it was never again as it had been; and the more painful because I hadn’t expected things to unravel so fast. I should have known that life is like that, because my mother’s death was like that, and I’d been through it. For so long we knew my mother would eventually die from her illness, and we forestalled believing it, successfully, often, but strangely, the more successfully the nearer it got, because we’d become so intent upon surviving, and so equipped to survive, each new crisis. And until the last fortnight we always thought there’d be more time; and in truth even in the last forty-eight hours we thought it would go on, maybe a week, and so were taken aback—literally caught short of breath, that surprised—when suddenly she breathed her last.
So too with Sirena’s departure; I’d known from the first that it would come; and then not that long before, I’d had the nasty shock of realizing it would come far sooner than I’d anticipated. But who could have expected it without warning, in quite this way?
Then, too, when we dismantled what there was, in the studio, of Wonderland, I was suddenly powerfully aware that it was only a half-built thing—not quite still an imaginary thing, but not fully a thing in the world, either. I’d lived so close to it in my head, her vision had been, to me, so fully realized, that I’d thought for a long time that the installation was closer to completion, there in the studio, than in actuality ever it was.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? All those hours spent with each of them, each separately, and such enormous reserves of passion in each case, and what could be more real than that? And it’s not as though, like my mother, they were dying, not as though a great furnace was to pulverize them into a heap of dust no more real than a memory or a thought. They would continue to breathe and move and laugh and talk and think and create—just on a different spot on the planet; and not even on so very remote a spot. But it was a spot remote to me, and because I knew that the three of them would continue to be together and that their lives would have a solidity and continuity far greater than did mine, although I’d still be in the same place and my life would be, superficially, the less altered one—in that way, it was as if I were dying, rather than they. I was the one who had to give them up, and in so doing, give up the world.
I didn’t go with Sirena and Reza to the airport when they left on a Wednesday evening in the second half of May, when there was still a month of school ahead at Appleton. I knew they were going and I made sure I had something to do: I went to see the film The Interpreter at the cinema at six o’clock, and let myself be thoroughly absorbed in the intrigues of Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn at the UN while their flight was taking off from Logan. I was inordinately moved to find a text from Sirena on my phone when I came out of the film into the summer gloaming: “Miss u already,” it said. “R sends special xx. Come 2 Paris!” She’d written from the airport. I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine it, and to see her message—there it was again: Hope.
2
I did see Skandar before he, too, returned to Paris a fortnight later. He called me one evening, at a funny sort of time, around nine at night, and asked if I’d like to meet for a coffee. We met at the Algiers café in Harvard Square, the oldest people there, surrounded by undergrads in their callow exuberance. He looked tired, his eyes behind his glasses blurry, dark rimmed. I wanted simply to touch his cheek, as he sat across the table. I wouldn’t have called it lust, or desire, particularly; not sexual, is what I mean, or perhaps not proprietorial.
These words, these words are so imprecise, so inadequate: when I speak of love, or desire, or even of longing, the freight of these words is for each of us so particular. If I could explain once and for all about my three Shahid loves: the sexual element was undeniably there, with both Sirena and Skandar. But it wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the core of what I