was no reply. No sound at all. Lights off, everything still. I put down my almost cold coffee and the bag with the cake in it and my handbag and my tote bag containing the folder of highresolution shrunk-down photographs of Edie Sedgwick, and I walked from one end of the L to the other, moving more and more slowly, because I couldn’t get my head around the fact that she wasn’t there. In those few minutes, scoping the joint (and the spring afternoon light was flooding in, I remember it exactly, great dust-dancing beams of it, and the studio smelled slightly of glue and old apples, as well as of Sirena’s cigarettes), I wondered whether actually I was going nuts, losing my grip. Because I’d been so certain that she’d be there, bent over some finicky detail, or smoking by the open window, or even lying on the cushions wrapped up, like a papoose, in her scarves—I’d been so certain of my reality that the facts were at first impossible for me to accept.
The next day, I didn’t know at first whether I’d go there or not. I broke one of my rules, and asked Reza if his mother was okay.
“How do you mean?” I was struck by how good his English had gotten: his intonation was native now.
“She wasn’t in the studio yesterday, and I thought maybe …”
He laughed, a little bark. I remembered him all those months before, in the Whole Foods, with the apples. “My mother never gets sick,” he said. “Papa says she’s like a superhero. No, she went away.”
“Away?”
He was keen to get out the door. I could hear his friends agitating in the hall. “But she’s back now. She came back in the night.” He threw this over his shoulder, and was gone.
When I made my way to the studio that afternoon, it was humbly: the story in my head, my desire for some confession, my wish to activate a drama between us, to lay claim to her attention, was up against some stronger reality of hers. Whatever had taken her away like that, so suddenly, would take precedence over me. As was so often the case—we Women Upstairs!—her life would be shown to be more important than my life.
She was there, her hair in a messy bun, a streak of blue ink across her forehead. She was leaning over a large picture book when I came in, clasping one of her shawls at her breast, and when she turned she threw her hands wide, dropping her shawl, and her face opened into an enormous, natural, crooked-toothed grin, against which I had no defenses.
“Nora!” She stepped swiftly across the room, light-footed. “I have such news!”
“Everything’s all right then?”
“Everything is all right? Everything is great”—only she said “great-e,” in her particular way. She fiddled with her hair, making it fall around her face. “Let me make us some coffee—I’ll tell you—”
She eyed my bag. “I didn’t bring anything today,” I said, not telling her that I’d eaten an entire cupcake the day before because she wasn’t there, and that I’d felt so sick I had to go home.
“It’s better,” she said, fussing with the coffee, the pot, the water. “I rely too much on your sweet things.”
I flopped down on the cushions. “So what’s up?”
“You know, yesterday I was in New York.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Ah, in my busyness—I must have forgotten. Or maybe because of being nervous, I didn’t want to spoil my luck.”
I waited a moment, then asked, “So did you get lucky?”
She shrugged, smiling again. “We’ll see,” she said. “But it looks good. This week, one thing, the week after next another thing; we’ll see.”
“Come on, Sirena. Just tell me. What’s the news?”
She sat beside me, leaned in conspiratorially: “Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend of mine who is an artist, a seriously good artist, a man in his sixties—he makes sculptures—sexy also, with a deep voice—and he wanted me to meet an important art critic. A woman from the university. She’s older, very famous, and she is curating, for two years from now, an important exhibition of art by women, feminist art. It will be unlike anything before—the museum in Brooklyn is opening a new wing, a feminist wing, and this will be the first exhibition, to open the building … Exciting, no?”
“So she wanted to meet you?”
Sirena gave a laugh, a “modest” laugh. “To meet me? Ah, no, she didn’t even know that I exist-e. Frank—he’s my friend—he makes