and now saw again from a sad and solitary distance.
We were meeting for drinks, Sirena and I, but not dinner: she was a Parisian artist in New York for a big opening, and her evenings were claimed by more important people than myself. But that afternoon, Sirena had the grace to introduce me to her gallerist as a dear artist friend from Boston. This meant that Anna Z, slightly praying mantis–like, looked at me as though I were potentially someone important. But then she wanted to know where I “showed”—a Fun House term if ever there was one—and I could feel my cheeks redden as I muttered some vague guff about how family difficulties had forced me to put things on hold for a while. After that, Anna turned back toward her sun, and aside from a couple of faintly curious, faintly pitying glances, was done with me.
And with Sirena? Two years had passed. Two years in which we’d exchanged perhaps ten e-mails, but in which I’d thought about her—and about Skandar and Reza too—every single day. It used to be that when people said, “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of X or Y,” I considered it embarrassing and quaint hyperbole; but thanks to the Shahids, I now understood. In my thoughts, I’d even set aside times of day for them, and places, where I permitted myself the indulgence. For example, the wholesale fantasies—some old, some new—were permissible in bed after lights-out. There were still, distantly, dreams of an artist’s life in Vermont or Tuscany; but more often, somewhat basely, I pictured myself in Paris—in a glittering restaurant with Skandar, our knees touching under the tablecloth as we discussed the differences between the French intellectuals and the Americans, or a post-Iraq world. Or I imagined grandly showing Sirena my artwork in a fashionable Spartan gallery that had courted me, while craven young girls in black looked on, awed, from the sidelines. I knew even as I had them that these dreams were impure—after all, the whole point of the Shahids, for me, had been to escape a world of pretending, to be seen for who I really was—but I couldn’t help it: their natures, you could say, had corrupted me. My need for their approval, and my understanding of what approval meant to them—this had changed the shape of my self, even, let alone of my dreams.
At that time, two years after they left, I was ashamed still to be at Appleton; ashamed because I believed that they’d write me more often, that they’d pay me more mind, that they would love me more intently, if I were more impressive in the world; which made me—how pathetic we are—wish it were so.
You see, in addition to my bedtime imaginings, I permitted myself to indulge my quiet obsession when the e-mail brought me news of them. I had put both Sirena and Skandar on Google Alerts; and you’d be amazed—I was—at how often the ether tapped my shoulder with a new development in one life or another. In this way, when I sat with Sirena in the dark bar near Anna’s gallery, I knew already about Skandar’s promotion at the university, and about the important lecture series he’d given in the fall of 2006 at Oxford. I knew the lectures were to be published as a book in late ’07, and I even knew what the cover of the book would look like; just as I knew that Skandar had recently updated his author photo and now looked to the world less blurry and more like himself. I’d heard him on the BBC online, talking about the Israeli bombings in Lebanon, which had made me think about him with great tenderness for days afterward; and I’d seen him on YouTube discussing incomprehensibly in French the current politics of Algeria, looking especially dapper in a crisp white shirt. I knew about the enthusiastic reviews that Wonderland had received in Paris, and then in Berlin, where the installation had been mounted at the Hamburger Bahnhof as part of a show on the spiritual in art. I knew collectors were leaping to acquire the videos she’d made of people visiting the installation, and that the Saatchi guy had bought one and in so doing made her valuable. She’d filmed a naked man coming through; and a gaggle of French schoolchildren, like our Appleton class that long-ago afternoon; and inevitably a girl dressed up as Alice herself. Now these videos, or