“Vivi!” Nothing. “Viv!”
It takes me a few tries, but I launch some twigs until one sails through the window. If she’s not actually home, that will be confusing to come home to—twigs in the middle of your floor. But she pops her head out.
“Heyo, darling,” she calls down. She’s wearing huge earrings and a red wig with very straight edges. “Let yourself in—it’s open!”
In her room, Vivi is the center of a cyclone. A cyclone of art supplies, color and texture smeared around her. There’s a long strip of fabric half-fed through the sewing machine. A propped-up canvas with a few long drips of sea blue and curry yellow. Scraps of magazines splayed out on the floor. The TV is playing an old black-and-white film, but it’s on mute.
I’m relieved to see her feeling better. It’s like all her creativity was pent up, and now it has exploded everywhere.
“Hey,” I say, staying in the doorway for a moment. She waves with one hand but doesn’t look up from her spot in the middle of the floor. She’s wearing some kind of robe with droopy sleeves, like a wizard’s costume, and she’s taking a pair of shears to an open magazine. “I knocked a bunch.”
“Sorry, lovey-o, I guess I didn’t hear. My thoughts are so loud and jumbly that I can’t hear much else at all. They’re like wriggly puppies, all diving over each other to get my attention, ha.”
Sylvia herself is not diving at all but dozing on the bed. Vivi climbs to her feet. I expect her to put her arms around my neck, but she moves toward the canvas. I sit on the edge of her bed, which is covered in mangled blankets, scraps of fabric, and various buttons and jewels. With anyone else, I’d wait to be asked why I’m here. But it’s Vivi. I don’t need a reason. Nobody needs a reason in Vivi’s world, least of all Vivi herself.
Tilting her head, she smashes the paintbrush at the top of the canvas and watches as a glob of neon orange drips beside the blue and yellow. Then she smears the line, the brush making swipes against the canvas.
I don’t know how to bring up the reason I came here—the things I said to my family. Instead, another question pops into my mind. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always, darling, you know that. I’m a fountain of truth, splashing past each concrete tier until I hit the bottom and spout right back to the top.” She laughs to herself.
“Do you ever think of us, like, long term?”
“Well, sure,” she says. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. She doesn’t look back at me. “I’ve imagined us living together in a tiny apartment in a big city, like drinking coffee in bed and you kiss me on your way out the door to your job as a sous chef at some fancy restaurant, and I own a vintage shop where I alter the clothes to be more stylish and then sell them. And I keep some, let’s be honest. And, like, maybe I find out I’m pregnant, and at first we’re like . . . oh shit, because we’re so young, you know? But then we decide to go for it, and we have this baby boy who comes with us everywhere, and we just make it work, you know, like this little urban family.”
So she sees us together for a long time. It sounds like a nice life. Like a real possibility. She served it out just like that, something that could be my two-or three-year plan. A busy city to distract me, a job that keeps me interested, and a Viv to come home to.
She’s not done. “But you have to understand, darling, I imagine everything. I’ve imagined us moving to India, and I fall in love with the country, but you think it’s too hot and crowded, so you come back to the States. I stay and marry, and I spend my days wearing beautiful saris and perusing open-air markets for the most colorful fruits and lushest fabrics. I’ve imagined you go off to a really scenic college on the East Coast, with lots of oak trees and green lawns, and I visit you on campus but wind up having an affair with one of your professors, primarily on the desk in his office. I’ve imagined that you trash your life here and move to Jackson Hole to a remote cabin and, like, live off the land, and I pine for you my whole life but I know you’re a mountain man, and that’s not the life for me. Still, when it’s a snowy winter and there’s a fire roaring, I imagine you in a flannel shirt making forest delicacies in your rustic kitchen, and I wish I could transport myself to you just for the night.”
I mean, what do I say to that? I can barely keep up. I leave India or I go to a traditional college where Vivi cheats on me with an older man or I retreat to life in a log cabin?
“Not Japan for us, then?”