Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“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 bottle 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.

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.

“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.