Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  She had just sung Genie to sleep when she came into the living room that evening, looking forward to the ease of sofa blankets and a cup of herbal tea. A chilly draft leapt past her, ruffling the pages of the magazine in her hands—one of the windows had been cracked open, she saw, and April was trying to dance its way inside. As a rule, spring in their city lasted two or three weeks only—a cool, green breeze that swooped on light wings one clear morning, sifting drifts of petals along downtown sidewalks, turning evenings long and crisp, before departing just as lightly when the inevitable heat set in. Its flight had always saddened her in the past, but now she suddenly wished for the harsh blast of summer; the wild spring smell unsettled her, awakening an odd, teary longing for nameless, distant, unfamiliar things. She shut the window with firmness and pulled the heavy drapes closed, then, sinking into the pillows of the couch, switched on the lamp that cast a circle of seemingly solid, brown-tinted light, rearranged her belly in her lap, and, after a short hesitation, reached for the telephone.

  He answered on the second ring.

  “Paul Caldwell.”

  “I was wondering,” she said, “whether you might be coming home soon.”

  “Honey, you remember, I told you it would be a tough month. The proposal I’m writing—” She stopped listening. “Why, are you not feeling well? Is Eugene giving you trouble?”

  “No, he’s just fallen asleep, and I’m fine. It’s just—” It’s just that my father is in some hospital in Moscow, and my mother keeps telling me it’s nothing, it’s only for routine observation, but I don’t know, the hospital has no direct line to the patients, so I can’t speak to him myself, and there is something about my mother’s voice I don’t like, some tightness to it. I really should go over there, you know, but I can’t leave for Russia right now, I can’t even leave for a café or a library, because I’m seven months pregnant, prescribed rest by my doctor, trapped in the suburbs with a toddler and no car, and my husband hardly ever comes home. Oh, and I don’t like to complain, but, since you ask, I will be thirty this summer, thirty, do you hear me, Lermontov was only twenty-six when he died, and Keats even younger, and Rimbaud had written all his poems by the age of twenty, and by the time Pushkin was my age, Eugene Onegin had all its best chapters, and I—I’ve written nothing for so long—

  Her bitter mood took her by surprise. She closed her eyes briefly. It’s only the spring, she thought, people often feel unmoored in the spring.

  “Honey, the sooner I wrap this up,” he said, “the sooner I’ll be home. I have some news—well, potential news, anyway. This proposal, it may turn out to be important—”

  She stopped listening again. After he hung up, she frowned at the unopened home decorating magazine, then picked up the address book she kept by the telephone, flipped through the pages, punched in Lisa’s number. Remote ringing went on for a while before ending in a recording; she left a message, though without much hope, and leafed through the address book to another letter, and tried a new number. Maria was running late for an audition, and Stacy had a deadline, some paper due for her graduate seminar; she did not pay much attention to their explanations. After two or three more attempts, she was out of friends to bother. There was always Olga, of course, but Olga was invariably busy, and she was loath to interrupt yet another fascinating chapter in the ongoing novel that was Olga’s life: she was either packing for a trip to Venice with her boyfriend of the month or rushing to a holiday reception at her New York law firm—or to a symphony—or a museum . . . Time and time again, as she tried and failed to force her own life into a narrative of any kind, she understood how dreadfully ordinary and drab she must appear next to the brightly plumed companion of her childhood; yet after Olga’s self-assured voice faded away from her mind, she would remind herself that Olga’s kind of life was nothing but bubbles and baubles, transitory pleasures and illusory accomplishments, while hers was a quiet life of substance, wisdom, and reflection—a life close to the earth’s immemorial springs and rich in universal human experience, which would serve as fertile soil for her future art.

  All the same, she did not feel like thinking about Olga right now.

  Setting the telephone down, she picked up a pencil and absently doodled in the address book, filling a page with daffodils and balloons and birds wearing hats, wondering whether Lisa might call her back after all. Abruptly the drapes at one of the windows swelled up, startling her; the brown-colored lair of the room came alive with a fresh, cool smell. She realized she had left another window open, but was too tired to stand up, so she continued moving the pencil, drawing circles and zigzags, breathing in the clean, wonderful, troubling smells of opening buds and rushing waters that wafted past her every now and then; and when she looked down at the page some time later, she discovered verses sneaking their way through the doodles.

  On a round hill she sat

  While the sky turned green

  And the grass turned blue:

  An absentminded evening

  In a black bowler hat,

  With a silver-headed cane,

  Was walking through.

  She was thinking.

  Furtive odors of the world

  Crawled out of wet holes,

  And a frightened white bird

  Would not stop screaming,

  Not even when they freed

  A fine pink balloon

  So it cleaved to the ceiling

  With its silk rope dangling

  As the night swept in—

  The land’s toy moon.

  She was thinking.

  When she melted in the air,

  On the damp blue hill

  There lingered for an hour

  A patch of trodden grass,

  A bicycle wheel,

  And a golden ring—

  Lost, or discarded.

  The baby kicked, and, uneasy, she pushed the address book away, then, reconsidering, reached for it again and tore the offending page out altogether. I’d better not meet anyone worth knowing whose name starts with G, she thought as she slipped the page into the pocket of her robe. She had always despised the notion of a poet as an inspired romantic pouring out his soul in unconscious, effortless trills; true poetry was hard work, hours and hours of mental acrobatics spent juggling sounds and walking the tightropes of meanings. This—this was not poetry at all, just scribbles and vapors, involuntary and unpremeditated like springtime birdsong.

  She righted her belly, settled deeper into the halo of brown, steady light, picked up the telephone, dialed Paul’s number.

  “Paul Caldwell,” said his voice, as always on the second ring.

  “Do you ever leave your desk?” she asked (and one of these days I will really figure out what it is that he does all day long in his office, she promised herself with a familiar pinch of guilt, then, feeling wearied already, set the thought aside). “It’s nine o’clock. I think I’ll be going to sleep very shortly.”

  “I’m almost done,” he said. “Another half an hour. If you stay up, I can—” A beep cut into his voice, then he resurfaced. “. . . and some ice cream . . .”

  There was another beep.

  “That’s Lisa calling me back, I should go now,” she cried. Of all her friends, Lisa alone had children, and complaining to someone who understood never failed to cheer her up. “Hello! Hello?”

  The line crackled and clicked and stayed silent.

  “Lisa? Is that you? Lisa? Hello?”

  The silence had an odd quality to it: not the static void of a dead line but a wordless presence, it seemed to her, not quite of someone breathing, but of someone there nonetheless, so she did not hang up for another few moments, herself silent as well now, listening, listening intently, wondering at the sudden loosening of sadness coiled inside her, and the flush of warmth, of love, that seemed to surge through her entire being, listening still, u
ntil she imagined that she heard her name spoken—not aloud, but beneath the silence somehow, reaching her more as a thought—just her name, spoken once, through the silence, across the silence, in a familiar voice that sounded infinitely kind and had a smile in it.

  “Papa?” she said uncertainly.

  The telephone burst into irritated chirps in her hand; it must have been off the hook all along. She glanced at the clock, did quick math: it would be just past five in the morning in Moscow. Puzzled, she set it down, and waited, but it did not ring again, so she turned off the brown lamp and pulled her legs under the brown blanket, curling into the back of the brown couch. The baby shifted within her, and the echo of her name spread in ever fainter circles through her mind. She felt warm and at peace, comforted in some vast, serene knowledge that she was not alone, that she was loved. She was just dozing off—or perhaps she had fallen asleep already—when the telephone woke her.

  She answered, her heart taking off in her throat.

  On the other end of the line, her mother was crying.

  “Mama?” she said. “Mama, is that you? Mama, speak to me! Mama, what happened?”

  But she already knew.

  20. Bedroom

  Conversation in the Dark at the Age of Thirty

  “Paul, it’s your turn to get up.”

  “Mmm . . .”

  “Do you hear me? She is crying. It’s your turn.”

  “Mmm . . .”

  “Paul? Paul! Oh, never mind . . . The floor is so cold, I need slippers—or maybe a rug, maybe we should buy a rug—”

  “Did you say something, honey?”

  “Yes, half an hour ago. She wanted her bottle.”

  “I slept through it again, did I? Sorry, you know how it is . . . Are you just now getting back into bed? What time is it?”

  “A quarter past four.”

  “Your feet are like ice. All of a sudden I’m wide awake. Hey, I can warm you up if you like—”

  “I need to get some sleep, Paul.”

  “You’re not mad at me, are you? You can nap with the kids during the day, you know. I have to go to work in the morning.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m just exhausted. They don’t nap at the same time. Genie hardly naps at all now. Can we go back to sleep, please?”

  “All right, all right . . . Hey, are you still awake?”

  “I am.”

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking. The other day in the city I saw this girl walking along the street, she was pushing a stroller and she had a greyhound on a leash. She was wearing a little round fur hat, and she looked beautiful. Not as beautiful as you, of course.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe we should get a dog.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t laugh. A dog. You know. A pet? People have pets. The kids would love it.”

  “Honestly, I don’t think it’s such a good idea right now.”

  “Do you ever wonder if you resist any kind of change so much because of all that preconditioning in your Evil Empire childhood?”

  “Look, I’m not saying we can’t ever have a dog. Maybe when the kids get a bit older . . . It would have to be a very small dog, though. We don’t have enough yard for a big dog.”

  “And that’s another thing. This house has gotten too tight for us, I think . . . Hey, are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been silent for a while. Did you hear what I said? I think we should move to a bigger house.”

  “Paul. We just bought this house. I’m only now beginning to get used to it.”

  “So if you aren’t used to it yet, you won’t miss it. I mean, it’s nice enough, but it has only two bedrooms, Emma can’t even have her own room. With her constant crying right next to us, it’s impossible to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “You seem to manage with no trouble.”

  “You know how it is . . . Anyway, about the house—”

  “Paul, this house is fine.”

  “You thought my one-bedroom rental was fine too.”

  “And it was. People don’t just hop about from place to place every couple of years.”

  “Actually, that’s exactly what they do. Did you know that an average American moves eleven or twelve times in his life?”

  “Really? How terrible for the average American! That’s, what, something like sixty rooms the poor fellow has to furnish? The horrors of having to buy sixty rugs!”

  “Probably more like forty—it includes dorm rooms and studios and poky little houses like ours. Which brings me back to my point. This house is too small for us.”

  “Oh Paul, I don’t know. I just hate the idea of moving again. And again. And again.”

  “What if we skip the remaining seven or eight moves, and just move this one time? What if we find ourselves a perfect place that we don’t ever have to leave again? Just think about it—living in your dream house.”

  My dream house . . . Each room a different texture, a different mood, a different poem, and at its heart, a creaking ladder sliding along floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in a timeless oak-paneled room that smells of leather and eternity; and floor-to-ceiling windows that glow nightly with a soft, thrilling life, the laughter of friends and the strands of music and the sonorousness of words imbibed in the still hours before sunrise; and doors that open daily onto the world—the mountains to the north, the jungles to the south, the swaying of tall grasses to the east, and to the west, the islands of the blessed. And you can leave the house at any moment, go out into the unknown with nothing but a half-packed bag swinging lightly in your hand and a half-finished poem in your heart, and when you come back, it will all be waiting for you still, welcoming and unchanged and endlessly surprising, a warm place full of art and love and starry vistas, the volume you were reading just before you left still open to your page by your favorite armchair, your never-grown children safely tucked into their beds, your mother the mermaid in her turret singing songs and braiding her emerald hair, your father the sage eternally at work on his antiquated typewriter behind the closed door, and no one gone, and no one dead, and everything always the same and always different and always joyful. A dream house unfolding at some magical juncture of the past and the future, bypassing the dull, heartbroken, trivial present, born equally out of memory and promise . . .

  “Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

  “No. What do you mean, ‘dream house’?”

  “I mean a house with two stories and a finished basement, and a real backyard. A bedroom for each of the kids and a couple of guest rooms. A master bathroom with a whirlpool bath. Large walk-in closets. A fireplace or two. A kitchen where we can turn around. A terrace where we can grill. Proper space for entertainment. Perhaps an exercise room, a media room, a wine cellar—”

  “I see. You want to dispense with the forty-room requirement all in one fell swoop. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in something out of The Great Gatsby. It’s a moot point, though—you know we can’t afford it anyway. Of course you make good money, but I don’t work, and there are all your student loans, and your car, and Genie will be starting preschool in the fall, and then Emma. And I was hoping to get a car of my own someday too . . . Even this place is a strain. Unless your parents help us, and we’ve decided against asking them, I thought.”

  “Well, but we won’t need my parents’ help. That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember when I turned in that proposal in the spring? Well, last week we actually . . . Hey, honey, are you asleep?”

  “Sorry, I must have dozed off. You were saying?”

  “I’m saying I’m likely to become full partner by the end of March. With the money we’d have we could get the perfect house. We could start looking in the summer, move in time for Christmas. Imagine having a real fire in a fireplace and the kids’ stockings hanging from the mantel. Eugene w
ould love it, he would be four, the ideal age. And you too, you could use some happiness right now. How nice would that be?”

  “That does sound nice . . . unrealistic but nice . . .”

  “It will happen, you’ll see. Hey, your feet are still cold. Let me just—”

  “Mmm . . . That’s nice . . . mmm . . . mmm . . . Oh, Paul . . . mmm . . . That was nice . . . But I really must get some sleep now . . . Oh. Paul? Paul! She is crying again, wake up, it’s really your turn now. Oh, no. Did you hear that? I think Genie’s up too.”

  “Mama? I had a scary dream. There was a monster who ate all my socks. I’m thirsty.”

  “Paul? Paul! Oh, hell . . . Hold on, sweetie, Mama will be right there.”

  My dream house: a place where you can sleep.

  Part Four

  The Present

  21. Ballroom

  Holiday Checklist

  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.