* * *
After the chanting and the silent meditation, when the namastes have all been said, and the red pillows are stacked in the corner of the courtyard, Eric joins Joan and says to Camille, “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m sorry we haven’t met until today, and now you’re leaving.”
Camille says to Joan, “Is this the beautiful young man you’ve told me so much about?” and to Eric, “You’re the lucky one chosen to meet with the Dalai Lama.”
Eric nods. “It won’t happen until next year, March maybe, or April, maybe even May. But time passes so quickly here.”
When he has his personal audience with the Dalai Lama, Eric will be into his second year in Dharamshala, and Joan wonders if she will be here too, during those months, in a whole new year.
“I miss that a great deal when I’m back in London. Days are the same length wherever you are, but in a big city, sometimes they last forever.
“Ashby,” Camille says. “I forget what you told me. How did you two meet?”
Joan knows she never told Camille any story about meeting Eric, as if he were a stranger she ran into at Namgyal Café, or up at Kareri Lake. For Joan, omission, while a sticky area, does not constitute an outright lie.
“I’ve known her my whole life,” Eric says, which seems to answer the question to Camille’s satisfaction.
After Eric waves goodbye and disappears around the side of the courtyard, Ela joins them, her blush-colored sari turning her into an elegant pale rose, her umber hair arranged on top of her head like flower petals. She hands Camille a package wrapped in pretty paper. “A small gift, to be opened when you’re back in London on a day that’s making you unhappy. Then a little Dharamshala to cheer you up.”
Camille is softly crying and Ela is holding her close, and then Camille says, “Enough, I do this every year. Ashby, come with me,” and Joan looks back at Ela, and Ela mouths, “See you tomorrow.” Then Joan and Camille are at the bottom of the trailhead, below the monastery, performing a last kora together. Turning the heavy prayer wheels all these months has made the effort not quite effortless for Joan, but easier than it was at the beginning. Camille stampedes through the wheels, shucking them around, barely breathing hard at the end.
“Come to my cottage with me,” Camille says when Joan joins her at the finish. “I have something to give you.”
“I have something to give you, too,” Joan says.
* * *
Camille’s cottage is high up in the steep hills, near the teahouse where Joan and Camille and Ela first shared tea, before they ran naked into Dal Lake on Ela’s seventy-fifth birthday. She has been here many times in these months, the backyard a postage stamp with the mountain rearing up right behind it, and each time Joan sees the cottage, she thinks of a sapphire that a jeweler damaged in the cutting. The whole house tilts, lists, really, to the left, and inside, the light has a cool blue glaze because the walls are all painted a cerulean blue paled down to its haunting jeweled base. She stole that color for the Parisian apartment Paloma Rosen has just left behind.
Joan stands at the front window and the whole of the marketplace is on view. At the Dalai Lama’s compound, under its white tent, a broad crowd funnels into the courtyard to listen to the debating monks. The colorful prayer flags flutter in the late afternoon fall breeze.
From her bag, Joan takes out her own present to Camille, a shawl hand-woven by a woman named Pema who sits surrounded by skeins of wool at the back of her shop in the Kotwali Bazaar. The knitting woman reminded Joan of Carla, and the shop Carla used to own in Rhome, Craftables, just off Strada di Felicità, the last of the Pregnant Six to give up the lives they had led before motherhood.
“You didn’t have to, but I’m so glad you did,” Camille says, ripping off the paper, opening the box, carefully pulling out the shawl.
Joan had chosen carefully. Luxurious and oversized, in various grays lighter and darker than Camille’s flint bun, with a vermilion stripe to remind her of Ela’s own parted stripe and bindi.
“Absolutely perfect,” Camille says, twirling around, ducking into her small bedroom to look at herself in the mirror. “I’ll wear it constantly. Now, sit down, I’ll make us some tea. There are a few things for us to talk about.”
When their teacups are filled, and the teapot and a plate of Nakhatai cookies that Camille says she baked herself, “Eggless with cardamom,” are on the table, Camille sets a bag on the floor near her chair.
“First, Eric is your son, yes?”
Joan was not expecting this. “Yes.”
“And you have another son, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
And she remembers Daniel asking her questions the same way—was she a writer, did she have books published, was she writing anything then? And she remembers the answers she gave him: yes, yes, no. The third answer, the no, a lie. She had been writing Words of New Beginnings.
“And the other son, he’s the reason you’re here?”
Joan can’t return to the discovery of her novel stolen and chopped into two, Daniel’s identical Lewis Carroll acknowledgments at the back of J. D. Henry’s books.
“Yes, and I thought about sharing—” and Camille cuts her off.
“Dharamshala is a place to figure things out, as I said to you when we first met. You don’t need to tell me. If you had been ready to share with me, you would have, and you’re still not ready. But I know how far you’ve come since you arrived. I’ve seen the pain, the confusion, the hurt and fear that riddled you, slowly starting to fall away, and that’s really all that matters. When you’re ready to tell me, we’ll talk. It is the other side of the world, or it feels like it, but we’re just a series of numbers away from each other. We can talk all we like.
“Drink your tea, Ashby, have another Nakhatai cookie. Good, aren’t they? So the next thing,” and Camille lifts the paper bag onto the table.
“The name Ashby was familiar, but I just never put anything together,” and Camille extracts from the bag two books, in English, Joan’s own Other Small Spaces and Fictional Family Life.
“Why didn’t you mention this part of your life? I loved your books when they came out, bought the hardcovers, couldn’t stop reading them, still have them at home. These I found at that bookstore at the end of Kotwali and bought them so you could sign them for me. Have you been to that bookstore?”
Camille is talking about Darpan’s bookstore, where she met Willem Ackerman. “Not since August, the day of the first heavy rain.”
“Well, you should visit it again because your books, in English and in Hindi, are stacked up in the window and above them is a sign that reads ‘Dharamshala’s Very Own Most Famous Writer.’”
“Holy Christ,” Joan says.
“You meditate now, so maybe call to the goddess Durga, or Hanuman, or to the Divine in the Moola, or the Buddha.”
And then Joan is laughing, and Camille is laughing, and they laugh until the laughter begins to turn, catching in their chests, their throats closing up, and Joan thinks how remarkable it is, the way laughter is so connected to pain. And then she and Camille are hugging a last time, and Camille is at the door, waving her shawl at Ashby—“You’re Ashby to me, I can’t imagine calling you Joan, and I really hope you’re writing something new”—and Joan is waving back, unsure if she has nodded to Camille’s last words, if she has acknowledged that she is writing something new, but she turns to negotiate the street because it is so steep, and with this laughing and crying, how easy it would be to fall, to trip over her golden crystal sandals, to roll all the way down to the bottom.
44
The Dalai Lama’s compound is deserted when she passes it, the monks and the meditators have left behind chanting and silent meditation and are loud at the food stalls, keeping the chefs busy cooking their aromatic offerings. The sun is dropping from its height in the sky, the breeze kicking up when Joan reaches the end of Kotwali.
At the bookstore’s window, she looks at the display Darpan has made
of her collections, artistically arranged like five-petaled flowers. An English-language flower and a Hindi-language flower, every petal a stack of five books.
Darpan must have ordered these books specially. A small Dharamshala bookshop would not have on hand fifty copies of her collections, twenty-five in each language, initially published so long ago. The sign is something else: Dharamshala’s Very Own Most Famous Writer in beautiful golden calligraphy, outlined a second time in silver, and a third time in black. The sign hangs across the entire window. It causes a crash of emotions inside of her.
The chime over the door tinkles when she walks in. There is Darpan, on his chair, mangling another thick paperback.
“Miss Ashby,” he cries, and jumps up. “Did you see? Is it not marvelous? The books in the window, all I have left. I have sold one hundred in the last week!”
She is stunned, and her old agent, Volkmann, will be surprised when the royalty statements from Storr & Storr show the number of Joan’s books purchased by a single store in a small village in India. The collections still sell surprisingly well and have long been a staple of colleges and universities and MFA programs, but she can see Volkmann scrunching up her face, saying to herself, “This can’t be right.”
“Willem has been gone since your trip to Pong Wetland, he’s been all over, now following the birds in the Kullu valley, so I couldn’t ask him to find you for me, and I don’t know where you have been staying, but you’re here now, and it is meant to be. Do you mind signing the copies in the window?”
“This is all such a surprise,” Joan says. When Darpan’s mouth turns doubtful, she says, “A great surprise. I love it,” and she thinks she might actually love it. She wasn’t sure on those steep hills down from Camille’s. But she is now. She does love it. “I’d be happy to sign all the books you still have.”
Darpan clears off the counter, pats his tall stool for Joan to use, brings the books to her in armfuls, and hands her a pen.
“So, Miss Ashby. Willem does not know this about me, but he is not the only writer, with his big articles and his little poems and his whatnots. I have my own desire to write, and I was wondering, if it was possible, if you had time, would you consider teaching me how to be a writer? And, if I am not getting too far ahead, too far afield, Willem always says, there are others here who fancy themselves writers. You could be our teacher, show all of us how to do it like you. You could become Dharamshala’s first ever writing teacher.”
Joan laughs. “I’ve never taught writing to anyone, Darpan.” She can’t teach them talent, but perhaps she can help them figure out how to put whatever talent they do have to good use. “But I might be willing to try.”
“Wonderful, Miss Ashby, simply wonderful.”
When she finishes signing the last book, her hand cramping from exhaustion, Darpan bows deeply. He straightens and says, “Miss Ashby. Don’t believe Willem—” And she was wondering the same thing. She has not heard from Willem Ackerman since he dropped her at Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, a quick kiss on her cheek, and he was gone. She has wondered if the kiss marked the end of their new friendship because she declined his offer on the lodge roof that last night, to allow him to take her to bed. She is glad to know he left Dharamshala immediately, is off working, that there might still be a chance for them, though she has deliberately not considered the nature of that chance. At the very least, she would like their friendship to continue.
Darpan says, “Don’t believe him because I am sure he told you that he has read your books so many more times than me, but I am like the tortoise, catching up to the hare.”
That makes her laugh, and she says, “I don’t know what to do with all of this flattery, Darpan.”
“Miss Ashby, one can’t flatter by telling the truth.”
Joan agrees to return to the store on the third Saturday of September.
“It is the time I need to maximize the news that Dharamshala’s very own most famous writer will be giving the first of many lessons in how to write as if the gods and goddesses have touched them too. Come at four. When you walk in, you will see how many of us want to be like you.”
“Let’s start with one lesson, Darpan, and perhaps leave out the gods and the goddesses,” Joan suggests.
“Am I not the good salesman? One hundred copies already sold, Miss Ashby, only those copies in the window remain for selling, so everything is in good hands. Thank you for thrilling me today.”
* * *
The sky is fighting against the onset of night, gripping the last rays of the descended sun, while Joan waits for the white-toqued chef to wrap her order of steamed spinach momo in wax paper, to drop it into a bag. She feels light on the ground, a little unsteady, dazed by the display of her work in Darpan’s bookstore, from signing her name inside fifty books, from her apparent agreement to become an erstwhile writing teacher for anyone interested.
And she is thinking of Willem, glad to have learned he is not avoiding her, wondering when he will return to his Dharamshala house, a place she has not seen, thinking again, as she has at various times since that trip, of them entwined in a sleeping bag on the ground, wondering why she never imagines them in an actual bed.
Then she is beyond the marketplace, heading up the steep, rocky hill to Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise, her mind leaping from Willem Ackerman to Paloma Rosen’s love life. Thinking about how Paloma has never lived long-term with another in her loft, that when Paloma permits her preferred solitariness to be invaded, the lovers stay for a week, a month, six months, perhaps a year, a panoply of different kinds of love and physicality. How Paloma faces the mundane that always eventually worms its way into any relationship, regardless of the heated passion, the torrential lovemaking, or the calmer, more poetic love, but Paloma is never thrown off her own course, good at avoiding the feelings of others, does not engage unless she desires it.
How much fun to consider Paloma’s lovers, their names, their personalities, the relationships they have or want to have with her. Paloma Rosen is, Joan knows, the kind of woman people want for their own, to possess entirely, no matter the cost.
She pictures a lover named Magnus, when Paloma is still in her thirties. A painter, Joan decides, of massive paintings that hang in museums throughout the world. She gives Magnus Willem’s face, his physique, an accent, but not Willem’s, and Magnus will have an incessant need to talk about the future course of their relationship, until Paloma says to him one night in bed, “Arrêtes de parler! Stop all your talking. Am I the woman, or are you?” and despite their year together, he will be gone three days after that, and Paloma will regret none of it, neither the interlude nor the hasty finale.
Perhaps Paloma has one serious lover per decade, Joan thinks.
In her forties, Samuel will show up at Paloma’s door when his multivolume memoirs are racing through the literary world like a brush fire, scorching all named within, making his reputation and his fortune as a result. When Paloma reads his hundreds of thousands of words for the first time, she will learn he was married and divorced once, like her, but will not know he is newly married, a second time, claiming, when he shows up at her door, that she is meant to be his, leaving out the fact that he is not free. She will care not a whit about his marital status because in bed he is a dervish, but outside the covers, she will find he is too silent for her, the mere act of talking confounding him, and Paloma requires a sensational conversationalist. And though he writes like a demon, baring his entire life in his pages, in real life, he is far too meek, withers in the face of her strength. She will send poor Samuel away.
Joan is not surprised when she sees a woman twirling on a stool in Paloma’s studio. She has a long Modigliani face, wan, suffering, and lovely. Lina will be stateless, Sultana-wealthy, ripe for all adventures, excellent at subterfuge, good company until her need for Paloma becomes relentless, jealous of Paloma’s attention to the sculpture at hand. Joan imagines they meet at Paloma’s fiftieth birthday party, and that night become lovers, a torrid week, o
r two, or three, but then Lina’s black and unblinking eyes remind Paloma of a buzzard waiting to feast upon her desecrated flesh and bones, and clingy Lina must be sent on her way, sobbing about the unfairness of life, the mutilations to her soul from loving a selfish artist, a woman who prefers the coldness of stone to the warmth of Lina’s lovely skin.
She sees Paloma in her sixties, still gorgeous, with those long white braids, her cheekbones and breasts still taut, and Joan imagines a Frenchwoman named Sabine, whose heart will be on her sleeve, eating up Paloma’s working hours, keeping her in the warm bed that Sabine will call “our bed,” though it is no such thing. Nestling Paloma against her own beautiful breasts, insisting on nuzzling way past Paloma’s dawn schedule of rising, showering, Turkish coffee, studio. Wonderfully brutalizing love that enflames Paloma’s most tender parts, until snap, the long hours of the day are wiped out in the craziness of consumptive sexual congress. Sabine has long legs that never end, balletic in bed, a female praying mantis, until Paloma shows her to the loft door and hands Sabine the small leather bag she brought when she arrived two months before.
In her seventies, Paloma will decide to become celibate, and will miss none of the blaze, the battles, the usurpation of her time, her heart, her emotions, by man or woman, regardless of how adept they are at the most intimate acts.
She will loathe the term “lovemaking.” Will not abide calling it “sex.” Always, in Paloma’s mind, whether a mere coupling or a symphony of exquisiteness, it is de se perdre en délire dans le corps d’un autre, to lose oneself deliriously in the body of another.
* * *
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 48