way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away. In this case, if anything, I became more convinced of the truth of what I’d felt in Amodeo’s, certain that I’d had a revelation, something like a conversion. But certain now, too, because of Didi and Esther’s reaction, that I had to keep my knowledge a secret, from everyone.
You might wonder how this was different from all that had come before, from months of being more generally, less specifically, in love. You might think it was essentially the same. But I felt I’d finally awoken, that the world was at last clear to me and that its shapes made sense. Not only did I have hope in a general way, I had something specific to hope for. I was certain that I understood. And certain that if I tried to explain what I understood, I would be—as I had been, with Didi and Esther—misunderstood.
When my father asked mildly if I was dating anyone—clearly, in his inarticulate way, fretting about my calcifying spinsterdom, unable to see, as my mother would have, that I had almost fulfilled her dream of independence—I snapped at him that I was too old for that kind of nonsense, which false bitterness made his voice, when he protested, small and sad.
But it was as if my revelation had opened a door in my head, into a further room where all life was suddenly potentially titillating, where everything was secretly part of my secret. Whenever I saw an article, or a book, or a film about a hidden or unrequited love, I thought it had been placed purposefully in my path, so I wouldn’t feel alone. When I was driving anywhere, or ambling the supermarket aisles, or lying in bed at night boiling my toes against the fake fur hot water bottle I’d bought on sale in January, I was now always thinking about Sirena.
No, let me be precise: I wasn’t actually. That would suggest real things. In a way that hadn’t been true before, I was thinking about my thoughts about Sirena. I was imagining telling her about my feelings, or I was imagining her confessing, in her particular lilting way, that she found me beautiful, or thought me a great artist, or on one occasion I imagined her saying that she could not now imagine her life without me. What conversations we had, in my head! What honesty, what pure transparency, what a perfect meeting of minds.
How much did Reza feature in these visions? Well, sometimes I’d picture the three of us, installed in a farmhouse in Vermont, or in Tuscany, or in a thatched bungalow on a Caribbean island, in order that we might live cheaply enough to make art, and grow a resplendent garden from which to feed ourselves. I knew the layouts of these various houses, the unfolding of their rooms. I built them in my mind, and we inhabited each of them at different times. I knew how the morning sunbeams fell in slats upon the terra-cotta floors in Italy, and the sounds of chickens scrabbling in the yard outside, audible as soon as you opened the casement window. I knew how the snow from the field behind the house reflected white in the bathroom mirror in Vermont, where the steaming water in the clawfoot tub smelled of sage, and Sirena, stepping into the bath, dropped her slippers—Moroccan babouches—one and then the other on the pink and purple round rag rug in the middle of the white painted wooden floor. I knew the kiss of the rising Caribbean wind, warm upon my ruffled arm hairs, if I stood in the shadowy doorway and squinted at the passing schoolchildren in their navy and white uniforms, kicking up dust as they ambled by, and I scanned their knots and clutches for Reza, his laughing olive face among the chocolate and coffee faces of his peers.
In these fantasies, Reza would always call me Mommy, resting a small, hot hand upon my shoulder while I worked on an art project at a table in the sunlight, or washed lettuce at a porcelain farmhouse sink, and even as they seemed completely surreal—sturdy-skinned bubbles unconnected to the standing traffic or the rows of cereal boxes or the almost sweaty duvet which surrounded me in reality—these imaginings were more vivid and more alive to me than much that I could see and smell and touch. As with my earlier dream about Skandar, I