Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“Wait,” she said. “Did you—you didn’t by any chance know her?”

“Not closely. I can’t quite recall. One meets so many people—”

There was something in his careless tone, in the glib readiness of his reply, in his refusal to meet her eyes, that made her heart throb. Since his eyes were cast down, she felt at liberty to inspect his face closely for the first time, to wonder, wildly, what it would look like if it ever had a mustache—but already, not wanting to see, she averted her gaze.

“Listen,” he began.

His subdued voice was that of someone about to make amends; but just then Rose, the new maid, walked into the library with a feather duster and waved it once or twice at the nearest books before glancing over at her armchair and tiptoeing back out—and yet in that moment something had changed in the air between them.

“So,” he said brightly, “what now? What will you do with the rest of… whatever you call this?”

She sighed. “I’m going to see Maggie off,” she said, attempting to hide her disappointment in idle chatter. “She’ll be finishing high school next spring, she has already been accepted at—”

He seemed dutifully interested if slightly bored, a well-meaning uncle; when he asked further questions, she found herself glad to return to the firm ground of her love for her husband and her children. She told him about Paul’s recent successes at work; and Celia dropping out in her junior year of college to depart on a journey of self-discovery through the jungles of Asia, driving her mad with worry; and George striking it rich with some newfangled technology idea; and Rich about to graduate from divinity school, such a good boy he had turned out to be, steady as a rock; and Eugene and Adriana moving to Romania, due for a visit at Thanksgiving; and Emma surprising everyone with her marriage and, mere months later, a baby girl, imagine that, she was a grandmother now, she had even taken up knitting—

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Well, that sounds pleasant enough. Finding happiness in the small things and so on.”

He yawned and stood, brushing invisible dust off his denim-clad knee, taking a slow, lazy step away from her. All at once she knew that he was about to stroll out of her life forever, and she started out of her armchair, knocking her knitting to the floor.

“Wait,” she cried, “wait!”

He paused in the doorway, his face a statue’s eroded blank, his eyes pale and flat and devoid of expression, like painted marble faded by centuries in the sun.

“Tell me, did you—did you kill Hamlet?”

“But my dear,” he drawled, “Hamlet is immortal. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and all that.”

“What? Oh. No. I meant John. My first lover. Did you kill him?”

The slits of his eyes darkened with sudden life. He stood absolutely still—like a panther in the instant before leaping, she had time to think just as her heart dropped somewhere, her senses snapped wide awake, and every drop of her blood, every inch of her skin, every hair on her head tingled with the old fear.

He spoke, his voice a slow hiss.

“Do you really think that you are so important and that everything that happens to you, to those around you, happens for some preordained, divine reason? They had a good word for it in the old days. Hubris, it was called. Excessive pride before the gods. Gods have better things to do than meddle in the lives of every craven little nobody.”

“Yes,” she gasped, shrinking back.

“Next you will think that gods sit around counting hairs on everyone’s head, cocking their ears for the sound of whimpering, ready to grant any prayer out of the goodness of their hearts. Please take this cup of suffering away from me. Please make my child well. Please make my father live. Please make my lover leave. Please spare me any real pain, any real joy, any real shame, any real life—yes, please make my life as smooth, as shallow, as easy as it can get, because all I want is to tiptoe on the surface of things, composing little ditties as I do laundry, not knowing gut-wrenching love, not knowing life-shattering loss—and in return I promise I will give up my passion, the only thing that makes me any different from millions upon millions of others, I will throw away every last crumb of inspiration I am granted, every last chance of becoming an artist, I will never break out of the circle of time, I will live a silent life and die a silent death, please, oh please—”

His tone was mocking, and furious underneath. She stared at him, stunned. His face was not the smoothly attractive face of a mortal man who had come into the library an hour before, but the achingly handsome face of a wrathful angel. She stepped back, and, tripping against the armchair, crumpled into it, and squeezed her eyes shut, expecting to be consumed by his burning ire. And then all was quiet, for almost an entire minute all was quiet—she could hear the rushing of blood in her ears.

She kept her eyes closed, but dared to draw a breath, to stir a little.

“Listen,” he said. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, and terrifyingly near. “Very few people are born great poets. Talents are a drachm a dozen, but nothing can be had for nothing. I told you this when you were young, but you didn’t pay attention. Or maybe you just didn’t want it badly enough. You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.”

And then, just as she cowered, fearing the rip of a barbed arrow through her heart, she sensed the smile back in his shockingly compassionate voice.

“Oh, and finding happiness in the small things, my dear, that’s really nothing to brag about—it’s the last consolation of those whose imagination has failed them.”

She felt her lips lightly brushed by other, smiling lips, and their touch was ice, and their touch was fire—and she was ambushed by the memory of all the times when she had lain in bed at night, always exhausted, often pregnant, occasionally wondering about her husband’s whereabouts, and as her thoughts would stray, she would imagine the soft, sneering curve of someone’s mouth, the light, circling touch of someone’s hand on her neck, and these thoughts would spin out into a tightrope on which she would balance for some minutes over an abyss of loneliness and approaching middle age, until momentary oblivion overtook her. Why, oh why, did you stay away for so long, she thought with a sudden contraction of anguish, not daring to look at him still; and though she did not ask aloud, he whispered against her cheek, so softly she could barely hear him, his words a gentle breeze that seemed to move through her mind: “You realize, of course, that I may not actually be here and that our little chats may be only as illuminating—or as hackneyed —as you are able to make them yourself? And if I live in your head alone, the real question you need to ask is why you haven’t called me for so long.”

Her eyes flew open. “No, I don’t believe that—you—”

The library was deserted.

She felt that the fierceness of regret, the knowledge of all the things wasted, the sorrow of a life half lived—a life not lived—would consume her whole.

“No, wait!” she cried. “Tell me just one thing—are you saying that I got it wrong—that I could have been—”

But already she heard the maid’s footsteps in the next room, and knew that, like all revelations, this too would soon be forgotten, and she let her voice die a death of resignation in the dark-paneled, leather-padded, respectable silence of the book-filled room. Her old volume of Pushkin still lay in her lap, opened to his poem “The Prophet.” Her eyes trailed over the words, underlined, with excessive exuberance, by an elated fifteen-year-old in another place, in another age.