forgetting or claiming to, had gone instead to hear a lecture at the Kennedy School. “Isn’t it partly why you married him?”
“I loved it then,” she said. “He seemed so free. But you get tired of it, you know.” You, too, might have thought him an ambivalent given.
When I got home that Friday evening, I Googled the pair of them. It seems strange in retrospect that I hadn’t done it sooner, but I realize now that I hadn’t wanted to know what the world thought of them, of her. I’d wanted her to be mine, the way my Emily Dickinson diorama was mine, without a world before or after or outside. It was how we all want life to be, no hubbub or white noise, no distorting mirrors. And so no doubt looking them up on the computer was a mistake.
There they were together, photographed at a cocktail party next to a beaky, long-haired fellow in a rusty velvet jacket; there was Skandar on a panel about Raymond Aron and the philosophy of history, caught behind a long table with his name on a sign in front of him, mid-speech with his eyes shut and his hands raised like birds in flight, a blur. There was a shadowy photograph of Sirena at the opening of her installation of Elsinore, holding a champagne flute and glaring at the photographer, grave and moody and wearing skinny trousers and high heels, her hair piled up on her head with chopsticks. There were links to his essays, in French, unintelligible to me; and his listing as a professor at the École Normale Supérieure; and clips from the papers about Sirena’s exhibitions—two of them, mostly, the Elsinore one and another two years before it, again all in French. When I clicked on “translate this page” I got a comical soup of errors syntactic and grammatical, along with some obvious howlers on the diction front—a lesson, surely, in the fundamental impossibility of cross-cultural exchange—but I could see that the terms in which Sirena’s work was praised were extravagant, almost uncomfortable. One review in particular raved not so much about the extraordinary constructions of Elsinore but about the video series that accompanied them. This, they said, was Sirena’s true genius, her ability to thrill and amuse and shock and surprise us with her set of six three-minute shorts, each describing the relationship of a creature—including a human observer, filmed unawares from behind; a live snail; and a plasticine Hamlet, which the reviewer liked best—to the spaces.
Not long after, I had a dream about Skandar, that kind of bright, real dream that stays with you into the day and changes you, as if something—what?—has really happened. It’s so visceral that it can’t then be expunged from your memory, as though it were written on the body. It was a sexual dream. We were naked together in bed in an apartment that wasn’t mine, but I knew it wasn’t his, either, and I somehow knew from the high, white, opaque light in the windows that it was in Europe—Amsterdam, maybe, is what I thought, where I’ve never been. I got out of bed to put the kettle on, and I said, “She’ll be here soon, you know,” and he said, “She doesn’t mind. She likes it.” Likes what? I wondered, and got back into bed with him, and then he had his fingers in me and I came. Then there was the kettle boiling and the doorbell ringing (my alarm clock, obviously: time to get up) and I got up to deal with these things but I wasn’t frightened, he’d said she liked it, and when I turned back to look at him, my whole body still tingling, he was leaning against the headboard and sniffing, like a perfumer, at his cunty fingers, with a sly faraway smile and just a glint of tooth.
13
The second thing happened only three days after the first, at the beginning of the last week of school before vacation. I’d been anticipating it for so long by then that I’d forgotten to keep worrying, so was duly shocked, even frightened. It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.
Reza was attacked again. This time more surreptitiously, more brutally. Under the lackadaisical eye of the after-school girls, Bethany, Margot and Sarah—feckless texters, busy planning dates on their cell phones—a massive snowball fight had been allowed to erupt among the