“I’m not any kind of artist,” he said.
“You have lovely black eyes, unusual, without a speck of any other hue, no green, no hazel, no dashes of silver or gold, no occlusions. You may not be an artist, but you remind me of someone I was once close to, and he was an artist. But never mind all of that. Sans importance. Hors de propos. You and I are sitting here to discuss whether you might be the person I am seeking, the person I need at this time. Let us see how it goes.”
Among all the English, she tossed in musical words Theo could not understand, that he realized were actually words in a foreign language, that were as foreign as he felt on her enormous couch in her unbelievable home with those extraordinary sculptures within view. He relaxed a little when he realized she was foreign, in maybe more ways than one, maybe even more than he.
She was forthright and unsentimental, explaining to him why she had decided to give up her happy solitary existence, to take in a lodger now, some young person to replace the burnt-out lightbulbs, sweep away the decorative cobwebs, kill the spiders that spun them, fetch the basic groceries, make trips way uptown to Spanish Harlem, where prices were cheaper and lug back the staples, wait out the cycles at the one Laundromat in the neighborhood so that her work overalls and shirts, and her scrubbing cloths, with the right amount of softener for polishing her mammoth stone forms, were done right. The washing machine and dryer in the loft were not to be used for anything related to her work, but could be used to wash anything else. She would need him to sweep her studio and not touch anything, clean and sharpen her array of sculpting tools as requested, stropping them with a leather strap. Did he know how to strop with a leather strap? Could he use a whetstone to sharpen the kitchen knives to an inch of their lives? Could he make a mind-bending tuna fish salad, one that included pickle juice and capers and the thinnest chopped pieces of a single jalapeno? Was he capable of setting a lovely table for a formal dinner party? Did he know about all the forks, knives, spoons, glasses, and plates that accompanied such a formal party? Could he turn a cloth napkin into a swan, a turtle, a bow tie? Did he have issues with doing housework, find it beneath him, or consider it woman’s work? Could he wash windows, mop floors, wash the stove, clean the oven, clean out the refrigerator, set fresh contact paper in the kitchen cabinets, scented paper in her bureau drawers?—pointing then to some large space behind the opaque floor-to-ceiling screens he was familiar with; his sobo Chiyo had a small Shoji screen at the foot of her bed, as if that whisper-thin rice could withstand the wrath that sometimes blew through the bungalow.
Did he know how to clean showers, sinks, toilets? Did he understand that the blue toilet-bowl cleanser had to be scrubbed with a brush, not left to do the work on its own, which it could not, and would only leave unsightly stains if not immediately attacked? Could he unscrew the grids over the air vents, rid them of all the dust clods that built up so supremely it was like seeing penicillin growing, without any need for a microscope?
Could he do all she needed to him to do, whatever her requests, however mundane, peculiar or illogical, in exchange for room and board and a monthly stipend? When she told him how much she would pay him to live in the loft, to do what she asked him to do, it was a fortune she was offering. He would have lived there and done everything she wanted for free.
“If you prove yourself, if perhaps you’re interested, if I think it feels right, if you feel right to me, I might train you to become my assistant, an artist’s assistant, teach you everything that you need to know, should know, about the world of creation. Which might actually help you create your own life. Of course, if I decide to spend the time training you in that way, and you prove yourself talented at such work, I would pay you an additional daily rate. But I will not pay you for the education you must undergo.”
Theo listened spellbound to this world she was painting for him, a world he had never known existed, that he might actually be part of one day, and he wanted her to keep talking about it all, what she thought he might do in this remarkable place, in his own life, even when she came to an abrupt stop and was waiting for him to speak.
In that long, tensile silence, he stared into her blue, blue eyes, ocean blue, ice blue, a frozen blue, the kind of blue that relaxed the marrow in his spine, a blue so strong it nearly erased the wrinkles lining her face. It wasn’t like that; she was beautiful, but old. Maybe even older than his sobo Chiyo, who cowered and ran to her plain room with her Shoji screen and her Butsudan shrine whenever his mother was back on the drugs, a brown bear on a rampage, blaming everyone, Sobo Chiyo particularly, for how things had turned out. And Sobo Chiyo doing her best to care for Theo when he was Emilio Inari Andramu?o, and for Poppy, before Poppy disappeared into the desert, until she died, and Theo left home for good.
On her deathbed, in her fossilized voice, in the Japanese she always spoke, his sobo said to him: I love you, but attend to what I say. You are a child of a weak woman, and I hate to say that about my own, but she has never had the strength to do right by herself, and she’s never done right by you or your sister. I will die knowing I failed her, that she failed herself. But if you make good, when you make good, I’ll know that too, and I’ll rest easy in my grave.
Sobo Chiyo was buried now in Salinas, in the special hallowed ground in Yamato Cemetery intended especially for the Japanese, which she was, 100 percent. The way his mother was, but not Poppy or him entirely. Theo believed that his sobo had rested easier these past three years, somehow knowing he had gotten himself away, and he was positive that the woman whose name meant eternal, a thousand generations, was finally truly at peace since Paloma came into his life.
That afternoon, answering the odd questions asked of him in the strange interview, Theo Tesh Park knew Paloma Rosen was the kind of person not made twice, no one else like her existing in the world, and when she said, “Do you have any questions for me?” he couldn’t believe he had the courage, the daring, to ask if she had any children.