I lay on top of the coverlet, fully dressed, listening first to my father and then to Aunt Baby snoring, their disharmonious, disconsolate wheezings, carried through the gimcrack condo walls as though we all slept together, one and the other of them laboring with each baleful inhalation toward his ever-nearing end, and I, stock-still, eyes open, waiting for dawn, seized in an unmasterable panic at the loss of my so-beloved, apparently unreal life.
PART THREE
1
Sirena never came back to Cambridge.
No, that’s not true: she came back for seventy-two hours, a week later, to pack up her part of the studio. The weird thing is that I have trouble remembering that time, and when I think about her, I always think that she didn’t come back. Perhaps because she was so distracted, almost like a mad person. She’d been visited by the realization that her installation would properly exist only in the right place—what she said to me is “Nora, it’s like we’ve just been pretending. Like I’ve been playing at making my piece. And now there’s almost no time, it’s almost the show, which is like saying it’s almost time to die, and I have to find a way to be ready. Not to be ready is not a possibility. So bang, the playing in Cambridge must stop, and the real life in Paris must begin again. Bang, like this, now.”
She was taking Reza home with her, and there was no point suggesting that this wasn’t a good idea. If you could have seen her, an almost incandescent little body, furious with energy, with the passion for her project: the heart would be done on time, but only because she’d screamed so loudly at the man from the factory, and promised to pay him double—or nothing, if he didn’t deliver. The giant canvas photographs would be ready six days early, but she was still calling the lab every day to be sure they didn’t forget her, forget those girls and women in their enormous, glorious nakedness.
She had men with dollies and packing stuffs and wooden crates for her aspirin flowers and her Astroturf, for the shards of broken mirror and the giant Alice-blue heavenly canopy that I’d sewn for her. None of these things alone seemed to merit the special art-world moving men, who must have cost a fortune, not even the technical things—those video cameras, set up to film our third graders—it was all packed away with her bossily overseeing them, and by the time they were nailing shut the wooden crates it really did seem a more significant assemblage—or perhaps I should say a more significant disassemblage—than I could have anticipated.
Yes, I saw her, and I tried to help—I lugged two bulging garbage bags of Reza’s outgrown clothes to the Goodwill shop at Davis Square, wondering whether some eight-year-old American boy would find himself transformed by the French sandals and Bermuda shorts of the previous fall—but any sense of our intimacy, of our close friendship of a year, was perforce put aside in favor of urgent practicalities. The closeness of our friendship was made, I suppose, into a thing of deeds instead of words, and I should perhaps have been flattered to be left to sweep and clean her end of the studio, flattered to be asked to pick up her dry cleaning and drop off her personal boxes at the UPS Store for mailing … I should have been flattered to be given her half-full bottles of aged balsamic vinegar and French mustard, the remnants of her cotton balls and hair conditioner: that she chose me as their recipient was as much an intimacy, in its way, as had been entrusting her son to my babysitting expertise; and was similarly faintly demeaning, although I can’t quite explain why.
So, yes, I did see her, and in fact saw quite a bit of her, and would have to agree that even in her frenzy to skip town—taking with her my beloved boy, who seemed cheerfully oblivious to the fact that I’d be left behind and was focused chiefly upon the retrieval of his old life, his old friends, his bedroom, even his skateboard—she managed to be affectionate, even apologetic. She said more than once that she’d miss me, and that I’d been an “indispensable” friend. She even gave me her navy blue honeycomb scarf, my favorite, but one of hers, too. It was a gift of love, because she’d miss it.
But my memory is that she didn’t come back because