All the Days and Nights

by Niven Govinden

  – We’ll have to eat some fruit first, otherwise Vishni will be angry with us.

  Vishni stands on the kitchen steps holding a bowl of quartered peaches and a jug of cream. Who knows how long she has been there, studying us in our reverie, both light-headed from the wine, induced to sloth from the crisp potatoes. Neither of us seems aware until the moment that our plates have also been cleared away and dirty glasses replaced with fresh ones. I am incapable of seeing anything, I want to tell Ben. Vishni is the one who sees. But I do not want him to leave thinking I am in a depression, because that will only come back to you from another letter left at the post office. Instead I do as I’m told and eat the dessert placed before me, listening as Vishni scolds Ben that he is not eating enough.

  – TRY EITHER OF THOSE jackets on the chair. Perhaps the darker one. It looks like it will be a better fit across the shoulders. Yes? It’s comfortable? Right, let me see your shirt. Stand by the window there, please. It doesn’t work together. There’s too much fuss with those stripes. Sorry, Ben. It’s a beautiful shirt, just too distracting. It doesn’t work … How about something a little softer … there’s a blue here, or white. The white would be perfect, I think. Unless you would be happier in a color? There’s a purple T-shirt on the shelf but it will drain your complexion. What was that phrase you used to tell us they drummed into you at art school: ‘We add, not subtract’? There you go; algebra in action. You’re about the same size so it shouldn’t feel tight on the collar. Oh, whatever you prefer, but maybe the top button open, and also the one after that. Let me see. Two buttons are definitely better than one … but not three. That’ll be too much.

  We are in the room behind the kitchen where Vishni does the laundry twice a week. I cannot bear to take Ben into your room, so pulling the clothes nearest to hand is safer. Your scent is not here, the overwhelming smell of detergent banishing all ghosts. We have swum together in the past, shared a bed for sleeping purposes more than once, making Ben not embarrassed to change in front of me. He has posed before, of course, many years ago, shortly after we first met and before the appearance of you. Ben’s painting was one of the first that got me noticed, but you know all about that; what attention does. It is this past history combined with his taste for Provincetown nudist beaches that has schooled him in his lack of self-consciousness. I am sifting through the pile of clothes that Vishni has ironed, looking for further options, so at first I miss an opportunity to note the differences in his body to yours, bar the firmness of his stomach suggesting his continuing loyalty to calisthenics. As he turns around, I see more: the muscular V of his back, the square-packed shoulders and how, despite being as tall and rangy as you are, there is neatness to his frame. He seems so compact. Time is etched on his face, of course, and clings with honor to his neck, but the body is a monument to someone decades younger. He remains smooth and mostly hairless, the other marked contrast to you. Something about his physicality and yours marks you as family, one from either end of blond’s spectrum. Ben is dressed, still in his Italian trousers, but the rest is yours, a white T-shirt instead of the shirt, and your navy fishing jumper. I don’t know how this is chosen, but somehow we both gravitate toward it, hanging from the door hook. You have worn it for years. Sacred clothing. I think about the darker recesses of the studio, areas where the light does not reach: in the corner opposite the sink, where one frame leans against another; the shelved recess that houses the paint. I think about Ben standing there and how, with his face turned away from me, it could almost be … We are both aware of it. His posture changes in your clothes. Now he slouches against the wall, hands in pockets barely wide enough to hold credit cards. Nothing about this is caricature. He is not making a joke as he curves his shoulders inward, lips pursed, arms loose and gangly as if an overgrown boy. He wrinkles his nose.

  – This stinks.

  – He went fishing last week. You were the one who pulled it down. When he hangs it up there Vishni knows not to wash it. It’s one of the quirks he has.

  – Doesn’t he just! What was he fishing? Are there still trout in the river?

  – Brown trout. He has to go where the river passes town these days. Further away from the hills as less seem to travel upstream. He did pretty good last week, though. We were eating for a couple of days.

  – Worth coming back for? It’s been a while since we went fishing.

  – Worth coming back for. You know he’ll be only too pleased to take you.

  – Maggots running everywhere, plenty of beer drunk, but not much fish, as I recall.

  – He’s better at it, these days. Has the patience, I should say. You’ve got a good month or so ahead of you, if you want to take him up on the offer.

  – So his letters suggest. Our boy’s become quite the country sportsman.

  – Something of that kind. Are you going to be happy in that jumper, Ben? You realize that once I start you’ll need to keep wearing it.

  – That I am aware of.

  – And that we won’t be able to wash it, less we lose any of the marking?

  – I can overdo the cologne to compensate. This is how you want me, isn’t it? I can see it in your face. Your eyes are lighting up.

  – They are not.

  – I know your game. The observer doesn’t want to be looked at, ad nauseam. Well, tough luck! We’re going to be staring at each other for a while.

  – Not if I have you looking down at the floor.

  – And you will, too! Now I understand why some of your subjects were posed the way they were. That little nugget never made it into the notes, did it?

  – Stop teasing, Ben. We need to make a start if you want to catch your train tonight.

  – I thought I might hang around. At least until John gets back. Shoot the breeze. If he’s only in the city, he shouldn’t be too much longer.

  – I wouldn’t have thought so.

  – I can take the overnight.

  – Don’t be silly. Riding the rails through the night like a teenager! Stay over. We’ll make a bed up. I’ll go and speak to Vishni now because I’m not sure what she had in mind for dinner.

  There is an ease with Ben’s decision, built on confidence, and from years of having had beds made in countless other artists’ residences, from poolside guest houses in California to squats in the wrong parts of London. There are some gallery owners who can barely bring themselves to shake an artist’s dirty hand, let alone sleep on a concrete floor; solely interested in the finish. Ben is not one of those. For all the comforts the success of his gallery has brought him over the years, he is still governed by a sense of adventure and an undying fascination in the process. He will spend the night in a tree if he is sure a good painting will come out of it. I hold him still and roll up each trouser leg; tight, narrow rolls that show his ankles. He stops talking now, knowing that he will have ample time to fill during the long studio hours ahead. For now, he is a cipher, who must ready himself to be prodded and pulled. Jumper sleeves are pushed up until they reach the elbow. I point to your shoes that sit by the door.

  – Take your socks off, too.

  – Sure. Anything else?

  – Your jewelry. Watch and ring.

  These are slipped off first, but there’s something slow in the way he moves now; these last moments where he morphs from friend and house guest to subject. From articulate to voiceless. Even though he still wears his trousers, removing his socks seems to erase the final remnants of who he is. He pulls on the shoes and follows me to the door. His shadow and soft steps are yours.

  In the studio Ben moves instinctively toward a row of canvases leaning against the wall. All the care that is given to paintings in the homes they finally end up with is not shared in their places of origin. A sheet protects them from dust, but at various stages they have been handled roughly; marked, nicked in places and painted over. Before perfection – truth – comes digging, dirt. Each canvas bears sign of this excavation, before being hidden by frames and glass. I am a mother bear who
carries her cub by the teeth.

  – Look at those afterwards. Let’s get you in the chair first.

  His eyes scan the rows hungrily, calculating how many have accumulated since his last visit. It is clear that he had not expected so many. The eyebrows that frame his widened eyes seem to tremble with the discovery.

  – All these?

  – Yes. But you can only see some of them. After you’ve worked for it.

  Nodding in affirmation, he moves to the center and waits for me to push the chair toward him. The curiosity for pictures overrides everything, even this house, and his friendship with you. He will not leave without seeing what is under the cloth. Having pushed, dragged back, and pushed again, I motion him to sit. Again, his nod is one of compliance, brisk and sharp, knowing that he will wait patiently, for as long as it takes, until he gets what he wants.

  THE EMPTY PLACE set at the table makes the lightness of our dinner talk a fallacy. We sit tightly as if listening to the band on the Titanic after receiving premonitions of our doom. The meal is good but there is sadness in the atmosphere, dulling taste buds and tampering with digestion. Ben does his best to play along, his easy manner and ability to keep the conversation going eventually relaxing us, so that at certain moments it feels like a replication of previous dinners, when the room was filled with the simple pleasure of friendship, and the absent place could be explained away by your fetching the wine, the watermelon, the cheese. It is only at the end of the meal, when interest in Vishni’s rose cuttings and my redundant gossip about other artists can no longer be tolerated, that Ben’s manners evaporate and he becomes testy.

  – Why the hell isn’t he back yet?

  – Soon. I’m sure it’ll be soon.

  – He should be here by now.

  We jump as his hand slaps the table, its echo as hard and flat as his palm. Our eyes meet momentarily before taking them elsewhere, both stabbed with sudden hurt as the realization dawns that you are not there for us. All this had only been a way to pass the time. He has waited all day for you. The world has tilted in your absence. After dinner everyone goes to bed, as if an early night will somehow speed up the process of your return. The table is left uncleared, kitchen detritus left to soak. It is the earliest in years that the house has fallen to darkness. With Ben and Vishni sleeping downstairs, one in the guestroom, the other in her room behind the kitchen, adjacent to the studio, the house feels lopsided. In bed especially, I feel poised to tip; how little it would take to tumble me: a gust from the open window, the telephone’s ring. Before I draw the curtain, I stare up at the stars and wonder whether the city’s neon would hide the bear and the scorpion from your sight; whether you would use the constellations to guide you from Penn Station to Hell’s Kitchen. Remember when you first moved here, you taught me how I could navigate my way home after dark by following the scorpion’s tail from rear end to tip? Imagine being born and raised in the country and never having learnt these skills; what a wonder you were! Every day, there seemed to be a wondrous new discovery to be made about you: setting traps behind the refrigerator that caught the kitchen rat, mending windows, your ability to recite any number of poems from Leaves of Grass that a well-meaning teacher had forced you to learn by rote as punishment for a litany of youthful misdemeanors. All this on top of the paintings. But navigating the stars was a party trick I never tired of. It was like leaving the world behind for the celestial. You made the walk so often from our country station, nothing grander than a platform and a sign thick with dust; you may as well have been blindfolded.

  In the city too, where the steps that lead home are ingrained in your memory, you walk from Penn Station without sight: along Sixth, heading downtown. You pass the fancy shops, virtual museums of aspiration for tourists and office workers, always closed to the likes of you; affordable yet still overpriced; and finally past those less desirable, stores that only stand because it is cheaper to open than shut up completely. Below Avenue A you hit your stride: deep down into the city’s unfathomable bowels. Then, nothing. A hinterland of boarded-up warehouses and tenements, long since abandoned, that now shelter only hobos and the spoils of local crime, theft and drugs. Though you are several blocks away from the Hudson, its dank fills your nostrils. You gorge on a nourishing stink that gives your aching muscles life. It is the closest you will get to milk now you are decades past weaning; now that your parents are no longer here to fight over and nurture you. What you are looking for no longer exists, and yet, there you are, standing outside an apartment that is now a laundry, on a street where life as you know it has vanished. I know this is where you will end because it is the one place you have never showed me. I had to find it for myself during visits to the city. A piecemeal search: riding subway lines and roaming every back street until I could be sure. If you feel the weight of the tenements across your shoulders, find some space among the stars. Drop all that you have carried and let the lightness of the night take you. If you are no longer angry, look up and let the sky speak for us. Take your photographs so that clarity comes from your anger. At the very least, one good picture should emerge from the black mist that marks your mourning for everything you left behind. All that you missed, the funerals of your parents, your brother’s homecoming, the rapid decline of the tenements, how your neighborhood vanished into a ghost town, will be captured somewhere in the roll of film you carry in your pocket. That is one thing I can be sure of.

  – Whatever happens, no matter how long I have to sit in the studio or sand down and creosote the fence? Whether I have to help James birth his dairy cows, or shell a bucket of peas for Vishni, I must take one good photograph a day. Just one. I’m not greedy, Anna. I only want one to lead to another and then the next. It’s like crossing the mountain river when we go fishing. You take the pass one stone at a time.

  Where did those photographs go? Developed at the drug-store and then placed in a box at the bottom of your wardrobe. Sifting and poring. The bad photographs bundled together and burned with the trash. The examples deemed good sometimes shown to me and Vishni, most often not. You were not secretive but your photos were a private undertaking; something you started over the last few years to make sense of the practice I had committed you to, when you were probably too young to understand what it truly meant. Your interest in photography began shortly after we last saw Ben, a Halloween party high up East, when Provincetown’s tourists had long since returned to the city and the cobwebs you had sprayed in all corners, combined with the creaky walnut floors, gave his house a feeling of the Marie Celeste. We were a party of eleven almost groping in the dark for other signs of life, the spirits of those who had lived and partied here during that long summer. You and Ben talked alone for much of the night, or that is, Ben spoke to you. Your faces were mostly serious, none of the fooling around that Vishni and I were so used to. His mouth so close to your ear, your neck craning into his, you were a hair’s breadth from a kiss. When he remembered his manners as the host, you flicked through the monographs in the upstairs room he used as an office. I found you crouched over his albums, oversized books the size of table tops, filled with giclée prints from artists he was interested in. You were looking at photographs of crumbling diners and abandoned gas stations deep in the country; of families of hobos dressed in found hippy clothes riding the freight trains. The gloss from the prints reflected in your eyes and back onto each plastic sheath that held them.

  – They’re amazing. Why has he never shown us this stuff before?

  – Probably because we never asked.

  – All this time it’s been sitting in his house. All this time.

  In your wonderment you soaked everything up, as you used to do when you first saw my paintings. You still had interest in those, but not the sense of wonder as now overtook you with Ben’s photographs. I knew, because something similar had happened to me many years before. I saw a Modigliani portrait hanging in an alcove of a Chicago museum during a college trip and I felt my mind unlock. It has felt as if the last
three years has been a slow period of unlocking, of opening yourself up to new possibilities and closing your mind to me. I do not say this from a sense of jealousy. I have often lain awake wondering how this life would ever nourish you, how sitting like a statue day in and out could ever be enough. I took you at your word when you said it was; took heart in how fast your legs ran around the meadow; how rosy your cheeks had become from eating good home-cooked food; the pride you had in being known and respected among the community, whatever they may have thought of me; but most of all because of the trust you had in my hands as they posed you and the nodded appreciation at the end of each day when you saw the progress made on the canvas; how even my stolid snail’s pace still felt like some form of magic. You have spoiled me over the years with your patience and blind faith; whether this was something I encouraged in you or that simply lay inert in your personality, waiting to be drawn out. Either way, it has made me fat and somewhat complacent. I was like a suburban wife who believed she was enough for her husband; that he would never stray elsewhere. Now I am suspicious, mistrustful, as she might be after being wronged; bitterness staining her tongue. You have given yourself up so readily and for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Your face is puffy with all the secrets you hold, the lining around the eyes tight as you hold them all in. When I am cleaning up I sometimes catch you out of the corner of my eye, staring at the paintings as if you want to burn them. Who planted the seed for that, Ben or I? I move as you do, by stealth, forcing lightness into my heavy legs as I tiptoe across the floorboards so as not to wake those below. The room is dark but never completely black. Black is for those who refuse to see color, even the red of their eyelids as they close. The hook on the back of your door where the camera used to hang is unadorned. I feel it as I push it open, hearing nothing knock against the wood on the other side. For most of the day I had been caught up thinking about your clothes, forgetting that if you left carrying your camera you would have all you need. So much about today has been about remembering and forgetting. The rigor of the studio shields me from the worst of it. Only at night do I lapse. Even as I open your wardrobe and pat my hands along its varnished floor, I know that my fingertips will find no resistance; that your slim box of photographs will be gone. The only picture left in the room should be where it always was, in a frame on your dresser. There were never any paintings here, only this. Still feeling my way, I pat up and around until I find it, hoping that this will have been taken too; that there is room for this one photograph in a stack of many. But as I stand by the window and shake the frame open, I see that it is still there, a happiness you no longer wish to remember; of us in our evening finery taken at the reception in London.