“Whose sex life is exciting after four years? We’ve talked about the possibility of an open relationship.”
“But he doesn’t want that.”
“I don’t know that I want it,” Viola says. “I think I’d rather him get some on the side and just not know. He’d be careful. He wouldn’t put my health in danger, which is the main thing. I trust him.”
“You really think this guy would try to get some on the side?” Viola and her ghost-mother watch Robert watching Throne of Blood: the banquet scene, in which the new emperor, driven mad by his murderous acts, is drawing his sword on thin air. “Milquetoast!” Viola’s ghost-mother calls at Robert.
“He’s been willing to explore things with me.”
“Isn’t that nice of him?” In the crowd of ghosts, various ghosts pass through the objects in the room, bump into each other, fall down, get up. Other ghosts just stand there, mouths open, silent. “Look, Vivi, we both know there’s a difference between ‘being willing’ and fucking your brains out.”
Viola looks down at one of the smaller, clumsier ghosts, who’s fallen squat at her feet. “I’d forgotten that you called me that. Did you always call me that?”
“What, Vivi?”
“My aunt calls me that. I thought that was her name for me.”
“It’s a family name,” Viola’s ghost-mother says, helping the clumsy ghost right itself. “You had a great-grandmother who lived to something like a hundred and twelve, that’s what we used to call her.”
Both of them watch the smaller, clumsy ghost wander away, bump into another ghost, fall down near the doorway to the kitchen. Viola gets a little weirdly choked up.
“The fuck do you even presume,” she says. “I am feeling some very reasonable anger right now. Some abandonment issues. All very reasonable. Stemming from for example how I haven’t seen you in twenty-five years or so. And when I do? You want to like, criticize my life decisions. Me, being angry right now? Me, raising my voice? Very, very reasonable.”
“I know what you thought of me, Vivi.”
Viola stands and starts picking things up, books, magazines, old cups, but in her anger isn’t sure what to do with them, so she starts putting them back where they were. “You know what? Don’t call me Vivi. Don’t fucking even.”
“You were afraid of me. You didn’t want me to come back.”
“I was six years old,” Viola says. “Jesus. I don’t have to defend my six-year-old self to you. Grow up.”
Viola’s ghost-mother who is actually a year or two younger than Viola looks at her for a long moment, eyebrows raised. “Right,” Viola says. “I guess that’s not something you can actually do at this point. But still.”
On the television screen the emperor is shot full of arrows. He stumbles, breaking off the ends of the arrows, a look of wild disbelief across his face. More arrows. “Did they do an okay job, your aunt and uncle?” Viola’s ghost-mother says.
“Great,” Viola says. “They did a really fantastically great job.” A coldness spreads throughout her body. She is not looking at her ghost-mother now.
“I’m glad,” Viola’s ghost-mother says. “I was jealous of them, you know that? I gave her hell for marrying that fat-ass, but I was jealous of them. I wish I had something to give you, Vivi, some sort of advice or something like that. I feel like I didn’t really ever give you anything.”
“I was fine,” Viola says, still cold.
Viola’s ghost mother shakes her head sadly, but whether at Viola or herself is unclear.
Mists envelope the image on the television screen. The ghosts slowly make their way from the room, Viola’s ghost-mother among them. There is a single piercing note from a Japanese flute as the last of the ghosts exit.
“Do you want more wine?” Robert asks. “There’s maybe enough for another glass.”
“It’s okay, you go ahead.”
~ ~ ~
At the Indianapolis Museum of Art is an exhibition of dozens of tiny rooms set behind glass. Each room is labeled: Louisiana Bedroom, South Carolina Bedroom, Virginian Drawing Room, and so on. Robert and Viola wander through the exhibition, peering through the glass. Displays throughout the exhibition show how craftsmen had built e.g. the tiny chairs, joining the joints the same way one would built a similar life-sized chair. Everything is exactly to scale, one inch to one foot; the rooms are each about two hand lengths high. Something about the tiny rooms makes Robert nervous, or makes him feel like he is out of place, maybe.
“I am working on acceptance. I am thinking about it as a sort of project,” Viola says. “My friend Nikola on the internet suggested to me the idea of the pink bubble.”
“Pink bubble?” Robert says.
“You imagine putting the thing you find distressing in a pink bubble, and then you picture it floating gently out into the distance. You tell yourself that it will be okay, this thing, it will be safe in the pink bubble, and you let it go. Off into the distance. It’s a meditation technique.”
“Why pink?”
“I don’t know. Other colors might be okay too.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes I think it helps.”
Above the fireplace in the Virginia Drawing Room is a mirror that reflects their faces back to them, full-sized among the miniature tables, chairs, vases, rugs. Viola puts her hand to her mouth and leans in to get a better view. For a moment, the effect is quite shocking.
She imagines a craftsman working over a single chair in the Virginia Drawing Room, spending hours or days on it, getting it right, getting it not-quite-right, starting over. At no point do you know that what you are doing is the right thing to do. You could be wasting all of your time, doing the wrong thing.
I am thirty-four years old, Viola thinks. Soon I will be middle-aged, and after that, old.
Through each of the rooms’ windows are miniature bushes, trees, gardens. The windows have been designed so that one can imagine the scene going on and on into the world outside the windows, so that the viewer can’t quite see where it all stops.
“Someone had to make all of this,” Robert says suddenly, as if it had just occurred to him. “By hand. Someone had to carve each of the legs of that table. Someone had to carve each of the drawers of that dresser.” Robert and Viola look through the glass into the little room, at the miniature dresser. “Do you think they open?” Robert asks.
Robert and Viola examine a framed schematic of the dresser, drawn in pencil.
“They open,” Robert says.
At the end of the exhibition, there’s a book for sale, containing full-page color photographs of each of the rooms. “They just look like rooms,” Robert says, disappointed, as he flips through the book.
Robert and Viola drink ginger-infused ice water in the café at the front of the art museum and look out at the giant windows that cover most of the wall. “It might stop,” Viola says. “We have no assurance whatsoever that it won’t.”
“What might?”
“How from here you can see trees and beyond them, cars, but somewhere beyond all of that, just beyond where you can see, it might just, you know. Stop.”
“How are things going with your FBI agent?”
“He’s not my FBI agent,” Viola says. “I haven’t claimed him.”
“I have some contacts in the CIA, maybe,” Robert says. “Guys I knew from law school.”
“I’m not sure how much good a CIA contact would do,” Viola says. “I think there’s a pretty high degree of animosity between the FBI and the CIA.”
“Sure, but with the recent attempts to consolidate the intelligence community…”