Far in the distance, the moon turns the peaks, cliffs, and scarps of the Dhauladhars into abstract art, like a mammoth sculpture Paloma might carve.
Joan falls asleep thinking of Martin, whose email she has not yet responded to, and dreams of Willem lowering his camera, turning away from the flying birds, coming in close to kiss her, wondering if they will kiss well.
45
Since the night she left Darpan’s bookstore, Joan has been working on Paloma Rosen at her desk from the moment she wakes until one, bath after, at meditation with Ela at two, sometimes spending an extra half hour with her, drinking masala chai at the tea seller’s stall, and often writing again for an hour or more in the evening when she returns to her pine suite.
Tomorrow, in the late afternoon, she will show up at Darpan’s bookstore and see what awaits her. She has been trying to write an outline for the class, simple instructions for beginning writers, but the page on her computer is still blank and she started hours ago.
When her cell phone rings, the caller is Eric. They have not seen each other since Camille’s last meditation session before returning to England, but they have retained their comfortable ease with each other. They do not need to check in daily, do not mind when days pass without any connection, when they are together, it is loving, caring, good. In their last conversation, Eric said he was volunteering, but gave her no specifics, and said he was busy with other stuff too, and she thinks the other stuff he’s busy with is the girl he mentioned in his backyard, when Joan first sought him out.
“Are you free on Sunday?” he says when she answers.
“Completely,” although she writes on Sundays too. She wonders if she is going about this the wrong way—not saying a word to Eric about her daily writing schedule, about the book she is writing, this instinctive need of hers to keep it private until the work is completed, on the verge of entering the world. Lately, when she meditates in the group, she thinks about all the methods she employed over the years to keep everything separate—her work from family, writer separate from wife and mother. She has paid a steep price to hold on to herself, remaining silent during all those years of writing Words, the time she lost caring for Eric.
To discuss it all with him now, to lay herself bare, would require the whole story, complete truthfulness: a man who breached his promise about having no children; an unwanted child who made motherhood precious; an expected child who destroyed years of her life; a favorite son who shattered her dreams, stole what was closest to her heart; and then about her work—the published collections, the failure of The Sympathetic Executioners, the Rare Baby stories, the castle up in the sky where she wrote Words of New Beginnings, and now Paloma Rosen, who is fully Paloma, but embodies bits of Vita, Camille, Ela, and Joan, too.
There is too much to disclose, to explain, if she wants to provide Eric the full picture. And she would not feel right, not now, picking and choosing which pieces of the story to tell. She has frequently looked back through it all: what she always feared, what she tried desperately to prevent, happened anyway—the stirring and mixing and coalescing of motherhood and life and writing.
Here in Dharamshala, despite one child’s near presence, Joan is returning to her own beginning, in solitude, writing away—does she want to alter the rhythm, the joy she is at last experiencing again? Her engrained instinct is to keep everything to herself, to keep the facets of her world separated. Like a port-wine birthmark staining the skin over her heart—even if she could remove the mark, laser it away somehow, it would leave behind an outline, a ghost of what was, of the past, of the life she was born into, of the child she became, of the adult who emerged from the ice and the flames.
Should she try nonetheless?
“I’ll pick you up at ten,” Eric says. “I’ve hired a car and a driver.”
A hired car and driver costs little here, but it reminds Joan again how distant Eric is from the rest of the world. He’s told her the particulars of Solve’s sale, the figure tipping two billion. Investors and vested stock options paid out, and his share is fully half of that. He could fund the most eccentric dreams of an unlimited number of generations of his nonexistent heirs. He could buy deserted islands and develop them. He could take over ailing cities and fix them. He could right the economies of small failing countries. He could wipe out at least one disease. The marvels of what he could do with his money are infinite. Joan wonders what he will choose.
“We’re going back into the past, Ashby,” Eric says. “See you Sunday.”
*
Joan looks at the blank screen. Despite what she’s just been thinking about, she hopes Eric means the historical past, not the familial one, she really does not want to parse through her own past, and his, and Martin’s and Daniel’s. She shuts down her computer and closes the lid. She’ll wing it tomorrow, no handouts, no lesson plan, she’ll speak from the heart about what it means to be a writer, at any age, at any juncture in time. Anyway, she doubts Darpan’s certainty that he will have a full house.
46
“Miss Ashby! Miss Ashby!” Darpan cries, pushing through the crowd spilling from his bookstore into the street.
“Come, come. I will lead you in. They are all here for you.”
Joan tries counting the people on folding chairs in the entry, on the counter repurposed as a high bench, sitting on the floor, flattened against all of the walls, and all of the bookcases, in every aisle, perched at the edge of the window display.
Sixty, maybe more. It is hard to tell when there are so many and the bookshop is quaint and small. From the very old and stooped in colorful jackets to children who may not yet have learned to read. She sees her books in laps, in hands, under arms, balanced on top of heads. Those in the folding chairs, who must have arrived early to claim that preferred seating, are waving papers, clipped and stapled, typed and handwritten, some rolled up and used as drumsticks against their knees. Their stories, Joan thinks.
Was this how it used to be, when she gave readings in all those countries, across the States twice? Did masses show up to hear her read and talk?
She remembers the filled rooms, but perhaps she’s forgotten those times when she read to only a few people, she at the podium, and those five or ten spread out in an auditorium meant for hundreds. Maybe she was lucky enough and never read to empty rooms.
So many memories: interviews with NPR, and Charlie Rose, with various newspapers and magazines, the interviews she gave to the reporter at the Wall Street Journal after her book tours, the long piece about her in the New York Review of Books, her talk at Barnard. She had been kind of a rock star then, hadn’t she, without even being all that aware of it. And then took herself away, sheltered in Rhome, becoming what she had never wanted to be.