in the same serious way. “These are remarkable,” he said finally. “Quite extraordinary.” He filled his wine cup, lit another cigarette. “They are at the same time truthful, and emotional—and so small.”
“So small?” It didn’t sound like a compliment.
“They put so much in so small a space. It’s like a Persian miniature, painted with a single bristle: tiny, precise, here is an entire world. Everything that matters, all emotion.”
“Yes.” If that was what he meant, then okay.
“But the question is why? Why so small? To speak softly, but to tell the greatest truth? Or, like the Persian miniatures, to be portable, to be able to go everywhere, and still to show, by their beauty and intricacy, their owner’s vast wealth? Or in this case, is it because they don’t feel they’re allowed to be bigger?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why not a whole room, a life-sized room, for each of these? Why only a little box?”
I shrugged, aware of unexpected stinging behind my eyes.
“Or again: Why, when there’s so much emotion in these rooms, in these artists—why is it all sad?”
“I put Joy in each room. You only have to look for her. She’s there—a golden amulet.”
“Okay, fine. But why, one time, just one time, is she not the biggest element? Why does Joy not take the whole room?”
There were tears in my eyes. I could feel them pooling. I blinked repeatedly so he wouldn’t see them. I suddenly understood that whatever else, Sirena’s art was joyful: that it was true—even if she wasn’t necessarily true—and joyful at the same time. My art was sad, because my soul was sad. Was this right?
“Do you think my soul is sad?” I asked him.
“I think your soul is lovely,” he said, and although he was still serious—as far as I could tell, he was completely serious—I was also reminded of Didi saying, “If it looks like a maple leaf and it feels like a maple leaf and it lies under a maple tree …”
“I think that you don’t think so, but your soul is beautiful,” he went on, and he took my left hand between his two hands, which were square and fleshy and hot and dry, like a furnace, but all these things excitingly so. “And I think it has a great capacity for joy and for sadness both. You don’t need to worry for a moment about your soul. Rather, you need only to move all of your emotions out of their little boxes, and let them take up the whole room.”
“They wouldn’t just take up a room,” I said.
“I know, your insatiable ravenous wolf. But how will you know his rampaging, unless you free him from his cage?”
I was both in the moment and outside it, aware of the theater and the kitsch of it—how could I not be?—and yet wholly involved—my fingers, my skin, my heart. Inside my ear, Didi’s voice was laughing—“silly!”—and Sirena’s voice I wouldn’t even imagine, the cry of it, like pain, and my mother in the background, quietly whispering, “How dare you, Mouse? How dare you? Who do you think you are, Mouse? Who do you think you are?”
But then, the pull upon me was not who I thought I was; it was who he thought I was: not Emily, or Virginia, or Alice, or Edie, or even Sirena. Not a Woman Upstairs. Not one thing. That I did not myself know my outline did not, at that point, matter at all. To someone, I had an outline, implausibly a worthy one. When his hands moved to rest, warm, even, like hot stones upon my back, just to be nakedly Nora Eldridge seemed, briefly, as though it could be forgiven; as though it could even be enough.
12
At first, I thought it could all be okay. Skandar and I had a conversation—oblique, weird, but a conversation—about how this was meaningful but wrong, and how it couldn’t continue. I was baffled, you see: this wasn’t a story I’d lived inside my head. The bead didn’t fit my thread. And yes, I believed I could simply will it away, because I had to, because there was too much at stake otherwise.
How strange that to feel oneself clearly, transparently, compassionately seen by one precious person meant to risk vile distortion in the eyes of another. Always we tell the children it’s best to be honest; but I knew, too, when to lie, in order to be true to something greater. It hadn’t felt false, or willed, or like seduction, or