Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “You mean that even at eighteen I was too staid and boring to listen to music or smoke pot. A management consultant as a young man. No novel there, I suppose.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that—I just—”

  “No, you’re right. The shirt was a gift from a girl I dated for a couple of months. I ditched it when we broke up.”

  He put the freshly made drinks on the counter and sat back down.

  She stared at the olive bobbing in her vodka.

  “Paul,” she said. “Where did we go wrong?”

  He was quiet for so long that she thought he was not going to answer.

  “Do you know what I liked about you?” he said then. “Well, I liked everything about you, but you know what I liked best, why I fell in love? I loved how different you were from everyone I knew. I thought it was your foreignness at first, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that, it was something else. The way you would grow still and seem so far away, the look that would steal over your face, like you were seeing something special, even when you did something as trivial as—oh, I don’t know, writing grocery lists. You looked so beautiful then, like you knew something about life that was worth knowing. And I wanted to find out what it was you knew, but I worried it was like one of those fairy tales where the dumb prince spies on his magic princess and she turns into a swan and flies away. So I never pressed for it—I wanted you to tell me. No, that’s not even right—it wasn’t that I believed there was anything to tell, not like a concrete thing or anything. It was just a sense I had that you were different, marked out by something or someone, and that if I married you I would have a life that would be—I’m not sure of the right word. Deeper, I guess. Charmed. Special.”

  “You told me once that everyone was special.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember. Isn’t that just the lie you feed your kids when they suspect, for the first time, that they too are just like everybody else? But who knows. Maybe it’s true, maybe everyone is special—maybe it’s just very few who manage to do something with it. It’s not so easy to measure all the things wasted.”

  “So then you haven’t,” she said softly. “You haven’t had a special life.”

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t. And look, this is a good life. We’ve been richer than most in our children, I’ve been luckier than most with my career, we live in a beautiful place, and you—you even iron my pajamas for me. It’s just that . . . I keep having this feeling that it could have been more if only you’d trusted your dumb prince with your frog skin or your swan wings or—or whatever it was you turned into when you were alone. Because our life often felt—I don’t know—less than real somehow. Like you weren’t all here.”

  She was almost done with her second martini. The bottles were winking and weaving on the mirror shelves. Her head swam. She wanted to cry, to beg his forgiveness—or else pull him toward her and kiss him, kiss him deeply, to dispel the need for stiff, inadequate words. Instead she heard herself asking: “When you were a child, what did you dream of being?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. I wanted to be a chef.”

  “The celebrated chef Paul Caldwell!” she cried.

  “No, I didn’t want to be celebrated. I didn’t have any delusions of grandeur, I just liked the idea of feeding people. My restaurant was going to be different. There would be no menus, and every day I would serve only food that was white, or only dishes that started with the letter p—paellas and pumpkin pies—or only desserts, whatever mood I was in. You would come and you would never know what to expect that day, except that it would be delicious—and a surprise. I wanted to make people happy.”

  “But you don’t ever cook at home,” she said. “Not like you used to.”

  He shrugged. “You seem to manage so well by yourself . . . So what about you?”

  “What about me?” she asked, though her heart was already skipping.

  “What did you dream of being?”

  She had not said certain things—not even to herself—in years, many years. She finished her drink before speaking. He waited patiently.

  “Do you know, my mother once told me that women in my family liked to keep secrets. I guess that’s true. My mother had her share of secrets—I remember odd little things from when I was very small. There was, I think, another man. Maybe. Maybe not. I asked her once, after my father died, but she pretended not to hear. My grandmother had secrets too, as did my great-grandmother before her—there was something about a Grand Duke, or maybe a gypsy, I forget now . . . Anyway. I wanted a secret of my own. I wanted to have something deep and unreachable by anyone else, all to myself—a kernel of light or dark, I could never quite decide which, at the very heart of things. But I think maybe I chose the wrong thing to keep secret. It’s dangerous to make a secret not of something you do but of something you are, because if you go about wearing a mask for years and years, you may end up becoming what you were only pretending to be all that time—you may find that there is no face under the mask.” She knew she was tipsy now, but it felt marvelous to talk, and her words flowed with the easy eloquence of an oft-imagined speech. “And as time passes, you forget you ever even had a secret. You know, like when you hide something in case there is a break-in or to keep it safe from your maid—say, you put your diamond necklace in some pocket of an old coat or some shoe you never wear—and then you completely forget where you put it, and you look for a while, but then you think, well, anyway, it’s in the house somewhere, I’ll find it some other time, except you keep putting off the search until you forget that you ever had it, because honestly, how often do you have an occasion to wear a diamond necklace? So for months you go about without remembering it even once, until a year or two later, out of the blue, in the middle of the night, you wake up from this nightmare you keep having, this dream in which your house slowly eats you, and you sit bolt upright in bed and break into a sweat and scream: Oh God, where the fuck did it go?”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “Are you telling me you lost the necklace I gave you on our twentieth anniversary?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, that. No, no, I’m sure it will turn up someday. Someday soon. I’m sorry, I think I’m a little drunk now. Anyway.” She upended the empty glass into her mouth, licked her lips. “I wanted to be a poet.”

  And then she sat still for several thrilled, inebriated, frightened heartbeats, waiting, waiting for something—but the lightning bolt did not strike, and he did not tumble off the barstool, or mock her for her failure, and the ceiling did not split open to spill out torrents of heavenly light with Apollo riding a white steed and strumming a lyre as he smote her for having squandered her gift.

  “Did you?” asked the young, friendly, curious boy from the library whose smile was so kind and who was so eager to talk to her. “Did you really? How come you never told me? You actually wrote poems?”

  She wanted to laugh and laugh, astonished at how simple it had been, how simple it was. “Yes!” she exclaimed, then sobered up enough to add: “A long time ago.”

  He swung the barstool around to face her. Their knees jammed together.

  “Read some to me.”

  “I can’t,” she protested, giggling. “I don’t remember any, it was decades ago . . . But wait, I remember this—” She looked away, recited all in a rush:

  “Taking a shower in small golden earrings,

  Well after midnight,

  Washing smoke out of my hair.”

  She stopped. He waited, smiling.

  When she did not speak again, he prodded her lightly. “Well, go on.”

  “That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. It was supposed to be a haiku, you see. It was the first poem I ever wrote in English. Well, maybe not the first one ever, just . . . one of the first ones.” She wondered if she was blushing. “I was nineteen. And the funny thing is, I had
no idea what a haiku really was, so of course the syllables turned out all wrong, and when Apollo read it, he was quite amused—”

  “Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “You said when Apollo read it—”

  “Did I? God, I’m not used to drinking this much, it’s hard to keep up with you . . . I meant to say Hamlet. You remember. John. The guy who—”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember.” But his face had darkened, and he appeared every bit his age again—a man of fifty with eyes grown opaque and a voice hardened by decades of success and pressure. He pushed his unfinished drink aside. “I’m sorry. Sorry things have turned out this way. But God knows, I loved you.” He was silent for a moment, looking at her. “Did you ever love me?”

  And all at once her thoughts were a disturbed nest of wasps, darting around with swift menace, all dangerously capable of stinging. She thought of confessing to the shattering loss of her youthful love, and her conviction, born in the solitary darkness of the following months, that she could never again give herself fully if she wished to remain faithful to her art. She thought of telling him of that time, shortly after his mother’s death, when she had seen herself in a new, stark, ugly light and been flooded with remorse, and blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong between them. She thought of asking him about the smell of perfume on his shirts. She thought of asking for another drink.

  She became aware of the silence spreading wider and wider between them.

  “Of course I did,” she said, speaking with something much like desperation—and, just like that, the wasps fell silent, and she knew it to be the absolute truth. “Of course I did. I still do. It’s almost as if—you know how you don’t choose your parents or your children? Well, after twenty-three years of marriage you don’t choose your spouse either.”

  “Such passion,” he said, but he was smiling now, and as he put his hand over hers, she thought: And this too was easy, and it’s not too late, nothing is too late—and for another minute they sat, no longer drinking, in companionable silence, until she brushed his cheek, quickly, almost shyly, and said: “I’m going back upstairs. Join me soon, before I fall asleep.”

  In the shadowy mirror above the bar, among the splintered reflections of tumblers and decanters, the dimly glimpsed middle-aged couple were having a conversation of their own. They talked about Rich’s difficult adolescence—they suspected him of dabbling in drugs, there was trouble at school. He was in favor of harsh disciplinary measures, but she wondered whether they shouldn’t take a family trip instead. They had never done it; of course, for years money had been tight, the house had sucked away everything, but they could try to do it now, could they not? Granted, his inheritance was not quite what he had expected, but wouldn’t it be worth a one-time splurge, it might bring them all closer together. He did not think much of the idea; how quick she was to spend his parents’ money, he said, what little there was of it. Hurriedly, before things veered off in an unpleasant direction, she mentioned Emma’s being less communicative of late, not returning her phone calls with the usual promptness, which she found a bit worrisome. Must she always be so oppressive, he said—the girl was entitled to cut loose in her college years. So they moved on to Eugene’s girlfriend; things were clearly serious between the two. She thought Adriana lovely, but he said that he doubted she’d make their son happy; she might be nothing but an Eastern European gold digger, he said. Conversation lapsed briefly after that, until she thought to mention her mother’s fragile health. She was hoping, she said, that they could persuade her to leave Russia and move in with them at last. He did not reply. She nursed her one drink. He was drinking steadily. His eyes were becoming bloodshot. After a while, he started to talk, staring directly ahead, past the bar, past the bottles, at whatever he saw in the mirror, beyond the mirror. Much of what he said made little sense to her, but he seemed to imply that her life had been easy, that he wished he too could stay home all day long drifting from room to room, playing peekaboo with babies, overseeing the domestics. She could not begin to imagine the stress of providing for a wife and six children, he said, she took things for granted, she took him for granted, she never asked about his work, did she even know what he did, she found him boring, he supposed—but she should take a long, hard look at herself instead. She held on to her silence with the tenacity of a drowning woman clinging to a log, until she could stand it no longer, until she found herself crying out that he—that he should drink less.

  He turned to consider her, his reddened eyes bulging.

  “When did you stop dyeing your hair?” he asked, his tongue slow in his mouth. “You are showing your age.”

  She stood up and walked away, leaving him hunched over the bar—the man who had made her feel safe, the man whom she loved. In the doorway, she paused to look at him. His back was toward her, the broad back of an aging athlete, obscuring the martini glass she knew to be trapped between his hands. He was, she realized, still wearing his suit and tie. They will be wrinkled tomorrow, she thought, I’ll need to drop them off at the dry cleaner’s in the morning, I must remember to defrost the chicken too, I know I should try harder, but everything will be fine in the end, we just need to work on some things.

  As she trudged up the stairs, she wondered which of the two conversations had been real—or had it been both, or had it been neither? She found she could not decide; though she had her suspicions, of course.

  36. Garage

  A Taxonomy of Neglected Possessions

  Things that will be used someday soon (if, that is, one doesn’t forget they are there): spare batteries, extra lightbulbs, extension cords, a shriveled-up pair of gardening gloves, a second hose, a box of candles, a tower of plastic cups. One tends to think of them as reserves maintained against the gray forces of entropy—if something breaks or runs out or gets lost in the house, there is a replacement waiting in the wings; yet as time passes and the batteries and cords turn dusty and drab, becoming an ingrown part of the garage shelves and corners, they may end up contributing to the encroachment of entropy rather than holding it at bay. But not if they get used first, of course.

  Things that don’t appear to be of much use in the foreseeable future but may come in handy next year, or at some point thereafter: three and a half cans of Paris Rain paint (in case they repainted the since repainted guest bedroom in the old color), converter plugs (in case they decided to take that trip overseas after all), portable heaters (in case the furnace malfunctioned) and fans (in case the air-conditioning broke down), a guide to the restaurants of Venice (see above), a giant fish tank, a yoga mat, a ski mask, a pair of hiking boots, a set of golf clubs, and on, and on. True, they do take up space, but one can’t just throw perfectly good things away. And one never knows.

  Things that are broken but may be fixed someday: an old vacuum cleaner, four or five expired computers, two maimed bicycles, a box full of cameras and phones, a microscope, a flashlight, a nineteenth-century porcelain cup with its handle knocked off and preserved in two separate pieces.

  Things that are ontological mysteries: nuts that fit unknown bolts, keys that open no doors, an unlabeled homemade videotape that gets stuck every time one tries to play it. Throwing them away would be tantamount to admitting that one no longer expects anything unexpected to happen in life. Though that may be a good thing.

  Things that will be discarded in due time, but not just yet: a baby monitor, a toddler’s bib, a child’s bike helmet, a child’s pair of goggles, a child’s telescope, a hedgehog that looks like a bear, its nose spilling plush of a muddy brown color, once beloved by a boy who got married last March; a saltshaker in the shape of the Taj Mahal; an empty plastic case that once housed magnetic poetry tiles. On second thought, the last item is best tossed out without further delay. Even clutter has its limits.

  Things that are the only remains of one’s childhood home (sold last year, gone decades before that),
brought over by one’s mother, not yet sorted: a shoebox filled with papers, and a duffel bag containing a handful of pipes wrapped in a thick gray-and-white sweater. These are, for the moment, relegated to the darkest corner of the garage, behind a battalion of cleaning supplies. There is no need to rush, there will be time enough to decide where to put them later—once one is able to look at them properly, without breaking into tears at the sight of the familiar handwriting, at the ghostly smell of tobacco, reaching one from another country, another century, another life.

  37. Deck

  Forty

  There were sixteen large flowerpots on the covered deck, positioned at regular intervals along the wall, and a separate tray with cooking herbs on the table. They had been her mother’s pet project: upon moving in with them two years before, she had declared their house too much like a museum, no greenery anywhere, and had set out to remedy the situation by assiduous gardening. Unwilling to brave the steep stairs down to the yard, she had spent most of her days on the deck, pruning and clipping and talking to herself.

  Nearly three full weeks after her mother’s death, she remembered that she had neglected to water the plants, and came out to look at them. Most were, indeed, beginning to turn brown, especially the ones at the deck’s western edge, inundated as they were for hours with the afternoon sun. The farthest on the right was the only one that appeared to be healthy; it had even sprouted a disturbingly glossy, plastic-like red growth—could it be a flower?—amidst the swollen protuberances of its leaves. But the third from the left seemed dead, all black and brittle, and a few others fared almost as poorly. She stared at them for a long blank minute, then dragged the hose over and flooded each pot with water. She had no idea what any of them were, or how much moisture they needed.

  When she returned to check on them some hours later, evening had already fallen. Here and there water was still standing in the pots, glistening with the pink of the sunset. The plants looked worse than before—dead with a final kind of deadness. She dropped into the nearest chair and began to cry.