Read The Woman Upstairs for Free Online Page B

led, grimly, to our humble front door.
    I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes.
    In the past few years, I’ve often thought of the Marianne Faithfull song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”—“At the age of thirty-seven, she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair …”—and I’ve felt little pricks behind my eyes. Not because I thought I wouldn’t get my Parisian sports car moment—insanely, and quite erroneously, I was sure at thirty-seven, and thirty-eight, and even thirty-nine, that that moment was imminent—but because Marianne is right that the age of thirty-seven—the first of my Reza years—is a time of reckoning, the time at which you have to acknowledge once and for all that your life has a shape and a horizon, and that you’ll probably never be president, or a millionaire, and that if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way. Then there’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and officially old, except that I didn’t use it for that purpose. I used those years another way, or thought I did. I thought I was using them to make my life real—wasn’t that what they said in the sixties? To “realize” myself?—but it turns out I’m still in the Fun House to this day.

6
    When Sirena failed to show up for Back to School Night, I wondered whether to call to remind her of our appointment at Burdick’s two days later. I decided to wait and see. I was aware that this was not only unteacherly but simply not very grown up of me. I was setting a friendship test.
    She passed. She came, although she was almost fifteen minutes late, and seemed to be carrying half a dozen parcels and bags with which she breathlessly and clumsily bumped the other customers: she got one of them, an old lady drinking hot chocolate, in the back of the head.
    Because I’d been waiting awhile, I’d managed to snag a table. The tables and stools there are small and close together, and they’re not comfortable, but we squeezed ourselves in and piled her packages underneath our feet. We kept our coats on, although it was warm, because we had nowhere to put them.
    “Shopping?”
    “Shopping, yes. It’s my husband’s birthday tomorrow.” She gave a pretty laugh. “We always give many presents. Nothing big, but lots of small things. It’s always a challenge to find the right ones. He is an—idiosyncrasy?”
    “He’s idiosyncratic.”
    “Yes, exactly.”
    “And his work is the reason that you’re here?”
    “Only for one year. He has a fellowship from the university, to write his book.”
    “Interesting. What’s it about?”
    “You’ll have to ask him to explain it, because I’ll do a poor job. Ethics. It’s about ethics and history. He’s interested in how we can’t tell a history truly—there’s no such thing after all—but so then we must try to tell a history ethically—and what does this mean?”
    “Why can’t a history be true?”
    “Because we always have only a part of a history. You can’t make a picture three hundred sixty degrees; we can’t, even in one second of a life, show everything that we experience. So how could we do such a thing for a person’s history, or a people’s history? A nation’s history? It isn’t possible.” She put her hands up in a cheerful show of despair.
    “And what do you do, then? Are you a historian, or an ethics person, or whatever, also?”
    “No! I could never do such things. Words are not for me.” She looked at me closely, her marbled dark eyes alight. “I’m an artist. I make things. Installations. Sometimes videos.” She said this as calmly as if she were confessing to making cakes or collecting stamps, and I