The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud Read Free Book Online

knew she was for real.
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. Why?”
    “I’m an artist, too.”
    I’d lurched inside at her admission—this! Of course! we shared—but worried, from her smile, that her first impulse was patronizing. She was thinking that making art must be a hobby for me. She was thinking that I was an elementary school teacher. But she was too polite to let on. “Really,” she said. “You must tell me about your work.”
    “No, no. I want to hear about yours. We can talk about me another time”—I felt bold because this presumed there might be another time—“I’m here to learn about Reza’s life; which means, about yours.”
    “About ours, there’s not so much to say. But Reza: he’s very cherished because we couldn’t—I couldn’t—have any more children. Do you have brothers and sisters, Nora?”
    “An older brother.”
    “Then you know what it’s like, so important. I come from five children;Skandar from three, although one of his brothers has died. But we both wanted more children, for Reza too, you know.”
    “As a teacher, I have to say that only children are often at an advantage academically—”
    “Yes, because we, the parents, spoil them and spend so much time. Only children, they become like a third person in the couple, do you know? They don’t get so much to be children, but little grown-ups.”
    “This is your concern for Reza?”
    “This is our concern. In Paris, we’ve made for him a world of children. He has cousins—not real ones, they’re in Italy—but friends as close as cousins. In our apartment building alone he has three friends, including a girl three weeks older that he’s known always. They see each other almost every day.”
    “So it’s a difficult transition for him, to come here.”
    “For all of us, yes, of course.”
    “It’s helpful to know. Thank you.” I’d hoped for some more intimate revelation. I don’t know quite what.
    “But with the bullying, you see—”
    “Yes, that was horrible, I know. I’ll keep a close eye. Those were bigger kids who didn’t know him, though. In our class, he’s extremely popular. Very well liked. Boys and girls both. He’s a very kind boy.”
    “Yes, kind.”
    “And he’s making good progress with his English.”
    “Yes. We speak only English at the dinner table now, to practice. All three of us, making mistakes. ‘Please pass,’ we say, and then ‘that thing,’ if we don’t know the word. Sometimes, we’re too tired. But Reza teaches us words now.”
    “Not rude ones, I hope?”
    “Those also.” She smiled.
    We’d finished our coffee. The moment of recognition, the sign—it had to have a meaning.
    “But about your art,” I said. “You were going to tell me about your art.”
    In that first conversation, she told me about her installations, which were—as I would eventually see with my own eyes—lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse: elaborately carvedsoap primroses, splayed lilies and tulips fashioned out of dyed dishrags and starch, silvery vines of painted and varnished clothesline and foil, precisely and impeccably made. I couldn’t quite picture them when she talked about them, but the idea made sense to me: visions of paradise, the otherworldly, the beautiful, and then, when you’re in them, up close, you realize that the flowers are mottled by filth and the vines crumbling and that the gleaming beetles crawling on the waxy leaves are molded bottle tops or old leather buttons with limbs. Her installations had names from fairy tales and myth—The Forest of Arden; Avalon; Oz; Elsinore—but they were, in reality, the kitchen or the laundry room, and sooner or later the viewer would realize there was an ancient sink behind the waterfall or that the boulders between the trees were a washer and dryer, blow-torched black and furred with dark lint.
    She told me too that latterly she’d made videos of the installations, that the story of the videos was