“My artistic nature, the force of my needs to accomplish my work, the way my life works in service to that, would not have mixed harmoniously with motherhood. Early on, I knew I did not want a life of bobbing and weaving between art and family, they fighting for my attention, me always being torn between the two, unable to acknowledge the truth in my blood, that no matter my ability to love, creation of art would always win out. For me, marriage, family life, motherhood were not sacred, art itself was then, still is, the great sacred thing, and from my earliest memories, I have always been devoted to it. So, perhaps more of an explanation than you expected, but non, no children for me.”
He had been so glad to learn there were no children lucky enough to have her as a mother, and thought his own mother should have made such a choice, not had the children she was incapable of caring for, had failed to love beyond all else. Of course, had his mother been smart, he would not exist, and despite all the hardships, Theo wanted to be alive, perched on the edge of Paloma Rosen’s huge sofa, thinking that maybe the best mothers were those who hadn’t birthed their own, didn’t know some young man was that minute choosing the role for her.
He had said yes to everything. Yes to being her errand boy, yes to all the mundane or peculiar or illogical tasks she said would be his to accomplish avec empressement, and when he must have looked confused, she said, with alacrity, a word he knew was English, but had no idea of its meaning. “Promptly,” she had said next, and he had nodded and said, “I can do that, I promise.” Yes to all the learning she said he would have to tackle in order to earn the potential of one day, perhaps, becoming her assistant, though he had not a clue what she meant by any of that. New places had opened up in Salinas before he left, galleries bringing suave monied people from Los Angeles and San Francisco, who bought the paintings that hung on walls. Theo had seen those buildings undergoing gut renovations, then the shiny floors, the white walls, cool folk trooping in and out of glass doors in a slinky dance, all of them, men and women, utterly gorgeous. He had walked past and wondered about the canvases he saw, what it all meant, but he had never gone in, had never felt such a place was meant for him.
Paloma Rosen had been staring at him, waiting for him to answer her question about whether he was willing to be schooled by her, to engage himself in a course of education, and he said, “You’re the first real artist I’ve ever met. So I wouldn’t know what you would want me to do, as your assistant, I mean, but I’ll do whatever I should.”
Her laugh was true and real, deep-throated, manly really, and she had said to him, “Good, but we shall not worry about any of that now. Mais, time will tell.”
Though he had seen her at the front door, had followed her to the couch, when she stood up right then, at what he thought was the end of the interview, he had been shocked by her size. There was such power and force within her, the extreme magnetism that caught him, that he could see snaring so many others, but she was little, small, at least a foot shorter than he, with the long thick braids of a child, but pure white, swinging against her waist, and when he expected to see delicate hands, because there was something delicate about her, a serious elegance, she held up one hand, beckoning him to follow her deeper into the loft, when he thought she was going to show him the door, and that hand was outsized, the thick fingers bare, not a ring of any sort, the knuckles shaped like wizened marbles, nails very short, nearly, he thought, cut down to the quick, though she did not seem to him a nail-biting kind of person. That she might make someone else bite their nails, that he could see.
He had followed her across the entire loft that seemed to stretch out forever, past the ten bookshelves standing on their own, with comfortable chairs and lamps set about like orphans, passing the enormous windows, one by one, each maybe ten feet long and four times his height, and he was nearly six and a half feet tall.
When they reached a far corner of the loft, she opened a door to a bedroom, and walked in, and then opened another door.
“Don’t be scared,” she said. “Come in and take a look,” and the bedroom was like being in heaven, all white and windowed and large, its walls filled with art, and he took many more steps forward, and peered around her to see into the white bathroom, that was old-fashioned in a way that the loft was not.
She had stepped back then, and measured him from his feet to the top of his head, and said, “I think you’re too tall to use the bath as a bath, je suis désolée, but you can rehang the showerhead so it’s higher up,” and he saw she was right, the water would just graze his ribs.
When he looked back at her, the flats of her palms were flying over the neat comforter laid across the king-sized bed in this room he prayed might become his. Thick fingers smoothing out every stray wrinkle, and she had stopped and looked up at him, said, “I am so sorry, Monsieur Park,” and his heart had roller-coastered into his stomach. “I should have asked you this first, because it’s a requisite—are you good with tools?”
He was very good with tools, had fixed the family bungalow in Salinas, the fraying electrical cords, the frenzied plumbing, the door hinges that refused to stay put, the doors that never properly closed, the washing machine that bucked at will. He had not been able to do anything about the house itself, but he had kept it running, kept his sobo and his mother and his sister sheltered under a roof that never once sprung a leak. None of the people he had lived with in New York owned tools, wouldn’t know what to do with them even if they had, but he did.
“I can do anything,” he said to Paloma Rosen. “I can put a tool chest together with all the right stuff.” He didn’t have the money to stock a proper tool chest, but he would figure it out.
“N’êtes-vous pas doux,” Paloma Rosen had said to him, and he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means.” She had laughed again, but he could tell that her laughter was with him, not against him.
“It is French for aren’t you sweet. And, oui, you are très sweet. Do not worry. I own every tool you might possibly need. One last thing—if you do not like the art I have put on the walls, you must tell me. Maintenant, follow me.”
It was so new to him, how someone could be both warm and briskly dismissive; he was used to only warmth from his sobo and his lost sister, cold from his mother.
Then he was again sitting on the huge couch and Paloma Rosen was in front of him, a beautiful old lady with mannish hands sitting on a tree trunk that only now he noticed. Its girth so big he imagined the way the tree must have been, so old, living forever, tucked away in a forest no one had ever been able to find.