by Ami Rao
‘No!’ she said, looking at the waiter, surprising herself, the word spilling out from some mysterious place inside of her. No – as much an order as a plea, and the brown waiter, plagued by a history of his own, unused to taking orders from someone who shared his shade of skin while the white man stood imperiously by, was confused.
But she is the artist, he thought!
And his eyes grew wide with alarm.
Torn between intuition and instruction, past and present, duty and the devil and the deep blue sea… but who are my gods? he asked himself and he shuffled his feet backwards – a tiny movement, a non-movement – but that was enough. Enough for everything that happened next to happen.
Ivanov, his hand having found the slender flute of the champagne glass while it was still on the tray, in the precise moment when the waiter shuffled backwards, lost his grip. The glass tipped forward, taking in its wake several of the other glasses on the tray in a perfectly orchestrated sequence of dominoes. There was the clink of glass and a loud hiss, which steadily petered out as globules of the golden liquid spilt out of the tray, drip, drip, drop, drop, the precious bubbles fizzling out, the liquid collecting on the floor in a puddle of something the exact colour and consistency of piss.
After that Ameena remembers no more except thinking that the look of outrage on the face of the white man, and the look of terror on the face of the brown one, was history on a loop. It was. It surely was.
recapitulating melodies and mistakes
Right or wrong, it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3.1
That night, as a crescent moon made a yellow smudge high in the midnight sky, David told a distraught, shivering Ameena not to worry. To just go in the next morning after a full night’s sleep and a calm head and tell them she was sorry. She had become overwhelmed, she had been distracted by other things on her mind, she had let her emotions get in the way of clear thinking, that of course it was all a terrible accident, she hadn’t meant for it to happen like that, oh no, she was absolutely horrified that it had, she had only wanted the waiter to not interrupt that very important conversation, but still, accident or not, she would apologise profusely to Ivanov and do whatever else she had to do to make this up to everyone.
And then he said to her: My feisty angel, you need to find compromise between painting the world and living in it.
And she thought: David, sweet, wonderful David, in finding compromise, there was no one like David who was every bit as ruthlessly dedicated to his music as she was to her art, but who had, besides that, a capacity for selflessness and generosity that she knew she could spend two lifetimes trying to equal and not even come close.
3.2
‘Yusuf,’ said Zoya, ‘I have a feeling.’
They were sitting upstairs in the bedroom, like they had done every evening for the past several weeks since ‘it’ happened, as they referred to the incident between themselves.
‘It’, like almost all historical horrors, big or small, had left for all of them an emotional residue that remained long after the actual incident was over and done with, but in this particular case, it was more than that. Emotional consequences aside, ‘it’ had been disastrous to the family Hamid on a very pragmatic level, in that ‘it’ had rendered the use of the half-hexagonal room impossible.
The thing with a room that is shaped like half a hexagon is that it remains defined by its geometry. One wall is straight, two walls are angled and everything within is built and bought and fit to accommodate. And so, when something like ‘it’ happens, there’s no escaping the concomitant effects on the usability of the space – the pure mathematics of the shape becomes compromised – something one never pays too much attention to when buying a house, because of course, one never imagines that something like ‘it’ could ever happen.
But ‘it’ had happened.
And ‘it’ had happened to a family who had bought a house with a funny-shaped floorplan in a city where it rained, often and hard.
And so, despite the heavy PVC sheeting that they had dragged from the garage – it had taken all three of them plus Kareem’s friend Faisal to carry it across – and duct-taped onto the window frame, when the rain came, the rain came, and well, it doesn’t take ‘it’ to happen to realise that any act of man, no matter how heavily reinforced, is no match for an act of God, and the room and all its contents had been soaked through.
After which, Zoya had proceeded to move all the furniture to one side – for the first time in her life she was thankful there was not much of it and that the burgundy sofa expertly made to look like leather was not, in fact, leather but some man-made material of a far more durable nature. Then she covered the lot with layers of the same heavy plastic sheeting they had used on the window.
The effect, Zoya thinks every time she unlocks the front door to come back home, is a bit like walking into an abandoned house in a bad 1950s-style horror movie. Sometimes, when she is upstairs in bed and the house is still, she imagines (inspired by the same bad movie) other things too. She imagines a large, non-existent, grandfather clock striking twelve, ding-dong, ding-dong (twelve times) and then at that portentous stroke of midnight, she imagines the wind from the broken window begins to howl and the plastic covering on the furniture starts to quiver and flap and footsteps belonging to something invisible and monstrous can be heard stomping up the staircase and… well… other suspended-disbelief things like that. Zoya had always enjoyed a rather expansive imagination when it came to the supernatural.
But besides turning her house into the set of a B-grade horror movie, what upset Zoya in truly distressing ways was that because of ‘it’, along with the use of the room, the little time that they spent with Kareem seemed to have vanished as well.
For even though Kareem was more out than in, and spent almost all the time he was in, upstairs in his bedroom, he would still come down for meals as he had always done, ever since Zoya can remember, for no matter what they did or didn’t do for the rest of the day the four of them – now the three of them – had always eaten their evening meal together on the sofa of the living room.
And now, thanks to ‘it’, all that had changed.
The night ‘it’ had happened, they had gone to sleep without dinner. First the shock of it, then deciding between themselves what to do about it, Kareem yelling and swearing and Zoya crying and Yusuf frozen in disbelief, all of them staring at the neatly severed head of the pig, not knowing what to do with it, how to get rid of it, who among the three of them would be the one to touch the thing, then Yusuf finally calling the police, and then the police taking forever to get to the scene and taking away the odious object, and then after all the questioning and the clear-up, they had been too exhausted and too sickened to eat.
The next night, at dinner time, Zoya had spread out a mat on the kitchen floor and set their plates and glasses on it. ‘Like a picnic in the park,’ she said brightly to Kareem when she called him down for dinner.
But he had stared at it a while and then finally said, ‘This is ridiculous, I’m going to my room.’ And he had done exactly that. He had helped himself to some food and taken his plate up to his room, and continued to do so ever since, and that, as far as family dinners in the Hamid household were concerned, had been that.
‘What feeling?’ Yusuf asked.
‘Bad-luck feeling,’ she replied.
He put his arm round her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘whatever has happened has happened. It’s all over now.’
But Zoya shook her head. ‘No,’ she said ominously, ‘everyone knows. Bad luck, it comes in threes.’
3.3
When Ameena walked into the little glass office, she saw Suzy behind the desk with Luca Zima, the man who managed the gallery’s accounts, a behind-the-scenes guy who Ameena had never met before but who she knew Suzy was involved with
in some intimate way in her personal life, a man who was considered a savvy businessman and, behind closed doors, a sadistic brute who wouldn’t hesitate to sell his mother’s soul for an extra dollar, and then feel totally at ease about it.
Ameena stood by the door, unsure how to proceed, what to say, who to say it to. For one second of madness, she quite realistically pondered giving in to the temptation of turning round and running away. In as much as she had entertained no delusions of this being an easy meeting, she hadn’t expected Luca to be there, and she knew what it meant, his presence in this meeting, before it had even begun; she knew how it would end.
‘Are you firing me?’ she asked eventually, choosing to direct her question at Suzy.
‘We sold one painting. One painting. No one would buy anything after that… that scene you created,’ Suzy said, looking distraught.
‘I… it was an accident. It wasn’t meant to happen like that… I…’ Ameena started to say.
But Luca was looking at her intently and she felt herself stuck for words. He was a short, spare man with full, fleshy lips, narrow eyes and a head full of slicked-back dark hair that, when regarded in isolation, belied his years. There was something about his physicality that made Ameena cringe. He reminded her of a small, furry animal that you were inclined to pick up and then before you knew it, you had three of your fingers bitten off.
Then he spoke in low, soft tones. ‘Giving an artist an exhibition is a very expensive gamble. Do you understand that, Ameena? Believing in your work is a good thing. But believing it is so good and so important that it will change the course of the gallerist’s entire enterprise is egotistical and arrogant. We are not in the business of giving deference to ego. A gallery is not just a room with four walls. It represents someone’s creative vision – in this case, Suzy’s. And we cannot allow the future of the gallery to be jeopardized by a single artist – any single artist.’
‘Suzy?’ Ameena looked desperately at the older woman. ‘It was the way in which he spoke to me. It was so… so… superior. It was like… after that, I couldn’t think straight any more. He wouldn’t have spoken to me like that if I was… Come on, you’ve got to see that! You’re a woman too, you know.’
But Suzy only shook her head. ‘There are many different ways to be a woman. Your behaviour was indefensible. I can understand you were hurt. I can understand also that you were angry. To not be hurt, to not be angry would be to not care, but this? You act like a child when you’re told your painting isn’t worthy to sit in the Louvre. He didn’t like your work. Okay, that’s not what we expected or wanted, but I would have found a way to deal with it. That is my job. That is my experience. But you! I mean, going up against Ivanov like that. Insulting him in a room full of important people. And in such a hideous manner. What were you thinking? You are, how you say… unhinged!’
‘Are you firing me?’ Ameena asked again and this time her voice was calm.
Suzy looked away.
Luca spoke. ‘Yes, Ameena, we have decided it would be best to discontinue our relationship. Art is a business. You need to learn to treat it with the professionalism it deserves. As any gallerist can tell you, what we do is a complicated calculus, and demanding and self-centred artists are seldom worth the work. There’s a very long line of talented people who would love to have an opportunity to get into an art gallery, people who are givers not takers. So, whenever you get a chance next – and I am confident that with time and maturity it will happen for you – be a giver.’
‘I didn’t give you a chance because your work was so great,’ Suzy murmured, still looking away, as if she was speaking not to Ameena at all, but to someone else that only she could see. ‘Your work was good, some of it was exceptional even, yes I won’t lie, I liked your work, I thought you showed potential. But that’s not why I gave you a chance.’ She looked at Ameena then, and her face was sad. ‘I gave you a chance because David’s poor mother was my childhood friend. And you threw the chance away.’
Ameena felt her face flush and the tears appear, hot and burning, as the knot in her throat that had slowly grown larger and larger now threatened to escape. Pride dissolving into the sticky, salty, primitive language of shame. But before they had a chance to roll down her cheeks, she gathered her bag and also her phone and also what was left of her dignity and left the room.
3.4
Later that evening, when David returned home from work, he found Ameena sitting in the living room on the loveseat by the window, her small form washed in the strips of dying sunlight.
‘They fired me,’ she said, staring straight ahead.
‘Oh Ameena,’ was all he said, but his face looked stricken.
‘They didn’t give me a chance,’ she continued, ‘to do what you suggested… I tried… I tried to say it was an accident, that I don’t know how it happened and it’s true, I don’t. I don’t know how it happened. I can’t remember very much, the whole evening is such a blur. All I really remember is the glasses falling and then later Peggy hugging me and saying something kind and then I was with you, here, at home. Anyway, I tried to say all that and that I was sorry… but they didn’t give me a chance. In and out, it was over.’
‘Baby, I’m so sorry,’ David said.
‘I begged. I actually begged your mother’s friend for another chance. There’ve been some low moments in my life…’ she gave a small, scornful laugh, ‘but I think this just reset the bar.’
She said ‘your mother’s friend’ in a deliberately pointed way that was not lost on David, but sensibly he chose not to indulge her by reacting. This, he believed, was not the time.
‘There’ll be more galleries,’ he said, trying his best to sound positive, but he knew she heard it, the catch in his voice, ‘this is New York City.’
‘Don’t you have a gig tonight?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Not going anywhere,’ he said in a quiet, worried voice.
‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ she said, and her own voice was listless, ‘but I just want to be alone.’
David said nothing, but he walked up to where she was sitting and touched her shoulder and when she didn’t react or respond or even flinch, he walked over to the kitchen and prepared a whole saddle of lamb with shallots and garlic and sprigs of rosemary, its leaves needle-like and shining silver on the underside.
When he brought it out, he noticed that Ameena hadn’t stirred, neither her body, nor the expression on her face. It unnerved him, her face, in that moment, a face that had looked everywhere for the smallest sign of life, and then, not finding it, had given up.
He stood next to her, stroked her hair.
A plane cut through the sky in the distance, birdlike, the gleam of metal visible for just a few seconds in the rectangle between two buildings.
‘I’ve made us dinner,’ David said, walking back to the dining table. ‘I hope you’re impressed.’
‘They only sold one painting,’ she said, her voice empty.
There was the sound of a utensil dropping and it rang around the room, a harsh, metallic clang.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘fork slipped out of my hand.’
‘One painting,’ she repeated vacantly as if she had barely registered the noise or the fact that he had apologised for causing it, ‘they sold one painting. One painting.’
‘Well,’ he said lightly, ‘one is better than none. Shall I serve you?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Ameena, you’ve got to eat.’
‘David, I’ve got to sleep,’ she said.
Then she stood up, drifted zombie-like into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.
She was asleep when he got to bed, sprawled out on her stomach on top of the duvet, arms flung out like Jesus on a crucifix, all the bedroom lights still on, her face sandwiched between her own pillow and his, which she had placed on top of her head. She was wearing one o
f David’s t-shirts and nothing else and its white oversized form swelled up around her like a cloud. On one side, it had ridden up to her waist, exposing one buttock cheek, the sight of which filled David with an intense personal shame. He shifted her body as gently as he could without disturbing her, pulled the duvet out from under her, then covered her nakedness and turned the lights out.
3.5
A day passes. Then a week.
David and Ameena dance around issues.
This is not uncommon between people and lovers.
They dance around issues because it takes two to dance, because as long as they are still involved, they retain control; they dance around issues because it is a kind of middle way, braver than running away, safer than battle; they dance around issues because burned bridges and damaged souls seem cruel and violent and impossible to repair, because the middle ground seems the way forward, and the illusion of control a salve.
They dance around issues because sometimes it just happens to be the most elegant way of doing things.
But that is the catch of course. It takes two to dance.
For a while it is good. It is a smooth dance, a waltz, travelling around the line of dance. David and Ameena become experts overnight. They waltz around the worn little apartment with its enviable river views and old-fashioned glass windows, they waltz around the living room talking about Hershel and his unexpectedly good mood, they waltz around the kitchen talking about the weather, how the winter seems interminable that year, lingering into April like an unwelcome guest, they waltz around the bedroom talking about Whitney, how she and her boyfriend are considering adopting a baby, Whitney doesn’t have a uterus, you see.
Then, in the middle of a turn, Ameena announces that she has taken ‘some time off work’.
‘Oh,’ David remarks coolly.
‘Not that long ago you were suggesting I quit. Now, you seem to disapprove,’ she observes.