So I took from Sirena the golf-sized, striped umbrella that Skandar had more than once held gallantly over my head, and I walked myself home. The distance felt longer than it had in months. Had he stayed there on purpose? He must have. Was the dark upshot of our brief numinous hour to be the loss of so close a friend? Because, as I realized only then, after all our walks and conversations, I could have counted him as a friend.
Henceforth, inevitably, Skandar was often uppermost in my thoughts. Sometimes I’d seem to forget, and my obsessive imagination would follow its old familiar trajectory—to the imaginary Vermont farmhouse, the peaceable artistic gynocracy, where a mere hand upon the arm set the veins pumping in double-time. And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it’s not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother’s death, I’d catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.
Sometime over that weekend, Sirena decided that she needed to fly to Paris to sort out the casting of the heart for her Wonderland. It was too complicated to try to clarify things on the computer or over the telephone, she told me on Monday morning, when I called to confirm the details for the school visit that afternoon. If the heart wasn’t right—it was to be open, split in the middle, on a Lucite dais a few yards in front of the film of Sana dancing; and it was to spray out, every few minutes, a particular rosewater scent—then, as she said, the heart of her installation wasn’t right. She’d leave on Tuesday, on the late Air France flight for Paris, and said she’d be back the following weekend. So I knew that, on Monday, and maybe it affected me somehow.
The kids were hugely excited. Any field trip is a hit—you could take them to a sewage treatment plant and they’d love it—but this one was weird and free, and even more fun because of it. Kids like breaking the routine, riding the school bus in the middle of the day, the feeling of possibility. We left Appleton at eleven thirty, right after their early lunch. They were unusually rowdy in the bus: Noah climbed over three rows of seats before I could get him to sit down; Ebullience had a spat with Miles over some hand-held computer game they ought not to have had in the first place; Sophia started to cry because she said Mia had pulled her hair. I had to raise my voice and threaten to turn around and go back to school. It was that kind of a beginning.
That said, I felt good about the excursion. Almost all the parents had said yes to the filming—it must have seemed cool to think their kids would be in some kind of movie—but I’d also arranged, at my end of the studio, for us to make papier-mâché masks. I’d had the kids read an abridged version of Alice in Wonderland the previous week, and we’d looked at old illustrations of the Cheshire Cat, and the Jabberwocky, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mad Hatter: I’d told them they could make masks of any of them, or of any other character they chose. The plan was to break the kids into two groups, to have one half start making the masks while the other was running around Wonderland, and then to switch them over. The pedagogical reasoning behind the afternoon wasn’t entirely clear even to me, but none of the parents had questioned it. I figured it was pretty memorable for kids to see a real artist’s atelier.
Things started out well. When we got to the studio, the kids seemed awed by the oddity of it all, and they sat quietly in a circle on the floor in the middle of the L while Sirena explained to them who she was and what she was doing. She was pretty good at talking to kids, better than I’d have imagined, and she talked about making art as a kind of magic, and also as a kind of play. Interestingly, Reza didn’t come forward to hug her: he sat squeezed between Noah and Aristide, fidgeting and behaving like one of the boys. I remember