42
Since returning with Willem Ackerman from the bird sanctuary and reservoir, Joan is at last writing. Her first evening back, she wrote a second letter to the Dalai Lama, and Kartar delivered it that night to His Holiness’s secretary. The next morning, at eight, she sat down at her pine desk with her tea and her lentils, and opened the laptop to a blank page. Eight until one every day now, a firm schedule that buoys her each morning when she wakes.
There were egregious attempts: tortured pages about what brought her to Dharamshala, then tiny fictional stories that balled themselves up so tight no string she pulled could release them.
She aborted everything, and ceded at last, or perhaps finally, to the older women who refused to budge, standing firm as schoolmarms in her head. The illimitable Vita Brodkey, the stalwart Camille Nagy, the serene Ela, women who might have taken themselves to Joan’s imagined Devata when they were in their twenties, and still lived there all these decades later, making their art, growing aged and wise, oracles handing down their earned nuggets about life, its vicissitudes, its joys.
Vita, Camille, Ela, and even the old lady in the sparkling blue sari on the chhotey train with her milky eyes and broad smile, have transfigured Joan, and her time here. No longer does she smell the rancid aroma of a son’s betrayal, the rageful odors her own body gave off. Time itself has altered, is shaping itself into a resurgence and revival of her creative intelligence. She realized she wants what these women possess—the sensate truth that they are remarkable, even if the rest of the world barely spares them a glance. Each woman has a trumpeting call of Here I am, listen and learn. And Joan has been listening and she has been learning, taking up her own instrument again—the right words on the page—figuring out the way they ought to slide up against one another, or sing, or crash, filled with grace, with blood, with bravery.
She started fresh, warily constructing one sentence, then another, and then the one after that. It took a few days before she realized the stealthy steps were working. She felt like a burglar silently jimmying the lock and entering the house of her mind, of the minds of those older women, of all their individual dreams, hoping everyone’s treasures would be out on display. Now, each morning, Joan keeps her steps light when she returns to the intriguing search, careful with the gems she is finding—the precious stones of miraculous and original lives lived, the semiprecious ones reflecting truths learned in the nick of time, the false gold of failures socked away in some cabinet in the farthest reaches of those houses, secret places no one wants to remember.
*
Joan pulls open the marigold curtains and returns to bed with her notebook and pen. It is early, hours before her writing day begins, and she wants to jot down everything in her head:
Paloma Rosen in downtown New York, in SoHo, in a vast windowed loft where the seventy-nine-year-old sculptor has birthed her sensuous minimalistic forms by chopping at marble and wood and twisting her chisels, hammers, mallets, and rasps. For the last fifty years, sliced free of life’s normative strictures, Paloma Rosen has worked privately making her art, without need of outside approbation, never seeking an agent to represent her, a gallery to proclaim what she renders. Though she has no sign on the door, does not advertise, is not a grand dame of the art scene, serious collectors find her, her name whispered along, as the greatest sculptor of the century, a truth Paloma has always known, does not need to hear sung.
Her hands are arthritic from working her soulfully hard materials, the force required to carve into the hulking elements that the earth throws up—massive stones and exotic tree trunks transported on cargo ships and hoisted by pulleys through her windows. Knees bad from decades of kneeling as she carves, from climbing the double flights of steep stairs—a replica of the staircase at the Pong Wetland Lodge—six from pavement to home, five from pavement to studio, fifty internal steps between loft and studio, thirty-five steps from loft to roof deck and garden, all those stairs growing ever harder to manage. At this late stage of her life, Paloma will take in a lodger, a Sherpa to run all her errands, to traverse all those flights.
One young man will respond to her Wanted ad. He is Theo Tesh Park, a name he has assumed, but why he needed a new name, or what he was named at birth, is unclear. Also unclear is whether he’s tall or short, broad or stringy, handsome or plain.
When the heavy steel door to Paloma’s loft swings open, his jaw will drop when, in the middle distance of the huge place, he sees stone and wood behemoths: A black stone goddess fresh from the earth. A single form rising from a narrow point at its base, turning into a shield for a giant. Two incredibly long and slender figures in white stone, nearly entwined, neither with any obvious human features, but encased in love. Pale-pink wood carved into a sculpture of multiple spirals, the insides painted a shocking red instantly making Theo Tesh Park think of blood, of life and of death.
A mellifluous, husky, accent-tinged voice will bring Theo down to earth. “I am Paloma Rosen,” she will say, and Theo’s spine will shiver when he looks down at the tiny, beautiful old woman patiently waiting for his attention.
“You’re an artist,” he will say.
His statement will recommend him, and Paloma will hire him, and Theo will prove himself trustworthy and competent, timely with the tasks Paloma assigns him.
One morning, months into their arrangement, Paloma flicks on the switch in her salle de bain and looks upon herself with fright, and remorse. Her long white braids have unspooled in sleep, her eyes bloodshot, the blue of her pupils bled down to some desiccated shade, her cheekbones cut into the skin, sharp as blades, mouth gummy and dry. At this ripened age, she knows better: two of her rye sours, or gin and tonics, every other night, after a good day’s work. Once she could drink with the best of them, but no longer, not in years, but Theo was home last night, and exactly how many of those devastating drinks did they imbibe? She feels how she will suffer all of this day.