Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“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.

“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.

“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.”