Joan’s heart is beating hard when she looks away from the screen. She has been with Paloma Rosen as a child in Egypt, her art-school years in London, her time in Paris where she met Jean-Pierre, the whirlwind courtship, the wedding, the settling love, her world there in that arch, luxe environment, and now Paloma is leaving, has left, and there are endless avenues for Joan to consider as Paloma heads out into her new freedom.
Last night, Martin’s latest email arrived and she declined to read it. This morning, she concentrated on her work, but the work is done, and her husband has something to say.
It still jolts Joan when she sees joanmanning as her email address. Here, she has not been Joan to anyone except Natwar briefly, and Willem Ackerman, and a Manning to no one. She has not been Mom or Mother. No matter the company she and Eric may be in, even among sojourners who mention the families they have left behind, the call of India louder than the call of home, he has never referenced their blood relation, has never faltered in calling her Ashby. Here she is only Ashby. The facts of her life—that she is someone’s wife, has a husband, is a mother—are like old garments she removed one day and stored on a shelf in her suite’s pine closet. Dressing again in those old clothes seems increasingly impossible.
Each time Martin sends her a message, she needs more and more time to reset her mind, to remember her other life unfolding without her, seventy-five hundred miles away. She can no longer picture Martin’s face, not completely, or the routines of his days, in operating rooms, with patients, on his bike with Men on Bikes on the weekends, the order in which he pulls on his clothes when he dresses in the mornings, how he packs his suitcase for his surgical trips—it is all a white blank.
Lately, his messages, voice or word, carry a certain tone, a particular articulation, and she understands—he has shown steady patience, has allowed her to try to work through this travesty on her own, but he wants her back in their joint existence, has not agreed to her disappearing forever. She understands, but she bridles, rears up against his entreaties. She had evaded as long as she can, but it is time to read his email.
I’m thinking of coming to Dharamshala. You’ve been there such a long time that I want to see what has kept you so intrigued. We could travel back home together afterwards. I am figuring out how to clear my surgical schedule and then will look into flights.
She is not ready to contemplate what her response might be. She has spent hours thinking about and then writing Paloma Rosen’s escape from her old life, the way she chose to leave her husband, the future she envisions for herself. Has Joan already written the scene of her own leaving? Did it happen when she bought the ticket to Delhi, or went to Dr. Abrams for the shots, or when she and Martin were so quiet the night before she left, or when he drove her to the airport and they kissed, or when she boarded the plane, overcoming that first urge to turn back? Or has she not written that scene yet, has she not actually left him, has she not made up her mind? She closes her computer without writing a reply.
43
Joan bathes quickly and then she is dressed, a bright Indian tunic over the only pair of jeans she brought, her feet in the golden crystal sandals she intends to wear until it is too cold to do so, a light wrap in the bag on her arm.
She is hurrying down the mile-long hill from Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise to the courtyard behind the Dalai Lama’s compound, for Ela’s meditation group at two, which she now attends daily.
She has known this day was coming, but she’s been dreading when Camille leaves Dharamshala until next year, returns to her home on the outskirts of London, returns to her damaged children and the art-therapy lessons she gives them. It is the third of September, and Camille is flying tonight from Gaggal Airport in Kangra—the airport’s existence fourteen kilometers southwest of Dharamshala a surprise to Joan—to Delhi, from Delhi to London Heathrow, then a train from London Heathrow to her terraced house at the end of a block in Twickenham, in southeast London, near the River Thames. She has shown pictures to Joan, springtime pictures of the front of her house: yellow daffodils in window boxes painted black, the window shutters painted white, a row of pink tulips on a small stretch of grass, ceramic ducks—that do not seem at all like Camille—marching along the path to Camille’s pink front door. Behind her house, Camille has a glass addition that extends beyond her kitchen, where she meditates through the year until she returns to Dharamshala. She showed Joan pictures of that too.
Joan is the last one to arrive, to sit on the red silk pillows in her usual six position. Camille is in her regular place, at seven, and Joan squeezes her hand, then finds Ela at twelve, and smiles, and is shocked to see Eric sitting next to Ela, at eleven. She told Eric about Ela’s group, but he meditates on his own in his backyard, or with the large group that gathers in the late afternoons at Tsug Lakhang, listening first to the Namgyal Monastery monks holding fierce, disciplined debates, until they fall silent, raise their hands and commence the meditation. But Eric is here, smiling at her, his ponytail, now nearly half the length of hers, thrown over one shoulder. In these months, Joan has kept separate Camille and Ela from Eric, and now they are all gathered together.
“Namaste,” Ela says. “Namaste,” everyone chimes in return.
“Our own Camille Nagy leaves us tonight, and so this is her last meditation in Dharamshala until next June. Before we begin today’s mantra, which Camille will choose, I wanted to tell you a story about an Indian man named Chand who has a home nearby, but spends most of the year driving a taxicab in New York City.