There was only one time when Boris ever seemed to let his guard down, and that was the talk I remember best, the one that stands out most vividly for me now. It was raining that afternoon—a dreary, all-day soak—and I dawdled longer than usual, reluctant to leave the warmth of the apartment and go back to Woburn House. Boris was in an oddly pensive mood, and for the better part of the visit I had done most of the talking. Just when I finally mustered the courage to put on my coat and say good-bye (I remember the smell of damp wool, the reflections of the candles in the window, the cavelike interiority of the moment), Boris reached out for my hand and held it tightly in his own, looking up at me with a grim, enigmatic smile.
“You must understand that it’s all an illusion, my dear,” he said.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Boris.”
“Woburn House. It’s built on a foundation of clouds.”
“It seems perfectly solid to me. I’m there every day, you know, and the house has never moved. It hasn’t even wobbled.”
“For now, yes. But give it a little time, and then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“How much time is ‘a little time’?”
“However long it takes. The fifth-floor rooms can hold only so much, you understand, and sooner or later there won’t be anything left to sell. The stock is growing thin already—and once a thing is gone, there’s no getting it back.”
“Is that so terrible? Everything ends, Boris. I don’t see why Woburn House should be any different.”
“It’s fine for you to say that. But what about poor Victoria?”
“Victoria isn’t stupid. I’m sure she’s thought about these things herself.”
“Victoria is also stubborn. She’ll hold out until the last glot has been spent, and then she’ll be no better off than the people she’s been trying to help.”
“Isn’t that her business?”
“Yes and no. I promised her father that I would look after her, and I’m not about to break my word. If only you could have seen her when she was young—years ago, before the collapse. So beautiful, so filled with life. It torments me to think that anything bad could happen to her.”
“I’m surprised at you, Boris. You sound like a rank sentimentalist.”
“We all speak our own language of ghosts, I’m afraid. I’ve read the handwriting on the wall, and none of it encourages me. The Woburn House funds will run out. I have additional resources in this apartment, of course”—and here Boris made a sweeping gesture that took in all the objects in the room—”but these too will be quickly exhausted. Unless we begin to look ahead, there won’t be much future for any of us.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Make plans. Consider the possibilities. Act.”
“And you expect Victoria to go along with you?”
“Not necessarily. But if I have you on my side, at least there’s a chance.”
“What makes you think I could have any influence on her?”
“The eyes in my head. I see what’s going on over there, Anna. Victoria has never responded to anyone the way she has to you. She’s positively smitten.”
“We’re just friends.”
“There’s more to it than that, my dear. A great deal more.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will. Sooner or later, you’ll understand every word I’ve said. I guarantee it.”
Boris was right. Eventually, I did understand. Eventually, all the things that were on the brink of happening did happen. It took me a long time to catch on, however. In fact, I did not really see them until they hit me in the face—but that is perhaps excusable, given that I am the most ignorant person who ever lived.
Bear with me. I know that I am beginning to stammer here, but words do not come readily for saying what I want to say. You must try to imagine how things were for us back then—the sense of doom weighing down on us, the air of unreality that seemed to hover around each moment. Lesbianism is only a clinical term, and it does not do justice to the facts. Victoria and I did not become a couple in the usual sense of the word. Rather, we each became a refuge for the other, the place where each of us could go to find comfort in her solitude. In the long run, the sex was the least important part of it. A body is just a body, after all, and it hardly seems to matter whether the hand that is touching you belongs to a man or a woman. Being with Victoria gave me pleasure, but it also gave me the courage to live in the present again. That was the thing that counted most. I no longer looked back all the time, and little by little this seemed to repair some of the innumerable hurts I carried around inside me. I was not made whole again, but at least I did not hate my life anymore. A woman had fallen in love with me, and then I discovered that I was able to love her. I am not asking you to understand this, merely to accept it as a fact. There are many things in my life that I regret, but this is not one of them.
It started toward the end of summer, three or four months after I arrived at Woburn House. Victoria came into my room for one of our late-night talks, and I remember that I was dog-tired, aching in the small of my back and feeling even more despondent than usual. She began rubbing my back in a friendly sort of way, trying to relax my muscles, doing the same kind and sisterly thing that anyone would do under those circumstances. No one had touched me in months, however—not since the last night I had spent with Sam—and I had almost forgotten how good it feels to be massaged like that. Victoria kept moving her hands up and down my spine, and eventually she slipped them under my T-shirt, putting her fingers on my bare skin. It was extraordinary to have that done to me, and soon I began to float from the pleasure of it, feeling as though my body was about to come apart. Even then, however, I don’t think that either one of us knew what was going to happen. It was a slow process, and it meandered from stage to stage with no clear object in mind. At some point the sheet slipped off my legs, and I did not bother to retrieve it. Victoria’s hands swept over more and more of me, taking in my legs and buttocks, roaming down my flanks and up along my shoulders, and at last there was no place on my body I did not want her to touch. I rolled onto my back, and there was Victoria leaning over me, naked under her bathrobe, with one breast hanging out of the parted opening. You’re so beautiful, I said to her, I think I want to die. I sat up slightly and began to kiss that breast, that round and beautiful breast that was so much larger than mine, kissing the soft brown aureole, moving my tongue along the cross-hatch of blue veins that stood just below the surface. It felt like a grave and shocking thing to me, and for the first moment or two I sensed that I had stumbled onto a desire that could be found only in the darkness of dreams—but that feeling did not last very long, and afterward I let myself go, was carried away by it completely.
We continued to sleep together for the next few months, and finally I began to feel at home there. The nature of the work at Woburn House was too demoralizing without someone to count on, without some permanent place in which to anchor your feelings. Too many people came and went, too many lives shuttled past you, and by the time you got to know someone, he was already packing up his things and moving on. Then someone else would come, sleeping in the bed once occupied by the other, sitting in the same chair, walking over the same patch of ground, and then the time would come for that person to leave, and the process would be repeated again. As opposed to all this, Victoria and I were there for each other—through thick and thin, as we used to say—and that was the one thing that did not change, in spite of the changes occurring around us. Because of this bond, I was able to reconcile myself to the work, and that in turn had a calming effect on my spirits. Then more things happened, and it was no longer possible for us to go on as we had. I will speak of this in a moment, but the important thing was that nothing really changed. The bond was still there, and once and for all I learned what a remarkable person Victoria was.
It was the middle of December, just around the time of the first serious cold spell. The wint
er did not turn out to be as brutal as the one before it, but no one could have known that in advance. The cold brought back all the bad memories of the previous year, and you could feel the panic mounting in the streets, the desperation of the people as they tried to brace themselves for the onslaught. The lines outside Woburn House became longer than at any time in the past several months, and I found myself working extra hours just to keep pace with the flow. On the morning I am talking about, I remember seeing ten or eleven people in rapid succession, each with his own gruesome story to tell. One of them—Melissa Reilly was her name, a woman of about sixty—was so distraught that she broke down and cried in front of me, clutching my hand and asking me to help her find her lost husband, who had wandered off in June and hadn’t been heard from since. What do you expect me to do? I said. I can’t leave my post and go off traipsing through the streets with you, there’s too much work to be done here. She kept on making a scene, however, and I found myself getting angry at her for being so insistent. Look, I said, you’re not the only woman in this city who’s lost a husband. Mine has been gone just as long as yours, and for all I know he’s just as dead as yours is, too. Do you see me crying and pulling my hair out? It’s something we all have to face. I loathed myself for spouting such platitudes, for dealing with her so brusquely, but she was making it hard for me to think with all her hysterics and incoherent babbling about Mr. Reilly and their children and the honeymoon trip they had taken thirty-seven years ago. I don’t care about you, she finally said to me. A cold-hearted bitch like you doesn’t deserve to have a husband, and you can take your fancy Woburn House and stick it between your eyes. If the good doctor could hear you talk, he’d be turning over in his grave. Something like that, although I can’t remember her exact words. Then Mrs. Reilly rose to her feet and departed in a last huff of indignation. The moment she was gone, I lay my head down on the desk and shut my eyes, wondering if I was not too exhausted to see any more people that day. The interview had been a disaster, and it had been my fault for letting my feelings run away from me. There was no excuse for that, no justification for venting my troubles on a poor woman who was obviously half out of her mind with grief. I must have dozed off just then, perhaps for five minutes, perhaps for only an instant or two—I can’t say for sure. All I know is that an infinite distance seemed to lie between that moment and the next, between the moment when I closed my eyes and opened them again. I looked up, and there was Sam, sitting in the chair across from me for the next interview. At first I thought I was still asleep. He’s a figment, I said to myself. He comes from one of those dreams in which you imagine yourself waking up, but the waking is only part of the dream. Then I said to myself: Sam—and immediately understood that it could be no one else. This was Sam, but it was also not Sam. This was Sam in another body, with graying hair and bruises on the side of his face, with black, torn-up fingers and devastated clothes. He sat there with a dead, wholly absent look in his eyes—drifting inside himself, it seemed to me, utterly lost. I saw everything in a rush, a whirlwind, a flicker. This was Sam, but he did not recognize me, he did not know who I was. I felt my heart pound, and for a moment I thought I was going to faint. Then, very slowly, two tears began to fall down Sam’s cheeks. He was biting his lower lip, and his chin was trembling out of control. Suddenly, his whole body started to shake, air spurted from his mouth, and the sob he was struggling to keep inside him shuddered out. He turned his face away from me, still trying to keep himself in check, but the spasms kept jolting his body, and the breathless, rasping noise kept escaping from his shut lips. I stood up from my chair, staggered to the other side of the desk, and put my arms around him. The moment I touched him, I heard the sound of crumpled newspapers rustling in his coat. A moment after that, I began to cry, and then I couldn’t stop. I held on to him as hard as I could, digging my face down into the material of his coat, and couldn’t find a way to stop.
That was more than a year ago. Weeks went by before Sam was well enough to talk about the things that had happened to him, but even then his stories were vague, filled with inconsistencies and blanks. It all seemed to run together, he said, and he had trouble distinguishing the outlines of events, could not disentangle one day from another. He remembered waiting for me to show up, sitting in the room until six or seven the next morning, and then finally going out to look for me. It was after midnight when he returned, and by then the library was already in flames. He stood among the crowds of people who had gathered to watch the fire, and then, as the roof finally collapsed, saw our book burn up along with everything else in the building. He said that he could actually see it in his mind, that he actually knew the precise moment when the flames entered our room and ate up the pages of the manuscript.
After that, everything lost definition for him. He had the money in his pocket, the clothes on his back, and that was all. For two months he did little else but look for me—sleeping wherever he could, eating only when he had no choice. In this way he managed to keep himself afloat, but by the end of the summer his money was nearly gone. Worse than that, he said, he finally gave up looking for me. He was convinced that I was dead, and he could no longer bear to torture himself with false hope. He withdrew to a corner of Diogenes Terminal—the old train station in the northwest part of the city—and lived among the derelicts and madmen, the shadow people who wandered through the long corridors and abandoned waiting rooms. It was like turning into an animal, he said, an underground creature who had gone into hibernation. Once or twice a week, he would hire himself out to carry heavy loads for scavengers, working for the pittance they gave him, but for the most part he did nothing, refusing to stir himself unless absolutely compelled to. “I gave up trying to be anyone,” he said. “The object of my life was to remove myself from my surroundings, to live in a place where nothing could hurt me anymore. One by one, I tried to abandon my attachments, to let go of all the things I ever cared about. The idea was to achieve indifference, an indifference so powerful and sublime that it would protect me from further assault. I said good-bye to you, Anna; I said good-bye to the book; I said good-bye to the thought of going home. I even tried to say good-bye to myself. Little by little, I became as serene as a Buddha, sitting in my corner and paying no attention to the world around me. If it hadn’t been for my body—the occasional demands of my stomach, my bowels—I might never have moved again. To want nothing, I kept saying to myself, to have nothing, to be nothing. I could imagine no more perfect solution than that. In the end, I came close to living the life of a stone.”
We gave Sam the room on the second floor that I had once lived in. He was in dreadful condition, and for the first ten days it was touch and go at best. I spent nearly all my time with him, skimping on my other duties as much as possible, and Victoria did not object. That was what I found so remarkable about her. Not only did she not object, but she went out of her way to encourage it. There was something supernatural about her understanding of the situation, her ability to absorb the sudden, almost violent end to the way we had been living. I kept expecting her to force a showdown, to erupt in some display of disappointment or jealousy, but nothing of the sort ever occurred. Her first response to the news was happiness—happiness for my sake, happiness for the fact that Sam was alive—and afterward she worked as hard as I did to see that he recovered. She had suffered a private loss, but she also knew that his being there represented a gain for Woburn House. The thought of having another man on the staff, especially one like Sam—who was neither old like Frick nor slow-witted and inexperienced like Willie—was enough to square the ledger for her. This single-mindedness could be rather frightening, I found, but nothing was more important to Victoria than Woburn House—not even me, not even herself, if such a thing can be imagined. I don’t want to be overly simplistic, but as time went on I almost began to feel that she had allowed me to fall in love with her so that I would be able to get well. Now that I was better, she shifted the focus of her attention to Sam. Woburn House was her only
reality you see, and in the end there was nothing that did not give way to it.
Eventually, Sam came upstairs to live with me on the fourth floor. He slowly put on weight, slowly began to resemble the person he had once been, but not everything could be the same for him—not now, not anymore. I am not just talking about the ordeals his body had been through—the prematurely gray hair, the missing teeth, the slight but persistent trembling in his hands—I am talking about inner things as well. Sam was no longer the arrogant young man I had lived with in the library. He had been changed by his experiences, humbled by them almost, and there was a softer, more placid rhythm to his manner now. He talked periodically of starting the book again, but I could see that his heart wasn’t in it. The book was no longer a solution for him, and once that fixation was lost, he seemed better able to understand the things that had happened to him, that were happening to all of us. His strength returned, and little by little we got used to each other again, but it seemed to me that we stood on more equal terms than we had before. Perhaps I had changed during those months as well, but the fact was that I sensed that Sam needed me more than he had back then, and I liked that sense of being needed so much, I liked it better than anything else in the world.
He started working around the beginning of February. At first, I was totally against the job that Victoria had devised for him. She had given the matter a great deal of thought, she said, and in the end she believed that Sam could best serve the interests of Woburn House by becoming the new doctor. “You might find this a strange idea,” she continued, “but ever since my father’s death, we’ve been floundering. There’s no cohesion to the place anymore, no sense of purpose. We give people food and shelter for a little while, and that’s all—a minimal kind of sustenance that barely helps anyone. In the old days, people would come because they wanted to be near my father. Even when he couldn’t help them as a doctor, he was there to talk to them and listen to their troubles. That was the important thing. He made people feel better just by being who he was. People were given food, but they were also given hope. If we had another doctor around here now, maybe we could get closer to the spirit this place once had.”