“Alors qu’est-ce que vous en pensez? Sorry. So what do you think, Monsieur Park?” she said. “I assume this is a palace compared to what you’re used to.”
She hadn’t known, still did not know, the half of it. He had never set foot in any place like Paloma Rosen’s loft, and that he would have a large bedroom of his own, his own bath.… The Salinas house was mean and small, and he had slept for years on a dingy pull-out couch in the canted living room. In New York, he had agreed to romantic entanglements that did him no good, just for a roof over his head, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in Queens, small places well cared-for, but sometimes cockroach-ridden, and when his quasi-roommates told him what they paid, he couldn’t understand the fortunes they spent. Three years sharing the beds’ of others, doing whatever they asked of him in all of those other ways. But then he had found Paloma Rosen’s wanted ad hanging from a lamppost: Artist offering room and board in exchange for errands and housekeeping. SoHo. Only serious applicants able to live-in need apply. Please, my days are very busy, I have no time to waste with perverts.
It had seemed like a joke, but he had written to the email on the notice, and received a confirming email setting the interview. Even when Theo was on the subway coming from the depths of Brooklyn, getting off too early and making his way uptown, to a six-story building on a narrow cobbled side street named Wooster, with two businesses on the ground floor, a coffee place and a flower shop with blooms of every kind and color in metal containers on the sidewalk, it seemed like a joke, that the chance to live in the building, in the neighborhood, for free, for odd jobs, couldn’t possibly be real. But he had taken the chance, had run up all those stairs, neatened the topknot he had worn since he was twelve, and knocked, and then it seemed that the gig was his, if he wanted it. And he did.
He willingly, eagerly, does all that Paloma asks of him, will continue to do all that she asks, and he is studying hard, reading the books she has given him, and visiting the museums and galleries she puts on his to-do list, taking notes about what he reads and his impressions of the exhibits he visits, wanting to understand art, to understand Paloma Rosen, who she is and what she sculpts, to be able to speak her special language.
They get along very well, he thinks, as long as he leaves her alone, does not bother her when she disappears down into the studio for her thirteen-hour days, unless she calls to him, and then he comes running.
Paloma Rosen chose him, Theo Tesh Park, and everything changed. He has wondered, these months, if she knows he chose her, too, as the recipient of his goodness, of the love nearly dried up in his heart.
Joan exhales. The daily writing of Paloma Rosen is mending her own heart, allowing love to run through it again, at least for the work, for Paloma and Theo, for Eric, too, for Vita, Camille, and Ela, and the others she has come to know here, her talks with Lakshmi at Namgyal Café, and the stern face of her father, Hadi, the café’s chef-owner, who lights up when Joan requests that he surprise her with whatever he would like to cook, wants her to eat. Joan’s heart is mending just as Paloma Rosen will mend Theo’s heart. Theo Tesh Park will love her, and Paloma Rosen will love him back, against her will, until she gives in, tosses away the precepts by which she has lived her life.
Paloma doesn’t yet know that Theo has chosen her to mother him, and then Joan is thinking about Camille, who did not want children, but provides art therapy to children so difficult it must be hard to find the love, and yet she does; and about Ela, who wanted children but could not bear the fruit, and now her children are those who sit around her on the red silk pillows, guided in meditative practice, learning the lessons she gently imparts; and about Vita, who lost a child before his twenty-first birthday. And how Vita and Camille and Ela, all childless, continue to mother Joan in their distinct ways, even when she bristled with Vita, refused, at first, Camille’s overture. And aside from her own explicit motherhood, Joan is about to become another kind of mother this Saturday afternoon, nurturing ten Dharamshalans who want to crack open their shells, emerge with wings that might flutter, allow them to fly on the words they arrange.
All the ways in which women become mothers of some sort. Is motherhood inescapably entwined in female life, a story every woman ends up telling, whether or not she sought or desired that bond; her nourishment, her caretaking, her love, needed by someone standing before her, hands held out, heart demanding succor, commanding her not to look away, but to dig deep, give of herself unstintingly, offer up everything she can?
49
After her post-work bath, Joan stands naked at the open windows in her pine suite, the solemn chill of impending weather on her hot, damp skin. The chirs are still green in the forest, but the oak leaves are already burnished, a carpet of gold and red on the forest floor. She’d packed light for three weeks in India, but at the last minute she tossed in a pair of boots, a pair of jeans, and a black cashmere sweater, her workhorse attire since the weather has dramatically cooled. In her sixth month, she is no longer prevaricating about the fact that she is living in Dharamshala. And because that is true, and because winter will arrive soon, she will need to buy suitable clothing. She’s been through all the shops in the marketplaces and bazaars, bought several Indian tunics she wore when it was warm, but nothing for a cold and snowy Dharamshalan winter. Her linen pants and shirts are too light now, and her golden sandals with their luminous crystals have been put away, in the pine closet since late October.
She dresses in her warm clothes—her new uniform—gathers up the ten stories and her own notebook and races out of the hotel and down the hill. She will miss the final outdoor meditation with Ela in the courtyard today. Starting tomorrow, meditation will be held in the banquet room of a teahouse on the edge of sacred Dal Lake. Then Joan is through the marketplace, at the end of Kotwali, at Darpan’s bookstore.
A sign on the door, in silver italics, reads: Closed for Writers’ Class Until 5 pm. The chime tinkles when she walks in. Darpan has prepared. A long table is in the open space between the counter and the first row of bookshelves. Twelve folding chairs, a pad of paper and pen at each place, in the middle, a pitcher of water, glasses, plates of cookies that have the misshapen look of homemade.
“Miss Ashby, welcome, welcome.”
“Everything looks perfect, Darpan. So nice of you to think of water and cookies.”