as though instead of a daily darkening, both seasonal and societal, we were embarked upon a brilliant new adventure, finding each new day more perfectly illuminated than the last. Which I was.
It was like being eleven, and craving your best friend’s company. If I woke up every morning with such zeal, every leaf or cup or child’s hand meticulously outlined for me like a wonder of nature, bathed in superior light, it was because in my heart I held each day the possibility of a conversation, of adventure, with Sirena. This possibility—often a likelihood—was inextricably bound up with the excitement of the studio, of the pure, bright, drafty, shabby space where we would meet.
She spent entire days there, while I trailed in near dusk, at three thirty or so, when the angle of the sunlight was long and the air powdery, already tinged with night, a bleak and glorious winter light. We’d have coffee: along with jewel-colored lengths of Indian silk that she’d pinned to the walls in her end of the studio, a grubby rug, three small tufted poufs and a tiny Moroccan brass tray table, Sirena had installed a burner on the long table, and had provided an Italian percolator, the heavy octagonal kind that sits upon the stove, and an array of chipped teacups from the Goodwill shop. She had the gift of making things beautiful, and comfortable too, in an easy way, a gift I’d thought of as my mother’s, growing up. I loved that the studio, while still Spartan, gestured in its few furnishings toward an Oriental souk. I even loved, when I went to find it empty, that she’d left dirty cups scattered about, ringed with tarry coffee grounds, and smearily marked by her crimson lipstick; and often a scarf or a sweater forgotten on the floor, as if she were saying to me, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”
I took to bringing snacks—scones from the Hi-Rise, or cupcakes from the then-new shop in Davis Square, a quick stop on Highland Ave on my way to the studio—and she’d break from her work to boil the coffee, and we’d hang out and talk for three-quarters of an hour or so, until she’d stand, quite suddenly, and brush at a few nonexistent crumbs, and say “au travail”—which even with my pitiful French I could understand and came to expect. Then I’d wash the coffee cups and she’d sweep the floor, in two or three brisk strokes, and turn her back to me, retreating to her corner of the L. I, too, would go to my corner, feeling slightly like a dog dismissed to its basket, and turn on my bright lights over the table I’d set up, and, fed on cakes and conversation, I would work, as the night fell around us, until there was only my pool of light and her pool of light and the music from the CD player hovering softly in the vast dark space between us.
At around five thirty or a quarter to six, she’d pack up her gear and go home to Maria the babysitter and to Reza and, notionally, to Skandar, although for months he remained a cipher to me, heard only as the murmur on the cell phone when she spoke quietly and rapidly and, I always imagined, with faint irritation, in French.
I loved working with someone else nearby. It was like being in Mr. Crace’s art room all over again. What I hated—although never straight away—was the time after Sirena had gone.
For a while, I’d be so busy with the scene I was working on that I didn’t notice. That fall I was making a tiny replica of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst bedroom, about the size of a boot box, each floorboard in place, the re-creation of her furnishings exact and to scale. Once I’d made her room, and made her, as perfectly as I could, in a white linen nightie with ruffles, my aim was to set up circuitry so that my Emily Dickinson might be visited, sitting up in her bed, by floating illuminations—the angelic Muse, her beloved Death, and of course my tiny gilded mascot, Joy herself.
This was, I imagined, the first of a series: I wanted to make one of Virginia Woolf at Rodmell, putting rocks in her pockets and writing her final note: my idea was that there would be slides of the river, raging, and sound effects, too; and an actual copy of the handwritten note that would project not onto