like a mistake. It hadn’t felt in conflict with my friendship with Sirena, or my love—my mad love—for her.
My sadnesses were many, but there was not, among them, a sadness at what we’d done, the absolute moral value of which didn’t seem to me to be negative: if you could only separate that bead from its neighbors, take it out of time and hold it up to the light, how beautiful and clear a bead it would be. If you were to make a room for the artist Nora Eldridge, and depict in it that experience, it would be joy. I don’t know what to say about the fact that for a time we lay upon the Astroturf, among the wavering aspirin flowers. I can’t explain it; or I couldn’t then.
On Monday morning, I almost choked at the sight of Reza at his desk, in his pressed T-shirt with a lock of black hair curling straight up to the sky. Now, suddenly, I saw not so much his mother’s eyes but his father’s nose, his father’s lips. His own goofy smile. I must have looked oddly at him, as he forced, in return, a stretchy, Gumby-esque grin, the grin of someone who’s done nothing wrong but is nevertheless afraid of being accused. Even from the front of the room I could see the scar by his eye, my scar; and with the sight of it came the memory of the doctor at the hospital, sewing her fine seam.
I didn’t choke, I didn’t stop, the day was launched, the moment passed, and in the unwavering routine of 3E, in the absolute familiarity and hullabaloo of my children around me, it was the events of Friday night, rather than this, that seemed like a dream; and as the day went on, I forgot about them. And then, that afternoon, we had an Appleton-wide staff meeting—Shauna in love with the sound of her own voice, droning on about plans for the end of the school year: our talent show, our fund-raiser, our school-wide picnic—and I didn’t even try to go to the studio. I wasn’t sorry.
On Tuesday afternoon, I felt myself lacking in courage; but aware, too, that the encounter had to take place—that as with Reza, with Sirena, too, I had to step across the awkwardness and proceed to the next scenes, the scenes of her finishing Wonderland, of our excited bond over her glorious installation, over our shared understanding that hers was the art, and the life, that mattered.
The shock was to recognize from the moment I entered the room that for Sirena there was no discontinuity at all between then and now. Her blithe greeting, her fervid hair-twiddling and shawl-adjusting, all were unchanged. She was the same Sirena who’d hopped on the morning Amtrak to New York five days before, blissfully, selfishly oblivious and full of the excitements of her trip.
“It’s so hard to decide—they both are really great”—“great-e”—“and they both want me to go with them. I’ll need your help, Nora—I trust you so much. When I showed my naked ones to Anna, she had tears in her eyes. She said they were stunning—and I said to her, ‘Be careful. You must imagine them in their context, in relation to the other pieces of the installation’—and she said, ‘Sirena, that’s great, but whatever you put around them can’t make them less stunning. More so, maybe, but not less.’ ”
“And the other guy?” I couldn’t help but be excited for her, even if she was a braggart. Somehow I could feel all my feelings separately—and the cloud of guilt, too, with its inadmissible tinge of triumph; I could keep it all in my head at once.
Because even I couldn’t hide from myself that not only did I want Sirena and Reza and—now, most tangibly—Skandar (don’t ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast, breathing skin, will insist otherwise), but I also wanted Wonderland, I coveted her very imagination, and wished it were mine.
I listened to Sirena talk about the two gallerists and their spaces and the promises they’d made to her, and I was with her and not with her at the same time. It wasn’t like at school with Reza, where the everyday realities had simply supplanted and replaced the other. Here, Skandar hovered in the studio, a shadow across the windows’ bleached light; and the fact that she couldn’t see him between us didn’t make him go away. Confusingly,