Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  And every single one of these feelings is a cliché, she thought as she stood in the hallway, staring and staring at the doorknob. In our youth we believe ourselves so unique and our stories so original, yet we are all stuck running like hamsters on the wheel of time, all acting in the same play, and the roles of the play stay the same, only the actors switch places: one minute you are an ingénue charming an affable heir—the next, a matron used for comic relief in a scene of which you are no longer the protagonist. Emma Caldwell must have known it, just as this lovely girl will know it in her own Mrs. Caldwell moment two or three decades from now.

  And yet maturity offered other consolations, so much so that Mrs. Caldwell supposed she would choose not to relive her twenties if presented with the option. Among the varied advantages of middle age, you knew enough to accept being ordinary and to find much comfort in it, just as you knew enough to recognize the clichés for what they were and be able to laugh at them. For of course the thing was funny, too funny. She waited another minute, twisting and retwisting her string of pearls. All was silent within the room now, but she sensed that the girl was standing still on the other side of the door, straining to hear the sound of retreating footsteps. Poor thing, she must be mortified, thought Mrs. Caldwell; but she too will learn to take life lightly, given time.

  With a slight sigh, she turned and walked down the hall, making sure to stomp, debating whether to find Eugene and allude to the incident. But she suspected that the girl would keep quiet about it, just as she herself had kept quiet about her mishap nearly a quarter of a century before; and in any case, by the time she reached her bedroom she had already set her heart on a long, lazy soak with an aromatic candle and a glass of red wine, and so let the matter rest.

  Family life was fraught with minor embarrassments, and some things were better forgotten.

  34. Living Room

  The Antique Mirror

  The Steinway had made her anxious—would the angles of the room accommodate it, she had wondered on more than one sleepless night—but when the movers stepped aside, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Almost done, ma’am,” said the man with the chipped front tooth. “Are you sure you don’t need help unpacking the boxes? We can do it in five minutes flat and haul away all the trash for you.”

  “No, no,” she said, “just set them down here, I’ll go through them myself.”

  She was rather looking forward to unearthing all the treasures from their padded cocoons. Again she glanced at her watch, impatient for the men to leave; she had only two hours remaining until the first of the school buses returned. The electrician, she saw, had just finished with the last sconce. It would all be ready by the time Paul came home.

  “Well, all right, then,” said the man with the tooth. “If everything is to your satisfaction, sign on the line here, please . . . Ah now, thank you, ma’am, your kindness is much appreciated.”

  Alone at last, she slit the boxes open, taking a quick inventory—silver here, china there, lampshades separate from the lamps, everything as it should be. She set to work. As she handled the precious objects, inspecting them one by one with subdued flurries of something approaching delight, her thoughts drifted and she found herself wondering about time. Like a train taking off from a station, which, after an initial leisurely stretch, starts gathering speed, time now passed more and more quickly, and the landscapes outside the windows flickered with increasing vagueness until merging at last into an indistinct blur, perceived in the most general of terms: a city, a field, a forest—school projects, home projects, the dizzying succession of holidays and birthdays, the smooth running of the household, the middle span of middle age—until life just flew by, reduced to unmemorable and unremembered, albeit pleasant, routine brightened by discrete flashes of rare events. (And “brightened” was really the wrong word, Mrs. Caldwell reproved herself as she discarded the last empty box; for at her age the events themselves had become predictable and rather sad, consisting mainly of departures: the younger generation setting off toward life, the older generation leaving in the opposite direction, for regions unknown, the middle generation seeing off both, struggling to stay in place amidst the flux.) Did it not seem like mere months since they had shared that happy Thanksgiving meal with Paul’s mother? Yet here they were, five years later, and Emma was gone, and the Caldwells’ stately ancestral furniture had just been installed in her own living room.

  The living room was her concession to Paul’s grief. The Caldwells’ New England house had been sold and most of its contents auctioned off, but his parents’ living room held a special place in Paul’s childhood memories, and he had wished to preserve it in its entirety, down to every candlestick on every table, every cushion on every chair, every photograph on every console, all of which had thus been carefully dismantled, boxed up, and dispatched to them in a behemoth of a truck. Some weeks earlier, in preparation for its eventual arrival, Mrs. Caldwell had stripped her own meticulously assembled living room bare. She had been sad to see her lamps and pictures dispersed and swallowed up by random corners of the house, and her adored green sofa carted off altogether; but, sensitive to Paul’s feelings, she raised no objections, of course, despite being quite upset every time she chanced to glimpse the dismaying eyesore of a void gouged out at the heart of her beautiful home.

  Yet now, as she stood surveying the handsome new layout of the room, she had to admit that the overall effect was rather pleasing. The dark mahogany antiques lent an air of blue-blood distinction. She found herself, to her surprise, loving the faded Aubusson rug, the richly tasseled French draperies, the magnificent collection of Cecilia Caldwell’s Meissen in the ceiling-high buffet; and the enormous Venetian mirror in its eighteenth-century frame made her feel almost giddy. She paused before it now, smiling at her well-coiffed, recently blond reflection—and was startled to see a tall, dusky shape rise behind her. For the duration of one wild heartbeat, she imagined that the mirror held an olive-skinned gypsy in swirls of fiery skirts, but when she swung around, the vision resolved into Mrs. Simmons in her somber widow’s clothes, standing just past the threshold, her old-fashioned black handbag in the crook of her arm.

  “I didn’t hear you come in!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with a flustered laugh. She had forgotten that it was a Thursday, had thought herself alone in the house. “You move like a cat. Are you on your way out?”

  Paying no heed to Mrs. Caldwell’s question, the housekeeper in turn studied the room. “It looks different,” she said at last, her austere, thin-lipped, long-nosed face without expression. “The furniture is fancier. And there is more of it.”

  “This is really a memorial to Paul’s parents,” said Mrs. Caldwell.

  Her heart still had not subsided all the way.

  Keeping firm hold on her bag, Mrs. Simmons walked over to a painting on the far wall, touched the top edge of its gilded frame, peered at her darkened finger.

  “Lots of new knickknacks to dust,” she said.

  Mrs. Caldwell noted disapproval in her housekeeper’s voice. On Mondays and Thursdays, ten to two, it would indeed fall to Mrs. Simmons to do the dusting, and Mrs. Caldwell felt a light itching of guilt, which, however, she was able to dismiss with relative ease: Mrs. Simmons received more than adequate wages.

  “I’m certain it can be managed,” she said, a little dryly.

  Without looking at her, Mrs. Simmons moved about the room, prodding here, poking there. “Do you ever wonder why it is so hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven?” she suddenly said. Mrs. Caldwell stared at her. “It’s because the rich have so little time. Time, you know, is what you give up to own all the things you own. Because every new thing you let into your life eats a tiny bit of your life away. The rugs need cleaning, the chairs upholstering, the silver polishing, the china washing—and even if you do none of it yourself, maids and handymen need supervising and keeping in line.”

  “I be
lieve I’ve always treated you with fairness,” Mrs. Caldwell said stiffly. She had never heard Mrs. Simmons offer any opinions on anything other than household matters, or say more than a few words at a time, and she was beginning to feel quite appalled.

  Mrs. Simmons did not appear to have heard her. “So the more things you have,” she continued, and her ordinarily imperceptible accent came and went, making some of her words sound harsher, more foreign, “the faster your time runs through your fingers. In case you were ever wondering why that was. And then you have no time left to think about things that are distant and hard. Like God. Or death. Or poetry.” Mrs. Caldwell looked at her sharply, but the old woman seemed busy inspecting the sconces. “Well, but it must be worth it to you, or things would be different.”

  Completing the circle of the room, she stopped in front of the mirror.

  “What—what do you mean by that, Mrs. Simmons?” Mrs. Caldwell managed.

  “Please, I’m no more Mrs. Simmons than you are Mrs. Caldwell,” the housekeeper said with growing irritation. “And you know perfectly well what I mean.”

  For a moment their eyes met within the silvery pool of the priceless mirror. In spite of the old woman’s ill-tempered tone, her direct black gaze held no strife, only sadness and, underneath, some vast, vast disappointment. Mrs. Caldwell saw what the old woman was seeing—a plump, beautifully dressed forty-eight-year-old blonde with large pearls in her ears; the blonde’s painted mouth appeared to be working in soundless outrage, chewing, chewing on itself . . .

  Mrs. Caldwell’s eyes thrashed and leapt away, like two slippery fish twisting free of their hooks and falling back into the rippled depths.

  The old woman shrugged and, turning away, began to rummage through her monstrous black bag. “I’ve watched you for years and years, you know. And every day I kept expecting you to do something different. Just waiting for you to wake up one day and say: Now. Today. But you didn’t, and you haven’t, and you won’t. I must have misread your fortune, happens to the best of us—”

  Mrs. Caldwell drew herself tall. Even at full height, she was a good head shorter than the old woman. “You forget yourself,” she said.

  “No, I fear it’s you who forgot yourself,” said Mrs. Simmons, not glancing up from her bag. “Well, tell the children I love them. Especially Celia. She’s a bright little spirit, I’ll miss her. I’ll miss them all. Now, where in the world did I put them—”

  “Are you giving notice, Mrs. Simmons?”

  “Yes, I believe I am, Mrs. Caldwell . . . Ah, there they are. I will leave them right here for you.”

  Mrs. Caldwell lunged to intercept the keys before they scratched the surface of the seventeenth-century table, and caught herself in mid-motion, and drew back, biting her lip. The old woman was looking straight at her, and her face was severe, and her eyes young and knowing. Mrs. Caldwell grew hot inside.

  “I will send you your monthlong severance by mail,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” said Mrs. Simmons whose name was not Mrs. Simmons.

  Mrs. Caldwell heard the front door open and close, but she did not move to see the housekeeper off. She was shaking. There had been an instant when their eyes had met within the mirror and she had felt seen—and felt, too, that in that one instant she had seen herself, seen herself with an absolute, pitiless clarity, and had found herself lacking, and had shrunk back from the fullness of her knowledge.

  She turned to the mirror.

  Had her longing for art and beauty somehow, without her noticing, become a longing for Aubusson rugs and Venetian mirrors? Or had it been that all along? Had her first-grade teacher been right after all—had her childhood yearning for a fairy-tale palace been nothing but bourgeois rot? Was that why she had chosen to trade her home, her language, her aging parents, for the land of walk-in closets and golden faucets? Was that why she had left the man she had left, and married the man she had married? And later, after her marriage had become what it became, was that why she had not let her husband go, binding him tighter to herself with yet another child?

  Horrified, she looked at the blonde in the mirror.

  When Paul returned from work that night, the house lay swollen with winter darkness, torpid and still.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  He stopped on the threshold of the unlit living room, peered into the dimness, saw her sitting on the shadowy couch against the shadowy wall in the cavern of shadows.

  “What are you doing in the dark?” he asked, taking off his coat.

  “Waiting for you. It’s all finished. Turn on the light, go ahead—it will make you less sad.”

  He flipped the switch, and saw the room, and gasped.

  “Just like home,” he said; but he did not look less sad. “The piano is a perfect fit. And the buffet. And the mirror—oh no! Was the crack always there, or did the movers damage it?”

  “It was always there,” she said, standing to straighten the photographs of sepia-tinted children on the side table. “But don’t worry, I’ve spoken to the restorers already. They have some period glass they can use to replace it. They are coming to do the measurements on Monday.”

  As she pushed the photographs about, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, she suddenly saw, in a serious, wide-eyed, beautiful face of one of the boys, the face of the hurt man before her. She stared at it for a long moment, careful to keep her bandaged hand out of sight.

  35. Bar

  Conversations Between Friends and Strangers

  She was barefoot when she came down, stepping softly on the wall-to-wall carpet, and he did not hear her approach. He was sitting hunched over at the bar, cradling a half-empty martini; between the scoops of his big, still hands, the glass looked fragile and small, like a cup from a child’s toy set. She stopped, feeling awkward, as if she were spying on something not meant for her eyes, invading a home not her own, and waited for him to notice her. When he did not stir, she cleared her throat.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, standing up. “How long have you been there?”

  In the blurred erosion of his voice, in the loose way he moved the bulk of his body, she could see that the martini before him was not his first. She wondered if she should not invent some trivial reason for entering his domain—a question to ask, a child’s activity to confirm—then quickly retreat to her upstairs quarters; but he had already walked behind the bar and was reaching for the shaker.

  “Can I make you a drink?”

  She did not want a drink—she drank almost nothing these days.

  “Please,” she said, tightening the belt of her robe as she climbed onto the leather perch of the stool next to his. She watched him go through the motions made fluid by hundreds, by thousands, of repetitions—watched his large hands deftly manipulate ice and crystal, watched the back of his head, his hair still abundant and dark, no trace of gray, watched his face as it appeared and disappeared in the mirror that ran behind the bar, sliced into slivers by the reflections of the bottles. He would turn fifty at the end of the month. His hair was that of a younger man, his face that of an older.

  “So,” he said, sliding the martini over to her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  She wanted to say: I felt lonely tonight. It’s different in the house these days—only four kids left, and the boys are seventeen and out so much, and Celia always has her nose in a book, and our baby—our baby is nine and so independent, sometimes it feels like she doesn’t need me at all. Of course, my days are still brimming over, so many things to take care of, always—but every night now, there is this odd sort of emptiness that can’t be filled, a stretch of emptiness before me, and you never even come upstairs until after I’m asleep. I just wanted to see you. To talk to you. The way we used to talk.

  “I just—I felt like having a drink,” she said.

  “You’ve come to the right
place,” he replied without smiling.

  They sat in silence for a while, drinking side by side. It was nearing midnight, she knew, but there was no clock in the bar. The lamps above the counter were turned down low, the shelves with the bottles mirrored, the wall behind the shelves mirrored as well; she kept catching oblique glimpses of the two of them at alluring or unflattering angles, reflections of reflections—a profile, a double chin, a slanted glance, a green bottle, a blue bottle, a bottle in the shape of a skull, a bottle in the shape of a bull, the dull glint of a wedding band on a hand raising a glass. An odd sensation took hold of her and grew, that of sitting in a real bar next to a real stranger; and as she neared the bottom of her drink, it stopped being a sad feeling and became one of possibility instead. She studied him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she would still find him attractive if she met him now—and then he turned to her, and immediately the sensation of strangeness dissipated, and she saw the good-natured giant of a boy who had made her feel safe all those years ago.

  “Oh, by the way, I’ve always meant to ask you,” she said, as if continuing a conversation. He rose to make the next round of drinks. “The first time we met—well, not met, technically, but the first time we spoke—”

  “The time in the library when you made me feel like a complete idiot.”

  “Well. You wore a Grateful Dead shirt, remember? It puzzled me later, because you never seemed the type—I mean—”