Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  Presently Paul and the others returned, and soon after, their guests were taking their leave. The boss said, “A perfectly cooked steak is so rare,” and laughed uproariously at his own pun. (Poor thing, he thought kindly, she looks much prettier in that wedding photo Paul keeps on his desk. She seems so ill at ease, and always as if she is thinking about something else. I tried to cheer her up, but no luck. Some folks are like that, difficult to talk to. Or it could be the language barrier, I guess. But if she listens to Paul the way she listened to us, he can’t be very happy. It’s a shame all the same.) “Look, if you ever need anything,” he said, and he sounded sincere. The boss’s wife, in parting, squeezed her hand and said, “I’m so sorry about your father,” and her voice was no longer toneless, and her eyes glistened. “Courage, my dear.”

  But they are not as I thought they were, she registered with mild surprise; but she was distracted, and when the door closed, she forgot all about them. She followed Paul back to the dining room, began to stack up the cups. As Paul talked, slurring slightly, about the success of the evening, and his plans for the wine cellar, and Mark’s lake house, she thought: It won’t be real unless I say something. I don’t have to say anything. I won’t say anything. I can just pretend it’s nothing. It probably is nothing. It was just that one time at Christmas, what are the chances, I’ve been late before, I’ve been nauseated before, it doesn’t have to mean anything. I could just go to the doctor, and I don’t have to tell Paul, I won’t tell Paul, and even if it is something, it won’t feel like anything if I talk only to the doctor, because when they say things like “first trimester” and “estimated date of confinement” and “induced termination,” these are just words, they don’t have to mean anything, as long as no one but the doctor knows anything about it. Of course I will know about it too, but it will be all right, it’s only five or six weeks now, if it’s anything at all, and it’s probably nothing, and in any case it will be over soon, and I too will forget all about it, it will mean nothing—just as long as nobody thinks about tiny little toes that look like pink peas, and tiny little fingers curling around one’s own finger in a surprisingly firm grip, and that sweet little fold in the back of the neck, and the warm smell of milk and sleep, and the toothless gums unsealed in their first smile—

  She set the wobbling tower of cups onto the table.

  “Paul?” she said. “Paul. I think I’m pregnant.”

  And within the cold immensity of her terror there already glowed a small, timid kernel of joy.

  23. Master Bathroom

  Death and Golden Faucets

  “There are columns in your bathroom,” said the plumber.

  His voice sounded indifferent on the surface, as if he was just stating the fact, but she imagined she could detect hostility underneath, and meekly, almost apologetically, she offered, “We’ve only just moved in.” She wanted to add: You could fit my entire childhood apartment in here; but he looked at her with a stony expression, and she said nothing else, only smiled to hide her discomfort and sat down on the vanity bench, awaiting his verdict. She took shallow breaths to avoid gagging.

  “So, no blockages, then,” the plumber said, unrolling his tools. “Just the smell.”

  “Just the smell,” she confirmed, then continued in a helpful rush, “Something must be wrong with the pipes. I mean, I understand that in my condition all smells seem stronger than they really are, but you can smell it too, can’t you?”

  He did not respond, did not glance up at her, did not ask about her due date, or whether she was having a boy or a girl. She had felt a little disappointed when she let him in the door, a flabby, sour-looking man past fifty with the hard bristle of a sandy mustache not quite hiding the downward turn of his mouth, and her initial assessment had proved right. The other plumber from the company, the one she had dealt with on the previous two occasions (there had been a leak in Emma’s bathroom and a dripping faucet in the kitchen), was an amiable, garrulous young fellow who would surely ask her how she was feeling and whether they’d picked a name yet. But this man went about his business in silence, tapping here, peering there, and she knew, just by looking at his stiff back, that he resented her presence in the bathroom and would have much preferred her to leave.

  Pulling herself together, she made a new attempt.

  “So,” she said brightly, “do you have any children?”

  He grunted into his mustache, whether a “Yes” or a “No” she could not discern, and set about rolling his tools back up. (Sean O’Reilly’s only daughter had drowned at the age of eleven. Now she often came to him at night. They walked the deserted streets of his neighborhood side by side, talking about nothing much, the weather, a new hardware shop around the corner, their old cat. Her sneakers squeaked with water, her voice never aged. The following morning his pajamas were often muddy and his heart lagged exhausted in his chest. He suspected that each nocturnal visit was shaving days, if not months, off his life, but he did not mind. Aching with hope, he wondered if she was going to come tonight, then reluctantly turned his attention to the rich lady with the slight foreign accent and needy eyes.)

  “Nice faucets you’ve got here,” he said, standing up with an audible creak, brushing off his knees. His tone, once again, carried a brusque undercurrent of hostility.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Your faucets. Gold-plated. Very nice.”

  “These faucets are gold-plated?” she echoed, incredulous. “I had no idea.”

  He gave her a sullen look and walked out of the bathroom.

  “But what about the smell?”

  “The pipes are fine,” he said. She waddled after him across the bedroom, down the stairs. “You’ve got a dead animal in the wall. I still have to charge you for coming out, though.”

  “A dead animal? You mean, like . . . a mouse?”

  He turned to her in the entrance hall. “Judging by the smell, something larger. A rat or a squirrel, I’d guess, maybe a raccoon.”

  “A rat? But . . . what do I do now? Do I call an exterminator?”

  “I don’t know what you people do in such cases,” he said with a shrug, and opened the front door without waiting for her help with the lock, “but I’d call one of those animal trappers. No need to exterminate anything, it’s dead already.”

  “You people,” she thought, stung—what did he mean by “you people,” I don’t have any “people,” one should never judge by appearance only, my real world is far away from here . . . Resisting the urge to chase the dour man outside and set him straight, she locked the door behind him and puffed her way back upstairs, stopping at the bathroom threshold, peeking in. When she had first seen the house, the whirlpool bath with its swan-shaped faucets, submerged in the deep basin between the two columns, beneath the two chandeliers, had struck her as the most marvelous of all the marvels here. Now, hidden behind its lustrous gray marble lay the decomposing corpse of some rat crawling with maggots—and so troubling was the image, and so unshakable her sudden sense of the entire house weighing down upon her, demanding to be maintained in a manner she was beginning to suspect beyond her, that she found herself reeling. Crumpling onto the gorgeously veined floor, she pressed her forehead against the cool side of the bathtub and burst into tears; and as she cried, she remembered last night’s dream, heroic and primary-colored, in which she had fought in some medieval battle in a green meadow under blue skies alongside fierce youths with lions’ manes and undying courage; and the memory of the dream made her cry all the harder. But it’s nothing, it’s only hormones, stop it this minute, she thought after a moist, confused moment, all at once angry with herself.

  At least she had not been cowed into giving that unpleasant man a tip.

  She called Paul, but he was in a meeting.

  “Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Caldwell?” his secretary asked, her voice oozing solicitude. “Do you want me to page him?”

&nbs
p; “No, no, I’m fine,” she said. “Maybe he could call me back later?”—but just then Emma woke up from her nap and Gene needed a snack, and her free half-hour was over.

  The trapper arrived on Wednesday. He was a cheerful black youth dressed in a neatly pressed khaki-colored uniform with his name, some unpronounceable combination of d’s and b’s, embroidered over the breast pocket. He took the matter in hand with great efficiency, considered the angle of the roof, even went outside and climbed a ladder to probe around the skylights. “This is where it gets in,” he said, returning to the bathroom, pointing. He spoke confidently, flashing bright teeth in a dark face agleam with sweat, his words like solid blocks of wood, sturdy with some accent she could not place. “I must break the wall to pull it out. I’m sorry I do not fix the wall for you. Your husband, he will fix it, yes? It is easy, just drywall here, then paint over.”

  She made a mental note to call a handyman as soon as the trapper was gone.

  “You should leave now,” the young man said merrily. “Bad smells for a lady in your state. Boy or girl, you know?”

  He looked smiling at her belly, and instantly she felt a rush of gratitude so strong it made her eyes sting a little.

  “Actually, it’s two boys,” she said. “Twins. Identical.”

  As always, when she said it (and she did not say it often, mainly to workmen who came to the house, and only if they were curious enough), she experienced anew that heady mix of terror, disbelief, pride, and wonder—just as she had felt when the doctor, studying the small black screen on which some white cobwebby lines shifted and curved, had said, “Ah, there it is, a nice, healthy heartbeat,” and frowned slightly, sending her own heart into a frightened lurch, then, an excruciating second or two later, beamed and said, “And here, surprise, surprise, we have another heartbeat,” so that in her first moment of pure incomprehension, she said stupidly, “The baby has two heartbeats?”—and as she was saying it, realized what the doctor had meant. She wept in the taxi on the way home. That evening, when she told Paul, dry-eyed but even more panicked, she wanted him to console her; but he only whooped and grabbed her and lifted her up, as though to whirl her about, then, recalling himself, set her down gently instead as if she were porcelain. “If one of them is a boy,” he had cried, “we should name him Richard. Dad would be thrilled!”

  “Twins,” the trapper said, inclining his head in what seemed a small bow. He was no older than twenty-two or twenty-three. “You are blessed, Mrs. Caldwell. Twins are special. Sacred. Poets sing songs about twins. In Africa, I am a twin also. My father was king of my tribe, and my twin brother is king now. One day I will find a poet and tell him my life, and the poet will make me and my father and my brother into songs.”

  Another delusional royal, she thought with a quick flash of disdain—and then, surprising herself, opened her mouth and said, “I am a poet,” and, flushed with instant embarrassment, hastened to add: “But I’m not yet published or anything.”

  “Published? But poets are not published, Mrs. Caldwell. You do not put a song in a book. Being a jali is a gift you carry to the people. You walk among your people singing them alive, keeping their roots nourished, teaching them who they are. The word jali, do you know what it means in my language? Blood. Yes. That is what it means. Poets are the true blood of their people.” He was silent for a moment, a still look on his sculpted face, as though lost in some memory. (He was seeing the night settling in the clearing, and the drums beating and beating, and his father twirling in the circle of the dancers, their eyes shining darkly in the slits of horned and feathered masks, and the wisdom of past generations deep in his being like the slow flow of rich ancestral blood, a part of him forever. The world, he knew without ever putting it into words, was so much more wondrous than most people here ever suspected.) Then his lustrous eyes rolled over her, lit up with another smile. “But now I open the wall, so you go someplace with no death, it is no good for you here.”

  She wanted to continue talking to him, but of course there could be no conversation while the animal (a squirrel, not a rat, as it turned out, much to her relief) was being extracted, and in any case, she realized with a start that Emma had been screaming in her crib for quite a while now; her ability to tune things out had become truly astonishing. Well, the drywall man will be coming in a day or two, she thought as she hurried down the corridor toward her daughter’s high-pitched wails. She wondered what he would be like, and felt a small thrill of anticipation.

  When the trapper left, she gave him a sizable tip.

  24. Wine Cellar

  The Cask of Amontillado

  Her heart flipped like a fish when she answered the doorbell.

  “Please, please, come in,” she said.

  He stepped inside, a bouquet of nondescript flowers in his hand.

  “Not gladioli, I see,” she said with a nervous little laugh. “You haven’t changed at all.”

  Adam smiled with his lips only, glanced around the entrance hall.

  “Nice place,” he said, his voice flat.

  His jacket was shabby, she saw, and his shoes cheap.

  “Oh, would you like a tour? I’ll ask Dolores to put these in water,” she said, and, flushing for no reason, abandoned the flowers on the marble-topped console and fled ahead of him without waiting for his reply. “Please, this way. Paul likes to show people around”—she spoke over her shoulder, not wanting to fall silent, not wanting to slow down—“but he won’t be back from work for another hour. I’m having the living room redone, do watch out—oh, sorry!”

  He had barely avoided stepping into one of the pans of paint her contractor had left for her to review. As she maneuvered him into the ballroom, the telephone rang, and for an insufferable minute she tried and failed to extricate herself from a discussion of cushion upholstery with Felicity, her decorator, while his level gaze pursued her through the mirrors, judging her, judging her. In the kitchen, Gene was helping Emma with a puzzle, and Squash and Pepper tangled panting in their legs. “The enthusiasm puppies have for the world!” she said, laughing, and again saw Adam’s cheap shoes, and was all at once conscious that, deep underneath the awkwardness, she was almost enjoying this chaotic display of the full, prosperous life she had managed to build for herself out of nothing. Upstairs, in the nursery, she grew likewise conscious of the fact that she had once wondered about having children with the very man who was now commenting politely on Emma’s doodles framed above the cribs; it caused her to coo over the twins in a fussy manner not her own, which made Mrs. Simmons raise her eyebrows slightly. In the bedroom, she was conscious of other things yet. To avoid lingering by the enormous king-size bed, whose elaborate carved posts Dolores was brushing just then with a duster, she pulled him into the bathroom.

  “Nice place,” he said again, in that same polite, flat tone. “Orchids and swans.”

  Their eyes met, and a brief silence settled between them.

  “Can you believe it,” she exclaimed wildly, desperate to dispel the hush, to say anything, anything at all, “these faucets are actual gold, isn’t that silly!”

  Dolores crept in, a spray in her hand, her gaze cast down with disapproval, muttering, “Excuse me, ma’am”—probably hoping to spy on us, she thought in sudden agony. (Dolores did not notice the strained pauses in the conversation between her employer and her employer’s guest. She paid no attention to them whatsoever. She was thinking of the bells ringing in an ancient bell tower in her hometown, and of herself as a fifteen-year-old girl, and of the bell ringer’s son taking her night after night up the winding staircase of the tower, and the bells ringing within the stone walls, and the two of them holding hands as they rose higher and higher, past the bells, past the roof, until they were climbing the endless celestial ladder among the stars. One time, when the bell ringer’s son was not looking, she sneaked a small star into her pocket, and when her son was born nine months later, she gave it to
him. She had not seen her son in twenty years, but she was sure she would always know him, for once you touched a star, you were marked for life.)

  “Why don’t I show you the wine cellar next?” she offered brightly.