The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

Author:Claire Messud [Messud, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary, Urban, Contemporary Women, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307962409
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

I have an old friend from college, long lost, who used to say that you should never let yourself think of a journey as long, because then it will feel long no matter what. By the same token, it’s important, when you’re the Woman Upstairs, never to think of yourself—but never, do you understand?—as alone or forlorn or, God help us, wanting. It will not do. It cannot be. It is the end.

At the warehouse, we rifled through racks and bins of all kinds—vast shapeless nylon granny dresses, shrunken, felted woolen dresses, polyester stretch pants, sheets and blankets, sequined netting, iridescent organza, animal print plush jersey jackets, bolts of corduroy in extraordinary shades of plum and puce and pear. Sirena fingered everything with her eyes closed, as if the garments had messages in braille upon them—“It’s to know if I can work with this,” she explained, when I teased her. “Some fabrics, the synthetics, the fake ones, like some people, is this”—and she mimed scraping her fingernails on a blackboard.

“Are there people you don’t like, then?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me before.

“Nora!” She shook her head incredulously. “Aren’t there people you don’t like?”

“So many of them.”

“I can’t work with people I don’t choose, not in this way. For me, life’s too short. Yes? Life is too short. When they”—she mimed the fingernails—“then they must go. Like the fabric, I don’t take it home; so with the people, they’re the same. Not for me!”

“There must be a word for that,” I said. “What’s the word for that in Italian?”

“Respingere, maybe—to reject, to return something.”

“Re-spinge? I love that: ‘Spinge it!’ Ditch the dope and spinge the sponge! Spinge him again—re-spinge him!”

We were excitable enough to laugh even at this, and it passed then into our vocabulary, part of the lexicon between us, so that when I was annoyed with someone I’d say, “Spinge her,” or Sirena might complain, giggling, that we should “re-spinge the sponges.” It doesn’t seem very funny now, but it became one of our things, after that.

On the way home, we realized we were famished, that it was late. The afternoon sun, still bright, hung now coldly low in the sky, and the heat in the car had that prickling, parched quality that comes when it’s genuinely freezing outside. We decided to get something to eat.

I don’t know why I thought of the Italian bar up behind Davis Square. Mostly it was the sort of place you went for drinks, when it was too late for everything else; and it wasn’t a place where you thought of eating, much. But years before, before my mother was even sick, a lifetime ago in my artist phase, when I’d thought I might yet turn out to be the person that I wanted to be—whoever that person might have been—I’d spent a long afternoon there with two friends—a hilarious and beautiful gay guy, Louis, who cut hair fantastically well, and cut mine for a while, and who was killed a

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