me put it another way. Are there interpretations that are plain wrong?”
“That Sirena would think were wrong?”
“Not even. No. I mean that are just plain objectively wrong—untrue, incorrect, false.”
“I haven’t really thought about it, but if you ask me for an answer straight off, I’ll say yes. With a set of facts, as in historical facts, there are obviously incorrect interpretations. So, with art—a different sort of assemblage of signs, and of course signs are not facts, although they may refer to facts—there might be more leeway, but there would certainly be a point at which a reading or interpretation would be not merely inept, or extreme, but simply wrong. Yes. I’m going to say yes. Why do you ask this question?”
I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was liking me better after I asked this than he had before. He wasn’t humoring me; he was reminded, by it, of the conversations on our long nighttime walks, and was distracted from the possibility that I was needy, someone who could prove troublesome to his loving and stable marriage in ways he hadn’t foreseen.
“No reason,” I said. “I just wondered. Sorry, Skandar, I’ve got to go now. My dad needs me for something.” Which might have been true. But in fact, after I hung up—and turned off—my cell phone, I loitered in the condo driveway for another ten minutes, feeling the sadness of what had been revealed to me.
You shouldn’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer. That’s what it means to have the courage to be honest. I hadn’t asked outright whether I meant anything to him, or what I meant, but he’d made it clear. The true sight of me might have been a passing pleasure, or even, as he said, a precious moment, the heart’s expression—but it changed nothing in his life.
I stood with my arms crossed against the Rockport wind, trying to accept the loss of my newest and most necessary fantasy. I’d realized too late that Skandar was my Black Monk, my Chekhovian familiar. Even more than Sirena, Skandar was the one who could convince me of my substance, of my genius, of the significance of my thoughts and efforts. If you took away my Black Monk, what was I? If nobody at all could or would read in me the signs of worthiness—of artistic worth—then how could I be said to possess them? How could I convince myself, against the whole world’s determination? It wasn’t that I’d felt he had to choose me over her—you wouldn’t ask that someone abandon his family—but I’d thought—I’d hoped—to find his choice harder to make. I’d hoped to get the sense that there was even a choice at all.
When you’re the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. It’s a small thing, you might think; and maybe it depends upon your temperament; maybe for some people it’s a small thing. But for me, in that cul-de-sac outside Aunt Baby’s, with my father and aunt done dissecting death and shuffling off to bed behind the crimson farmhouse door, preparing for morning mass as blameless as lambs and as lifeless as the slaughtered—I felt forsaken by hope. I felt I’d been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore. This wasn’t about sex, desire, or not only, you must understand this—I never fully let him inside me in that way, not as everyone would assume; but what we did together and our union, if I can use that word, was nonetheless absolute; even more so, perhaps, because our limits were real, and created by real love for other people, and we kept true to that too; and the touch of his skin on mine—so much uncovered skin, that thinnest of pulsating sheaths between our souls: ours was a touching replete with all meaning. Or I’d thought so. It had meant, for me. There are other ways of reading the signs: “We didn’t even sleep together” would be one.
When I went inside, they’d turned off the downstairs lights. They must have thought I’d already gone to bed. I fumbled my way up to the second guest room—a closet, almost, with its monastic single bed, where the bedside lamp must have been all of twenty-five watts and there was no question of reading.