Suddenly, she will look away from her hands in the mirror plaiting the long, long platinum braids, braids she wore even when her hair was chocolate brown, the straight middle part to the nape, the gathered thickness divided in half, each half divided into thirds, then twined together and tied off with silver bands, plaits that reach her waist, and she will catch her own eyes.
She will know this headache of hers is not a bland hangover, that there was wildness last night, tamed wildness, of course, but she remembers Theo telling her about a drug-addled mother, a dead grandmother, a sister in the Mojave with other like-minded young people, thinking themselves old-fashioned hippies rather than failures. Or is that how Paloma interpreted what Theo told her last night, and he said he thought his sister was in a cult, or in something that seemed like a cult? Paloma might need clarification about that.
And Paloma will know she must have been cross-eyed drunk because she elicits others’ stories while remaining private, and yet she must have told Theo a few of her own because Jean-Pierre Beson is in her head and, until this moment, she can’t recall the last time she thought of that once and long-ago husband, of her former life, ancient now, in Paris.
Though the specifics are unclear, she will remember last night as one of revelations, timid at first, and although the air never cooled down, she is fairly certain she and Theo lit dozens of candles, and then their secrets were flying through all that beautiful flickering candlelight, whisked out of their mouths on the hot breeze that flowed in through the open windows.
There must have been an ungodly number of drinks because she will remember Theo pulling down a glass pitcher from the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet, and then he had armfuls of lemons and limes and blood oranges, taken from the large basket on the ten-foot-long marble island she herself hammered from an even larger piece, then chiseled, sanded, and polished, back in 1967, when she was twenty-nine and in her first full year in New York, living in the loft, owning the otherwise vacant building. Theo was slicing all that fruit, his big hands squeezing citrus halves in one tight squeeze, when she would have had to cut each into eighths to wring juice from the fruit. And she will remember pouring the dregs of rye from the dead bottle into the pitcher, then opening a fresh one and pouring forever, a stream of amber that went on and on, and the seltzer had sizzled, and the cubes had tinkled against the glass until the pitcher was brimming, and she will say, “Marcel Duchamp gave me this pitcher,” bragging as she never did, and Theo will say, “Who’s that?”
And there will be a song still on a loop in Paloma’s head, the song Theo is embarrassed that he loves because it is played on the radio and Theo will not abide music played on the radio. A girl with a huge soaring voice singing The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out … And in the dark, I can hear your heartbeat … and Paloma will remember the singer’s strange name—Florence and the Machine—and she will remember clapping her hands and yelling over the singer’s voice, telling Theo to play the song again. And he had been like a puppy dog with a yummy bone clamped in his jaw, grinning his innocent grin, that precocious spirit of his making her laugh, both of them singing along. Theo’s voice unexpectedly fine, knowing every word that trilled and thrilled. All Paloma could do was grab hold, here and there, of the words she recalled, acutely aware that the orchestral music and the starbursting voice of the singer were at odds with lyrics about a tumultuous love affair that blinded the singer, left her screaming aloud, until she found her lover’s heartbeat, and knew she would stay in the darkness with him, or her, or whoever you was.
Later, when Paloma is downstairs in her studio, assessing the eight-foot hunk of soft butternut wood she plans to begin carving, Theo will sneak down the staircase, sit silently on a step, and she will be aware of him, wonder how long to give him to marshal the courage to say whatever he has come to say, to reveal the artifact she is aware she has forgotten in the hazy murk of rye and juices and seltzer and sugar.
Her relationship with Theo will fascinate her, but she will not have expected to feel this sense of commitment to him, and while it has taken her some time to adjust, the notion of caring for another in a pure way will not be, as she used to fear, awful. Until Theo, no one’s needs or desires or expectations ever altered Paloma’s intentions for her own life, or never for more than a few brief weeks or months, times consumed by lovers. It is not sexual attraction she feels for Theo, although he is a most beautiful specimen, and it is not romantic love, they are ages and worlds apart, but getting drunk together last night will be an indication of how they might speak to each other in the future, about the real things that propel them.
But right now, what she understands is that the love she feels for him is deep and protective, and wonders if this is this why the untouched butternut wood before her seems to hold two figures, one larger, revealing itself, one smaller, still shy. Although Theo is the tall one and she the small, the great maternal figure in the butternut speaks to her first.
Paloma does not pray, or not in some usual way, she is a Jew from Cairo, long divorced from a practicing French Catholic husband, and yet she will whisper words of hope, that the love she feels for Theo is not, mon Dieu, maternal. That would not work for her, not suit her at all. She has avoided all of that, was never a woman with those impulses, has had a tremendously creative and prosperous life because she never felt an iota of longing for a child of her own.
She will begin chiseling away the unnecessary bulk from the wood on the turntable. Her strength is not what it used to be, otherwise she would simply lean down and swing the turntable around until the other side of the untouched wood is before her. But this block must weigh close to a third of a ton, and she has only two choices: to call to Theo and have him move the turntable, or walk around to the other side of the wood. If she does either, she will have to admit she knows he is there, waiting for her to acknowledge his presence, to engage as he wants to engage.
She’s not ready for whatever he needs to say to her, and so she will stare for a while at the wood until a wide ray of sunlight finds it, and her. Oui, there, just beyond the large rounded form, is the smaller one, peeking out, not quite ready to emerge, but its tentativeness is falling away. She will angle her head upwards to the deep-blue sky hanging beyond the huge windows. On the ledge, pigeons are cooing. She will want to smoke another clove cigarette, but she structures that vice as carefully as she works her materials, and she has an hour to go before she allows herself the second of her working day.