bad,” she said. “You’ve got to run your class your way. You’ve got your rules.” She sighed. “It’s a shame because it wasn’t the same, after. Kids are so sensitive, they absorb everything.” And then, “Don’t worry about coming back to clean up. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks, Sirena.” I didn’t usually call her by name like that. It seemed almost to echo in my ear.
“I think we’re saying good-bye for the week? I go to Paris tomorrow.”
“I almost forgot.” I was about to say, “I’ll keep an eye on your boys for you,” and then thought better of it. “I hope it all goes well,” I said.
“Don’t worry. It will”—she lit up for a moment, seemed more normal—“because it has to.”
Things with Reza weren’t really changed. He was remorseful—he apologized to me the next day before school started—and besides, he didn’t see the complicated ironies of the day before. He wasn’t going to tell me what had actually happened, whether because he didn’t want to be a tattletale or because he didn’t want to repeat an insult to his mother; but he felt his punishment had befit his crime. It was all finished and forgotten, for him, at least—which was a relief.
Sirena did only a half-decent job of cleaning up the studio before she went away. She put all the kids’ detritus—cups, napkins—in a garbage bag, and she swept the floor for crumbs. She rearranged her Wonderland, replanting the flowers and folding away the river of cloth; but she left all the kids’ unpainted masks higgledy-piggledy at my end of the room, and she let the papier-mâché glue harden in a bucket, which I then had to throw away. The studio was accumulating a lot of strange emotions, for me. It wasn’t so easy to be there.
I tried to tidy up some more, in anticipation of her return. I arranged things neatly but visibly, the way a cleaning lady might arrange your bureau. Once this was done, Sirena’s end of the L looked oddly forlorn, abortive, like a woman half dressed, and I had to turn my back on it. All that week I went only in the evenings, pretending to work, but really hoping to hear footsteps in the corridor, the secret knock.
He was busy, I knew. But surely also he wasn’t able to see me because of the force of his emotion. It was possible, I knew, that he didn’t want to deal with me; but I didn’t want to believe that. Better for us both to be noble, to suffer in withdrawal. I certainly wouldn’t telephone him. It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I’d sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn’t been sure whether it was mine. My fingertips could still trace the distinct coarseness of the hairs on his chest, the softness of those along his forearm. My cheeks and chin had stung, the morning after, from the evening bristle of his. And his body, his hands, his tongue: if I closed my eyes, they were still on me, in me, with me. I was always remembering him, a physical memory, like an imprint in the earth. There is, I came to realize, what the mind wants and what the body wants. The mind can excite the body, but its desires can also be false; whereas the body, the animal, wants what it wants.
13
The next weekend I was going with my father to see Aunt Baby. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and I’d rashly promised that we’d spend the night on Saturday, in order to go to mass with her on Sunday morning. On Friday night, I stayed at the studio almost until midnight—not working on my rooms at all, reading the newspaper online and drinking red wine out of a teacup—but still there was no word from Skandar. On Saturday morning, after a run around the reservoir that failed to clear my head, I went to pick up my father, and some peonies (my mother’s favorite flower) and a Bundt cake (for most of my life, my mother baked cakes for Aunt Baby; but I went to the Coolidge Corner bakery she’d found when they moved to Brookline and she could no longer cook), and we headed north to Cape Ann.
“Did you speak to Matthew this week?” my father asked, looking out the windshield at I-95, and not at me.
“No.