The Life Room, page 15
I asked him how he expected me to look. Something about whether he expected I would look like a middle-aged housewife. He looked at me soulfully and said, “That’s not you, Eleanor. That could never be you.”
I pictured my children tucked into their beds, brushing my fingers across their foreheads the way they liked. It was what calmed Noah when he was worked up. I pictured myself slipping my hand in the crook of Michael’s arm and walking down an avenue as we had done when we’d first married, looking inside the shops, imagining the future we would have together, the life we would build that seemed to stretch before us like an endless, empty road. I had to tell myself that that life still existed. Until Michael entered my life, I’d been pulled in places I didn’t understand, had done things I regretted and had been ashamed of. Being with Michael had canceled out the ways I’d trespassed. I found purity and goodness in him that had moved me. He was the opposite of my father. Of Adam. Of William. He would never leave me. I knew that when I married him.
“But will he be enough for you?” my mother said when I told her that Michael and I were engaged. In the years that we’d been married that comment occasionally floated to the surface of my mind and then I just didn’t think about it. Only now, flying miles away from Paris, am I remembering my mother’s remark. I know I should put down my pen and sleep, try to rest before we land, but I have to record it all. There are things I need to reconsider, and by writing them down, the past seems to come to me with more clarity. I thought that Michael embodied all the characteristics my mother held dear. He could provide a good home, a family. He was generous, kind, and reliable. “I still think about the years I had with your father.” “After he left you?” I was angry. “What about those years?” “He has music inside him,” she said. I told her that he had squandered it. “He wasn’t made for this world,” she had countered. I told her she was wrong about Michael. That he was never going to leave me. “You never know what’s going to happen in life,” she said. She asked me if he made me happy. “Daddy made you happy,” I told her.
We were in my mother’s kitchen talking. I remember how I looked out at the back of the Masons’ house. I could see through the still skeletal branches of the tree to the roof, the brick chimney, the white shingles. Was Stephen a better match for me? The last time I had seen him we had been in our twenties. We had never really talked about a future together, though it existed in the air between us. But the minute I walked back into my mother’s house I pushed the thought away. I saw my mother wiping the table and putting away the dishes. Everything seemed perfectly clear. I didn’t want to have her solitary life, and I knew by marrying Michael that I was choosing a path different from the one she had chosen.
When we reached my hotel it was almost 7:30. The evening came on, and as the light receded I already began to long for what was lost of the day. It must have dawned on both of us simultaneously that we were saying good-bye, that the moment had come to a close, that we might not see each other again. What kind of relationship could we have in the present? Could Stephen and I really be friends? I doubt either of us had a chance to process what our encounter meant, and I wanted to ascribe what had happened between us to fate so as not to be accountable.
We stood in the lobby. Stephen was beside me. I could not see him—I didn’t want to see him—but I sensed his presence next to me. I was aware of his every movement as I fumbled in my purse for the key, among my wallet, cosmetics, loose pens, and scraps of paper, and I realized I was avoiding how I would say good-bye to him. I realized that we had never once talked about our severed connection, and I regretted it. The fact that I was married and had my own life allowed me to be more free and open than I had ever been before with him. Now part of me wanted to stay attached. Another part of me wanted to flee to my room so that I could begin to quiet the feelings that our confessions had unleashed.
I found my key and for a second I wondered what would happen if I invited him up to my room, as if what had transpired between us all those years ago was just starting to be remembered, as if I were a woman without attachment, and I saw in his eyes that he was waiting for me with anticipation. It was as if both of us were certain only in the moment in which we were to part that something momentous had happened between us that we could not understand. His eyes pleaded with me. I should have turned away, but I did not.
I am not the kind of woman who is unfaithful to her husband. That kind gravitated toward my father.
My mind is going to overflow. He rested his hands on the bare skin of my exposed upper arms and it sent a shiver through my body. We looked at each other and I realized then that Stephen was not going to kiss me and that I was not going to kiss him. We smiled shyly and laughed. “I guess it’s time,” I said. All the emotions of being young, of finding someone you were attracted to, came back, and I realized how strange it was to feel that way again, how difficult it would be never to experience that tingling sensation of being hyperaware, so vibrantly alive. In my smile I felt my face coming to life and was suddenly embarrassed. I turned to look down, then laughed, and I heard Stephen laughing, too, and our laughter broke through my embarrassment.
Stephen told me it was good to see me so happy. It had been great to see me.
I took out my card with my university address and office number and handed it to him. He made some comment about the fact that now we were going to exchange business cards as if we were beyond that convention, and reached into the back pocket of his wallet and gave me his card in return. We said good-bye and hugged. When his hands were around my waist and then my hips, my body was wet with perspiration. When I touched his back to hold him it was warm against my palms. I was shaking a little. I looked up into his eyes and he kissed me on the lips. I did not protest. The scent of his body rose to my nostrils. It was salty and dark like earth, the same as I had remembered it. His fingers slid down my hips and touched the piece of skin between my skirt and my shirt that had risen when I lifted my arms to embrace him. I was terribly hot and the heat of Stephen’s body so close to my own made my heart move violently In my chest. I closed my eyes to drown out what? Feeling? Fear? It was more complicated than fear. There was an edge to it. I sensed my own weakness rising in me. It was weakness born when promise is suddenly snatched back and you are left hungering for something you don’t quite understand, and it was that particular weakness that only he inspired in me. Or at least I thought so then.
I stepped back after our lips brushed. It was too intense. Stephen stepped back, too, and looked at me shyly, and I saw the boy in him again. We both smiled and I walked away holding his card in my palm. Once I reached the elevator bank and looked back at Stephen I was stunned to find him still standing where I had left him, watching me walk away. For a moment I wondered whether I should go back and say good-bye again, but the part of me that was girlish and shy took over and I stepped into the elevator. By then my body was so filled with adrenaline I could barely think. My cheeks flushed. It was as if everything was happening so fast and I needed to slow it down so I could digest it and know how to act. After I had unlocked the door to the hotel room I had a premonition that Stephen was going to come back for me, that he was in a moment coming up the tube-shaped elevator and would soon be in front of my door, and I opened it and stepped out to look for him, but the narrow gray carpeted halls with their soft lavender walls were empty. I stared down a long corridor of absence. I went back into the room and sat immobile on the foot of the bed. I needed to begin packing. My plane was leaving later that night. But I was paralyzed. I unfolded myself onto the bed and lay down thinking I had made a grave mistake. There was something inside Stephen he wanted to give me, or something I needed from him, something we needed to say to each other, and we had let the opportunity pass. How would it have hurt if I had invited him up to my room? If we had ended the unrequited journey? Would I now be able to relax? I didn’t want to leave Paris. I didn’t want to return home. Did that mean I had no home now, other than these four walls in a hotel room painted a light Parisian blue? My room with the little French desk that now held my belongings, my folders and books and notebooks, the armoire filled with my clothes and the delicate pitcher. These were all I would need in the world. My own quiet. It had been so long since I’d felt this way.
Tears filled my eyes and moved down my cheeks. It was easier and more familiar to long for what I could not have than be in its presence, and my tears seemed to release some of the tension that had formed a knot in my body. I was surprised by how long I needed to cry. How bereft and lost I was. I thought as I began to pack that I’d never move beyond those feelings. Suddenly I was glad that I was leaving Paris, that I had to quickly finish packing and catch my flight, otherwise I’m not sure what I would have done. Once I had calmed down and settled myself against these overwhelming feelings, I was compelled to write it all down, this journal of what had transpired in Paris, lest it be forgotten. It was an urge almost like hunger. I couldn’t wait until I had taken a cab from the hotel, checked in at the airport, found my seat on the airplane (it seemed an eternity) so that I could take out my notebook and pen and make sense of things. And now what? Will I be able to return to my life unharmed?
PART III
11
Eleanor walked with John and Rob to the baggage claim and through customs. They were tired and barely spoke. In expectation of returning home to their individual families, each had retreated back into themselves. They looked at each other tentatively, and then parted with quick hugs and promises to keep in touch. John slipped into the car he had ordered. Irrationality, grogginess, separation anxiety—whatever it was, she didn’t want him to leave. She watched him through the window of the limousine as he lit up a cigarette, and then the limousine pulled off, taking him away to his suburban home in New Jersey.
It was early morning, the sky pink beneath the darkness. Slowly the dawn accepted the break of day and the light shifted. She smoothed the creases on her skirt, accumulated from ten days in Paris.
When she turned the key in her apartment door, her sons and husband were asleep in their rooms. A lovely light was cast in the apartment, half dark and half light—that semidark when objects just begin to emerge with clarity. As she quietly walked down the hallway to the bedrooms, she heard Noah’s sigh as he turned over and Nicholas’s thicker breathing. The warmth and press of light through the curtains filled their rooms, and for a moment she could not tell which bed she wanted to enter first.
She caught her reflection in the mirror in the hallway. Nothing about her had changed. She had seen the tougher, severe, more complicated look in women who had followed their passion. She just looked tired.
She couldn’t help herself. She awoke the boys first, sliding next to Noah in his bed and kissing him, then Nicholas. She took in their individual smells that had become a part of the way she breathed. They couldn’t seem to get enough of her. Noah sat in her lap, where he had come to join her, touching her dangling earrings. Nicholas sat next to her on his bed, clinging to her, touching her hair, reaching for her hand, in his excitement to have her home forgetting his need to separate. “Mommy, I missed you,” he said, hugging her. Noah wanted to know how high the Eiffel Tower was and whether she’d actually climbed all those stairs. Michael stood in the hallway of the boys’ room, yawning, in only his boxer shorts.
“My, my, look what the cat dragged in,” he said, his voice not yet awake. He reached for her and she stood up and fell into his arms, taking in the warmth of his body. “Aren’t we glad Mommy’s home,” he said to the boys.
Noah and Nicholas talked excitedly, trying to outshout each other. She tried to stay in tune to all that they said, not wanting to miss anything, feeling herself slowly come back to life in their presence. Michael said he would make pancakes for the occasion. The boys ran to help him. Noah liked spooning the batter onto the skillet and watching it begin to bubble and Nicholas asked if he could flip them if he promised to be careful. She reluctantly let them go and went into her bedroom to change out of the spent clothes she’d worn on the plane, happy to discard them in the hamper.
Breakfast was full of chatter and excitement. Noah poured too much syrup over his pancakes, making a lake on his plate. Though another day she would have scolded him, that morning she kept quiet. Nicholas spilled his orange juice. Michael loaded her plate with more pancakes than she could eat, and before he sat down, he reached over and kissed her again, clearly happy that she was home. Noah refused to eat, jumping up and down, touching her with his sticky hands, until he had opened his presents. She indulged him and went into the hallway to fetch her suitcase. They loved the hand-painted trucks and trains, the French books and stuffed bears she had brought home. “Will you read it to us in French?” Noah asked, holding a French version of Goodnight Moon, remembering how she had read him the English version when he was little. She showed them the postcards she’d collected. Michael appreciated the handwoven blue shirt and the Hermes tie she’d picked for him. He tried the shirt on over his T-shirt, then put on the tie, and the boys laughed since he was still in his boxer shorts.
She was truly happy looking into her children’s bright, laughing faces. She observed Michael’s cheerful smile, noting how her presence seemed to fill them with contentment. Noah told her he had looked out his window every night to see if he saw her plane coming home, and she put him on her lap, kissing the top of his hair, remembering how when the boys were both babies she couldn’t seem to get enough of them, their physical bodies producing in her their own kind of hunger. “He actually thought he could see you out the window if he kept watching, Mommy,” Nicholas said. “I told him that the plane wouldn’t actually fly over New York City, but he didn’t believe me. What an idiot.”
“Nicholas, don’t call your brother an idiot,” Michael said.
Eleanor looked at Michael, realizing how hard it must have been for all of them to be pulled out of their comfortable routine by her absence, and she felt guilty for having enjoyed her trip, for being so caught up with her new friends that she’d even, at times, forgotten them completely. “How were they?” she asked, clearing the table. “Did they really miss me terribly? Was it hard for you?”
“We managed,” he said. “But you owe me.” He looked at her sardonically and smiled. “I’ll cash in later.” He came behind her at the sink and pressed up against her when she was cleaning the breakfast dishes and the boys were playing with their new toys in the living room. Then he went into the dining room to check his phone messages.
After she cleaned up the kitchen, she went to unpack. She held in her hand the blouse she had worn on her last day in Paris and brought it to her face, unable to quite let it go. It smelled of the lavender perfume in her hotel room. As she unpacked, she felt herself back in Paris again. She checked her pockets and in her light jacket she found Stephen’s card. Unthinking, she brought it to her lips, then folded the clothes into a shopping bag to take to the cleaner. She took out the notebook she had kept in Paris, slipped Stephen’s card inside, and tucked it into the top drawer by her bedside table. She turned the key, locking the drawer.
Filled once again with a quick rush of euphoria, she carefully unpacked the pitcher she had bought in Paris. She took it into the living room to show Michael. She remembered Keats’s poem, thought of John, and smiled. She thought about the lines from the end of the poem, how the speaker becomes aware that the lovers shown on the urn are in fact “far above . . . all breathing human passion.” The poem’s speaker relishes the happiness of the urn’s world, where spring is permanent, where the melodies from the piper are “ever new,” and where love is “forever warm.”
Michael was at the dining room table looking at slides of animal heart tissue through his microscope. She was slightly disappointed that he was already back to his work, but she decided not to bother him, realizing that in her absence his own work must have suffered. She looked out the terrace window, opened the doors, and stepped out. The clouds were pillowed over the trees in the park.
“The sky is so beautiful today,” she said, coming back inside. Michael was still looking into his microscope, making notes on a pad next to him. “I think we should take the boys to the park. When I was in Paris I thought of them every time I walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. We have to remember that life is gorgeous.” She looked over his shoulder where his eye was pressed over the lens. “We can’t miss any of it. Isn’t it strange how one day you can feel closed off to the world, and then the next day everything feels possible?”
“I was in the pathology lab all week,” he said, glancing up at her, sensing something was different. “I’ve been looking at animal cells while you’ve been traipsing all over Paris.”
She looked at him, slightly hurt, but decided to let the comment go. “But what about when you leave the hospital? You have to start noticing things. The sky on the way home at dusk. The way the gray slowly creeps in.”
“I usually think about my patients on the way home.” Michael glanced up at her, raising his eyebrows suspiciously. Then he put his eye back to the microscope.
“Look what I bought in Paris.” She showed the pitcher to him and told herself she was willing to accept the imperfection of her own capacity for human love and connection if only she could reach him for a moment. She put it next to his microscope on the table.
“It’s nice,” he said, barely raising his eyes from the lens.
“These buds. They remind me that everything is on the brink of becoming if we want to believe it’s so.”
