Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “Oh, but you don’t! You can’t possibly love me more than I love you. All I want is your happiness, I don’t care about my job, I’ll call them and tell them I don’t want it—”

  “Oh no, you can’t do that, it’s your future, our future, I will come with you, of course I will, all I ever wanted was to hear you say that—”

  And our lips drew close together, and all was righted in the world, and in another heartbeat I did hear that key turning in the lock—he must have paused on the landing before the closed door for a long moment, perhaps likewise imagining me running after him, throwing myself into his arms, reading who knew what stilted script of unlikely, corny phrases. His steps thundered up the stairs. The springs of the outside door wheezed.

  He was gone.

  I did not know how much time had passed before I became aware of the deep, all-pervasive cold—at least an hour, probably longer. I was shivering. The radiator was lukewarm under my stiffened fingers, and my legs had gone numb on the icy floor. I felt that I could not move, that my body did not belong to me, and for one mad instant I was possessed by an absolute certainty that somehow, without my noticing, I had died, and was now condemned to spend a meager afterlife trapped in the grimy hell of a narrow, dim bathroom, remembering in an agony of perfect regret the light I had chosen to walk out of, the love I had chosen to lose.

  I forced myself to rise and strip. Stepping into the shower, I pushed the gladiolus down into the tub and turned the water on full-blast, as hot as it would go, until it felt scalding, until the steaming stream ran red with the blood of the flower. I began to scrub myself, scrub myself hard, so hard it burned, and at last tears came, big wracking sobs, and still I kept scrubbing, scrubbing the memory of his touch off my skin, the memory of slow kisses in the dark small room, dancing naked to Bach and Django, the threadbare carpeting coarse under our bare soles, our souls always bared, breakfasts in bed at two in the afternoon, feasts of grapes and vodka at two in the morning, reciting Apollinaire and Gumilev to each other—his fluent French, my native Russian, arriving at clumsy English together—candles guttering in pewter holders picked up at a sidewalk sale, conversations intense with questing after truths, the romance of youthful poverty, a three-legged rat scratching night after night at our basement window, boots stomping past, the trembling web of moonlight on the ceiling, the abandon of nights deep and hard and raw with life, the taste of crisp green apples on his lips, the perfect exclamation point of New Year firecrackers bursting on the street outside just after I said: “Yes, yes, I will.”

  In the room beyond, the telephone started to ring.

  Leaping out of the shower, naked and wet, heart pounding, flinging open the bathroom door, steam pouring out, damp footprints on the grim gray carpet, not caring who peeked into the bare windows, tearing the receiver off the cradle, breathless from the cold—Hello, hello, are you there, is it you? Where are you, give me the address, stay there, don’t go anywhere, don’t go anywhere ever again, I will come right away, I love you, I will always love you, I can’t live without you—

  And as I stood still in the shower, the scalding water running down my back, my breasts, my thighs, the circles of telephone rings widening on the surface of deep winter silence, I watched that other girl through the bathroom door she had left wide open behind her. I watched her flying around the room, pulling on clothes, tossing clothes into her bag, throwing on her coat, running out the door, coming back to pick up the keys she had forgotten, running out again. The girl looked frantic with the relief of happiness—happier, I knew, than I was ever likely to be now—but also somehow less real, diminished. The door closed behind her, just as it had closed behind him.

  In the empty room, the telephone stopped ringing.

  I turned off the water, dried myself, got dressed, and bent to fish the discolored petals of the dead gladiolus out of the tub.

  “When I was seven years old,” I said aloud, “I carried a bouquet of flowers just like this on my first-ever day of school. We were all supposed to give flowers to our teachers, you see, and gladioli were traditional. I felt ridiculously proud. The teacher had all the new children come up to her one by one, hand over the flowers, and announce in front of everybody what they wanted to do when they grew up. All the boys wanted to be cosmonauts, all the girls wanted to be ballet dancers. When it was my turn, I said that I just wanted to live in a castle full of beautiful paintings and old books. The teacher was indignant. She hissed that it was dangerous bourgeois rot and that she would have to speak to my parents. She made an example out of me, and at recess all the other children called me names and laughed. I was so distressed that I became ill and spent the next two weeks in bed with a fever. My mother read me Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but my father read me poems. I fell in love with Blake’s ‘Tiger’ and Gumilev’s ‘Giraffe.’ Remember, I translated it for you—

  “I see that today your gaze is especially sad,

  And your arms, as they hug your knees, seem especially thin.

  Listen: far, far away, at Lake Chad,

  There wanders an exquisite giraffe . . .

  “But ever since then I have detested gladioli.”

  I finished stuffing what remained of it into the trashcan, then meticulously rinsed the dark red pollen off my hands, the last traces of the murder committed. I thought about what had bothered me most, about what I could have told him—all the things about art and fulfillment and not wanting a small life consumed by happiness. The Muses may have been women, I could have complained, but they had still inspired men, had they not? I would have lied, though, about what bothered me most.

  What really bothered me was that I loved him more.

  I worked the smooth golden band off my finger, scraping my hand to blood in the process. I put the ring in the empty soap dish—had he taken the soap, or were we, was I, just out? I thought of the past two years of my life—gone, gone, gone just like that—and, dull with wretchedness, wanted to cry again. So I found a stray sheet of paper in the medicine cabinet, behind some bottles of aspirin and a calcified face cream, pulled a pencil stub out of my pocket—he always laughed at the habit—and, kneeling on the floor, scribbled against the side of the bathtub.

  It was so cold that all my words felt frozen

  and flew away, a brilliant blue cloud.

  One fancy adjective sped toward a close-by chimney,

  attracted—all that warmth, and noise, and smoke—

  a real life, it seemed.

  I watched as it went down, its tail atremble,

  while we in silence sat, and then he asked

  (the smell of imitation phrases musty):

  “What color flowers do you like the most?”

  “None,” I responded, “flowers always scared me”—

  and looked away.

  My fingers bled again;

  my hands had never any luck, it seemed.

  “I do not think I’ll come with you to Paris.”

  “Oh no? A pity.”—And he sipped his coffee,

  and then pulled on those leather gloves of his

  that stranglers would have envied any day,

  and strolled away—politely.

  My night grew warmer then, and my best words

  bounced back to me, my loyal, joyous pets.

  They flocked into my lap, and lapped their milk,

  and were at home at last—

  alive and needed.

  And then I knew that I had prayed for numbness—

  that I had hoped to be enwrapped by winter—had wanted him

  to change my mind, it seemed.

  The paper was damp and curling with steam by the time I was done. I decided to call it “The End.” It was not any good, I saw upon rereading, but one had to start somewhere. And as I sat on the cold bathroom floor, struggling to chisel the poem’s true, muscular shape out of the awkw
ard lump of fatty phrases and petulant sentiments, I already felt—rising slowly from within the muddy misery of loneliness—the hard, bright joy of my newfound solitude.

  Part Three

  The Past

  12. Kitchen

  Apollo’s Arrow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Quickly she changed the subject.

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

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

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

  She found his capable presence relaxing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Apollo’s arrow,” she said quietly.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothi
ng.” She stared out the window. Streetlamps were beginning to glow in the green twilight. Do you not imagine sometimes, when dusk wanders through the house, that here, alongside us, lies another plane, where we lead entirely different lives . . . She felt cold, so cold. “Paul. Do you ever feel that there is more to life than we can see, near us but just out of reach?”

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

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

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

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

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