The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  Suddenly the sun was high in the sky, and I could hear horns blaring as drivers took to the flooded streets, tires crashing through rivers of water, imprecations stoppered for days let loose into chilly air that was a little less sodden.

  I stood at my wall of windows and thought how the harms from the past inform the present; how old wishes are nailed to a person’s endoskeleton, no matter that the bones have lengthened, solidified over the years; about the confluence of events in a life; the power of the written word.

  Part III

  WHAT IS THERE BETWEEN NEVER AND EVER THAT LINKS THEM SO INDIRECTLY AND SO INTIMATELY?

  Clarice Lispector

  kabhī nahīṁ aur sadev ke bhitar kya sambandh hai jo inko itni ghanishtha aur paroksh roop se jorhta hai?

  31

  “Darling, could you fix my sweater for me?”

  Joan looks away from the window to the old woman slumped down in her seat with a spine as liquid as water. Even now, decades after a romantic picnic in Central Park, she remembers Martin running a slow finger down her back, saying, “The spine is comprised of twenty-six bones, twenty-four separate vertebrae interspaced with cartilage, the spinal-cord nerves carrying electrical signals and sensory information, like touch, pressure, cold, warmth, and pain, from the brain to the skin, muscles, joints, and internal organs,” and Joan wonders how this teeny old woman’s spine still has the strength to accomplish all that.

  “What do you need me to do?” Joan asks.

  “If you could settle my sweater back where it should be, darling.”

  Joan weights down the wispy, hot pink shoulders, rolls the long sleeves up over the thin wrists.

  “Thank—” the old woman begins to say, cut off by an announcement about the meals that will be served on the flight, a recitation of the movies that will play once the lunch service concludes.

  “Oh, I’ve already seen all of those. What a shame. But how lovely, you and I can talk.”

  Joan sighs inwardly. In the past, she enjoyed the intimacies, on a train or a plane, when strangers revealed their secrets to her, the interesting material she sometimes gathered this way. But today, she is incurious about who the big Indian man is, or why this old woman is traveling on her own to Delhi. Today, because of Daniel, she does not want anyone else in her head.

  “Please,” Joan says. “I hope you won’t be offended, but I don’t want to talk at all. Perhaps the man on your other side?”

  When the big man turns his head toward them, the air shifts with the invisible block he slides into place. That he has no intention of engaging is clear, and there is the hard look he sends Joan’s way, but she feels impermeable, tucked into her corner of the row, the few inches of her own buffering space. She glances quickly at the old woman, wondering how she feels hemmed in by people who have no interest at all in her. Joan turns away, sees the faintest reflection of her own face in the window.

  An hour since takeoff. An hour plus two since Joan entered the airport and lifted off from her own life. The plane has climbed, evened out, and is sailing along. Outside her window, the blue of the sky is hesitant, uncommitted. How far has she traveled in this hour? Has she crossed into a different time zone, or is she in the same hour and minute as those Mannings she left behind? She tries imagining Martin surprising himself, breaking away from his regular hospital and office routine, jumping naked into their lap pool in the bright light of day, his music blaring so loudly it can be heard in the glen, or riding his bike on the nearby picturesque path along the Potomac, embracing the wind his own body creates. Joan closes her eyes, but she can’t picture him in either scenario. Even though he refuses to think so, would deny it if asked, they have long been in uncharted territory.

  Last night, he’d said, “We’ve been lucky during our marriage. No event has come along that could have destroyed us. We can weather this.”

  “Weather this, like we weathered Eric?” she said.

  “But he’s okay now. We got through it.”

  “I got through it, Martin. Mostly on my own. And all of this, what Daniel has done, has destroyed only me.”

  “But I’m here, and I love you, and we’re in this together.” His voice was laced with need, that she affirm their marriage, its abundant healing properties, its ability to heal her, but she said only, at last, “Your love for me has no impact on this.”

  The window is cold when Joan touches it. Martin is angry that she has left on her own, that she didn’t want him with her, but their son’s theft has detonated her every past decision: whether to marry at all, bear that first child, and the one she knew came after, every choice, so thoughtfully considered and made, mucking up her own dreams. If she could travel back, she would cling to the nine admonitions set out in her notebook labeled How to Do It, forego love, marriage, children, eliminate everything right from the start. She would not forget a second time that there was no choice to be made, if she wanted to continue as the writer she was already proving to be. Martin would never think along such lines, could never imagine his life without Joan, without the boys, but it’s her past that has been torched, her shimmering future that has expired, and their marriage, responsible for all of it, can’t resurrect time past.

  Joan straightens up. She should have asked Martin his plans over the forty-eight hours it will take her to reach Dharamshala, because now she imagines him leaving the airport, driving to Daniel’s apartment, duking it out, frantic voicemails she hears when she reaches Delhi, about wounds and blood. From Martin, or from Daniel, or from a solemn-voiced nurse at a hospital. How would she feel if she learned they had taken each other down, were both dead? Not maimed, not left mute and motionless, fed through a tube, lungs inflating and deflating because of a machine, but dead, funerals and plots and gravestones and she wearing black. Her breath whistles out through her lips.

  The sky has turned a rich pearlescent blue, like the color of heaven, like the sky over Devata when the sun shone after those ten days of rain. Endless blue atmosphere beyond the window, exquisite hours of her life lost to mothering, encouraging, caretaking, soothing, explaining, letting one know he was always in her thoughts, policing the brilliant one and his team of pale genius ghosts. Such irony that her choices have turned out to be the wrong ones.

  * * *

  When the drink-and-snack cart pulls up, Joan has to lean past the old woman again and again. “Apologies,” she says, when she hands her credit card to the attendant, and when her credit card is returned, and when she is handed two small bottles, a plastic cup filled with ice, bags of peanuts and pretzels.

  The sound of the ice cracking under the vodka is the first sound today that relaxes her. The lime wedges she requested are slivers, rinds only, the bits of fruit on the underside dried out. She should have purchased a third bottle. These miniatures contain so little volume and it could be hours before the cart comes her way again. She takes a long, cool sip, then sighs and shifts around in her seat.

  “I’m Joan,” she says to the old woman.

  “Oh, how lovely, darling. I am so pleased that drink is refreshing you. I’m Vita Brodkey,” and her name sounds like a mouthful to Joan.

  She pats Joan’s arm with a translucent hand. “Do you know, dear, that I am eighty-five years young? And now I am returning to the place where I was born. I want to be there when I die. I think it will give my life a soothing symmetry.”

  Vita’s conversational opener leaves Joan floundering and Vita leaps into the gap.

  “I was born in Udaipur. Some know it as the Pink City. My parents were British, my father some high-up in the Raj rule and all. And Udaipur was a storybook place to come up as a girl with parents at the top of the pyramid. The City Palace buildings. The old city with its winding streets. The temple towers. I attended a school set behind tall iron gates. Every afternoon, I ate lovely English cream teas. I went to countless parties. I wore ball gowns to galas. I spent my weekends at the club. I played tennis and watched cricket and sailed in small boats on the lakes. It was al
l so romantic. I don’t know if they still call them the floating palaces, but that was what we called Jag Niwas and Jag Mandir. Because they were floating palaces. They had turrets and balconies and they floated on top of the lakes as if conjured from a beautiful dream. And then I was forced out of Eden, so to speak, forced to leave the only home I had ever known.

  “I wish I could say it was for a scandalous reason, that I fell in love with a local Indian boy, brown and smooth and poor, but that wasn’t it at all. Although the skin color was different, it was the same situation really, because I fell in love with the youngest son of a duke. Three older brothers meant Nigel had nothing of his own, as poor as any poor Indian boy in Udaipur, and Nigel would be left penniless, having to figure out how to make a living when he was educated to do nothing except to be literary and fun at parties. Nigel had no future, unless all three brothers died in some disaster that would eliminate them all in one go. And that wasn’t going to happen. Nor was Nigel going to make a living, so his family had to find him a young woman with a serious inheritance, and I was not that young woman. I was not titled, and although my father had grown quite rich during our years there, my parents did not adhere to the tradition of bestowing an annuity on the groom or the deliverance of a dowry. Falling in love with Nigel let my parents know that my judgment was not to be trusted. If I were so pedestrian to choose a boy with a title but no future, then it was time they sent me abroad. So abroad I went. Finishing school in New York. Cotillions and debutante balls, where I met a nice young man from Boston, and married him, and to Boston I moved, where we had a very fine life together. Now that I am the age that I am, and have lived a life, I can tell you that I am not convinced the life I led with my husband was that much better than the life I would have led with Nigel. Inherited wealth is just that, and working for a living is just that, but that’s neither here nor there, at least not anymore.

  “In any case, Whitson and I had a beautiful boy who grew up for a while and then died when he was still quite young. Then Whitson died. And now I have been alone for more years than I was married, and we had a long marriage, longer than I was a mother. I stayed on in our house for all these years, alone most of the time. Sometimes I brought in young artists to stay in the empty rooms, and they were a delight, and taught me much, and I used to put out a cream tea on Sundays, and I popped bottles of bubbly on Tuesdays, and I liberally poured sherry on Thursdays, but now I have sold the house. The hardest thing I have had to do, other than giving up Nigel and burying my son. But I am lucky. Always lucky. Nigel never did make a living and he shot himself in the mouth with a hunting rifle, though I am certain it must have been an accident and not at all what was reported. And I have the years with my husband to remind me of what love might be. He was very smart when it came to investments and life insurance policies, insured himself to a high degree, but he also insured our son’s life. Though, of course, we never expected to benefit. It is decades now since our son died, my husband ten years later. Back then a five-million-dollar life-insurance policy meant whatever it meant, and now it means so much more than that, so I am set. I gave up being Mrs. Whitson Tagamore, and returned to being Vita Brodkey, the name by which I was known in Udaipur. I expect to buy myself a beautiful place overlooking Lake Pichola, which is the lake I could see from my bedroom window as a child. I hear that Udaipur has changed much since I have been gone, but so have I, and perhaps we’ll be perfect for one another.

  “Darling,” Vita Brodkey says, interrupting herself, “I hear the rattle of the cart. Another for you? I might have one myself.”

  Joan buys a third and fourth vodka for herself and insists on buying Vita’s bottle of wine. Vita points out the wine she would like from the card in the seat pocket. On a trip from DC to Delhi, it is a Chardonnay from Long Island.

  “You know, darling, since you’re being so kind. Maybe two bottles?”

  In Vita’s hands, the undersized bottles look as large as magnums, and when Joan looks at Vita’s face, her eyes are dancing. She is delighted.

  Joan pours the vodkas into her cup and wonders how Vita’s son died, hopes that her dead husband’s financial acumen is real. She feels concern for Vita Brodkey, who is now engaged in some kind of ritual, the slow severing of the filaments of the bottle top, the slow pouring of the wine, the slow wafting of her speckled hand over the glass, trying to bring the wine’s perfume up to her nose in this refrigerated plane. An ornate demonstration for a six-dollar bottle.

  “Oh, absolutely lovely, darling,” Vita Brodkey says, when she touches her glass to Joan’s, then takes a delicate sip.

  Beyond the small oval of Vita’s face, Joan finds herself pinned by the eyes of the big man, who is watching them pour and taste. His stony face does not reveal what he thinks of their new companionship, and Joan lifts her glass in a toast, embarrassed when he turns away. Should she say something, offer to buy him bottles of whatever he might want from the cart if it returns? But then Vita is describing her plans when she is back in Udaipur. “I will begin to paint watercolors. Just little things. A way to paint the end of my days,” and Joan swallows down the rest of her drink.

  When lunch is served, Joan buys a fifth vodka, telling herself that the bottles are, indeed, small. Artists might have been trooping in and out of Vita’s house since the death of her husband, but Joan thinks she has spent most of her time alone because Vita talks as if presented with the best gift in the world—the ear of someone interested. Her words are flowing freely, perhaps after being bottled up for a very long time. And everything Vita talks about entrances Joan, lifts her heart, serves as a stringent reminder that people love and lose, hopes are decimated, lives finished in an instant, and yet so much remains to be done, that life can go on. Vita regales Joan with more memories from her Udaipur childhood, her life as a young bride in the States, her early days of motherhood, the funerals she attended for son and husband.

  The lunch trays are long gone when Vita finishes off her second bottle of wine. “I think, darling, that it’s time for my nap. I hate to impose, but I have one of those special pillows just beneath my seat. Could you fetch it for me?”

  Joan feels a sharp pang that Vita’s wonderful stories are about to end, and she will be left alone for the hours remaining on this flight, with only her own story to consider.

  “Do you want to stretch your legs first?” Joan asks. “Use the restroom? I need to do both.”

  Vita rubs Joan’s arm. “I have the bladder of a blue whale, which has the biggest bladder of all the mammals. So I can stay right here,” she says, which makes Joan smile.

  It is a complex operation by which Joan is freed from her seat at the window. The big man rises unhappily, Vita Brodkey slowly sidesteps herself into the aisle, and then Joan is out, stiff from sitting so long.

  At the back of the plane, the attendants on their jump seats are reading magazines, feeding themselves lunch from trays balanced on knees. She leans up against the porthole and stares out. Where in the world is the plane right now, and what lives are unfolding down on the ground too far away to see? Everything Joan once knew feels immensely distant. What if she could travel across the sky for the rest of her days, never landing, too far up to be touched by what has transpired in her life, set up perfectly in her little corner of space, with her face against the window? As she watches, the portholed sky gains an underwater density, a deep-diving blue. She should return to her seat because Vita is waiting for her. She has waited so long to not be needed at all, she never thought that being needed in the smallest of ways by a little old lady would make her feel there might be some point to it all. In and out of the bathroom, a request for bottles of water from an attendant unhappy to leave aside his magazine and his lunch and satisfy Joan’s polite request. So nothing is perfect, Joan thinks. Even seven and a half miles above the earth, she is forced to deal with grumbling others.

  She walks slowly back up the plane. Once she is again in her seat, Vita will nap, and Joan will be left in the silence she thou
ght she had wanted at the start of the trip but now finds herself fearing.

  Joan offers a bottle of water to the big man and is surprised when he takes it, surprised when he smiles and thanks her, and even more surprised when he says to Vita Brodkey, “If you’ll permit me—” and then Vita Brodkey is dangling in the air like the weightless doll that she is, her head close to the ceiling, her feet hanging over the narrow void of navy-blue carpet in front of her seat. Just enough room for Joan to duck and reclaim her corner. “If you’ll permit me—” the Indian man says again, and Joan hears Vita say, “Yes, how lovely,” and Vita Brodkey descends through the air.

  “Thank you, kind sir,” Vita Brodkey says to the big man. But he has already recalled himself, his eyes glued to the front of the plane, the bottle of water resting in a hand as big as a mitt. Joan moves this way and that in her seat, trying to see what holds the big man’s attention. She wonders if he is on the trail of a criminal or in search of a lost love, but all she sees are racks of heads, hair in a range of colors, bald spots, a cauliflower ear on a man lifting himself up, rearranging a pillow. It is impossible to identify the furtive or lovelorn from the backs of heads. She glances quickly at the big man, his stare unblinking, his eyes turned inward now. Maybe he’s meditating, Joan thinks.

  “Lean forward,” she says quietly to Vita. The pillow, a beige canvas-covered square with a keyhole, fits around Vita’s slender, mottled neck, suddenly poised as if on a chopping block, as if her head has already been relieved of its body.