by Olga Grushin
An enormous tree, the size of Paul with Gene standing on his shoulders. Check.
A room vast enough to accommodate said tree. Some months before, as they had followed the genial real estate agent on their first tour of the house, she had felt dazed by the stately succession of spaces—the entrance hall with its marble staircase, the living room with its blinding wall of windows, the expansive kitchen with the sunlit dining area separated by the curve of the granite island, the darkly paneled library, then yet another room, which appeared to be a second living room, with a spectacular chandelier she had just narrowly avoided walking into. “It’s hung a bit low, I think,” she said, flustered, and the agent laughed his agreeable laugh and said, “But naturally, there will be a table underneath.” “Oh,” she said, “I thought the dining room was back there.” “No, honey,” Paul said, smiling, “that was just the breakfast nook.” “Oh,” she said again. By then they had returned to the hall and the agent had stopped before the tall French doors on its opposite side. “And the best for last,” he said.
She fully expected that they had come to the end of the house and would now find themselves outside, and so was unable to suppress a gasp when, after a dramatic pause, the agent pushed the double doors open.
“The ballroom,” he announced.
She thought: It’s like a house within a house—a house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like in some magic story. I will write a poem about a delighted little girl who discovers a fairy-tale ballroom, complete with candlelit mirrors and princesses twirling in a waltz, hidden in the middle of her suburban bungalow. But when she considered for another minute, she knew that there was no poem in it: the mere notion of living in a house that contained something called a “ballroom” left her too stunned for words.
“Just look at these ceilings,” Paul said, tilting his head.
(Sudden money, and not as much as they suppose, the agent thought, appraising his clients with an experienced eye; the woman especially looked all agog with greed. The agent had “Peter Boggart” printed on his expensively embossed business cards, but his real name was Bogdan Petković, and he did not like big new houses, or the people to whom he showed them. His grandfather had kept bees in a small village in the Balkan mountains, and he himself dreamed of going back there once he had set aside enough savings. Whenever he felt drained, he imagined the drowsy droning of bees above a blue meadow, and a dark-eyed girl by the village well looking at him over her shoulder with a quick, saucy smile; the vision never failed to motivate him.)
“Twenty-two by thirty-two, with a fourteen-foot ceiling,” the agent offered energetically. “You could almost fit the White House tree in here.”
Check.
(“It’s perfect,” Paul had said as soon as the agent had waved his good-bye.
“It costs much too much,” she said.
“We can afford it. As long as we budget.”
“The kids might fall down the stairs,” she said.
“We’ll set up childproof gates.”
“I wouldn’t be able to hear them at night,” she said.
“We’ll put monitors everywhere.”
“It would take all my life to clean it,” she said.
“So we’ll hire a maid. Once I get my next raise.”
“All the furniture we own would fit in that one throne room, or whatever he called it, and I wouldn’t know what to do with the rest of the house,” she said.
“We can get a decorator to help you. It will be fun. Please, honey, don’t fret so much. This house is perfect for us. And we can finally get a dog. Or even two.”
She thought: God help me, I love the house.
She thought: I no longer recognize the shape of my life.
Aloud she said, “You have a solution for everything, don’t you?”—and, after a moment, remembered to smile, so it would not sound like a reproach.)
The penultimate item on her holiday checklist: a dozen children’s presents to assemble under the tree in festive piles—check, check, check. They had promised to give each other no gifts that year: she had not yet mastered driving, and the new house was even farther out than the old one, with no stores to walk to; in any case, she had argued, the house was gift enough for both of them. On Christmas morning, still in her pajamas, she kneeled on the new rug and watched the children; four-year-old Gene whooped with excitement as he tore the paper off his puzzles, and one-and-a-half-year-old Emma lay cooing on top of a gigantic plush dog. Once all the presents had been unwrapped, dismembered, and discarded, Paul brought in mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and she gathered both children into her flannel-clad lap and sat looking at the flames, while white wintry sunlight flooded the great expanse of the bare room. There is something so peaceful about a fire in the morning, she thought. Emma grew heavy with sleep, making her right arm numb; Gene stared at the wisps of snow that darted outside the still-curtainless windows.
“Tell us one of your stories,” she asked.
Gene nodded and, not pausing to think, began: “Once upon a time a boy wanted to make a snowman, but it was fall, and there was no snow, so he made his snowman out of leaves. But in the morning he woke up, and the snowman was not there: the wind carried it away at night. But when Christmas came, the boy made another snowman out of snow, and it was so much fun. The end.”
As she listened, her habitual worry loosened its hold on her heart, and she felt certain, almost certain, that this house was just what they needed—that here Gene and Emma would be sure to have a childhood no less magical than hers had been. But magic, she knew, was not born of place alone; she too would have to try harder. When Gene fell silent, she reached for the book of Russian folktales that had been her present to him, showed him the pictures of firebirds and bears. He seemed indifferent until his eyes fell on a reproduction of a painting she had loved as a child, which he studied in absorbed silence. “The rider has stopped at the crossroads,” she explained, pleased by his interest. “See this stone? The words on it say: ‘If you go straight, you’ll find happiness. If you go right, you’ll lose your horse. If you go left, you’ll lose your life.’ He is choosing where to go.”
Paul guffawed. “Why would anyone choose to go right or left?”
“Hmm,” she said. “I never thought of it like that. Maybe you need to be Russian to find it tempting.”
“Or maybe he can’t read,” Gene said, sounding slightly disdainful; he had learned his letters in the fall. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”
“Scary?” she repeated, surprised, and looked at the picture again—and saw the empty yellow sky, the crows and the skulls, and the horseman, his face invisible, stooped before the gravestone; and now his pose did seem to her one of deep weariness, perhaps even defeat, and the entire landscape pregnant with an evil hush of ominous forebodings.
Gene leaned over to push the book away, and spilled his mug of chocolate on the Persian rug. Emma woke up wailing as a few hot drops landed on her wrist. But of course memories and enchantments aren’t transmitted by blood, she told herself sensibly; it was only natural that their childhood magic would be different from hers. And as she rushed to take care of burns and stains, she strove to smother the dull throb of sadness deep, deep inside her.
That evening, when the exhausted, satisfied children had fallen asleep, the monitors crackling at their bedsides, she returned to the darkened ballroom and sat on the floor by the dying fire. After some minutes, Paul came to join her, a glass of spiced eggnog in one hand, a long velvet box in the other.
“A little something for you,” he said, setting the box gently in her lap.
“But Paul,” she protested. “I thought we’d agreed—”
“It’s nothing. Just a token, really. Go ahead, open it.”
Inside was a choker necklace of golden filigree.
“It’s lovely,” she said with a small sigh.
<
br /> “Here, let me—the clasp has a trick to it . . .”
There sounded a sharp little snap, like a clang of rodent teeth. She looked at the shadowy woman in the nearest mirror, at all the women in all the mirrors around the room, then slowly lifted her hand to her throat. The necklace felt cold, heavy, and smooth under her fingers. She thought she saw a reflection on the edge of the crowd stand up and leave without a glance back, and was seized by a wild desire to follow.
She turned her back to the mirrors.
“This is just the way we imagined it,” Paul said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she replied—but as she said it, she knew that she had never imagined anything like it. She had grown up in a world where the value of jewels had been measured in stories, not carats, and the castle she had dreamed of inhabiting as a little girl had nothing to do with owning property, or with drinking eggnog on a palatial (if somewhat stained) Tabriz: it had been merely a wish to live in the daily presence of beauty—the idea of beauty, as she had understood it in her seven-year-old mind. Yet this beautiful house was not an idea, it was real—too real; and she could no longer pretend, as she had in their low-ceilinged bungalow, that it was all temporary somehow, a flimsy, hastily assembled theatrical set, a prelude to a proper life she would lead someday soon.
But perhaps she was wrong to feel so apprehensive. There was an art of poetry, true, but there was an art of living as well, and, contrary to the beliefs of the nineteenth-century romantics, one did not preclude the other, did it? Perhaps it was time she learned something of the latter. And why should she not enjoy a comfortable house with two bright, healthy children and a loving husband? She emerged from her anxious reverie to discover him kissing her neck, a little shyly, whispering about christening this rug, this room—this house, actually, even though they had now lived here for almost two months—for it had been a while, a long while, a very long while, she kept putting him off, she had not yet had a chance to visit her doctor since Emma’s birth, to talk about options, and he had grudgingly agreed that two was probably enough, yes, three would have been nice, three would have been his choice, he supposed, but he understood that two was just right for them. But maybe this time, just this one time, she could stop worrying and live in the moment, for what were the chances, and wasn’t that what she wanted, a life of spontaneity, a life of experience—and the embers were glowing so cozily in the fireplace, and the tree was tinkling and sparkling above them, and the taste of eggnog was sweet on her lips, and of course in time she would write all the poetry she meant to write, and everything, everything, would turn out just fine.
The last item on her holiday list: happiness. Check. And a barely visible question mark next to it.
22. Dining Room
The Ghostly Conversation
“Salad forks go on the outside,” said Paul, walking into the dining room with a stack of soup bowls and taking in the table at a glance.
“I know that,” she replied with some irritation, and, turning, saw that she had indeed set the forks wrong: the smaller ones bumped the gilded rims of the plates at crooked angles. She did not remember placing them there.
“Are you feeling all right?” Having unburdened himself of the bowls, he paused on the threshold to give her a mildly inquiring look.
“I’m fine.” She would not meet his eyes as she went around the table switching the forks. “Just a bit queasy. Something with my stomach.”
“Or it could be nerves,” he said with an easy shrug. “There’s no need to feel nervous, you know. It’s only my boss and his wife we’re trying to impress. Only my entire future hanging in the balance. Well, I better go check on the sauce.”
He beamed at her before vanishing into the kitchen, and she heard more sizzling and banging and the oven door swinging open and the refrigerator door swinging shut. I guess that was a joke, she said wordlessly to the afterimage he had left behind, I mean your comment about the future, because isn’t all this, your partnership, this place, our children, isn’t all this supposed to be the future already? . . . The meat smells so rich . . . Oh no, there it is again, that wave of sick feeling. I suppose I’m getting ill. Or else. Or else. But I can’t think about that right now.
And she did succeed in not thinking about it while their guests arrived, and for a spell after that, give or take a nauseating stray thought. As the four of them sat around the table crowned by the radiant magnificence of the chandelier, she would turn her head to the left and converse, almost convincingly, about the merits of silk wallpaper, then turn her head to the right and discuss the Russian Revolution, all the while straining to catch the back-and-forth traipse of Mrs. Simmons, their new babysitter, on the ceiling and the hushed whimpering of Emma, who could not fall asleep. Paul’s boss, a stout, round-shouldered man in his early sixties, had a rowdy laugh and the massive jaw of a bulldog. His forty-something wife talked softly, revealing a dazzle of perfect white teeth in a frozen face framed by long tousled locks of brittle gold. “But this is divine,” the woman kept saying in a toneless voice every time she took another dainty mouthful of soup. Whenever she lifted the spoon to her mouth, her diamond bangles slid down her skinny wrist and clicked together discreetly.
They got through the soup course. She poked at the edges of her salad, unable to eat, nodding as Paul’s boss held forth on the proper ways of stocking a wine cellar. Paul brought in the steaks, explaining his personal take on béarnaise sauce. When they began to debate some incomprehensible work issue, she played a silent rhyming game she had invented to help her get through the more mind-numbing chores of the day, constructing short stacks of words in her mind, moving from the tangible and present to the abstract and remote: “Fork—cork—dork—New York. Knife—wife—strife—life. Spoon—old prune—cocoon—doom . . . Wait, the last one doesn’t fit. How did that jingle go, from the show Gene used to watch? One of these things is not like the others . . . All right, then: Big Bird—slurred—curse word—theater of the absurd—”
Paul’s boss had turned to her and was asking her something.
“I’m sorry?” She tried not to look at a speck of brown fat that glistened on his chin.
“Dacha,” he boomed. “Tell us about your dacha. You have a dacha back home?”
He mispronounced the word—daka, he said—though of course she did not correct him. But when she opened her mouth to reply, something happened to the guests, to the room, even to Paul himself: everything suddenly assumed a flat, two-dimensional sleekness of unreality, like some film she was only half watching. I must be getting sick, she thought again. Or it could be nerves, I suppose. Or . . . No, do not think about that, the gods would not be so cruel . . .
She blinked, caught herself, felt the awkward silence widening around her like a clumsy spill. All three of them were looking at her, their smiles becoming glazed.
Paul came to her rescue.
“But naturally they have a dacha,” he rejoined, and she felt a sharp little shock when he echoed his boss’s error, though he knew how to say it correctly. “It’s a real log cabin in the middle of a forest. No running water, and conveniences in the yard.”
“How quaint,” the wife said, sounding faintly disgusted. “Like living in a Tolstoy novel.” She stood up, her bracelets sliding and clacking.
Paul started to clear the table for dessert.
“Don’t you get frostbite when you use your outhouse in the winter?” the boss asked, his mouth remaining agape even after he finished speaking. She smiled at him in anguish. His teeth were not perfect like his wife’s, but pointed and yellowing, wolfish somehow. “Siberian winters and all that?”
“They don’t go there in winter,” Paul answered with readiness, bending to refill the man’s wineglass for the fourth time, then, after a beat of hesitation, refilling his own as well. “Of course, in the summer you must ward off the mosquitoes and the wasps, no?”
He carried the empty bot
tle into the kitchen.
Could it be true, she wondered, that people got just the dinner conversations they deserved? She went on smiling, terror growing inside her.
“Hell,” the boss cried, “if I were a mosquito, I would bite you!” He roared with laughter, and in the next instant she found his hand clamped around her knee. Stricken, she stared at his impeccable starched cuff, at his golden cuff link in the shape of an anchor; but the clasp had already turned into a pat, jovial and vapid, and the wife came back in, talking about this nice little shop she knew where one could get the best guest soaps, and Paul entered with a new bottle of wine and a platter bearing Casanova’s Delight, announcing it to be the very thing that had made his wife fall in love with him, and the evening proceeded on its limping, unreal course.
After coffee, Paul offered to take their guests on a tour of the house. “But I must warn you, it’s a work in progress,” he said. “Apart from the dining room, none of it’s furnished. As you can see, we started with the most important room.”
“You should keep it this way,” said the boss’s wife, rising from her chair. “I always say one can have too many things. Don’t I, Mark? Don’t I always say to you, one should be able to waltz through one’s house without tripping over all these silly antiques?”
It was obvious from her tone that she meant precisely the opposite.
“Coming, honey?” Paul paused in the doorway, swaying a little.
“You go ahead,” she said. “I’d like to clean up a bit.”
But when she was alone, she did not move from her seat. She heard their voices echoing in the entrance hall, Paul’s boss guffawing—“And what about a bed, surely you have a bed!”—adding something she could not make out that caused the men to gargle with laughter the entire way up the stairs. Now their voices grew indistinct, and two sets of manly footsteps thumped broadly above her head, while a third set tapped like a delicate hammer driving delicate nails into her temples, which made her realize her head was throbbing, had been throbbing for some time. Then she no longer heard them at all; but oddly enough, she continued to hear the flow of some ghostly conversation taking place just a breath away, not behind the wall but right next to her, yet sounding distant, as if reaching her ears through a thick veil. Several voices wove in and out, discussing with quiet passion things of inestimable interest and everlasting importance, though she could catch only a snippet now and again—something about a ruined temple in a tangle of vines in a jungle, and a sky over a western sea darkly aflutter with a thousand migrating storks, and a herd of wild horses running breast-deep through wind-blown steppe grasses. She listened for a long, entranced minute. Perhaps, she thought, in some parallel dimension, infinitely close and infinitely far away, another house existed alongside theirs, and in that other house lived fascinating people who did fascinating things and held fascinating talks over their dinner table—and though there was no doorway between the two places, one could occasionally stumble upon glimpses and echoes of that other, brighter place, and, for one single moment of miraculous serendipity, one could feel almost complete. She could write a poem about it . . . And she forced herself to go on, to think about the poem for another full minute; but all along she understood, of course, that what she was really doing amidst the fingerprinted crystal, the smeared china, the crusted silver—the wreckage of a sumptuous, laborious, vacuous meal—was trying to ward off her nausea, to distract herself with frantic imaginings from what, deep inside, she already knew to be true.
