The Life Room (3 page)

After a few sips of wine the anxiety began to dissipate. She relaxed, her body softened. Her mind drifted away from her paper to thoughts of Stephen Mason, a boy she had known in childhood. He had been in the back of her mind since her mother in Chicago called to say good-bye. But with all the rush of leaving, she hadn’t had time to really think about it clearly. Her mother had mentioned that Stephen was also going to be in Paris writing a magazine piece. The last Eleanor had heard of him he was still living in Colorado. She was happy to hear he’d become a writer, as he’d wanted. Hearing about him had filled her with a jumble of excitement and anxiety, followed by a familiar lingering confusion. She’d told her mother she doubted he’d want to see her. “You two are like cousins. Don’t be silly. Of course he will,” her mother said. After she hung up, she told herself the odd feeling inside was about leaving for her trip.

The Masons lived in the house behind Eleanor’s childhood home in a northern suburb of Chicago. From her upstairs window she could see into the window of Stephen’s bedroom. Even after twenty-five years, mysterious, illogical memories still grew like weeds around a grave. Eleanor remembered the texture of light through her bedroom window, the branches of the tree in her yard almost touching the tree in his, the bent branches on the verge of breaking. She remembered the flashlights she and Stephen used to signal each other in the dark, like fireflies sending their own private code in the twilight.

Eleanor’s mother was having company for Christmas. Ted and Carol Mason, an air of estrangement between them, came over with their son. When Eleanor’s father still lived at home, the Masons and the Cahns had formed a tight foursome. But that year, when she was twelve, her father had been gone for three years.

She was a dreamy, sensual girl who painted her ceiling sparrow-egg blue so she could lie on her bed and cast her eye on beauty. She was also adventurous. Sometimes they played kick-the-can in the street with other neighborhood kids, or built intricate snow forts, or hung out in Stephen’s backyard playhouse. Eleanor wore her red hair long. Her body had begun to fill out; she wasn’t used to the way her growing chest made it difficult to sleep on her stomach, or the cramps in her abdomen once a month, or the longings. One eye could look bluer if she was wearing blue, or the other eye greener if she wore green, and sometimes, like her mood, they changed color for no particular reason. She had white skin and a long neck.

“Eleanor’s upstairs,” Eleanor’s mother told Stephen, before he burst into her bedroom. She was reading on her bed. Stephen took the book out of her hand. His eyes were deep blue and his face chiseled. Even at twelve with long eyelashes, you could tell that he was going to grow up to be a heartbreaker. “You can’t read on Christmas.” He pulled out firecrackers from his pants pocket. “Watch this.” He opened her bedroom window, lit one, and threw it outside; they watched it explode and then fall into the snow.

He gazed at her, his dress shirt pulled out of his dress pants, his hair uncombed, his face damp. Heat traveled up her neck and warmed her cheeks.

“Did you like the way that firecracker went off?” She looked at him. “You liked it,” he said, knowingly. He tickled her in the ribs, pushing her to the floor. He pointed out her window toward his house. “I’ve been watching you. I know what you like.”

It was a turning point, that moment when she realized there was no need to be afraid of her own powers. Stephen leaned closer, so that she felt his forehead graze her neck. She caught his dark, visceral scent. His soft lips touched her skin. He whispered her name so tenderly that later that night, after all the company had left, she wondered whether she had imagined it. He had always been rough, but she’d never seen this side of him. After he lifted himself away from her, he looked her in the eyes and boldly felt her chest. Bewildered that she had allowed him to touch her, she found herself without words. He slicked his wavy hair back and stood up to tuck in his shirt. She noticed the curve of his spine as he rose, the way his hair curled behind his ears, and the mole on the back of his left lobe. “I didn’t embarrass you, did I?” he asked, turning back around.

“I’m not embarrassed,” she said, a little defensively.

The encounter lasted less than a moment, but it seemed to define their history.

It was snowing that afternoon, falling over the bare, gnarled branches of the tree outside her bedroom window, the same tree whose branches touched the branches of the tree in Stephen’s yard. As the snow continued to blanket the quiet streets, it enclosed the two of them more tightly inside Eleanor’s room, separating them from the noisy conversation of their parents downstairs, so that all that was left was the two of them, as if they’d become their own secret family.

“I got suspended from school the other day,” he said, proudly, before they went downstairs. “Got caught smoking a cigarette in the boys’ bathroom.” He paused. “Do you want to get caught doing something bad with me?”

She looked back at him, slightly perplexed, once again at a loss for words.

It wasn’t until the night was almost over that the two talked again. Stephen followed Eleanor into the kitchen as she was bringing in a stack of dirty dishes.

“Do you know other divorced people?” He hiked himself onto one of the stools in front of the kitchen counter. “I mean, besides your parents?”

“No.”

“Well, now you do.” He paused. “My parents are getting one.”

“My parents aren’t really divorced. They’re separated.”

“Why am I telling you these things, Eleanor?” His blue eyes clouded with feeling.

“It’s okay.” She forced emotion into the smile she gave back to him.

“It’s not a big deal. At least I won’t have to hear them fighting anymore.” His eye landed on the wet dish towel balled up on the counter. He picked it up.

“Do you miss your dad?” He looked into her eyes of different colors with such intensity she felt as if she was suddenly brought to life.

“He’s been gone three years. You get used to it.”

He played with the knob on the gas range. When he ignited the burner, the gas burst into flame. Seemingly enchanted by the power he held, he turned the knob, watched the flame go slack, then bloom into a dangerous blue flower. He took the dish towel. From his other hand, he danced the dish towel in front of the flame so that the fringe teased the fire, scorching the ends.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“Are you scared?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll stop.” He was a strange bird, but she liked him. He gave her back the dish towel, allowing their fingers to touch, before he went back into the living room.

The snow burned her fingers. The air burned her cheeks. Ice was frozen into her mittens. Two days after Christmas they wound up in a snowball fight on the lawn after Stephen slipped a handful of snow down the back of her coat. Their ski jackets and hats dusted with snow, they retreated inside the playhouse—a mini version of Stephen’s house, white with black shutters—behind the Masons’ garage to get warm. Stephen steamed up the window of the playhouse with his breath, and using his finger, he wrote their initials over the windowpane. He did not enclose the initials inside a heart. Still cold, they went inside Stephen’s house, through the kitchen door. His parents were arguing upstairs.

“How come you don’t touch me anymore?” Stephen’s mother’s voice wound down the stairs like agony, chilling the air between them. “I’m not like Elizabeth. I need to be touched.”

Eleanor glanced at Stephen. He looked back at her somberly.

“Because I’m no longer in love with you,” his father said. “Is this what you want? It’s dead between us. Is that what you want to hear?”

“The kids are downstairs.” His mother clearly had been crying. “For god’s sake, lower your voice.”

Stephen tapped Eleanor on the shoulder. “Let’s play hide and seek. Count to ten and try to find me.” In an instant he was gone.

She closed her eyes and counted out loud, thinking about what she’d overheard. She went to find Stephen. She looked underneath the couch in the living room, behind the cushioned chairs, inside the closets. The back door banged shut. Stephen had run back outside. She grabbed her ski jacket and followed. The dampness seeped uncomfortably into her skin. When she found him he was standing behind the playhouse door grinning, unmistakenly glad to be found.

He slouched to the ground. He looked sad. Stephen gazed around the four walls of the playhouse. In one corner was a spiderweb with a dead fly trapped inside. He perked up and looked at her. “I like being in here with you. Would you let me kiss you, Eleanor?”

His nose was dripping, and he was shivering. His hands were curled up in the sleeves of his sweater. He had run out of the house without his ski jacket. She watched him wipe his nose with his sleeve. “We’re friends,” she said, not quite sure what to say.

“What if I don’t want to be your friend?”

“I won’t let us not be friends.” She reached over and kissed his cheek. His face brightened into a smile.

“Do you think you could really like me?”

“Maybe.”

He looked at her intensely, and as she watched him she felt new feelings inside. He continued to look at her, fixated on her eyes until an icicle fell against the glass.

Then he turned on the record player and put on “Eleanor Rigby.” The turntable was plugged into an extension cord that traveled to the playhouse through the Masons’ garage. The record skipped, warped by the dampness. He picked up the needle and sang the refrain. “
Lives in a dream . . . Who is it for?
It’s for me, isn’t it, Eleanor?” he said, pinching the skin on her ribs. Candles dripped pools of wax on the old wooden crate they used for a table. He dipped his fingers into the burning wax. “Ouch,” he said, smiling, as though he liked the feel of the burn.

“You want to see something?” He dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a Swiss pocketknife. “My father gave it to me. He said I’m supposed to protect her.”

“Protect who?”

“My mom.”

“That means he still loves her.”

“It means he’s leaving.” He looked at her again. “I like your eyes.”

“They don’t creep you out? Janis Talbot said I look like a cat.”

“You’re the cutest girl in the school. Can I tell you something? Sometimes I get this funny feeling. Like I’m going to jump out of my skin. I want to destroy things. Kick in a door. Or burn up something. Do you ever feel that way?” He opened the blade of the pocketknife and began to saw it into the wooden crate they were using for a table.

“Kind of.” She wasn’t sure but didn’t want to make him feel bad.

“You’re it.” He ran to hide as if in love with the idea of fleeing, being sought after, and being found.

She went back out to the yard to try to find him. She went to her house. He was nowhere. She decided to wait for him inside. She looked out the back window from the kitchen. The playhouse was on fire. Within minutes, fire engines encircled the block. When she went back outside Stephen was standing by the playhouse, watching it burn. His parents were consulting with the fire chief. The smell was like burning leaves, grainy and pungent. Smoke floated over the snow-crested hedges like neglect. Mrs. Mason pulled Stephen away from the fire and pressed him against her side. She wasn’t a demonstrative person, and seeing her awkwardly holding Stephen brought tears to Eleanor’s eyes.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Stephen said, pulling out of her grasp.

Eleanor tapped him on the shoulder. Her look said,
What happened?
He turned away. She tried to catch his eye again but the fire put him in a hypnotic trance. He ignored her. She thought about the cigar box where they kept their secret stash of cigarettes. Their pile of records. The privacy of their talks. How just minutes before they had seemed so close. She wished she had let him kiss her. She pulled on Stephen’s shirtsleeve.

“Cut it out, Eleanor.” He stared ahead, transfixed at the fire devouring the wood.

“But how did it happen?”

“Be quiet, Eleanor.”

She felt like he had jabbed her in the stomach.

Beneath the snow, the fire chief found the chewed-away extension cord with exposed wires that Stephen had run from the garage into the playhouse. He said it was an accident waiting to happen. That night she was unable to sleep, thinking about Stephen, how she was drawn to him and frightened of him at the same time. She thought about the fire, his parents arguing, and the words she’d overheard, wondering if the reason her father had left was because he wasn’t in love with her mother, and she felt strangely linked to Stephen and his own pain.

Stephen’s father moved out the next day, to a home on the other side of town. A few months later Stephen moved in with him. His mother mysteriously left town. There was talk she’d had a breakdown. Once Stephen moved out, the shades were drawn over the window in his room. Empty of his bike, Frisbees, and baseball bats, the Masons’ backyard looked like a graveyard. Eleanor found herself night after night seated by the window. Stephen’s father eventually fell in love with a young French au pair named Sabine, and within a year she was installed in his new house.

When Stephen’s mother returned to her house a year later, Eleanor’s mother called her changed demeanor a nervous condition. Stephen continued to live with his father and Sabine. The idea of the newly in love couple gave the impression that life could be exotic and foreign even if you lived in a suburb of Chicago, but Eleanor overheard Carol Mason bitterly tell her mother that Stephen was treated like a third wheel.

Eleanor rarely saw Stephen since he moved. Once they ran into each other when he came by his mother’s to visit. He acknowledged her with a quick nod of his head, as if he had revealed too much of himself and was embarrassed to be in her company.

Sometimes Eleanor caught a glimpse of him from the window of her house. She ducked in the shadows of her room to make sure he hadn’t seen her. She didn’t know why she did not want to be seen. As she watched him walk up his mother’s porch stairs in his leather bomber jacket, a hot, distracted feeling consumed her. When he turned sixteen and began to drive, she sometimes saw his blue Pontiac parked in his mother’s driveway. They never spoke. And yet, she often found herself looking through her window into his, as she had through all the years of her childhood.