grandchildren’s visits, is never entirely empty. If I sit still enough, letting my mind drift free until it bursts the imprisonment of matter, I begin to see the riches of things that skip, slide, and dance beneath the surface of the world—and I can then sense ghostly women moving through the house. All with their own versions of my elderly face, they walk through the rooms on their different errands, possessed of varied degrees of presence and persistence—some mere echoes, glimpses, faint wisps of holographic lives, others coming through so clearly, so tangibly, it seems as if I could reach out and truly touch them. I understand that they are not really here, of course, for they are only a vast, cosmic branching of endless possibilities, of numberless outcomes—all of them variations on my own fate, passing through mirror dimensions, brushing by me, fading in and out of sight—an endless theater of myself, parading before me as I sit in the entrance hall, ruminating on the packing list (I can do without the passport, I think), dreaming of all the poetry I will compose once I am away.

The woman I see most often is an absolute bore, an expensively dressed phantom of a person with not an original thought in her exquisitely coiffed head. She spends her days straightening the rooms and leafing through magazines; her visitors are of the most prosaic sort, electricians and rug cleaners and dog walkers; in the evenings, when her husband’s car pulls into the driveway, she dabs a touch of lipstick on her faded mouth before the entrance hall mirror, and waits, smiling meekly, tilting her head at the sound of his key in the lock. Paul is kind to her, if ever so slightly dismissive.

A more disturbing presence is a Mrs. Caldwell who has only five children and whose husband abandoned her for his secretary two decades before, though leaving her in full possession of the house. She dyes her indecently long hair blond and has dabbled in plastic procedures. Every time the doorbell rings on a Friday night, she clatters across the marble floor in her stilettos, and I catch a terrible glimpse of my features drawn on a sixty-five-year-old flesh-colored balloon, stretched and bloated. I hurry to avert my eyes, just as she is letting in her much younger boyfriend, to whom she then glues herself in a long, slurping kiss. I believe the man is no good; he is after her money. She has started to write love poetry, too. I find her frankly embarrassing.

There are a few others here as well—a thin-lipped, dieting, strident Mrs. Caldwell who has gone to work at some downtown office doing who knows what, as well as a flighty Mrs. Caldwell who occupies herself with trying to translate her mother’s poetry and is prone to bursting into tears whenever any of her children visit. My favorite Mrs. Caldwell is plump and energetic, young at sixty-seven, with a bristle of unkempt hair and a marvelous touch with her grandchildren; her house is always overrun with them (Emma is divorced now and living here with her two daughters while she studies for her architect’s exam, and Eugene and Adriana often visit with their baby). She appears genuinely happy, and seems to love everyone, just as everyone loves her, and her entrance hall is always traipsed over with muddy footprints and wet leaves, chaotic with toddler shoes and lunch boxes and mismatched mittens and shed petals of flowers and the bustle of dogs. I think of her belly laugh, her jolly face, to ward off despair whenever I see that other woman, that obese, slovenly, gray-haired and gray-faced woman who lives all alone and drags herself through the house, dressed in a dirty pink robe and dirty pink slippers, sighing wetly, mumbling poems under her breath, never failing to twist my heart with pity. I do not know her story, but I can see death in her stark, empty eyes—a child’s death—and I turn away every time, horrified and ashamed for some reason.

There may also be a Mrs. Caldwell who is moving away—though, strangely enough, neither she nor Paul is organizing the move; it is only the children, much older now, who come to the house, arriving in somber groups of two and three. Maggie and Celia, I notice, have been crying, Emma is white-lipped as she speaks to Eugene on the phone, giving him details of some funeral arrangements, asking when his flight from Bucharest is due to land, and I overhear Rich consoling George as they stand in the doorway surveying the boxes. For the entrance hall has been filling up with boxes upon boxes in the past few weeks—boxes of porcelain, boxes of silver, paintings wrapped in cocoons of padded paper, precious plates buried in crates of packing peanuts, contractors and realtors coming and going, two electricians carrying the dining room chandelier trussed up like a slaughtered boar on a pole between them. As the movers shuttle in and out on moving day, the double doors stand open for hours at a time, and hour after hour I sit in the hall, revising the packing list in my head (I have resolved to leave the notebook and the pens behind) and staring outside, at the rectangle of the gray November sky above the movers’ heads, at the waving of the oak tree’s naked branches. When the final boxes depart, I feel relieved to be rid of all that useless stuff at last, but a bit depressed too. I catch a glimpse of a “For Sale” sign stuck in the lawn outside, and then the doors close, and the house stands empty and dark, a winter draft from below the doors blowing a dead oak leaf across the filthy floor. To the left, then to the right, then to the left again, flutters the leaf. I wonder if it has my name written on it, and attempt to smile at the thought; but I do not get up to look. The lights of the grand chandelier above me no longer come on, for the electricity has been turned off; I can sense the long winter night moving in.

The old panic takes hold of me roughly.

How would I know, I think wildly, if I were not myself, but one of these other apparitions instead—and if so, how would I know which one? How would I know if I were only a footnote in a story that has gone on without me—if some other, braver woman has not led an entirely different, wonder-filled existence in my name, never even setting foot in this house, never even coming near all this? How would I know if I were the ghost of someone long dead within these walls, unable to leave, trapped here as punishment for my waste of a life—as failed at death as I was at living? And if this really is some kind of purgatory, how will I know when I am forgiven for my sins, when I am allowed to leave it all behind?

But quickly I push these dark thoughts away. Because of course I am going to leave, I am going to leave just as soon as Christmas is over. In the meantime I continue whittling down my list—I have decided to take nothing but Celia’s one-eared bunny and the volume of Annensky, and soon the volume of Annensky seems superfluous too, as I find I remember his poems with perfect clarity, even as I can no longer recall a single line of my own. I recite his words for hours, for days, for months on end, sitting in the entrance hall, looking at the closed door.

It is not a bad way to spend one’s time. It could have been so much worse. This morning, for instance, I heard a siren wailing outside. The next thing I know, the doors are being flung open, and two men in white burst in, a stretcher between them, and disappear at a run inside the house. I sit in the darkened entrance hall, waiting for them to return. After a while they walk back across the hall, slowly now, bent under the weight of the body on the stretcher. I glimpse a limp strand of gray hair, a dangling pink slipper, a hanging fold of a dirty pink robe. I do not look closely; I do not want to know what the matter is with her. I just whisper a quick prayer for the poor soul, and feel grateful for having been spared, and, as I hear the ambulance start, say to myself: There but for the grace of God go I.

The men in white, I notice with a sudden jolt, have left the doors standing wide open. I look at the glorious blue sky of April, or is it July—the light pouring through is radiantly clear, a luminous invitation. I realize that I do not, after all, need to bring Celia’s bunny. As I stand up and walk empty-handed toward the shining rectangle of light, I think of all the secrets, all the marvels of the world I am about to see.