be gone before we know it; and I’ve promised my gallery that I’ll come home ready for my exhibition. So: au travail!” She stood up as she said this: time to go. And then: “What have you promised yourself for the new year?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t made any new year’s resolutions. That night I’d spent in the studio, oblivious to the time, aware only too late that the ball had dropped in Times Square, I’d wished Emily D happy new year: I’d lifted her, in her lacy nightgown, from her high, narrow bed, and had stroked her glossy head; and then had returned her, carefully, to her dollhouse life. Happy new year to you. “I’ve resolved to be more independent,” I said.
“You? But you’re more independent than anyone!”
“More alone, maybe.” And for some reason I thought of my mother, each day more trapped, until she was buried in her aloneness. “It’s not the same thing, you know.”
2
Because I’d complained of my solitude, I worried that Sirena’s invitation to dinner the following week was a pity call. I was invited for 7:30. I arrived at 7:40, afraid I was late, carrying a bottle of expensive Italian red—Barolo, I think—recommended by the girl behind the cheese counter at Formaggio. I had the feeling when he opened the door that Skandar was surprised to see me.
“Ah! You’re here. Sirena, Nora is here. Come in.” The entrance was very narrow, the stairs heading straight up, and Skandar had to back up them in order for me to get in the door. It wasn’t clear what physical salutation, if any, was in order, so we did nothing but bob and smile awkwardly.
“I haven’t got the wrong day, have I?”
He shook his head, laughing, and reached for my coat, backing up the stairs the whole time.
“The wrong time?”
Sirena appeared at the summit, with Reza beside her, already in his checked pajamas. “Welcome! So much better than your last visit to our house. This time, we offer you superior food to toast and tea.”
They’d set the table with flowers and candles, so the horrid tinted globe light was turned off, and by lighting strategic lamps around the space, they’d managed to make it almost attractive.
“Come, Miss E, come see my room.” Reza at once took me by the hand and pulled, while his father poured wine and his mother returned to the stove.
I followed him there to find that it, too, was transformed, by a slowly spinning magic lantern that cast upon the wall the colored shadows of jazz musicians playing—a green drummer at his kit, a rose saxophonist, a burly blue outline wielding a bass guitar. A large poster of a running soccer player—French, I assumed—took up most of the wall above his bed, and flickered in the light almost as if alive.
“That’s Zidane,” Reza explained. “He’s the best. He used to play for Juventus—do you know them?”
“No.”
“Let me explain …” He pulled me down to sit beside him on the bed and began to recount, with more enthusiasm perhaps than clarity, the trajectory of Zidane’s career, on both the French national teams and the league teams.
“Reza”—his father was smiling in the doorway, holding a glass of red wine and a scotch with ice—“your time with Miss Nora is in the day, at school. This evening is for grown-ups.”
“In a minute? Please?”
Skandar said something in French. He handed me the glass of wine and retreated.
Reza smiled conspiratorially. “I have three minutes,” he whispered, “but nobody will know if we take four.”
Reza had already eaten, and although he sat for a while with us, swinging his legs and picking idly from a bowl of grapes, he didn’t volunteer much, nor even particularly appear to be listening, and before the starter of imam bayaldi and crostini had been cleared he’d asked to be excused and had gone to read Astérix in his room.
This was a shame, really, in spite of his odd superfluity; because in the same way that three people only barely constitute a family, a meager and Spartan sort of family, so too three people barely constitute a dinner party. This is especially true when two are intimates and the third an alien, an Upstairs Woman with manners and insufficient temerity. There is, about such a scenario, an aura of hard work—at least at first. We were all very polite, toiling through our excellent eggplant dish with its crusty toasts. We talked about school; how long had I been there, Skandar asked, and how did it