central space, and I sat on the left-hand one and watched—forgetting that I was myself being filmed, though of course, like everyone else, I was.
I must have stayed at least half an hour there, in the rosewater air among the glowing flowers. Wonderland, eat me, drink me; yes, yes, yes. I was still in love with this, with her, with them, and how could I help it if being inside her head felt to me so familiar, as if it were the inside of my own mind, as if I’d built this Wonderland myself, as if this life, all of this, were for me, too. I felt, in that half hour, so full, like an overflowing vessel, its trembling meniscus arced toward the sky. I felt—for months, I’d felt this every second, and then for two years had been denied that feeling—I felt as though in any given instant, anything might happen, all wonder and possibility, the antithesis of a Lucy Jordan moment. I felt brilliantly alive. And I thought, somehow, still, that she—that they—had given that to me. I couldn’t be angry, not wholly angry, at someone or something that could fill me with such joy in life. You’re bound to love such a gift, and its giver.
I grant that this wasn’t much to go on, but it would sustain me, if you can believe it, for two more fallow years, years in which I still held on to the idea of her, of them, to the hope that they had offered me.
Think of that: two more years. More than four years in total, about fifteen hundred days, and every single day they were with me, somehow. Out of some sense of obligation, some sense that I should move on, I went on dates with several men—an anxious divorcé with three kids, ground down by bitterness and care; a fifty-year-old who seemed so clearly gay that surely only he didn’t know it; a Buddhist with long thin fingers who spoke terribly softly and made me want to shout and pummel his contained and withholding chest—and yet every time I sat in a restaurant in that way, I’d hear Skandar’s laugh, or see his apologetic smile, and remember—my Book of the Wonders of the World—how much more there was out there, beyond the limits of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’d want to turn and flee my mediocrity.
Having vacated the Somerville studio long before the lease was up, unable to bear its ghosts, I tried intermittently to work on my dioramas, without success, and ultimately without hope. They sat forlorn under a dust sheet in my second bedroom, my former so-called studio, lumpen as corpses, from which, if I had to enter the room, I averted my eyes. One thousand five hundred days, some surely alarming proportion of the time left to me on this planet, I dedicated in my heart to the Shahids. You could say it wasn’t their fault; you could say it was nothing but my own madness; but that wouldn’t be quite true.
I sent e-mails, every so often, to Sirena, mostly, or even to Reza—I asked if he’d studied life cycles yet, when our sixth graders, under a new science teacher, dissected eggs in various stages of development and shouted in the hallways in their awe at life. Once I even found an excuse to write to Skandar, with a link about a Kennedy School conference I’d read about, and he politely sent back a couple of lines saying they were all well, and asking if I was ever coming to Paris … but for the most part, I heard nothing from them.
I became aware, in the early fall of 2008, that Skandar had been in Cambridge without contacting me: when I turned on the local television late one Saturday night, he was there in his rumpled jacket, part of a panel discussion about race relations in America—meaning, in this instance, Arab relations—and he spoke eloquently about how the possible election of Obama might change the tenor of society. The program had been filmed five days before it aired; I was sure he would already have decamped. Was I hurt? Yes; but not offended. Think of what was between us, and of what separated us. Better to be close only in our hearts. Besides, these whirlwind business trips that important people make—they don’t have time to look up old friends even if they want to. I knew that.
The Woman Upstairs is like that. We keep it together. You