Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

They stopped, stood side by side, their shoulders close but not touching, looking at the dull gleam of the dozens of bottles before them.

“So,” he said, “this is where you invite me to taste your rare Amontillado, and while I stumble about inebriated, you chain me to the wall and abandon me to starve to death for all my sins.”

For the first time since he had crossed her threshold, his voice lost its dullness, quickened with life.

“I’m afraid the sins are all mine,” she said, starting to laugh, and the brittle sound of her laughter was like a tinkle of broken glass falling all around them.

He turned to face her.

Suddenly she was no longer laughing.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, and the long-forgotten gentleness in his voice made her heart thump, pushing into her throat, her wrists, her temples, until she felt her entire being filled with her heart’s troubled thudding. She shivered in the chill of the cellar, drawing her cardigan tighter around her shoulders.

I’m thinking: Once you love someone, how do you unlove them?

I’m thinking: Kiss me.

“I’m thinking of a poem I wrote when I was twenty,” she said. “One of the ones I burned on the day we met. I translated it for you later, though it isn’t nearly as good in English.”

He waited in silence. She too was silent for a moment, unsure whether she was going to do it. Then, meeting his eyes, she began to recite, stumbling a little, the heat of her insidious intent creeping up her neck. “In the coldness of an autumn night— no, ‘coldness’ is not right, was it ‘darkness,’ yes, I think it was ‘darkness’—

The cavernous cellar caught her voice and echoed it ever so slightly, as if adding a second dimension to the sounds, amplifying and deepening the meaning.

She broke off. She looked at the wine racks, at the tiled floor under her feet, at her hands twisting the button on her cardigan—anywhere but at him. The unfinished poem lay like a damaging secret between them, the unsaid words crowding in her throat, pushing against her lips; she felt them on her tongue, shapeless, soundless, but she could not bring herself to release them into the cool, expectant stillness of the cellar.

“I… I don’t remember any more,” she began to say, all at once frightened—but he was kissing her already.

She felt suspended for an instant, then leaned into the kiss, her eyes fluttering closed. Everything forgotten was back in the kiss—their youth, their love, their future. The smells of earth and wood in the cellar became the smells of the outside world, the smells of mushrooms and flowers, the changing of seasons, the joyful, heedless tumbling of the universe through rushing, dazzling space—for when you closed your eyes tightly and fire coursed through your soul, you were free to inhabit any place you willed into miraculous being, a place with no walls, no thermostats, no neatly arranged rows of expensive wines…

“Come away with me,” he whispered into her neck.

“How can I?” she asked, pulling away just a little so she could see his face.

And for one slow, deep-thudding heartbeat, she believed that she had truly intended it as a question—had wanted him to tell her, had hoped he could tell her.

Releasing her, he turned away, stepped back.

“I understand,” he said.

No, no, you don’t, she nearly cried out, wild with panic, kiss me again, do you hear, I want you to kiss me again—but she stood unmoving, and so did he, his face now closed, almost cruel-looking, and it was suddenly over, the moment was over, and she knew that he had not meant it, not fully, not at all. And she knew too that in that one confused, liberating, false moment she had risked robbing of meaning the entire past decade of her life—and the near loss of her past made her weak with shame.

Did you only want to pay me back for breaking your heart all those years ago? Did you want to make me feel that my marriage, my children, my life—that all of it was worthless, that nothing real had happened to me since I had left you, that I would give it all up at the drop of a hat if only you called? Well, let me tell you, I wouldn’t—you could never have given me a life like this, and I’m happy with what I have, with where I am, do you hear me? And the kiss—the kiss was nothing, nothing at all, just a moment of insecurity, do you hear—and I don’t care how handsome, how impossibly handsome, you look—

There were steps running above their heads now, and Squash, or was it Pepper, choked on excited barks, and the bottles jingled anxiously as someone—Gene—thumped down the stairs hollering, “Mama, Mama!”

Paul was home.

“We might as well pick out some wine for dinner,” she said, readjusting her cardigan as she moved to face the bottles. “We are having snapper Veracruz.”

“Could go either white or red,” he said. “The whites are over there, yes?”

The door to the cellar opened, and Paul strode in, wide-shouldered in his custom-made gray suit, his head almost touching the ceiling, his easy smile at the ready. She flew at him with an exaggerated, frantic kiss. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Paul said, laughing as he shook her off. But they already recognized each other from an anthropology class they had both attended in their sophomore year. Everyone stood smiling at everyone else with the shared consciousness of being broad-minded and civilized and mature, and achingly insincere.

“We were trying to choose a bottle for the main course,” she hastened to say into the small breach of silence. “Chardonnay, perhaps?”

“No, that’s too obvious. Why don’t we let our guest choose?”

The two men began to talk about sauces and pairings. It now transpired that Adam knew his wines every bit as well as Paul, and quite possibly better, and they soon fell into an amiable banter of old acquaintances, comparing the qualities of Pinot Noir, Chenin Blanc, and Pouilly-Fuissé. He had not cared two figs about fine wines in the past, she thought—back when they had been young, and free, and so full of joy, living in that dreary basement studio, no bigger than this cellar, spending entire days in bed, listening to jazz, reading poetry to each other, drinking whatever sour piss they could come by—

“How about Amontillado?” she said, cutting in.

Paul laughed dutifully, looking a bit puzzled, but Adam only smiled a fleeting smile without taking his eyes off the racks.

“Riesling would be another possibility,” he said smoothly.

For another minute, her heart tight as a clenched fist in her chest, she listened to the two of them discussing grapes. Then, unnoticed, she slunk away, making sure to close the door behind her, mindful of forever maintaining the steady chill of fifty-six degrees.

Rich had cried so much during the night that she had moved his twin brother over to Emma’s room and had spent the hours before dawn dozing fitfully in the armchair next to Rich’s crib. Now his fever seemed to have broken, but a rash bloomed all up and down his pudgy arms. Might be roseola, she decided—she had been through enough childhood illnesses, midnight vigils, emergency room dashes, to keep a mental catalogue of various symptoms, pink eyes and earaches and inflamed throats, at a well-thumbed ready; except that this was an odd sort of rash, tiny red blotches under his skin, like pinpricks of blood. Probably nothing to worry about, just hives or a heat rash, she thought as she inspected him closer in the morning light—but worth a visit to the doctor all the same. She checked the clock above the dresser. Paul would have already left for work—vaguely she remembered his shout of “Bye, honey!” reaching her from the edges of the house—but Mrs. Simmons was due to arrive shortly. She would have to ask her to take the boy, and Mrs. Simmons would purse her lips and act all put-upon, and she would end up offering extra for Mrs. Simmons’s trouble.