when his family forces him into clarity: that he’s nothing special after all. Sirena had been my Black Monk, and perhaps she’d been only a delusion.
But there was Reza, quite suddenly, in our classroom at Appleton, holding out to me, with almost a blush, a tacky key chain of the Eiffel Tower, a belated Christmas present. So he—even they—had thought about me, too. They’d missed me. My first thought was that she’d be at the studio at that moment, and I had half a mind to skip out of school, to leave them all behind, and go to find her. Never mind that I’d accomplished as much in my ten solitary days as I had in all the weeks of talk leading up to them—she was my Muse, my alcoholic’s bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.
Reza’s eye didn’t look too bad. He’d had the stitches out; the scar—tidy, tidy, I’d seen the surgeon at her seam, hemming his flesh—was red, still, and looked raw, but didn’t cause alarm among the children. If anything, it gave Reza a rakish air, as if he were a beautiful little bandit. He deflected all questions about the incident, with knowing smiles and taps upon the shoulder: an initiate, he gave nothing away.
He did, however, expand about Paris, about the bumper cars at the Bastille and his favorite bakery, where a warty old woman named Léonie gave him a palmier every morning because she was so happy to see him. He told about the white plastic Christmas tree that listed wildly in the lobby of their building, and the resident dogs that lifted a leg in passing against its synthetic trunk, so that quickly the entrance grew redolent not of pine needles and snow but of stale urine. Reza was, for a child, and given the gaps in his English, a good storyteller, and he managed to make everyone laugh, which made us all feel, after the interruption of break, like a family again.
I didn’t go to the studio that afternoon, because I didn’t want to seem pathetic to myself. I didn’t want to want so much to see her. It was my austerity choice, my show of independence. I didn’t even know whether she’d be there. Instead, I went for a run and bought fresh trout from the fishmonger, and went home.
I’m not a cook. I’d bought the fish but didn’t want to prepare it; I’d taken it out of the fridge and put it back again, and was eyeing the cans of soup in the cupboard when my buzzer rang, downstairs. I almost didn’t go down: it was cold in the stairwell, and I expected it to be kids selling magazine subscriptions or the MASSPIRG guy shilling for handouts. As I approached the door, I switched on the outside light, my frown at the ready.
And there she was, in a long black puffy coat, carrying a big bag: shorter, one eye lazier, her hair more ragged than in my mind’s eye, but smiling, arms out wide, her elegant curled lip stretched over her slightly prominent front tooth, her crow’s-feet crinkled.
“Carissima!” she exclaimed. “My dear, dear Nora! How have you been?” She took my upper arm with her hand, tightly, and led me inside and shut the door behind us. “Hard at work—you’ve been so hard at work! I was there this afternoon, at the studio. It is perfection, this little room you’ve made—” She was almost herding me up the stairs, but stopped, held me at arm’s length, and looked at me: “What extraordinary work you’ve done, Nora. Your Emily’s room is unlike anything else.”
“Oh, hardly.” I was delighted, and bashful. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve brought you something. To eat. I brought it from Paris for you, and I thought, Maybe this will please Nora for supper tonight, and it will give me a chance to say hello, and thank you.”
“Thank you?”
“Ah, Nora! You know why. I’ve felt terrible that we never properly said good-bye, that I never thanked you. When what would we have done without you? I hate the e-mail, and the telephone too—especially in English, I get confused—but at last here I am, with a foie gras and a bottle of Sancerre, and some very special panettone, to say ‘Happy new year.’ ”
“Foie gras?”
“You don’t like it? I worried you might not. Don’t feel you have to eat it. I’ll bring you something else—a quiche? A stew? What would be nice?”