The Life Room (16 page)

The movie has begun and the flight attendants have returned to their little kitchen in the back of the plane. The lights are dim. Every passenger is either asleep, tucked into his or her separate self, heads leaning against windows, or thrown back against chairs, or behind headsets. It turns out that John and Robert are on my flight. We are dispersed throughout the cabin, and I’m grateful not to have to talk to anyone. The airplane floor is a mess of fallen blankets and discarded shoes. Before I return home I need to record my encounter with Stephen. He’s still taking up my energy, my serenity, my space. I’m going to write our encounter exactly as I remember it. So that no one can take it back.

When I saw Stephen standing outside the hotel lobby waiting for me I almost didn’t recognize him. His hair had receded, revealing a wide forehead. As a boy he boasted a mass of unruly, wavy hair, and when I looked at him it was as if I could still see the crown of it surrounding him. His face had something tender and angry about it. He wore a pendant around his neck, in the shape of a cross. It was tucked under a soft pale yellow shirt. He wore khakis and hiking boots. He looked broader than I remembered, as if he had been working out. I still pictured him as boyish, troubled, with his motorcycle helmet in his hand. He was carrying a leather backpack over one shoulder. I looked at his browned arms. He looked youthful, though his hair was beginning to gray at his sideburns. I don’t want to admit that his physical presence still unnerves me. But it does. He’s gorgeous and still has those penetrating, not quite knowable eyes. Is it vanity that has been our sole attraction all these years? When he smiled, I noticed that one of his two front teeth was chipped. When I asked him about it later he said he was in a drunken brawl over a girl, and that he’d lost the nerve in the tooth. He said he didn’t want to fix it. He wanted to remember the fact that he still had it in him to fight for someone. His face lit up when he spoke. He wore a gold stud in his left ear.

He embraced me when we said hello, and we stepped back, looked at each other, smiled. “It’s been a long time. Eleanor, all grown up,” he said.

We roamed the narrow streets together. It was a beautiful day, and as we walked it was as if we were revisiting all the paths and valleys where we had known each other, though neither of us had to say it. Everything was in bloom. I could look at him and not feel attracted to him, not be drawn into his pain, to the little boy inside him who needed my comfort. For a writer he seemed uncultured, not bookish (did he ever read?), though I was surprised as we walked how much of the history of the city he seemed to know. I felt myself getting caught up in his manic energy.

Stephen told me about the article that brought him to Paris. It was a piece on the rise of Napoleon for a new men’s magazine that he described as a cross between
GQ
and
Rolling Stone
.

“Did you know that Napoleon was only thirty when he entered Paris and crowned himself Master of France?” he recounted, proud of his knowledge, as we walked along the Seine toward the Louvre. “He established peace with the Vatican and revived the entire city.” As he spoke, he motioned with his hands. He was dramatic and theatrical. I caught the same look in his eye that he flashed as a boy when he sang “Eleanor Rigby.” I was attracted to how passionate he was about his work. He spoke about it with confidence and maturity. I’m proud of him. He never finished college. He went for two years to the University of Colorado and dropped out. He wrote scripts and pieces for magazines and painted and built houses to make money. I’m glad that all his hard work seemed to be paying off, that he was now a respected journalist.

Occasionally, as we walked, our arms brushed. I almost tripped on the cobbled streets in my heels, and he reached for my arm to help me catch my balance.

“Eleanor Cahn!” he exclaimed. He stopped to look at me. “In fucking Paris.” We both laughed.

He asked me if I remembered playing strip poker in his playhouse. He said something about my being leagues ahead of him, even then. He paused. He was clearly trying to revive our closeness. He turned me toward him dramatically. And then asked me whether I had any Kleenex in my purse.

I looked at him strangely. He said he just wanted to find out if I was still a babe. “Mothers always keep Kleenex in their purses. You know. To wipe the snot from their kid’s nose.”

I pulled out a purse-size box of Kleenex and showed it to him. “So if I’m a mother I can’t be a babe?”

“You can, Eleanor.”

I was certain it was a line he gave to many women. I was on to him. On guard.

Was it kismet or mere coincidence that we found ourselves in the most romantic city together? At one point my thumb reached for my wedding ring, and I shamefully turned the stone inside the palm of my hand. In Paris, at that very moment, I committed to taking him at face value. He was in Paris writing an article on Napoleon for a magazine, and this had nothing to do with me. It was as if I was meeting him for the first time, and I was simply drawn to his energy and creative nature. The attraction was still there. I was warm and slightly agitated in his presence. His physicality was bold and sexual. It was the first thing that defined him; that charged energy that I had felt and had pushed away the very first time we were alone together in my childhood bedroom when I was not yet thirteen.

He continued talking about his work, about the piece he was writing. His face lit up when he spoke. He was on his own, unattached. He could travel around the world if he wanted to. I had wanted to live in Europe after I finished graduate school. It represented longing and possibility, a kind of permanent hunger. I had wanted to spend my time with writers, painters, and musicians eating and drinking in cafes. I imagined living in a drafty artist’s studio with a primitive kitchen, a table where none of the dining chairs matched, a small desk to hold my portable typewriter. Paris represented that lost possibility. What had changed all that? Was it because of my mother’s insular suburban existence, my father’s wayward life, that I had chosen the safe road and married? Was it merely that I was face to face with someone who had chosen a different path that made me question my own? I took the barrette out of my hair and it came tumbling to my shoulders. For a minute I wanted to stop in a doorway of one of the apartment houses with the Parisian blue shutters and knock on the red door, and like Alice in Wonderland magically enter into its inhabitants’ lives, go down that tunnel and never return.

Why had my mother never remarried? Why had Stephen’s mother never remarried? Even my mother’s friend, Celia, who had enough money to travel the globe if she wanted to, confined herself to her small but elegantly decorated apartment. Occasionally my mother and her friends fantasized about starting up a new life in a new city, the way one can dream of one’s future when one is inside a prison, but by the end of a week or a month the fantasy deflated into routine, weekend trips to the flea market, dinners out every week. Since my father, there hadn’t been another man in my mother’s life. Her headaches had been getting worse. I finally had convinced her to go to the Migraine Clinic. The last time I was home for a visit she told me about it. We were sipping tea from her best china cups in her kitchen. I remember looking at the missing button on her cardigan. I remember thinking that my mother made beautiful clothes for other women but she barely thought of herself. She told me that the first appointment at the clinic was with a psychiatrist. She said she told him about us. About me and my father. She said she told him her headaches were like a hammer banging inside her head. She had to rate the pain on a pain scale of one to ten. She said they fluctuated from an eight to a nine when they were at their very worst. It was the first time my mother had ever talked to a psychiatrist. “I was frightened,” she said. “To bolster my confidence I wrote little notes to myself on a piece of paper I put in my pocketbook. ‘You’re beautiful,’ I wrote in large letters. On another I wrote, ‘Joseph still loves you.’ I didn’t want to forget. I didn’t want to think my life has been a lie.”

I looked at the missing button on her cardigan and said nothing. Was it fantasy that sustained her all these years or had my father’s love been enough to fill her for a lifetime? I told Stephen that I believed the hammer beating inside her head was caused by her longing for my father. But to my mother I had only asked if she knew she was missing a button on her sweater. She thanked me. She said she didn’t ever want me to hide anything from her. She always wanted to know the truth.

Before I left that day she opened my father’s armoire looking for the letters he had sent her. She wanted to read one or two to me, as if to convince me that he still loved her. She still kept his sweaters and clothes in the armoire, and when she opened its drawers it was like his essence swept into the room. A soft smile broadened on her lips and her hand reached toward her cheek and she dreamily stroked her face before a current of grief washed over her. She took out of the envelope one of my father’s letters and read it to me. “Dear Elizabeth,” one of the letters said. “I still remember the first day we met. We were wandering in the garden outside the music school. I can still remember the smell of your shampoo.”

I was filled with two contradictory thoughts. I wanted to tell my mother that I understood. And I wanted to rage at her for not having the courage to move on, for continuing to love a man who could not give her what she needed. And these two contradictory emotions, I understand now, have defined all my own relationships, my desires. I doubt whether I have ever quite understood what it is that I need or want. I have always been too preoccupied trying to understand another person and what that person needs or wants to ensure that he will not leave me like my father did. Have I always been more comfortable in a state of resignation, like my mother? After being in Paris where everything around me was so alive, resignation no longer seems acceptable.

As we walked past the china shop with the pitcher in the window, I pointed it out to Stephen and we stopped and admired it. A wave of inexplicable fear washed over me as I studied the painted crocus buds. I was relieved when we continued walking.

Stephen seemed particularly careful of what information he divulged about himself, making sure, I thought, to paint the best picture. His rugged face was set in the expression of a combination of self-satisfaction and neediness. He seemed unsure and intimidated by me, but at the same time aggressively demanding. We walked side by side, and his arm brushed up against mine again. Our lives were again intertwining beyond my will, like strands of thread that formed a tough, unbreakable knot.

“I have to show you something,” Stephen said. He took me to Sainte-Chapelle. In 1100 when Paris began to emerge as a great city, kings and bishops began building the churches, including Notre Dame. Sainte-Chapelle was completed in just two years. We waited in line looking at the exterior. I had read about the church in one of the guidebooks, and others at the conference had remarked that it was worth seeing, but from the outside the cathedral looked dim and ordinary.

We ascended the narrow spiral staircase used by the palace servants and entered the room with the fifteen stained-glass windows that glowed with Chartres blue, reds, and yellows. The walls consisted almost entirely of glass. I grasped Stephen’s arm in astonishment. We sat down on one of the rickety wood chairs and looked around us at the panels on the glass that told the Christian story from the Garden of Eden through the apocalypse.

“I was here a few days ago and I was glued to the chair. I began to think how fundamental it all is. Adam and Eve. You know, the girl and the boy and desire. I’ve run from that my entire life.”

I remarked that the artistry of the stained glass was astonishing.

“I’m not talking about art.” He reached over so that he was looking directly into my eyes. “I wonder what it would be like to just stay with it. To not have to run away.”

“From what?”

“We’re the center of our own stories, Eleanor. You have to remember that.”

At that moment what he said seemed to carry import. I found myself fascinated, drawn into his self-mythology. I looked up at one of the panels. It dramatized Eve alone in the garden and the serpent with the head of a man coiled around the tree holding out the apple, tempting her with forbidden knowledge. “What are you trying to say?”

“We only have one life, Eleanor.”

“And?”

“You have to think about how you want to spend it. And who you want to be with.”

He looked at me with that seductive, pleading look again.

I had the strangest feeling that he was trying to tell me something. Or had I imagined it? We sat quietly for a moment. I thought now that I liked him better when he didn’t talk. It seemed when he spoke that there was an agenda or subtext behind his words that I wasn’t sure how to read. To lighten things up, I told him that I was glad I did not take a bite of the apple he offered me earlier, when we were waiting in line. He laughed.

The hairs on his arm almost touched my skin. We were sitting that close. His body radiated warmth like a furnace, and I felt as if we were inside a tiny jewel box with the windows all aglow. When the sun shone intensely the church was less gothic.

“I could sit here all day in the dark with you,” Stephen said. “We could pretend it happened. That you and I are together.”

We sat in silence and I pondered what he said, looked back at him, and we both smiled, in recognition of our past history coming more into focus.

After we left the church we settled in for lunch at a bistro with blue shutters on its open windows. I had been reluctant to sit face to face with Stephen, and when we sat down I studied the menu intently to avoid looking at him. The intensity between us made me uncomfortable. Then he looked at me. Said he couldn’t do this. That he couldn’t sit in a cafe with me on my last day in Paris. That it had to be more spectacular. He stood up and took my hand and asked me to follow him.