by Black Inc.
‘I loved the smell of gesso in the curtain. Just loved it.’
He had done a few preliminary sketches, with pencil and crayon – and in different poses. ‘Some standing, some lying, some sitting in the middle of the room, on this chair, his bed, whatever he said. Do this or that … Oh, what did he call me?’ A worm of hot ash dropped to the grass when her hand tried to summon it.
‘Names, names, they come back at three in the morning.’
Her small blue eyes had ignited and widened. She was catching one after the other the images that her past was eager to toss at her. And one image she held fast to with a passionate ache. Of herself – propped up on her elbow on a ramshackle divan. The sketches were for a single voluptuous oil painting.
‘Bhero had this ambition for it to be his “magnum opus” – the work by which everyone was bound to remember him. He struggled with it for over a year. This one painting! He kept telling me it was his chance to “break through”. I suppose all artists say the same.’
Sylvia smiled, animated, before her seriousness returned. She needed an accomplice, to escort her, without stumbling, beneath that gesso-scented curtain, into the small back room where she had posed for him.
‘I felt very special,’ she said moistly. ‘He wanted me to pose like that woman, you know, with her back to you, in London.’
‘The Rokeby Venus?’ I nodded.
She half smiled, but without a smidgen of humour. ‘Only, I was to lie facing the artist …’
Two yards away, Hugh fidgeted in his sleep.
She leaned further forward, her chin almost to her knees. ‘Like I said, we loved each other very much – well above a passion.’ Her voice was growing softer and softer. I moved my head closer. We were breathing the same air in front of her face. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with sex. Oh, it was in a way, but also not part of it at all. When you pose for people, you’re sharing with them. Bhero never talked while he worked, but afterwards he’d say: “When I’m painting you, I feel I’m touching you. I know what the texture of your skin is like. I know the texture of your hair in the way your husband does. I feel the bone under your forehead, I’m running my fingers over it …”’ Her hand mimicked the motion. ‘He taught me that turning someone into art is one of the most intimate things you can do.’
‘How did it end?’
‘Horribly.’ Her arm fell back slowly. ‘Hugh came home and it was only with great difficulty that I returned to him. But he had been in the war …’
‘Did you see Bhero again?’
She shook her head. Her face had taken on a painful, obscure look. She stared down at her gleaming shins, then at her husband – before hoisting her eyes up to me. ‘But I saw his painting.’
*
Some years after the war, the Billingtons had been guests at a military club in Delhi. After dinner, they went into the officers’ bar. ‘It’s totally Indian now; at the same time, more British than the British – wood panelling, regimental colours and the rest of it. Hugh was offered a whisky, I had one too. Conversation normal. The CO was pretending to speak to Hugh – the smallest of small talk – but I could see from his eyes that his mind was on me, doubtless hoping for some luck if my husband was away on a long business trip. Then he said: “I’ve got much better stuff. Black Label! I keep it in my bachelor quarters over the yard.”’
‘I was slightly reluctant to go to with this whiskeyish man to his “bachelor quarters” – we knew perfectly well he had a wife in Poona – but couldn’t see a way out of it.’
Sylvia’s voice had grown bleak. I sensed that everything she had told me was a prelude to this journey across the courtyard.
‘We went through a room and into a locked room tacked on to it. He said, opening the door, “This is my den where I prepare military campaigns.” Eyes glowing, he added in a mildly lascivious way for my benefit: “What secrets it could tell!”
‘We walked in. Everywhere the usual swords and daggers on the walls and an inlaid Afghan rifle. There was a sofa with a blanket tossed over it. And in pride of place, on the wall at the end, this quite large painting in an ornate frame. I looked up and to my horror – there I was. Horizontal. Me with my red hair.’
She held my gaze, to see if I would understand.
‘I kept walking, but in fact I froze. My heart pounding, my face on fire, this chill spreading through me …
‘Our host pointed at the painting with the bottle he’d opened, eager to know our opinion: “Well, what do you think? I bought it in Nangloi – off a decrepit sort of a fellow with a limp,” and he laughed. “He didn’t want to sell it, but he had to.”
‘I saw Hugh looking at the painting and with every cell in my body braced myself for his response.
‘He looked at it and remarked in that jocular way he has: “I’m not the one to ask about modern art.”’
I imagined Sylvia’s relief – and said something to this effect. But her smile was very slight.
‘By then, I was fifteen years older,’ she said eventually. ‘That can be quite a long time sometimes.’
I looked at her, puzzled.
Her voice had gone ragged and she had tears in her eyes.
Sylvia’s expectation that I would understand lasted no more than a few seconds. She spoke in a fierce whisper. The heat of her breath was on my face. She no longer seemed tipsy. ‘It’s hard to explain … but it went through me like a dose of salts to feel that nothing in my pose connected us. Not a hint.’ Her mouth was trembling.
I reached out, touched her arm. I was able, now, to picture the scene: her terror that Hugh would recognise her in the naked figure, and then, almost instantly, her greater sorrow that he hadn’t. And behind the fear and sadness, her concern for Bhero Sethi and the circumstances that had forced him to part with his magnum opus.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, covering my hand with hers, squeezing it. ‘I don’t know why I’m upset. I get this decent, good man, my treasure …’ She picked up her towel and wiped her eyes, doing it quickly so that she could put her hand back.
I shot a look at the slumbering hero. ‘You’re positive he didn’t see you in the model?’
‘I didn’t think so at the time – you have to realise how out of context it was. Then as the years passed, I decided he had recognised me and was being protective. Now? To be honest, I have no idea. I’ve lived so long with the uncertainty, I’ve come to accept it.’
Bogogogogoinnnngggg!
We both tightened. To our left, the diving board reverberated with a terrific judder, like a ruler twanged in the flap of a school desk.
Afterwards, I couldn’t help feeling that he had bounced higher to regain our attention. Sandwiched between distinct sounds, the silence was intensified by being prolonged. I remember my hand incongruously beneath her hand, and Sylvia looking sharply up. But not at the diver.
‘Neelam!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was it.’
Whooooshhh.
He smashed through the surface of the water at a loose, untidy angle, jetting spray onto the lawn, onto us.
Behind her, Hugh started. He rose into a sitting position and looked around, blinking.
‘It’s nothing, dear,’ said Sylvia, and moved away.
‘Blasted Americans.’
‘Don’t panic. All is well.’ She towelled the drops from her forehead, her swollen blue eyes. ‘Our nice young friend has ordered you a nimbu-pani.’
Hugh relaxed. He turned in my direction. ‘Has she forgiven me?’
But he had seen her face.
‘Syl?’
‘It’s nothing, Hugh,’ she said in her cross voice. ‘He was telling a silly story that made me cry.’
Love and Honour and Pity and Pride
and Compassion and Sacrifice
Nam Le
My father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter’s keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem – perhaps the best I’d ever written. When I woke up, he was sta
nding outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.
‘What time is it?’
‘Hello, Son,’ he said in Vietnamese. ‘I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened.’
The fields are glass, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words excuse and alloy in the line after. Come on, I thought.
‘It’s raining heavily,’ he said.
I frowned. The clock read 11.44. ‘I thought you weren’t coming until this afternoon.’ It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.
‘They changed my flight in Los Angeles.’
‘Why didn’t you ring?’
‘I tried,’ he said equably. ‘No answer.’
I twisted over the side of the bed and cracked open the window.
The sound of rain filled the room – rain fell on the streets, on the roofs, on the tin shed across the parking lot like the distant detonations of firecrackers. Everything smelled of wet leaves.
‘I turn the ringer off when I sleep,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
He continued smiling at me, significantly, as if waiting for an announcement.
‘I was dreaming.’
He used to wake me, when I was young, by standing over me and smacking my cheeks lightly. I hated it – the wetness, the sourness of his hands.
‘Come on,’ he said, picking up a large Adidas duffel and a rolled bundle that looked like a sleeping bag. ‘A day lived, a sea of knowledge earned.’ He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it.
I threw on a T-shirt and stretched my neck in front of the lone window. Through the rain, the sky was as grey and sharp as graphite. The fields are glass … Like a shape in smoke, the poem blurred, then dissolved into this new, cold, strange reality: a windblown, rain-strafed parking lot; a dark room almost entirely taken up by my bed; the small body of my father dripping water onto hardwood floors.
I went to him, my legs goose-pimpled underneath my pyjamas. He watched with pleasant indifference as my hand reached for his, shook it, then relieved his other hand of the bags. ‘You must be exhausted,’ I said.
He had flown from Sydney, Australia. Thirty-three hours all up – transiting in Auckland, Los Angeles, and Denver – before touching down in Iowa. I hadn’t seen him in three years.
‘You’ll sleep in my room.’
‘Very fancy,’ he said, as he led me through my own apartment. ‘You even have a piano.’ He gave me an almost rueful smile. ‘I knew you’d never really quit.’ Something moved behind his face and I found myself back on a heightened stool with my fingers chasing the metronome, ahead and behind, trying to shut out the tutor’s repeated sighing, his heavy brass ruler. I realised I was massaging my knuckles. My father patted the futon in my living room. ‘I’ll sleep here.’
‘You’ll sleep in my room, Ba.’ I watched him warily as he surveyed our surroundings, messy with books, papers, dirty plates, teacups, clothes – I’d intended to tidy up before going to the airport. ‘I work in this room anyway, and I work at night.’ As he moved into the kitchen, I grabbed the three-quarters-full bottle of Johnny Walker from the second shelf of my bookcase and stashed it under the desk. I looked around. The desktop was gritty with cigarette ash. I threw some magazines over the roughest spots, then flipped one of them over because its cover bore a picture of Chairman Mao. I quickly gathered up the cigarette packs and sleeping pills and incense burners and dumped them all on a high shelf, behind my Kafka Vintage Classics.
At the kitchen swing door I remembered the photo of Linda beside the printer. Her glamour shot, I called it: hair windswept and eyes squinty, smiling at something out of frame. One of her ex-boyfriends had taken it at Lake MacBride. She looked happy. I snatched it and turned it face down, covering it with scrap paper.
As I walked into the kitchen I thought, for a moment, that I had left the fire escape open. Rainwater gushed along gutters, down through the pipes. Then I saw my father at the sink, sleeves rolled up, sponge in hand, washing the month-old, crusted mound of dishes. The smell was awful. ‘Ba,’ I frowned, ‘you don’t need to do that.’
His hands, hard and leathery, moved deftly in the sink.
‘Ba,’ I said, half-heartedly.
‘I’m almost finished.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Have you eaten? Do you want me to make some lunch?’
‘Hoi,’ I said, suddenly irritated. ‘You’re exhausted. I’ll go out and get us something.’
I went back through the living room into my bedroom, picking up clothes and rubbish as I went.
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ he called out. ‘You just do what you always do.’
The truth was, he’d come at the worst possible time. I was in my last year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; it was late November, and my final story for the semester was due in three days. I had a backlog of papers to grade and a heap of fellowship and job applications to draft and submit. It was no wonder I was drinking so much.
I’d told Linda only the previous night that he was coming. We were at her place. Her body was slippery with sweat and hard to hold. Her body smelled of her clothes. She turned me over, my face kissing the bedsheets, and then she was chopping my back with the edges of her hands. Higher. Out a bit more. She had trouble keeping a steady rhythm. ‘Softer,’ I told her. Moments later, I started laughing.
‘What?’
The sheets were damp beneath my pressed face.
‘What?’
‘Softer,’ I said, ‘not slower.’
She slapped my back with the meat of her palms, hard – once, twice. I couldn’t stop laughing. I squirmed over and caught her by the wrists. Hunched forward, she was blushing and beautiful. Her hair fell over her face; beneath its ash-blonde hem all I could see were her open lips. She pressed down, into me, her shoulders kinking the long, lean curve from the back of her neck to the small of her back. ‘Stop it!’ her lips said. She wrested her hands free. Fingers beneath my waistband, violent, the scratch of her nails down my thighs, knees, ankles. I pointed my foot like a ballet dancer.
Afterward, I told her my father didn’t know about her. She said nothing. ‘We just don’t talk about that kind of stuff,’ I explained. She looked like an actress who looked like my girlfriend. Staring at her face made me tired. I’d begun to feel this way more often around her. ‘He’s only here for three days.’ Somewhere out of sight, a group of college boys hooted and yelled.
‘I thought you didn’t talk to him at all.’
‘He’s my father.’
‘What’s he want?’
I rolled toward her, onto my elbow. I tried to remember how much I’d told her about him. We were lying on the bed, the wind loud in the room – I remember that – and we were both tipsy. Ours could have been any two voices in the darkness. ‘It’s only three days,’ I said.
The look on her face was strange, shut down. She considered me a long time. Then she got up and pulled on her clothes. ‘Just make sure you get your story done,’ she said.
*
I drank before I came here too. I drank when I was a student at university, and then when I was a lawyer – in my previous life, as they say. There was a subterranean bar in a hotel next to my work, and every night I would wander down and slump on a barstool and pretend I didn’t want the bartender to make small talk with me. He was only a bit older than me, and I came to envy his ease, his confidence that any given situation was merely temporary. I left exorbitant tips. After a while, I was treated to battered shrimps and shepherd’s pies on the house. My parents had already split by then: my father moving to Sydney, my mother into a government flat.
That’s all I’ve ever done, traffic in words. Sometimes I still think about word counts the way a general m
ust think about casualties. I’d been in Iowa more than a year – days passed in weeks, then months, more than a year of days – and I’d written only four and a half stories. About seventeen thousand words. When I was working at the law firm, I would have written that many words in a couple of weeks. And they would have been useful to someone.
Deadlines came, exhausting, and I forced myself up to meet them. Then, in the great spans of time between, I fell back to my vacant screen and my slowly sludging mind. I tried everything – writing in longhand, writing in my bed, in my bathtub. As this last deadline approached, I remembered a friend claiming he’d broken his writer’s block by switching to a typewriter. You’re free to write, he told me, once you know you can’t delete what you’ve written. I bought an electric Smith Corona at an antique shop. It buzzed like a tropical aquarium when I plugged it in. It looked good on my desk. For inspiration, I read absurdly formal Victorian poetry and drank Scotch neat. How hard could it be? Things happened in this world all the time. All I had to do was record them. In the sky, two swarms of swallows converged, pulled apart, interwove again like veils drifting at crosscurrents. In line at the supermarket, a black woman leaned forward and kissed the handle of her shopping cart, her skin dark and glossy like the polished wood of a piano.
The week prior to my father’s arrival, a friend chastised me for my persistent defeatism.
‘Writer’s block?’ Under the streetlights, vapours of bourbon puffed out of his mouth. ‘How can you have writer’s block? Just write a story about Vietnam.’
We had just come from a party following a reading by the workshop’s most recent success, a Chinese woman trying to emigrate to America who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of migration to America. The stories were subtle and good. The gossip was that she’d been offered a substantial six-figure contract for a two-book deal. It was meant to be an unspoken rule that such things were left unspoken. Of course, it was all anyone talked about.