“If we are not only to analyze concepts in their most rigorous and internalized manner,” Mike continued, “but also to question from the outside what these concepts hide as repression or dissimulation, then the presence of a more diverse faculty can only be an advantage.”
Good for you, I thought. Standards weren’t the issue. Who didn’t want rigor? The question was, whose standards?
Mike smiled at Jerry. They were squash partners, pals. It was a love letter written in the language of Derrida.
A beam of late-afternoon sun crossed the room.
The queue moved forward.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Alex began with rhetorical flourish, adjusting his small wire-rimmed glasses, “but if what the students are saying is that we should now hire on the basis of skin color, then it seems to me—”
Jerry broke in. “What they’re saying is that’s exactly what we’re doing, hiring on the basis of skin color. White.”
Alex shot back, “The only criteria for hiring should be excellence. Otherwise, we’re talking about racism.”
“That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” Jerry countered.
“Look around.”
Here we go again, I thought. Last time this happened, Alex walked out.
Silently the faculty divided. If this were gym class, they would give out pinnies, or play shirts and skins.
“Please,” the dean said, his expression sour. The purpose of the queue was to avoid conflict. Let a hundred flowers bloom, the meeting would end, the flowers would wither, people were busy, nothing would happen.
Jerry, undeterred, let out his sail. “There’s more at stake here than noble gestures, letting in those who have been excluded. The question is, what have we lost, what has been lost to architecture and design by virtue of this exclusion, and what can we do to include it now? What is it that we are not seeing?”
Alex, tight-lipped, receded into his stony castle of excellence.
“Roya,” the dean said. She put down her pen.
And now for something completely different.
I settled back to watch.
“In Farsi, we have a saying, ‘Hameen yek karam moondeh.’ It means, that’s the last thing I need to do. I observe you already work too much.”
General laughter, a jangle of bracelets, Roya adjusting the collar of her blouse, an infusion of fuchsia in the otherwise gray room.
“But as a Jewish woman,” she continued, faces suddenly on guard, “who has lived in an Islamic regime that does not value diversity, even though historically there is a strain of tolerance running through Persian culture, I have seen what can happen when one group thinks they possess the truth or that God is on their side. At least some of these students may be trying to communicate what is for them a painful experience, the feeling of being disappeared. They have come here to learn and yet they discover that what they know from experience has no significance. The question for us is, what do we want to teach them, not only about architecture but also about how to live in this world?”
A stir in the room. Some people looked thoughtful, others began to gather their papers.
The dean looked at his watch.
“I too am a visitor here,” Sanji began, his voice melodic, his glasses reflecting the light. He was from New Delhi, an architect with major commissions. “There is a saying my daughter told me from one of the songs she listens to on the radio: ‘You don’t know what you don’t know.’ I will not tell you in what context she said this”—a ripple of laughter—“but maybe you will guess it was not about architecture.
“But this is not my point. My point is that if what your students are calling for is to explore, as the painter Anselm Kiefer does, the possibilities of the frame, then you have done a very good job of educating them.” He smiled broadly.
I wasn’t sure this was what the students had in mind, but he had cast them in the best possible light. A surge of warmth for my colleagues, the ray of intelligence in this dour meeting like sunlight in a Dutch landscape painting.
It was four o’clock.
Predictably, the dean suggested we form a committee to meet with the students and take up the matter.
Jerry, Mike, and Roya volunteered.
The dean asked Alex and Sanji to join them.
I hesitated a moment, then raised my hand, a flicker of hope trumping my aversion to taking on more work.
Roya had office hours starting at four. I headed for the river, propelled by a lightness I had not anticipated. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Greta would love that. The last session with her had left me unsettled. Nothing might come of the dean’s newly formed committee, but what happens when two women decide to explore the possibility of changing the frame? As Greta and I had agreed to do.
The headlights brightened as the light fell, the stream of rush-hour traffic heading home. I realized that, like Roya, I was a foreigner here, although no longer a visitor. The deconstructionists would say, Explore the between. The November sky streaked pink and red. I could turn and walk in the opposite direction, toward rather than away from the sunset. I could call Roya from the pay phone at the gas station and invite her for supper. I could pick up prosciutto from the Italian store on Prospect Street and a melon from Bread & Circus. I had been remiss about swimming, had missed our coffees. Yet something impelled me to keep walking in the direction I was going. Into the darkness. I would call Roya when I got home. I would swim with her in the morning and spend the evening alone, exploring the between.
“Last night I dreamed I was walking on a narrow bridge over a deep ravine. Midway, the railings stopped. I turned, but the bridge behind me had disappeared. In its place was an old Roman aqueduct, the stone surface wide like the aqueduct at Avignon, but still there was nothing to keep one from falling over the edge. The height was dizzying. Both ways were dangerous. I took a step forward on the thin bridge. Now it was impossible to turn back. I panicked, and then I woke up.”
Greta sat still in her chair.
“My associations,” I continued, grateful for the enclosure of the black leather chair, “are to my paper, the one I have to write. The MAK, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, has a new director. They’re planning to restore the old buildings, he has a bold new agenda. The conference I’m invited to speak at is the beginning. There are no guidelines.”
I stopped, the room frozen in time.
“The feeling of panic was that I couldn’t turn and go back because the bridge was too narrow, and I couldn’t go forward because if there had been the slightest wind, or if I made a misstep and lost my balance, I would fall to my death.” The terror of the dream washed over me. It was how I felt about the paper, frozen for fear of making a misstep, my project too narrow for a conference of this magnitude. Or was that it? A painter friend said that with each new project, you had to be prepared to walk off the edge.
I looked at Greta, saw the faintest etching of a smile on her face.
“I’m wondering about the aqueduct,” she said. “They were built to carry water long distances, but they also were used to divert water.”
“So going back would be a diversion?”
“You have said what we do here was a Roman therapy, you objected to the setup, the structure. I thought you had a point. I understand about the paper, but I wonder if it is something of a diversion from what the dream is telling us.”
She crossed her legs, adjusting her skirt.
“Which is?”
I glanced at the spider plant on the desk beside me. It had produced a new crop of babies, hanging over the edge, out of the light.
“If you hung that plant from the window frame,” I said, “its offspring would get more light.”
Greta laughed, and for a moment we were two women in a room.
“Do you want me to say it?” she said, her voice playful.
I crossed my legs and eyed my low boot, the heel scuffed, the brown leather cracked and faded. In the window of the Italian shop on JFK Str
eet, there was a pair of boots I coveted. A persimmon suede that would be perfect with my black slacks for the conference.
“That we’ve taken away the railings here,” she said quietly.
The we grated. It was I who had said there was a problem with the structure, with the ending, and then she—My thoughts jolted. She had met me halfway.
Dizziness swept over me, a swell of emotion. The skin on my forehead tingled and then thickened.
“What’s happening?” Greta asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, swallowing hard. Inexplicably, I began sobbing.
She waited until my sobs subsided. “Let’s just say,” she said, her voice soft, caressing, “that whatever this is about, it’s connected to very strong feelings.”
I looked at her blindly.
It was time to stop.
Afterward, the session replayed in my mind. The dream, the bridge, Greta coming forward, meeting me halfway. More than that, given her training. We’ve taken away the railings here, she had said. The sudden vertigo and then were sobbing. As if something were being purged from my body.
Anna and Tony were nesting, surrounded by catalogues on the sofa. Their winter season had begun. I found myself watching Anna carefully, looking for the first signs of pregnancy, the passing on a glass of wine. So far no sign. Greta had asked how I felt about the possibility of my sister having a baby. The question set my teeth on edge. What I would feel, I said, if she got pregnant, is what anyone would feel in my situation: happy for my sister, and then—I eyed Greta steadily—jealous. It was the word she was waiting for. I was tired of the game.
I told Anna what had happened, how the “problem of the ending” had been suspended, upended, who knew. It wasn’t that therapy would continue endlessly, it was about the future of the relationship.
In return, Anna told me a story. She had gone to a conference, a meeting of psychoanalysts. It had been held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. A fur-and-jewel occasion, she said, she whose sympathy was with the minks and the seals. The room was full, and the analyst presenting was young and recently trained, known for her work with difficult patients. The case she was presenting was of a young man who had fallen in love with her, his therapist. He wanted to know if they could become lovers once the therapy ended. “And I can’t remember her reasoning,” Anna said. “I mean, how she reasoned it out in terms of his issues, but her response struck me as brilliant. What she had said to him stunned the whole audience. She had refused to close off the possibility.”
“Did she really think of sleeping with him?” I asked.
“You’re missing the point, which was not to foreclose anything, but I don’t think she did.”
“Then it wasn’t an honest move on her part.”
Anna looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re right, and it was a ruse, which would give it a sinister cast. Or maybe she meant you can never really know in the present what may happen in the future, which makes it an existential statement.”
We were in my room, sitting on my bed. I was brushing my hair. Anna picked up the barrette, opening and closing the clasp.
“But that’s not the issue with Greta,” I said.
“What?”
“Sleeping with her.”
“What would you say the issue was?”
“It’s about love, the meaning of love. When it’s real and when it’s not.”
I took the barrette, gathered up my hair, and clasped it at the top of my head.
“It’s daring,” she said.
“What?”
“To do what you’re doing.”
“You think so?” I wondered how she felt about it.
A light came into her eyes. “You know,” she said, leaning back on her elbows, “what I’m feeling now is that when all these other people entered our lives—Greta, Tony, and before that, the whole thing with Andreas—it was hard sometimes, there were times when we weren’t really talking to each other, I felt myself moving away but that’s not how I feel now.”
“Me too,” I said.
She smiled and put her arms around her knees. “I like it this way,” she said, “I mean us, and also your hair.”
I went and looked in the mirror, my face completely exposed.
I knew I couldn’t sit in the chair. A rawness had come over me as I entered the room. There was another chair, catty-cornered from Greta, wooden arms, upholstered seat. I opted for the couch, to Greta’s left against the wall, and settled into the brown velvet.
“So?” Greta said.
“So,” I said.
I had always avoided the couch, averting my eyes, but it now seemed more inviting than frightening. I lay back and pulled the green chenille throw over me. The room looked different from this angle, the faint stuccoing of the walls more pronounced, the lamp reflecting on the ceiling, a circle of light and shadows, the window directly in my line of vision.
“Kyra, darling,” my mother would say, “take a little rest.” I had resisted her then.
I turned toward Greta. She was staring straight ahead, her face in profile looking older. Was this how she looked to the members of her trio or quartet?
I shifted the pillows and lay down fully. My thoughts began to drift. There was an advantage in not seeing her, in not being looked at. Roya had said it was painful to be disappeared. I knew what she meant. Still, this was different. I pulled the throw over my head, disappearing like a child. Where’s Kyra?
Greta said nothing.
The silence took on a buoyancy, I floated on its surface, the ceiling my sky.
“I’m thinking about that dream,” I said, my voice coming from a distance I could not measure. “About the bridge and the railings.”
I paused.
“Two years ago, I gave a talk at Cornell. A friend I had known at university was on the faculty and he had invited me up to Ithaca. There was a job opening in urban design. He thought it would be perfect for me or I would be perfect for it, one way or the other, or maybe both, but to Anna, Ithaca was unthinkable. I decided to go, just to see. Anna said that if I wanted to go to Ithaca, why not leave the country and go to the real thing. I said it was a thought. At the time I was feeling very unsettled. It was before Andreas, before the island project got under way.
“Following the Cornell talk, there were the usual drinks and dinner with members of the faculty. The wine was good and we drank a lot. Afterward, Gabriel, my friend, suggested that we go for a walk to clear our heads. It was November, this time of the year. I had been nervous about the talk, as I am now about the Vienna paper, but it went well, and I remember feeling relieved and lighthearted. Gabriel wanted to show me the campus, high on the hill overlooking the lake, suspension bridges crossing the gorges, like in the dream. There was a harvest moon, pulsating on the horizon. We stood in the middle of one of the bridges, talking about the moon illusion, how it looks larger on the horizon than at the zenith, when he turned to me and said, ‘You know, Kyra, I’ve always been a little in love with you, but at university you were with Simon. And now I’m with Karen.’ I remember feeling sad for his wife, that he would even say this to me, whether or not it was true. But he was an attractive man and I felt a stirring inside me. There had always been something between us. And then he said, ‘You know I don’t do this,’ and I said, ‘I can’t.’”
I stared at the ceiling. Andreas had said, I don’t do this, but he wasn’t married, at least not anymore, so it was more an internal resistance, like keeping a vow. Greta was married, she had made a vow. Had she also, like a nun, taken a vow in becoming a psychoanalyst: a vow of silence, a vow of chastity, a vow of obedience. Yet she was now bending the rules, leaving the ending up in the air.
“Where are you?” I asked into the silence.
“I’m here,” she said, her standard reply.
“I mean, where are you really?”
A stir in the air.
“What is it you want to know?” she asked.
I picked at a cuticle. The heat was on,
winter an impossible season for hands. I thought of Roya, her implausibly long nails. Saying maybe it’s love that’s revolutionary.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
The question naked in this spare room.
“I’ve told you. You can’t do this work without love.”
“Why not say what you are feeling?”
My thumb rubbed the strand of cuticle. I bit it off, my finger started to bleed.
“What do you need me to say?” she said, her voice clipped.
“I need you to be real with me.”
I sat up on the couch to face her, crossing my legs in front of me.
Greta turned toward me, a flash of anger, in her eyes a flicker of fear.
Was she a little in love with me, she who had seemed so married, so settled in her life, with her bathrobed husband in the kitchen, reading the paper, drinking his coffee.
Did I feel desire for her? Could I be with a woman, I wondered.
She had said that in my work I had always taken risks, moved forward in the face of fear. I had done this with Andreas as well, but then I had panicked, which was why I was here. What risks had she taken or not taken? What did she fear?
I eyed her steadily, holding her gaze.
“What does it mean to you to suspend the ending?” I said. “I need to know from you now whether or not you mean it, or whether this is a ruse, a technique.”
“Where is this question coming from?”
She picked up her pencil.
I could see it, she would write up the case, turn it into a presentation. The patient, she would say—or she could call me K., like a character in a Kafka novel—had a problem with endings. The end of the hour was always difficult for K., and as the therapy proceeded, its ending became a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. She had a history of relationships that had ended traumatically. It was inevitable that this issue would come up with me. She began therapy when she cut herself after her lover left her. She said she had to know what was real. The same question came up between us. She wanted to know if this was real.
Kyra Page 17