Joan agrees to return to the store on the third Saturday of September.
“It is the time I need to maximize the news that Dharamshala’s very own most famous writer will be giving the first of many lessons in how to write as if the gods and goddesses have touched them too. Come at four. When you walk in, you will see how many of us want to be like you.”
“Let’s start with one lesson, Darpan, and perhaps leave out the gods and the goddesses,” Joan suggests.
“Am I not the good salesman? One hundred copies already sold, Miss Ashby, only those copies in the window remain for selling, so everything is in good hands. Thank you for thrilling me today.”
*
The sky is fighting against the onset of night, gripping the last rays of the descended sun, while Joan waits for the white-toqued chef to wrap her order of steamed spinach momo in wax paper, to drop it into a bag. She feels light on the ground, a little unsteady, dazed by the display of her work in Darpan’s bookstore, from signing her name inside fifty books, from her apparent agreement to become an erstwhile writing teacher for anyone interested.
And she is thinking of Willem, glad to have learned he is not avoiding her, wondering when he will return to his Dharamshala house, a place she has not seen, thinking again, as she has at various times since that trip, of them entwined in a sleeping bag on the ground, wondering why she never imagines them in an actual bed.
Then she is beyond the marketplace, heading up the steep, rocky hill to Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, her mind leaping from Willem Ackerman to Paloma Rosen’s love life. Thinking about how Paloma has never lived long-term with another in her loft, that when Paloma permits her preferred solitariness to be invaded, the lovers stay for a week, a month, six months, perhaps a year, a panoply of different kinds of love and physicality. How Paloma faces the mundane that always eventually worms its way into any relationship, regardless of the heated passion, the torrential lovemaking, or the calmer, more poetic love, but Paloma is never thrown off her own course, good at avoiding the feelings of others, does not engage unless she desires it.
How much fun to consider Paloma’s lovers, their names, their personalities, the relationships they have or want to have with her. Paloma Rosen is, Joan knows, the kind of woman people want for their own, to possess entirely, no matter the cost.
She pictures a lover named Magnus, when Paloma is still in her thirties. A painter, Joan decides, of massive paintings that hang in museums throughout the world. She gives Magnus Willem’s face, his physique, an accent, but not Willem’s, and Magnus will have an incessant need to talk about the future course of their relationship, until Paloma says to him one night in bed, “Arrêtes de parler! Stop all your talking. Am I the woman, or are you?” and despite their year together, he will be gone three days after that, and Paloma will regret none of it, neither the interlude nor the hasty finale.
Perhaps Paloma has one serious lover per decade, Joan thinks.
In her forties, Samuel will show up at Paloma’s door when his multivolume memoirs are racing through the literary world like a brush fire, scorching all named within, making his reputation and his fortune as a result. When Paloma reads his hundreds of thousands of words for the first time, she will learn he was married and divorced once, like her, but will not know he is newly married, a second time, claiming, when he shows up at her door, that she is meant to be his, leaving out the fact that he is not free. She will care not a whit about his marital status because in bed he is a dervish, but outside the covers, she will find he is too silent for her, the mere act of talking confounding him, and Paloma requires a sensational conversationalist. And though he writes like a demon, baring his entire life in his pages, in real life, he is far too meek, withers in the face of her strength. She will send poor Samuel away.
Joan is not surprised when she sees a woman twirling on a stool in Paloma’s studio. She has a long Modigliani face, wan, suffering, and lovely. Lina will be stateless, Sultana-wealthy, ripe for all adventures, excellent at subterfuge, good company until her need for Paloma becomes relentless, jealous of Paloma’s attention to the sculpture at hand. Joan imagines they meet at Paloma’s fiftieth birthday party, and that night become lovers, a torrid week, or two, or three, but then Lina’s black and unblinking eyes remind Paloma of a buzzard waiting to feast upon her desecrated flesh and bones, and clingy Lina must be sent on her way, sobbing about the unfairness of life, the mutilations to her soul from loving a selfish artist, a woman who prefers the coldness of stone to the warmth of Lina’s lovely skin.
She sees Paloma in her sixties, still gorgeous, with those long white braids, her cheekbones and breasts still taut, and Joan imagines a Frenchwoman named Sabine, whose heart will be on her sleeve, eating up Paloma’s working hours, keeping her in the warm bed that Sabine will call “our bed,” though it is no such thing. Nestling Paloma against her own beautiful breasts, insisting on nuzzling way past Paloma’s dawn schedule of rising, showering, Turkish coffee, studio. Wonderfully brutalizing love that enflames Paloma’s most tender parts, until snap, the long hours of the day are wiped out in the craziness of consumptive sexual congress. Sabine has long legs that never end, balletic in bed, a female praying mantis, until Paloma shows her to the loft door and hands Sabine the small leather bag she brought when she arrived two months before.
In her seventies, Paloma will decide to become celibate, and will miss none of the blaze, the battles, the usurpation of her time, her heart, her emotions, by man or woman, regardless of how adept they are at the most intimate acts.
She will loathe the term “lovemaking.” Will not abide calling it “sex.” Always, in Paloma’s mind, whether a mere coupling or a symphony of exquisiteness, it is de se perdre en délire dans le corps d’un autre, to lose oneself deliriously in the body of another.
*
At midnight, in the dark of her pine suite, Joan stares out into the Dharamshalan night, the moon lighting up the trees in the forest beyond her window. Unlike many of the birds she saw with Willem, whose names were unbeautiful—long-tailed shrike, large cuckooshrike, Himalayan bulbul—the trees in her forest glide off the tongue. The chirs are plush, their needles scented of smashed pine. The evergreen deodars have silvery-green leaves that capture even the weakest light. The Himalayan oak trees are rugged and tough. Soon, autumn will burnish the leaves that turn, will make the forest into a bonfire of colors, as she once wrote in a story in Other Small Spaces. All of Joan’s ancient work is present these days in her mind, and she feels Paloma Rosen’s clove-scented breath on her own skin.