No, I could remember all of it: the waxiness of the paper bags from the cake shop; the light on her hair in the subterranean booth that afternoon at Amodeo’s; the sound Skandar’s dress shoes made behind me in the packed snow, when he walked me home in wintertime between the drifts, and the freeze in my throat when I gulped the air. The small, muscled roundness of Reza’s upper arms when he undressed for bed, and the strawberry birthmark on his left biceps, his rib cage naked and frail as a bird’s breast; and the tidy silvery streak that emerged, over time, from the red welt near his eye—I could see that plastic surgeon, too, with her unexpected high heels and her square hands and her fairy-tale deftness with the needle and thread … any moment of it all, all of it, I could have handed over, translucent, shining bead upon shining bead, had Sirena but wanted to hold them—which, it seemed, she did not especially, as she said, “Oh, I can remember if I try—I’m not that old yet! But it’s all fuzzy, and in my memory, dark. Even though I know it can’t be. Surely Boston isn’t always dark?”
“No,” I said. “That’s your imagination. It’s quite a bright city, actually.”
Many things had been all in my imagination, surely I knew that; but then there was what had been decidedly, entirely real, all the moments and details so vivid, still alive to me—and for Sirena, like so much flotsam, long jettisoned into the broad ocean of her past. As that Air France flight had risen into the night air, two years before, so Boston had fallen away beneath her.
“I can barely remember making the installation at all,” she said. “I do remember you sewing together all the blue dresses, though.”
“There were a lot of them.”
“D’you know something funny,” she said. “You remember that postcard you sent, the illustration from the early edition of Alice in Wonderland, the one where she is so big and her neck is so long?”
“Of course.” I’d sent it almost at once after they left, my first dispatch, never answered, to their mythical Paris address, timed to arrive for the opening of her exhibition.
“Well, it’s still on our refrigerator,” she said, bemused. “Right there, for the longest time. I don’t know who saved it—I don’t think it was me. Reza, maybe?”
I smiled. Reza.
“Yes, so there you are with us, all the time,” she said. “Sometimes I’m taking out the orange juice, or the yogurt, and I see Alice there, so startled, with her long neck, and I think of you.” Sirena was finally looking at me, then, in the nasty bar, as she rifled blindly for a credit card in her overstuffed wallet, and her smile was real—the old smile, the old face, that I’d so loved.
It was in this affectionate spirit that I visited the Brooklyn Museum the next morning, soon after opening time, by myself. I was the only visitor walking through Wonderland in the quiet, and I was surprised by the coziness imparted by the canopy of Alice dresses, three wide swathes of blues draped overhead, rippling slightly in the air-conditioning breeze. The lighting fell upon the aspirin flowers so that their colors glowed as they bobbed, gently, above the electric-green grass; and the mirror shards glittered and glimmered, unignorable, unsettling, but not overwhelming. I hadn’t forgotten the nudes, but my memory had changed their features, or else I saw them differently now—the girl’s splayed toe, the dark-nippled heft of a slightly drooped breast, the delicate flaring of a freckled nostril, the rib that protruded at an un-ribly angle, witness to almost a century of life—and they were enormous, bigger than I was, where I’d seen them small upon a computer screen. They, like everything else, rippled slightly, as if they were breathing, as if the room were breathing around us.
And then the famous cast plastic heart, upon its pedestal, lurid, halved, its protruding ventricles like the blowing tubes of an airplane life jacket, its innards dark, wet-looking, although they were dry; and then the automatic intermittent pump of it, a slight hiss from its core, Sirena’s precious rosewater mist rising to fill the air—the soul, it was meant to be, I think—consuming the room in scent, smelling of flowers and an instant later of death, in the way that rosewater does. And Sana, then, finally, twirling, gigantic, above it all. There was a pair of small black benches in this