computer late nights in hotels. I was only twenty-five, and owned four pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. I possessed a fancy oversized white sofa and the most expensive comforter money could buy, from Sweden(an item I still enjoy). And when Ben asked me to marry him—over a dinner so rich in a restaurant so elaborate that we were the youngest patrons by twenty years and probably the only ones without gout—I realized—not straight away, but in the weeks that followed, with the diamond bright and heavy on my finger (what use had I for a diamond?)—that Ben the white-collar criminal defense lawyer bored me, sweet though he was, and that I didn’t care about the sofa or the shoes or even the comforter, and that I didn’t even like fancy food, which either made me constipated or gave me diarrhea.
You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs. I had a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it. If I’d married Ben and moved to Westchester (you know, don’t you, that we would have moved to Westchester?), then, years later when my mother got ill, I wouldn’t have given myself over to her as I did, because there would already have been children (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen; and there would have been those jobs, and all the things that went with them, and there would have been Ben, who, guileless as he was till the last, I came to despise for his very malleability, his likeness to myself, almost, and to look upon—quite wrongly, I now see—with contempt.
I don’t know where he is now, more than a decade later, Ben Souter (“My suitor Souter,” I joked in the beginning), but I hope for his sake that he married happily and has bonny children and a big house, and I hope he’s raked in his millions while remaining ever sweet.
Nor was he by any means my last, all those years ago. I don’t need to enumerate them to you—briefly the married man; for much longer, the weary graduate student; the boy ten years my junior who told me—the only person in my life I think actually to say this to me—that I was sexy. This perhaps makes me sound defensive. Which I suppose I am. Because before the Shahids I thought I understood love and what it was and how I felt about it; and they turned it all upside down. The very fact that I can tell you without blinking that I could kill them—that above all I could kill her—says all that needs to be said. Oh, don’t worry, I won’t. I’m harmless. We Women Upstairs are that, too. But I could.
12
In the two weeks before Christmas, two things happened. The first was what I’d feared, in my studio solitude in the dark. I’d been trying to fight my terror, to sit tight through its spasms, and keep working into the evenings at Emily’s diorama. I was working on Emily’s bed, and there was no sound but the knocking of the radiators and the intermittent distant shipboard roar of the furnace igniting, blowing, juddering into sleep again. I’d let the CD player lapse into silence, because I wanted to be sure I could hear any human sounds, and feared that music would muffle them.
And then, as I sanded and whittled in my pool of light, I did hear sounds. The distant tramp on the stairwell, faint and almost hollow, and then footsteps, starting, stopping, ginger footsteps, growing louder, pausing along the corridor—would I catch the rattle of a padlock, the squeak of an unoiled hinge?—and no, the walker came on again, advanced ever closer. The steps, as my nightmare dictated, came to my door. The end of the hallway: nowhere else to go.
I put down my paper, my sanded sticks. My hands hovered over the table, and I was aware from the bowl of silence in the room that I held my breath. I didn’t want to scrape my chair along the floor. I
You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs. I had a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it. If I’d married Ben and moved to Westchester (you know, don’t you, that we would have moved to Westchester?), then, years later when my mother got ill, I wouldn’t have given myself over to her as I did, because there would already have been children (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen; and there would have been those jobs, and all the things that went with them, and there would have been Ben, who, guileless as he was till the last, I came to despise for his very malleability, his likeness to myself, almost, and to look upon—quite wrongly, I now see—with contempt.
I don’t know where he is now, more than a decade later, Ben Souter (“My suitor Souter,” I joked in the beginning), but I hope for his sake that he married happily and has bonny children and a big house, and I hope he’s raked in his millions while remaining ever sweet.
Nor was he by any means my last, all those years ago. I don’t need to enumerate them to you—briefly the married man; for much longer, the weary graduate student; the boy ten years my junior who told me—the only person in my life I think actually to say this to me—that I was sexy. This perhaps makes me sound defensive. Which I suppose I am. Because before the Shahids I thought I understood love and what it was and how I felt about it; and they turned it all upside down. The very fact that I can tell you without blinking that I could kill them—that above all I could kill her—says all that needs to be said. Oh, don’t worry, I won’t. I’m harmless. We Women Upstairs are that, too. But I could.
12
In the two weeks before Christmas, two things happened. The first was what I’d feared, in my studio solitude in the dark. I’d been trying to fight my terror, to sit tight through its spasms, and keep working into the evenings at Emily’s diorama. I was working on Emily’s bed, and there was no sound but the knocking of the radiators and the intermittent distant shipboard roar of the furnace igniting, blowing, juddering into sleep again. I’d let the CD player lapse into silence, because I wanted to be sure I could hear any human sounds, and feared that music would muffle them.
And then, as I sanded and whittled in my pool of light, I did hear sounds. The distant tramp on the stairwell, faint and almost hollow, and then footsteps, starting, stopping, ginger footsteps, growing louder, pausing along the corridor—would I catch the rattle of a padlock, the squeak of an unoiled hinge?—and no, the walker came on again, advanced ever closer. The steps, as my nightmare dictated, came to my door. The end of the hallway: nowhere else to go.
I put down my paper, my sanded sticks. My hands hovered over the table, and I was aware from the bowl of silence in the room that I held my breath. I didn’t want to scrape my chair along the floor. I
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