first time you had me over in Cambridge? This is the stew you prepared.”
“Imagine! I’d completely forgotten. I’m afraid it’s just a sign of how limited is the …”
“Repertoire,” said Skandar, winking at me; and I couldn’t tell whether the wink said that he, too, remembered that evening; or whether it just agreed that together we would tease his wife.)
—touched by the details Reza recalled from his long ago Cambridge classroom—painting—the twins—times tables. I looked, at the dinner table, for the trace of the scar by his eye: when he leaned into the light, I thought I could glimpse the faintest of white lines, though I couldn’t be wholly sure. I still loved them, if differently. I felt full of forgiveness, and sanity. But not hope. As I fell into my pleasant low bed in my pleasant room in my pleasant hotel, I was conscious in my semiconsciousness of feeling the opposite of hope—which would be despair. I was clear, right before slumber took me off, that this was why I’d chosen a light, bright, post—Jean Rhys, anti–Emily Dickinson, never Virginia Woolf hotel: because everything about its pleasantness insisted, inarguably, No Suicides Here.
I had all this anger. Years of it, decades of it, my very body full of it, bloody with it. And I’d lumbered across the Atlantic to lay it all down upon a doorstep. Almost like blackmail: love me absolutely, or take this shit from me. I had the mother lode. Yes, the term is apt. It was to be assuaged or offloaded. And yet, while I left their home feeling welcomed, even loved, it was a different, smaller sort of love than I’d wanted—not so much a glacier or a fireworks display as a light shawl against an evening breeze. Recognizably love, but useless in a gale.
5
There’s so much to see and do in Paris. So much that it’s a wonder I saw it. A wonder that I saw that I could see it. But for so long I’d trained myself to read and find the references to Sirena and Skandar, that it would have been a shock of another kind had I missed it. I had a lot of time, really, in Paris: five whole days. I arrived on Monday, was leaving on Friday. We’d had dinner on Tuesday. I was to call Sirena on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. On Wednesday, I got up and descended the stairs to the breakfast room—a sweet atrium, with pots of flowers in the corners and an electric fountain against the wall, a naked cherub with an overturned ewer, trickling water into a shell-shaped bowl—spectacular, cheerful kitsch—with my Pariscope in hand. It listed everything—films, gay nightclubs, poetry readings, gallery shows.
Ignoring my zealous spread of baguette crumbs over cloth, clothes and newsprint, I flipped through beyond the museum listings to the private galleries. Here was a city, like New York and unlike Boston, where a private dealer might have an exhibit of Picasso lithographs. Or where you could see Robert Polidori’s enormous Chernobyl photos, up for sale at over 20,000 euros apiece. It was half as a lark that I looked for Sirena’s name—she didn’t have any major installations at present, she’d told me over supper: her next was a commission for a group show at the Serpentine Gallery in London the following spring, on the theme of rebirth and renewal. But there she was, a listing at a gallery in the 7th, a show open only for a few more days. A show titled After the Fall: The Wonderland Tapes. Here, without the installation itself, would be the videos she’d made at, or in, the installation, to get people to respond to the responses to her work.
It seemed a favor to her to go to see them—the videos, as far as I was concerned, were the least interesting part of her art; although I knew important critics disagreed with me—and I was aware that if I hated them, I might just lie and pretend I didn’t know about them. Credit to her modesty, I thought, that Sirena hadn’t told me about the show; or perhaps credit to her now arrogant grandeur: perhaps she thought the videos were too trifling to bother with? Either way, I’d go out of my own curiosity, pure or impure, and would see what I thought. If it felt like spying on her life—how little it was, compared to all the Google Alerts I’d assiduously studied, all the details I’d hoarded and treasured as if