Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

As she pushed the photographs about, a bit to the left, a bit to the right, she suddenly saw, in a serious, wide-eyed, beautiful face of one of the boys, the face of the hurt man before her. She stared at it for a long moment, careful to keep her bandaged hand out of sight.

She was barefoot when she came down, stepping softly on the wall-to-wall carpet, and he did not hear her approach. He was sitting hunched over at the bar, cradling a half-empty martini; between the scoops of his big, still hands, the glass looked fragile and small, like a cup from a child’s toy set. She stopped, feeling awkward, as if she were spying on something not meant for her eyes, invading a home not her own, and waited for him to notice her. When he did not stir, she cleared her throat.

“Oh, hey,” he said, standing up. “How long have you been there?”

In the blurred erosion of his voice, in the loose way he moved the bulk of his body, she could see that the martini before him was not his first. She wondered if she should not invent some trivial reason for entering his domain—a question to ask, a child’s activity to confirm—then quickly retreat to her upstairs quarters; but he had already walked behind the bar and was reaching for the shaker.

“Can I make you a drink?”

She did not want a drink—she drank almost nothing these days.

“Please,” she said, tightening the belt of her robe as she climbed onto the leather perch of the stool next to his. She watched him go through the motions made fluid by hundreds, by thousands, of repetitions—watched his large hands deftly manipulate ice and crystal, watched the back of his head, his hair still abundant and dark, no trace of gray, watched his face as it appeared and disappeared in the mirror that ran behind the bar, sliced into slivers by the reflections of the bottles. He would turn fifty at the end of the month. His hair was that of a younger man, his face that of an older.

“So,” he said, sliding the martini over to her. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She wanted to say: I felt lonely tonight. It’s different in the house these days—only four kids left, and the boys are seventeen and out so much, and Celia always has her nose in a book, and our baby—our baby is nine and so independent, sometimes it feels like she doesn’t need me at all. Of course, my days are still brimming over, so many things to take care of, always—but every night now, there is this odd sort of emptiness that can’t be filled, a stretch of emptiness before me, and you never even come upstairs until after I’m asleep. I just wanted to see you. To talk to you. The way we used to talk.

“I just—I felt like having a drink,” she said.

“You’ve come to the right place,” he replied without smiling.

They sat in silence for a while, drinking side by side. It was nearing midnight, she knew, but there was no clock in the bar. The lamps above the counter were turned down low, the shelves with the bottles mirrored, the wall behind the shelves mirrored as well; she kept catching oblique glimpses of the two of them at alluring or unflattering angles, reflections of reflections—a profile, a double chin, a slanted glance, a green bottle, a blue bottle, a bottle in the shape of a skull, a bottle in the shape of a bull, the dull glint of a wedding band on a hand raising a glass. An odd sensation took hold of her and grew, that of sitting in a real bar next to a real stranger; and as she neared the bottom of her drink, it stopped being a sad feeling and became one of possibility instead. She studied him out of the corner of her eye, wondering whether she would still find him attractive if she met him now—and then he turned to her, and immediately the sensation of strangeness dissipated, and she saw the good-natured giant of a boy who had made her feel safe all those years ago.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve always meant to ask you,” she said, as if continuing a conversation. He rose to make the next round of drinks. “The first time we met—well, not met, technically, but the first time we spoke—”

“The time in the library when you made me feel like a complete idiot.”

“Well. You wore a Grateful Dead shirt, remember? It puzzled me later, because you never seemed the type—I mean—”

“You mean that even at eighteen I was too staid and boring to listen to music or smoke pot. A management consultant as a young man. No novel there, I suppose.”

“I didn’t mean it like that—I just—”

“No, you’re right. The shirt was a gift from a girl I dated for a couple of months. I ditched it when we broke up.”

He put the freshly made drinks on the counter and sat back down.

She stared at the olive bobbing in her vodka.

“Paul,” she said. “Where did we go wrong?”

He was quiet for so long that she thought he was not going to answer.

“Do you know what I liked about you?” he said then. “Well, I liked everything about you, but you know what I liked best, why I fell in love? I loved how different you were from everyone I knew. I thought it was your foreignness at first, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t only that, it was something else. The way you would grow still and seem so far away, the look that would steal over your face, like you were seeing something special, even when you did something as trivial as—oh, I don’t know, writing grocery lists. You looked so beautiful then, like you knew something about life that was worth knowing. And I wanted to find out what it was you knew, but I worried it was like one of those fairy tales where the dumb prince spies on his magic princess and she turns into a swan and flies away. So I never pressed for it—I wanted you to tell me. No, that’s not even right—it wasn’t that I believed there was anything to tell , not like a concrete thing or anything. It was just a sense I had that you were different, marked out by something or someone, and that if I married you I would have a life that would be—I’m not sure of the right word. Deeper, I guess. Charmed. Special.”

“You told me once that everyone was special.”

“Did I? I don’t remember. Isn’t that just the lie you feed your kids when they suspect, for the first time, that they too are just like everybody else? But who knows. Maybe it’s true, maybe everyone is special—maybe it’s just very few who manage to do something with it. It’s not so easy to measure all the things wasted.”

“So then you haven’t,” she said softly. “You haven’t had a special life.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t. And look, this is a good life. We’ve been richer than most in our children, I’ve been luckier than most with my career, we live in a beautiful place, and you—you even iron my pajamas for me. It’s just that… I keep having this feeling that it could have been more if only you’d trusted your dumb prince with your frog skin or your swan wings or—or whatever it was you turned into when you were alone. Because our life often felt—I don’t know—less than real somehow. Like you weren’t all here.”

She was almost done with her second martini. The bottles were winking and weaving on the mirror shelves. Her head swam. She wanted to cry, to beg his forgiveness—or else pull him toward her and kiss him, kiss him deeply, to dispel the need for stiff, inadequate words. Instead she heard herself asking: “When you were a child, what did you dream of being?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I wanted to be a chef.”

“The celebrated chef Paul Caldwell!” she cried.

“No, I didn’t want to be celebrated. I didn’t have any delusions of grandeur, I just liked the idea of feeding people. My restaurant was going to be different. There would be no menus, and every day I would serve only food that was white, or only dishes that started with the letter p —paellas and pumpkin pies—or only desserts, whatever mood I was in. You would come and you would never know what to expect that day, except that it would be delicious—and a surprise. I wanted to make people happy.”