The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

At midnight, in the dark of her pine suite, Joan stares out into the Dharamshalan night, the moon lighting up the trees in the forest beyond her window. Unlike many of the birds she saw with Willem, whose names were unbeautiful—long-tailed shrike, large cuckooshrike, Himalayan bulbul—the trees in her forest glide off the tongue. The chirs are plush, their needles scented of smashed pine. The evergreen deodars have silvery-green leaves that capture even the weakest light. The Himalayan oak trees are rugged and tough. Soon, autumn will burnish the leaves that turn, will make the forest into a bonfire of colors, as she once wrote in a story in Other Small Spaces. All of Joan’s ancient work is present these days in her mind, and she feels Paloma Rosen’s clove-scented breath on her own skin.

  Far in the distance, the moon turns the peaks, cliffs, and scarps of the Dhauladhars into abstract art, like a mammoth sculpture Paloma might carve.

  Joan falls asleep thinking of Martin, whose email she has not yet responded to, and dreams of Willem lowering his camera, turning away from the flying birds, coming in close to kiss her, wondering if they will kiss well.

  45

  Since the night she left Darpan’s bookstore, Joan has been working on Paloma Rosen at her desk from the moment she wakes until one, bath after, at meditation with Ela at two, sometimes spending an extra half hour with her, drinking masala chai at the tea seller’s stall, and often writing again for an hour or more in the evening when she returns to her pine suite.

  Tomorrow, in the late afternoon, she will show up at Darpan’s bookstore and see what awaits her. She has been trying to write an outline for the class, simple instructions for beginning writers, but the page on her computer is still blank and she started hours ago.

  When her cell phone rings, the caller is Eric. They have not seen each other since Camille’s last meditation session before returning to England, but they have retained their comfortable ease with each other. They do not need to check in daily, do not mind when days pass without any connection, when they are together, it is loving, caring, good. In their last conversation, Eric said he was volunteering, but gave her no specifics, and said he was busy with other stuff too, and she thinks the other stuff he’s busy with is the girl he mentioned in his backyard, when Joan first sought him out.

  “Are you free on Sunday?” he says when she answers.

  “Completely,” although she writes on Sundays too. She wonders if she is going about this the wrong way—not saying a word to Eric about her daily writing schedule, about the book she is writing, this instinctive need of hers to keep it private until the work is completed, on the verge of entering the world. Lately, when she meditates in the group, she thinks about all the methods she employed over the years to keep everything separate—her work from family, writer separate from wife and mother. She has paid a steep price to hold on to herself, remaining silent during all those years of writing Words, the time she lost caring for Eric.

  To discuss it all with him now, to lay herself bare, would require the whole story, complete truthfulness: a man who breached his promise about having no children; an unwanted child who made motherhood precious; an expected child who destroyed years of her life; a favorite son who shattered her dreams, stole what was closest to her heart; and then about her work—the published collections, the failure of The Sympathetic Executioners, the Rare Baby stories, the castle up in the sky where she wrote Words of New Beginnings, and now Paloma Rosen, who is fully Paloma, but embodies bits of Vita, Camille, Ela, and Joan, too.

  There is too much to disclose, to explain, if she wants to provide Eric the full picture. And she would not feel right, not now, picking and choosing which pieces of the story to tell. She has frequently looked back through it all: what she always feared, what she tried desperately to prevent, happened anyway—the stirring and mixing and coalescing of motherhood and life and writing.

  Here in Dharamshala, despite one child’s near presence, Joan is returning to her own beginning, in solitude, writing away—does she want to alter the rhythm, the joy she is at last experiencing again? Her engrained instinct is to keep everything to herself, to keep the facets of her world separated. Like a port-wine birthmark staining the skin over her heart—even if she could remove the mark, laser it away somehow, it would leave behind an outline, a ghost of what was, of the past, of the life she was born into, of the child she became, of the adult who emerged from the ice and the flames.

  Should she try nonetheless?

  “I’ll pick you up at ten,” Eric says. “I’ve hired a car and a driver.”

  A hired car and driver costs little here, but it reminds Joan again how distant Eric is from the rest of the world. He’s told her the particulars of Solve’s sale, the figure tipping two billion. Investors and vested stock options paid out, and his share is fully half of that. He could fund the most eccentric dreams of an unlimited number of generations of his nonexistent heirs. He could buy deserted islands and develop them. He could take over ailing cities and fix them. He could right the economies of small failing countries. He could wipe out at least one disease. The marvels of what he could do with his money are infinite. Joan wonders what he will choose.

  “We’re going back into the past, Ashby,” Eric says. “See you Sunday.”

  * * *

  Joan looks at the blank screen. Despite what she’s just been thinking about, she hopes Eric means the historical past, not the familial one, she really does not want to parse through her own past, and his, and Martin’s and Daniel’s. She shuts down her computer and closes the lid. She’ll wing it tomorrow, no handouts, no lesson plan, she’ll speak from the heart about what it means to be a writer, at any age, at any juncture in time. Anyway, she doubts Darpan’s certainty that he will have a full house.

  46

  “Miss Ashby! Miss Ashby!” Darpan cries, pushing through the crowd spilling from his bookstore into the street.

  “Come, come. I will lead you in. They are all here for you.”

  Joan tries counting the people on folding chairs in the entry, on the counter repurposed as a high bench, sitting on the floor, flattened against all of the walls, and all of the bookcases, in every aisle, perched at the edge of the window display.

  Sixty, maybe more. It is hard to tell when there are so many and the bookshop is quaint and small. From the very old and stooped in colorful jackets to children who may not yet have learned to read. She sees her books in laps, in hands, under arms, balanced on top of heads. Those in the folding chairs, who must have arrived early to claim that preferred seating, are waving papers, clipped and stapled, typed and handwritten, some rolled up and used as drumsticks against their knees. Their stories, Joan thinks.

  Was this how it used to be, when she gave readings in all those countries, across the States twice? Did masses show up to hear her read and talk?

  She remembers the filled rooms, but perhaps she’s forgotten those times when she read to only a few people, she at the podium, and those five or ten spread out in an auditorium meant for hundreds. Maybe she was lucky enough and never read to empty rooms.

  So many memories: interviews with NPR, and Charlie Rose, with various newspapers and magazines, the interviews she gave to the reporter at the Wall Street Journal after her book tours, the long piece about her in the New York Review of Books, her talk at Barnard. She had been kind of a rock star then, hadn’t she, without even being all that aware of it. And then took herself away, sheltered in Rhome, becoming what she had never wanted to be.

  The crowd is noisy, everyone talking to one another, to Darpan, calling out to her, “Ashby, Ashby, we are here for you!”

  It’s ridiculous and marvelous and she thinks she should have told Eric about it, asked him to come, allowed him to see his mother, to see Ashby in a way he would not recognize, knows still so little about, and Kartar, and Willem, if he was back in town. She spots Lakshmi at the back, with her father, Hadi, and Pema, the woman who wove the shawl she gave Camille the day she went home, and she recognizes the food stall chef from whom
she regularly orders momo, and waves at them, lets them know she’s seen them, that she’s touched they have come.

  If this is what she experienced when she was young, how had she given up this reward for the long hours of shaping characters and stories, the sentences that brought them alive? Had she been too young to understand what she had been given back then? Is fame better in the later years? This is just a small bookstore in Dharamshala, but the pure adrenaline she’s feeling reminds her that life is not yet at an end, that the powers of creation cannot been ravaged by time or events. Despite how she has been tested, despite being left with a conditional sense of her own being, she is still who she once was and is becoming again, a writer, and a woman as solid as Vita, Camille, and Ela. She knows this afternoon will keep her charged up through all the coming months of writing Paloma Rosen.

  “Everyone quiet,” Darpan yells to the crowd.

  “Order, order!” he tries next, and when the decibel level fails to drop, Joan steps to the front.

  “Hello, everyone,” she says. “I’m Joan Ashby,” immediately aware she has spoken her full name, perhaps for the first time since Natwar cycled her from the Kangra valley train stop to Hotel Gandhi’s Paradise. And the room grows quiet, then still.

  “Thank you all for coming, for choosing to be here. Darpan said he wanted to start a writing class, and asked if I would teach. There are so many of you today, perhaps it would be best if I talked a little about different kinds of writing: the fiction of short stories and novels; the true stories of histories, autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs; thrillers, crime sagas, and detective stories. Well, the list can go on and on.”

  She stays focused and precise, talks for thirty minutes and then closes. The audience has been rapt and she wants them to remain that way, does not want to be responsible for their losing interest, does not want to experience their losing interest in her. After today, she will be less of a mystery to them, and won’t necessarily remain atop whatever pedestal they have placed her on.

  “I’m happy to answer questions,” she says.

  Hands fly into the air. Joan is not completely sure they all know who she is, or have read her books, or will even read the copies in their hands that they previously purchased; her appearance at the bookstore might simply be a welcome break from the routines of their days. But no matter, she is having great fun, and even if the adulation is not specific to her, it still feels nice to be respected, made to feel special, to be looked at adoringly. And it’s amusing watching Darpan hush those who presume to talk without being called on first. She wonders what they will ask her. She has vague recollections of banal questions thrown at her all those years ago, at the end of a reading. But surely here, in Dharamshala, a place threaded through with spirituality, the questions will have a different heft:

  “Will you read my story?”

  “Will you read my story?”

  “Will you read my story?”

  “You did not talk about writing about vampires and werewolves, why not?”

  “Is it possible to write a good story in, say, three hours?”

  “If I want to be a writer, do I have to read books?”

  “Will you read my story?”

  “What single piece of advice would you give?”

  “Will you read my story?”

  “Will you read my story and have your publisher publish it? It is very important to me.”

  It’s nearly an hour before the questions peter out, an hour that severely taxes Joan’s ability to deflect, in different ways, the dominant request, but she has made it through, and is still smiling.

  When Darpan says, “If anyone bought a book Miss Ashby didn’t already sign, she’ll sign it now, but no pushing and no shoving,” she leans over to him and, hoping she won’t come to regret it, says, “Darpan, if you still want me to lead a writing class, then those with stories should leave them with you. It can’t be a class this big, but I’ll read them through and choose ten that show the most promise. We could start there.”

  “Brilliant, Miss Ashby,” and Darpan gives out the new instructions, where to line up for the book signing, where to leave their stories, and just as Joan thinks it, Darpan yells, “Your stories better have your names and phone numbers, otherwise tough, you’ll be out of luck, never part of Miss Ashby’s most amazing writing class.”

  Christ, Joan thinks, it’s true what Darpan said about himself; he is a sensational marketer, he could sell anything. She wonders how much he intends to charge. She does not want to be paid anything, but Darpan should make enough to hang a new sign out front. The bookstore could end up very busy after all this.

  47

  Other than Willem Ackerman’s orange jeep, and the occasional jalopylike taxi with Camille when they explored places too far away for foot travel, Joan walks everywhere.

  It feels odd to be in a shiny black Mercedes with fine leather seats, to realize that Martin drives this same make and model, bought last year, that could be parked this moment in his spot at Rhome General.

  At the wheel is Vivek, whom Eric introduces as his right-hand man. Vivek, in jeans and a black leather jacket, is short and broad and his hair is buzzed down to his skull, but he has the ruddy, round face of a choirboy, his smile permanently attached.

  Eric is as radiant as ever, and serene, but he’s grinning, and they have barely cleared the Dalai Lama’s compound when he says, “I have so much to tell you.” She is thinking she has much to tell him too, has decided she will tell him about the wonderful afternoon in the bookstore Friday, about the writing class she has agreed to lead, about Paloma Rosen.

  But then Eric says, “I’ve been volunteering at the Rogpa Daycare Center. Taking a page from your book. Maybe one day soon I’ll want my own.”

  And Joan is taken aback, that page from her book isn’t one she had wanted to heed. Despite his agelessness, in spirit, in outlook, in the wisdom he has acquired, Eric is still so young chronologically. She wants to say she does not believe the experience of having a child is necessary to live a great or good or happy life, can cause the opposite. She would soften the declaration with a lie, that she would never change having him and his brother, and tell him a new truth, that she really does love him.

  “And working at Rogpa gave me a lot of ideas. They cater only to little children, but I’m aiming higher. Amari has helped me research what’s worked in the past in Dharamshala, when it comes to charitable good works, and what hasn’t. And I’ve decided to open a center focused on providing children aged five to eighteen with specific kinds of extracurricular education: arts, like photography, music, and dance, different kinds of sciences, like astronomy, even computer coding, if there’s interest. This coming week, we’re looking at spaces we won’t outgrow in a couple of years. I’ve hired an Indian lawyer in McLeod Ganj and he’s set up a nonprofit for me called Good Manning Works, and the center will be called Good Manning. What do you think?”

  Joan takes a moment to collect herself, looking at Eric’s face, so eager to hear what she has to say. Her own news can wait. It’s not far in the past when he ignored her completely, when he would not have cared what she thought.

  “It’s a huge undertaking, but I shouldn’t be surprised. You started Solve at thirteen, why not an educational center at twenty-two. That’s not much older than some of your potential students,” Joan says. “Does that feel okay with you?”

  “It’s weird, I know. But my life experience is completely different from theirs, and, in most ways, I feel so much older than I am.”

  “Will you run it?”

  “Yes, and Amari will come on board, and there’s a place for Vivek, too,” he says, putting a hand on Vivek’s shoulder.

  “Space first, and if there’s no appropriate space, then we’ll build exactly what I see in my mind. I’ve looked at land and an architect from Mumbai is coming week after next, a friend of Amari’s father. I’ve been talking with him on the phone.”

  “So, Dharamshala is going to be hom
e for you.”

  “Yes. It already is. In a way Rhome never felt like home to me. I hope that doesn’t upset you.”

  Joan shakes her head. She understands exactly what he means.

  “And Amari? So are you dating each other?” she asks.

  “More than that. But you already figured that out.”

  One son is nearly dead to her, this son she is getting to know in a different way. Is Eric telling her she will suddenly become a mother-in-law? Motherhood, she still mostly wants in the distance, and now, mother-in-law-hood, a young woman possibly wanting to bond with her? The thought is much to contemplate.

  “She’s great, you’ll love her. She’s been working at the Tibetan Institute for the last three years.”

  “The Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts? I’ve been there. Camille and I saw a troupe rehearsing something called a lhamo opera, a masked dance drama, it was explained to the audience. Thrilling and bizarre, even if we couldn’t understand what any of it meant, or what it signified. Our fault, I’m sure.”

  She wants him to know she will do whatever is required for Amari to feel included.

  The mission statement on the front door of the institute articulated its goal in pretty script: To share Tibet’s cultural heritage with international audiences.

  “Is Amari Tibetan?”

  “No, Indian. From Mumbai. She thinks she was born into the wrong life, like I do. What her family wants for her, she doesn’t want for herself.”

  She is not hurt by Eric’s statement. She understands it. Joan was born into the wrong family, Martin felt he had the wrong father, and she wonders how many people in the world feel that way, if Daniel felt that way, and if he did, does he still?

  How does she ask Eric if Amari knows about Solve, his money, his time in Oregon?

  “Have you and Amari talked a lot about your lives?”

  “She knows everything. Dropping out of school, my company, my rehab in Oregon, the money I’ve made.”