Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin Page A

eyes met. His face had the broad, clean planes of a Michelangelo nude, and his hair was the boyish, curly mop of a Raphael angel. His eyes were no longer laughing.
    “Well, I’ll be going, then,” he said.
    “Yes,” I said. “Thanks.”
    Still he stoodthere.



10. Studio Room
    Conversation in the Dark at the Age of Twenty-two
    Happiness this deep is wordless.

11. Bathroom
    A Poem Written at the Age of Twenty-three
    I sat on the mattress, my sweater wrapped tightly around me, my arms wrapped around my knees. I felt chilled to the bone. Adam freed a shirt from its hanger, tossed it into the open suitcase, and threw the hanger onto a growing pile; plastic hit plastic with a dry, loud clap. He would not look at me. Through the basement’s two small street-level windows I watched the rain battering dark winter puddles. A woman’s shoes rapped past, sharp and reptilian. I made another effort to speak, though my words felt like ghostly wisps of real words, passing right through him, helpless to change anything.
    “Please understand. I followed you up here because of your school, and now you want me to follow you across the ocean because of your job, and I just . . .”
    Another hanger smashed into the pile with an angry clatter.
    “Please. I don’t want to leave you. Maybe later . . . when you get back . . .”
    He looked at me at last. His eyes were dark and flat.
    “We were going to spend our lives together.” I could see the jaws clenching in his face. “Now, at the very last minute, I find out that you went behind my back to extend the lease on this dump, and you tell me you won’t be coming.”
    “Please. Please listen . . . I just . . .”
    “No,” he said, turning away. “I will finish packing and go. I will stay somewhere else tonight. I don’t know where. A hotel. I will go to the airport directly from there.” I tried to interrupt. “No,” he said again, and the force of it was like a hand clamped over my mouth. “I don’t want to say things I’ll regret later. I’ll call you from the hotel. If you change your mind, pack and join me. Otherwise—otherwise we’ll work out the details later, and I wish you well.”
    Stunned, I listened to the skeletal clacking of the hangers for another minute, then stood up and, without looking at him, walked into the bathroom and shut the door behind me; there was nowhere else to hide from each other in our cramped closet of a place, and, like a frightened child, I needed to close my eyes so I would become invisible to the horrible monster stalking me through the basement. But the monster got me here just as well. He had already taken his toothbrush and his razor, but in the corner of the bathtub a giant gladiolus leaned against the moldy tiles, its wilting petals stuck out like red tongues from its many maws, mocking me, mocking me.
    (“By the time it dies,” Adam had said when he had brought it home a week before, “you and I will be strolling along the Seine.”
    “But we don’t have a vase large enough,” I had protested. “Come to think of it, we don’t have any vases at all.”
    “So let’s put it in the bathtub. It’ll make for some interesting showers.”
    “Do you know, I haven’t seen one of these in years,” I had said. “I remember carrying a bouquet of gladioli on my very first day of school. I was seven, and the flowers were taller than me, and— You’re not listening.”
    “I am,” he had said, but I could see that he was thinking about his music again, so I had stopped talking and he had not noticed.)
    Crumpling onto the floor by the radiator, I pressed my forehead to the wall, tried to drown out the unbearable clash of the hangers. After a while the noise stopped, all was quiet for some time; then the rip of the suitcase zipper gashed my hearing, and his steps crossed the room—it took only four of his strides to reach the door from the bed.
    The front door opened and closed.
    Frozen with disbelief, I listened