White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  I tried not to panic. Maybe he was just giving me space to settle into my new space, I reasoned. I didn’t call. But for the rest of the day, I had a bad feeling, even in my new sanctuary.

  • • •

  BACK AT THE museum, I also faced the issue of my historical design colleagues, who, as colleagues do, ended up becoming a version of family in that I didn’t select them, and yet, they formed my daily context. At first, England was ignorant bliss for me. People seemed tame and nonthreatening; reticence, self-consciousness, and the kind of fumbling awkwardness that I’d always struggled to hide were de rigueur. My shyness melted away amid the shyness of others, and of course the immense quantities of liquor. I blended in.

  Or so I thought. When a colleague balked in horrified shame when I told her I liked her sweater, I began to suspect that I wasn’t aware of all the conversational codes that were at work in my new life. When I commented on the severe discomfort that my colleagues appeared to feel when introducing me to others, an expat American explained it was because my foreign lack of class-markers was confusing. Never mind living rooms, they did not know how to place me. I was well-educated (upper-middle) but asked questions about people’s work and lives (lower) and sometimes even complimented their clothing (off-the-charts, very suspect behavior).

  I was appalled. I wanted to be placed. I observed and interpreted, carrying out my own social study to try to make sense of these rules. I deduced where my officemates were placed. Helen was from the North, which meant she was working class, while Charlotte was Manchester society and lived in an Art Deco split-level, which meant middle-middle. I finally realized I’d been acting outside the beams of the class-markers that I should have been exhibiting and buckled down to become properly middle. I tried to read the right newspapers, say extra sorries, and leave people alone. I never complimented, made eye contact, or showed emotion. Stiff upper-middle-class lip über alles. For my lunch, I became middlingly modest, also bringing sandwiches on white bread in recycled aluminum foil. (With crusts—to cut them off was too upper.) I took off my scarf and braved the office’s gales (upper-middle?). I never again asked for Post-it notes (expensive! wasteful! . . . American!). English über-self-consciousness spread through me like a contagion: I was now a decoding machine, constantly translating North American impressions into this aged, nuanced English language, crystallized over centuries, unlike “American” which was direct, catering to immigrants.

  Eventually, I was promoted to curator and searched like a sleuth, virtual magnifying glass in hand, taking lunches “al desko,” desperate to find the most fitting living rooms imaginable. But I was particularly excited (though didn’t dare show it, Englishly) when I came across an interior image by R. B. Kitaj, a painter whose personal story—a perpetual stranger, a self-declared “wandering Jew” who had moved from America to England—was so compelling. An Ohio native, Kitaj studied and settled in England, making collagelike work influenced by British figurative style. Further research proved that the image depicted his Holocaust-surviving relative’s living room in West London. He was my champion: a Jewish foreigner whose genes were stamped with refugeeism, but who’d made a home in the British art world. So much so, he could even create its representations. It was a jagged scene, the furniture on different planes, the walls broken, the hard wooden chair its only standing staple. The living room scene was cluttered but flat, skewered with thick black lines, as if a frame held together the largely dark red chaos.

  It was called Desk Murder.

  “Look at this,” I said to Margaret, not mentioning its title. “A foreigner’s take on home.” Then I naively added, “A moving, passionate work, not just about furniture, but showing ambiguities, the home as a site of suffering, loneliness, malaise.”

  She examined it, then pointed at the abstractly depicted sofa. “Is that middle class?”

  “I don’t know exactly; it’s a nonrepresentational rendition,” I tried.

  “Call him and find out,” she ordered.

  I just imagined it. “Hi, Mr. Kitaj. I’m very moved by your expression of sheer heartbreaking loss alluding to your family’s time in Dachau, but I just wanted to confirm that their couch was bought at the John Lewis department store.”

  “OK,” I said, sighing. “I’ll check on the couch.”

  “Sofa,” she corrected me. Couch was working class.

  “I’ll call him,” I said, putting it at the bottom of my to-do list, lying. Englishly.

  I couldn’t do it, even in the name of living rooms and of scholarly endeavor. I wasn’t drawn to the painting for its furnishings or historical framework, but for how it made me feel—less alone in my perpetual foreignness. I was interested in beauty and stillness because I’d lacked those in my life.

  I did not make the call, but Kitaj became my symbol of cultural symbiosis and my cause. At the weekly cappuccino meetings, I kept suggesting the inclusion of his living room, gently pushing for a domesticity that was complex, crowded, nearly incoherent, for his empty chair that stood tall among the chaos.

  • • •

  “NOTHING FEELS RIGHT,” I said into my cell. I was on the top of a double-decker bus, stuck in traffic around the Marble Arch circle. I’d felt so lost, so alone that day, that I found myself impulsively dialing my mother, even though I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps, I knew she’d be by the phone. Perhaps, automatic numbers.

  “You’re young,” she said gently, strangely calm compared to her histrionic calls, listening to my every word. It was better, I saw, when I called her. “Nothing feels right until your thirties.” The bus moved an inch. Diesel seeped in through the windows. Hyde Park spread in front of me, but I felt closed in by the cars. “You need to be good to yourself,” she said. “Treat yourself like a baby. The brain grows faster than the heart.”

  I imagined myself rocking my inner turmoil. I imagined Mom rocking me, now. “How did you and Dad find each other?” I surprised myself by asking something so intimate. Emotions were so fragile, could crack like thin porcelain.

  “Love is a happy coincidence of moods.” She chuckled. “It happens when two people meet at the right moment.”

  “Huh.” I thought of Mom’s poetry years, her haunted drawings, of how somewhere in her, she knew so much. Perhaps we could talk—talk about love. The phone line was a good connector. The distance was physical and so it felt less threatening. The medium was contained, deliberate, could be turned off. And I could command it, get her attention. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, finally feeling a breeze on my face, wishing I’d thought of more questions and could keep her in this tender frame, this side of her mind, for just a bit longer.

  • • •

  ON EVAN’S MOVING day, a dark morning in early December, I arrived early. “Don’t stand there,” he said, agitated. “Help me move that stuff.”

  Evan had a lot of stuff.

  I’d been particularly stuff-resistant in my new apartment. I loved the open shelves and made neat piles of clothes and books. I used my old coffee table as a bathroom ledge and placed my cosmetics on them one by one. I kept my fridge only lightly stocked, and bought no decorative trinkets. The room partitions were bohemian beaded strands, but I’d tied them back to make crisp angles. My only adornment was a red sun decal that Evan had given me, stuck to my kitchen window under the brown slatted blinds, which made the sunlight blush across my gray counter.

  When we arrived at Evan’s new place, in Zone Three, I helped bring in the small boxes. Afterward, we sat in his dark front room. “The mover thinks I should marry you,” he said. His gray eyes looked deeper, thicker, as if whole worlds swirled inside, making them the color of all color.

  “Marry me?” We’d been together for less than a year! Marriage for me was a fuzzy notion, like looking at a pointillist painting up close: I knew it would make sense in the far-off distance, but was completely indiscernible now. But it was reassuring to know he felt confi
dent enough to repeat it. I smiled, and turned away.

  “Maybe he’s right and I should marry you,” Evan said, but not to me.

  I moved boxes. Play it cool. I offered to leave and give him space like he’d done for me. He agreed. I left. I didn’t call him. And he didn’t call me.

  For a week.

  A horrible seven days. I checked my cell constantly, my landline for voice mail beeps. He’d mentioned marriage—marriage! I prayed I was giving him the space he needed to feel settled into his new abode. To think about next steps, future plans. Then, on Christmas, the world dark but lit red and green, he called. Let’s have lunch.

  On Boxing Day, we met at a curry house in Banglatown. He brought me a regifted bottle of Drambuie. My stomach heaved in waves. I couldn’t fathom ingesting a calorie. Evan ordered up a storm—unusual for his home-cooking tastes and budgetary stylings. He dumped rice on his plate.

  “This isn’t working,” he said. I used all my facial strength to blink back tears. My head spun. Marriage and now this? He had turned, flipped, spontaneous, quick.

  “Why not?” I couldn’t understand. I knew things weren’t perfect, but not this not-perfect. Nothing was perfect. We’d both improved our lives, found our dream houses.

  “They’re on the opposite sides of London—doesn’t that tell you anything?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m looking for, well . . .” He paused. “You just don’t make me feel comfortable. You have no throw pillows, no armchairs. No stuff to make me feel at home. I keep asking you, but . . .”

  Then it hit me. “Are you sleeping with Honor?” I barely formed the sounds.

  He didn’t say anything for the longest second of my life. “She has matching plate sets,” he finally conceded.

  “You fucking asshole.” I threw my biryani right at him. Then I got up, fled straight out the front door.

  “It wasn’t working out between us,” he called after me, and then other words that I couldn’t hear over the roar of my fury and shame. Honor, the middle-aged divorcée, had won. My youth meant nothing, my cool controlled style was worthless. I’d been trying to impress Evan with sophistication, my hipster neighborhood, moving bloody apartments for him, and what did he do? He cheated on me. With her. Suburban her.

  How could I not have known?

  I rushed up the creaky stairs to my solo abode, ready to call him and scream, but I stopped myself. Evan was right. He’d been asking me to cook him dinner, to help with his gardening, what I thought of marriage, but I’d played it cool. I’d been equating intimacy with neatness, maturity and beauty with minimalism and restraint. I thought getting rid of objects, being antihoard, would help me get close to people. But all Evan had wanted was for me to nurture him. Make him comfortable.

  I looked around my living room, its blank walls, its cushionless couch. I was so good at purging, I’d gotten rid of my boyfriend.

  My brain had paved my way out of Kildare, but it wasn’t enough. All the domestic theory in the world couldn’t teach me how to live.

  • NINE •

  25 WEEKS: WHEN WATER BREAKS, ALMOST

  New York City, 2011

  I looked down at the water that crashed in every direction, underlying forces opposing one another for no apparent reason. My legs went wobbly—actually a nice break from the general aching strain.

  “Why are my legs hurting?” I quickly looked up and asked Jon. “It feels like I run a marathon each day.”

  “Because you’re carrying an extra twenty pounds,” he said. “It’s a real weight.”

  “Hm.” He was right. A real burden. It was a blissfully clear Saturday afternoon, the sun bright but the air dry, the best of New York summer, and we were taking one of our weekly strolls through the city. Since we’d moved to NYC, we’d spent most Saturdays on foot, hiking from one event to another, always completing the full trajectory as pedestrians, committed to exploring the tucked-away shops and unusual offerings of Flushing, the Lower East Side, Harlem or, that day, Williamsburg, where we tried to take in every coffee shop and gadget sale, knowing that our daylong walks were numbered.

  Now we headed back into Manhattan across the Williamsburg Bridge, an incredible and gargantuan structure with lanes even for walkers. The architecture was magnificent as were the views—enormous housing projects, buildings where tens of thousands of lives converged, their dreams and fears meshing and bumping into one another, reminding us of how small we are and how contained our physical existences can be, and yet our inner worlds can span continents, ages.

  That was on top. Below, visible beneath cracks and layers of metal—the abyss. The bridge accommodated traffic on many levels, all of us—bikers, walkers, drivers, riders, mariners—suspended between boroughs, between land, taking our lives in our hands with no fuss at all, as if the state of hanging was banal, as if dangling in midair was par for any course.

  “I can’t take it,” I burst out.

  “I know,” Jon said, “the weight is annoying, but I think you look super sexy.” He squeezed me into his side. He was strong, a sturdy spectacular structure. I flashed to my sludgy walks home from school with Bubbie, my Sunday marches through Montreal with Dad, how intimate it was to step in sync with someone else, seeing the world from the same point, smelling the same scents, the same dust landing on our pores.

  “It’s not the weight,” I said. “Well, not just the weight.”

  “What is it?”

  You’re the only person who’s ever understood me, who enabled me to create the composed life that I so urgently needed. And now you’re not on my side, but on the side of my insides. I can’t even turn inward for refuge, as I’ve done for over thirty years, because my interior has been invaded.

  “This pregnancy is hard for me,” I said quietly. “I’m afraid of losing my space, my mind, all the ways I’ve learnt to cope with my past.”

  Jon was silent.

  “Look at where I came from. What happens if I’m just not ‘maternal’? What if I don’t know how to hug or feed or play? Don’t you feel that way? Aren’t you worried?”

  “No, not really,” he said. “I mean, we’ll figure it out. Everyone does it—how hard can it be?”

  Damn reasonable Jon. He didn’t get it, he didn’t have the anxiety I had—despite his own background. But maybe that was better. One of us needed to be calm, a pillar of full breaths. He took my hand.

  “I’m worried it can be pretty hard,” I said. Aside from my messed-up past, there were other issues. Like, what did I know from kids? Almost no one in our social set was a parent. “I haven’t seen a child in twenty-five years.”

  He chuckled. But I was serious.

  “I’ve been trained in molecular biochemistry and continental feminist psychoanalytic theory, not home ec. I did internships instead of babysitting. I have no idea what to do with a baby. Or a child. Or, lord, a teenager.” I reminded him of the weekend when my friends from Montreal came to visit with their two toddlers. Strollers, pouches, bedtimes were a language I didn’t speak. Even Mones, our cat, hid in my closet and retched. The kids spent whole days fighting violently over chewed-up puzzle pieces. “Share, share, share,” was the parents’ mantra—as if we all lived in a utopian commune, I kept thinking. What if they don’t always want to share? What if a child wants to hang on to their stuffed musical octopus, keep it special, beautiful, under their sole control? Then the toddlers left tangerine peels under our sofa. “I don’t even know how to cook—how am I supposed to help another human realize their full potential? How do I avoid drowning the baby in my issues?”

  “Well,” Jon said, “at least you don’t hold back.”

  I was able to be open with him, that was true. My concerns seemed concrete and surmountable when Jon and I discussed them, when I was willing to be seen for who I was. And I certainly hadn’t always been able to do that.

  “I hav
e to pee again,” I said, in the spirit of saying it all.

  PUNCH LINES

  London, 2004

  “We better send someone out to get drinks,” Andy said, pointing at the table with at least a hundred bottles on it. The house party was packed, but he was talking to me, a dazzling smile lighting his face.

  “People will die of thirst,” I played along, my voice shaking. I knew Andy from my new stand-up comedy workshop but we’d never spoken one-on-one. “And scurvy.”

  His lush lips stretched like elastics across his boyish Australian face, round and welcoming and topped with green eyes like jewels.

  Nothing like Evan. After slowly recovering from my shame at being dumped, largely by talking about it with Charlotte, who was going through a divorce, as well as dodging him and Honor at the dance school by changing for class in an upstairs closet, I accepted my new singlehood. Eventually, in place of the heavy hollowness that would set in on Saturday mornings when I realized I had nowhere to go, that no one expected me anywhere, there sprouted an appreciation of my home. All four mini rooms were mine; I didn’t have to live with depressives or drug addicts, with psychopathologies seeping through the walls. I splurged on a red-and-cream-colored shawl that I draped over the straight slat blinds in my bedroom, and a round red rug to spice up my gray wall-to-wall carpeting. I had savvy! I enjoyed how the sun filtered in through my window in the early mornings, casting a neat shadow of straight lines along my living room floor. I liked the smell of curry from the adjacent Pakistani men’s club that wafted through my bedroom, reminding me of the bustling, globo life around me. I even cracked open a beginners cookbook and made some salad dressing.

  Perhaps it was this new calm that enabled me to try out a pipe dream: stand-up comedy. Dad had performed Yiddish sketches, Eli worked in musical theater, my most exhilarating memory was my bat mitzvah speech. I’d always entertained people with my anecdotes and insecurities—why not bring them to the world! And if I’d been looking for answers in an academic way, well, here was the inexplicable, illogical art of humor. My first classes had gone well. “Funny.” People gestured at me, serious, nodding.