This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Because to think is what she cannot manage, not here, not now, not with this man who is sucking words out of Timou, out of her, and feeding them into his notebook. This man, who is sitting in her apartment, in the chair her mother bought for her, in a flea-market downtown, a beautiful thing it is, with planed oak arms and woven strapping. Does this man see its beauty, its craftsmanship? Claudette doesn’t think so.

  She cannot think – she cannot think at all. She wants to dwell on the final frames of the film they have edited because something is not quite right, something is unbalanced, and she cannot see what it might be. Is it the dialogue in the corridor, between her character and the man playing her husband? Does it go on a beat or so too long? Should they cut out the last exchange? Or is it that it needs more sense of time passing? An intervening frame or two of the street outside, devoid of people?

  Claudette cannot decide. There is no deciding to be had when this man is talking, when Timou is talking, when there is no space, no rest, here in her own home, the very place she ought to be able to think best. How can she make this most important of decisions – the closing minutes of the film! – when her mind is filled with the back of the Québécoise assistant’s head?

  Smooth, glossy hair she had, the colour of charred wood; she wore it up, mostly. Claudette can picture it now, how vulnerable the nape of her neck seemed, how the ponytail flicked between her shoulder-blades as she turned her head to answer the phone, to type something on her keyboard, to call through to Timou, if he was working in the bedroom. How sometimes, when Claudette returned to the apartment, the girl’s hair would be wet, as if newly washed, pulled through its band, the ends drying in the central heating, which Claudette had been so careful to turn on because it was such a cold winter they were having, so very cold. Strange, Claudette found herself thinking, to wash your hair in such cold, in the middle of the day.

  Claudette cannot bear it any more. She has to move, has to activate her frame. She takes out her hand from under Timou’s and pushes herself from the sofa, causing Timou to shoot her an alarmed look, but she’s not going far. She steps across the carpet, across the floorboards and it feels good to be in motion, to have uncurled herself from that sofa, which can have the unpleasant habit of swallowing you whole, an upholstered Venus flytrap. She passes the window, reaching out to graze the white muslin curtain there, and she comes to a stop at the alcove.

  The desk is neat, ordered. Which, Claudette reflects, it should be, since no one has sat there since the girl left, so abruptly, just under a month ago. Only this week Timou has been interviewing people to replace her. A keen but slightly frightening woman from Boston. A man, Lenny, who lives a few blocks east of here.

  There are still a few notes in the girl’s handwriting sticking to the paint of the alcove wall. Paul called for CW, reads one. TL to confirm dates, reads another.

  Claudette pulls this last one from the wall and holds it close to her face. TL, she sees. TL to confirm. The girl had narrow, closed-off handwriting. She favoured rollerball pens in bright primary colours and made her descenders markedly longer than the ascenders. Claudette runs a hand along the top of the computer, across the numberpad of the phone.

  In a way that doesn’t feel like realising something, learning something, but instead like uncovering a fact you had known a long time ago, she knows why what Timou had said to her in the bathroom sounded familiar.

  Strike while the eye is hot.

  When the girl said it to her, Claudette had been standing right here, just behind where the girl was sitting – her hair caught up in a damp ponytail, the nape chalk-pale, a few stray strands reaching the collar of her maroon sweater – and they had been looking at details of nightclubs because, Timou said, they needed to shoot a scene in a basement restaurant: a nightclub could easily be mocked up to look like a restaurant and nightclubs were always empty during the day. The girl had been holding photocopied pictures of two basement nightclubs, one in each hand, and saying that she had heard back from one manager, who said it would be OK, and the other hadn’t returned her call.

  ‘What do you think we should do?’ Claudette had said, leaning over her shoulder to see the two images.

  The girl had shrugged inside her maroon sweater and then she had said it: ‘We should strike while the eye is hot.’

  Claudette, glancing from the images to the girl and back, had had to suppress a smile. The eye is hot: she rather liked it. Hot eyes. Flaming vision. She would never, in a million years, have corrected her. She wasn’t that kind of person and certainly didn’t want to be that kind of boss.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ she had said instead. ‘Why don’t you call them back now?’

  She rests her hands on the edge of the desk. The room, the rug, the scarab beetles, the street outside, the journalist and Timou, especially Timou, seem to fade, as if someone somewhere has turned down a dial on the world. The sounds, the light, the colours all become dim. It is just Claudette, her breathing and the desk now. Nothing else. Just her and her mouth, which keeps itself open, drawing in air and pushing it out, over and over, because it doesn’t know what else to do.

  Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here?

  Daniel, New York, 2010

  Somebody is saying my name.

  ‘Danny?’

  The word reaches its arm down whatever hole I am hiding in and gives me a sharp shake. My head jerks on its neck and the mumbling monologue that seems to have been going on in the background of my mind comes to an abrupt stop.

  ‘Danny?’

  I find myself leaning – or is it lying? – on some forgiving, yielding surface, in a strangely uncomfortable position: legs twisted to the side, arms flung out. The position of someone who has fallen from a great height.

  Have I been asleep? Was I sleeping? Where am I and what am I doing here?

  ‘Danny,’ the voice says again.

  My head appears to be filled with smog, my vision wavering and pricked with vibrating points of light. I have come to in a place unfamiliar to me. I seem not to be in full command of my faculties. But, hey, I tell myself, screwing up my eyes against the glare, you’ve coped with worse. And: doesn’t this remind you of the bad old drug-taking days of your youth?

  What materialises around me is a room. There is a high window to my right, a ceiling with meandering cracks above my head. Lace curtains make a hesitant advance into the air, then, held back by their pole, retreat. Advance, retreat, advance, retreat.

  I know this room. I see where I am.

  I am lying, unbelievably, on my parents’ bed in Brooklyn. The side that was my mother’s, next to the window, beside the painted nightstand, under her reading lamp. The very spot, ladies and gentlemen, where she died.

  This takes me a moment to get my head around.

  I am just straightening out my legs, pushing my hair back off my forehead, when I hear the person say my name again.

  ‘Danny?’

  For a moment, and just for a moment, the notion enters my head that my mother is calling to me from the afterlife, from the wide blue yonder. Have I summoned her simply by lying here?

  ‘Yeah?’ I get out.

  ‘Jeet?’ the person says, or seems to say.

  ‘Huh?’ I lift my head from the pillow. Across the room, in a chair beside the door, sits a woman. It is, I hardly need tell you, not my mother or, indeed, any other supernatural incarnation. This woman is possibly in her seventies. She is wearing a loose kaftan thing and her hair is pinned up in a kind of topknot; there are many coloured beads slung around her neck and her fingers glitter with rings. Do I, I am asking myself, recognise her? I must do. She seems to know me: she’s using, after all, my childhood diminutive. But is she an aunt, a cousin – what?

  ‘Danny,’ she says again, leaning forward in the chair, ‘jeet?’

  We stare at each other for a moment, she and I, each of us struck by the unaccountability, the incomprehensibility of our situation.

  ‘Jeet?’ I repeat warily, and
as I say it I know what it means. She is asking me, in pure Brooklyn, ‘Did you eat?’

  I almost clap my hands together. Jeet. How could I have forgotten that? I am going to write it down, as soon as I can find a pen.

  The woman pushes herself out of the chair and comes towards the bed. ‘You look like you could do with a little sustenance. You want me to make you up a plate?’

  I stare at her from my prone position. The rings, the multiple necklaces, the long white hair. It comes back to me that I am at my father’s birthday party: the sounds of chatting and cutlery reach us from the door. I came in here to the bedroom with the idea of calling Claudette, of speaking to the kids, of taking ten minutes out for myself to consider what to do, where to go – home to my family or off to Sussex in search of Todd? – but instead I must have fallen asleep. Jet lag can do strange things to one’s body clock. There in my hand, in fact, is my cell phone: evidence of my better intentions.

  So I have located myself in time and space but I still have no idea who this woman is. I search her face for traces of the Sullivan brow, the Hanrahan jaw, any clue at all, but there’s nothing. I cannot recall ever meeting her before. Could she be a friend of the family, one of my sisters’ mothers-in-law?

  ‘Er,’ I say, struggling to raise myself on my elbows, ‘no, thanks. I’m good.’

  She puts her head on one side, looking down at me with an encouraging smile. ‘Tired?’

  ‘A little.’

  She reaches out and straightens a book, a box of tissues on the nightstand. I see that it bothers her that I’m lying here like this, and an old, rebellious flame kindles itself somewhere inside me. Why, I want to say to her, shouldn’t I lie on my mother’s bed, if I want to? What’s it to you anyway?

  I cross my feet, put my hands behind my head. Not going anywhere, lady, not any time soon.

  ‘You want me to help you up?’ she says, this tiny old lady who stands so proprietorially in my mother’s room.

  I laugh. ‘That’s kind of you but a little ambitious, don’t you think?’ I gesture down myself. ‘I’m at least double your weight.’

  She nods. ‘You’re probably right.’

  She adjusts the box of tissues again and, as she does so, it comes to me who she is, what she’s doing in here, addressing me by my family name, why she might not like me lying like this with my shoes on the comforter. She is my father’s wife, the woman he met a few years ago at some social for elderly people – a church thing, was it, or a dominoes game? Something like that. I didn’t fly out for the wedding so have never met her, apart from a brief introduction when I came through the door.

  I swing my legs off the bed and sit upright, my head swimming only slightly. Myrna – is that her name? I’m almost sure it is.

  ‘I guess I should get up,’ I say. ‘How’s the party?’

  Myrna adjusts one of her necklaces, disentangling it from the others. ‘It’s going great,’ she says. ‘Your father sent me to look for you. Everyone was wondering where you’d got to.’

  ‘Oh, sorry about that. I just came in here to … um … make a phone call and … well … the thing is … I needed to … I need to decide whether or not I should …’ I look up at her, this woman who agreed to marry my father, the woman who sleeps in this bed every night now. What could have persuaded her? I wonder. How would anybody think that hitching themselves to a man like my father was the right choice to make in life?

  I once put this very question to my mother, when I was aged about fifteen, and it didn’t go down too well. The memory sits uneasily within me, like a surgical pin in a broken bone. I came into this room (I say ‘came’ when, in fact, I must have crashed through the door, filled with ire at my father’s latest infringement to my liberty – as I saw it) to find her sitting on the side of the bed. She must, I see now, have come in here for a break from the Sturm und Drang going on in the apartment. Funny how you realise that only after you become a parent yourself. Here she was, a book open on her lap. And it was the book that seemed to me, in that moment, the essence of my frustration, its absolute cathexis.

  You see, my mother’s idea of a good time was to spend the evening re-reading The Divine Comedy, whereas my father liked to have several beers and watch the game. That they were woefully mismatched seemed a given, a background presence in our lives; like others of their generation, they just got on with it, circling around each other, making the best of it. But my mother, I remember, often wore an expression of abstraction, of distance, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, exiled to a place none of us could reach.

  What I wanted to know, in that moment, as I stood there in the bedroom in front of her, was how it had come about. What had led her to this terrible mistake, what had tripped her up, what had deceived her into thinking this marriage was a good decision for her?

  ‘Why the hell,’ I remember yelling at her, in the cruelty and myopia of youth, ‘did you marry that guy? What possessed you?’

  She started to admonish me for cursing but couldn’t manage it. Instead she looked at me, right in the eye, and she said my name: ‘Danny.’ And she began a sentence she never finished. I would, to this day, give almost anything to have heard it in its entirety but, then, life is full of unanswered questions, as we all know. ‘Danny,’ she said, ‘the truth is that all this time I have …’

  She didn’t get any further. You know why? Because she started to cry, with such overwhelming immediacy that she couldn’t speak. I had never seen my mother cry before. She was not an emoter, not a crier: she conducted herself always with an enigmatic calm. To see her racked with sobs, tears pouring down her face, was a shock of the most visceral, horrifying kind. I think I said, sorry, I think I said, Mom, I think I said, don’t. But perhaps I said nothing at all.

  Either way, I never made the mistake of asking her again.

  And now I am the one on the bed, looking up at my father’s second wife. In order, I think, to stop myself putting the same question to her as I put to my mother that day, and also to attempt to plaster over that awful memory, I blurt out the following: ‘I’m facing a dilemma, Myrna, and I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Oh?’

  I don’t really know where I am going with this but it seems preferable to be talking about dilemmas, rather than my father’s attractions as a husband. ‘Maybe you can help,’ I say wildly.

  Myrna’s pencilled-on eyebrows shoot up but, to her credit, she attempts a smile. ‘I can try.’

  ‘I … Well, it’s kind of a long story but I – I just found out something about someone I knew a long time ago. And it has come as something of a surprise to me. Now, do I go and find an old friend who will be able to explain a lot more about what happened, who will be able to give me some answers? Or do I go home to my wife and forget the whole damn business?’

  Myrna regards me, her fingers pressed to her lips. Maybe I have misjudged this situation. Maybe Myrna is not a person to whom you can put this kind of question. Maybe I should just shut the hell up, go back to the party, get a plate of food, talk to my relatives and wish my dad a happy birthday, then get myself out of here and go home.

  ‘This thing you found out,’ she says, after a moment, ‘is it to do with another woman?’

  I point my finger at her. ‘Myrna,’ I say, ‘you are an astute thinker. How did you guess?’

  She shrugs. ‘I’ve been married four times, Danny. There’s not much you can teach me about the way men are.’

  ‘I see that,’ I say. ‘Then I have to say that I’m intrigued as to what you make of my dad, the ins and outs of his mind, because no one has ever been able to—’

  ‘Your dad misses you a lot.’

  ‘Er, I really—’

  ‘He’s very proud of you.’

  ‘Myrna, come on, I—’

  ‘I would never presume to comment on your relationship with him – it’s not my place to interfere – but I know it’s a source of great sadness to him that he has so little contact with you and your family.’


  ‘With all due respect, I’m not sure you fully—’

  ‘When,’ she interrupts, ‘are you going to bring that wife of yours to meet us?’

  The idea of me ever bringing Claudette here strikes me as improbable, hilarious. I laugh. She laughs in response. We laugh together. ‘I really can’t say!’ I exclaim, and we laugh some more.

  I stand. I gather up my cell phone. I straighten out the bed.

  ‘Your wife,’ Myrna says behind me, ‘is she a good woman? Does she make you happy?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I say, sliding my phone into my pocket. ‘I managed to pick a good one this time.’

  Myrna reaches up and straightens my collar and tie, a gesture that seems oddly intimate for someone I’ve just met. ‘You know,’ she says, brushing at the lapels of my jacket, ‘your father always says you got all of the brains and none of the sense.’

  ‘He does?’ This interests me a great deal. ‘Well, he may have a point there.’

  Myrna smiles at me as we stand in the room where my mother died. ‘I would go home, Danny, if I were you,’ she says, and she puts her arm through mine, as if we’re about to take part in a country dance, and propels me towards the door. ‘Leave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals? Go home to your wife. But first come and eat. OK?’

  The Kind of Place You’d Have Trouble Getting Out Of