by Ami Rao
‘Only joking,’ she said lightly after a bit, and just like that, the ‘o’ was gone. She looked at him, then hesitated. She knew Peggy was away on work, touring a paper mill in Savannah – due diligence, she had explained to Ameena, for her to be able to value the business accurately for investors – but still she hesitated. They passed a pretty white church, Greek Orthodox, David gathered from the Byzantine cross above the tower, and then next to it a redbrick building, in front of which she stopped and said, ‘This is me.’
‘Looks different from down here than from my rooftop,’ David observed.
‘Perspective,’ she said, ‘is a beautiful thing.’
‘Isn’t it just,’ David agreed.
‘Do you want to come upstairs?’ she said, and she said it quickly as if any delay might put her in danger of changing her mind.
‘I’d like that,’ he replied.
‘To look at my paintings, I mean.’
‘Of course.’
He nodded. And then she nodded. And in that way, their meaning was clear.
David and Ameena squeezed into the elevator and stood against the back wall, their shoulders touching, not because they necessarily wanted to or didn’t want to, but because it was impossible in that tiny elevator for them not to. They didn’t feel the need to speak and their silence magnified the sounds of the elevator, sounds that seemed alien to Ameena, as if she’d never heard them before, but she had, of course, she just hadn’t paid attention to them, the groaning and the rattling and the rumbling of the ironwork.
On fifteen, the doors heaved open, Ameena stepped out and David followed. They walked in single file, down a dimly lit corridor, passing on either side identical pale green doors, all the way to the end, then she stopped and unlocked her own pale green door. She went inside first and reached for a light switch, then motioned for David to follow her in.
‘They’re all in my room,’ Ameena said, ‘stowed away under the bed,’ she added with a little laugh, ‘where no one can find them. Stay here, I’ll call you when I’ve got them out.’
Alone, David looked around the apartment. It was small, clean, distinctly female. The kitchen was painted an unusual but rather striking teal and opened out into a living area with a sofa and a TV and a small rectangular wooden table that seemed to double up as both dining table and reading desk, for in that moment, it lay strewn with books along its entire length. A large triangular-shaped glass vase sat on one edge, bursting with lilies that quite spectacularly filled the room with their fragrance. On one side of the room was a single large window with an enviably close-up view of the Chrysler Building; on the other side was a bookshelf, crammed tight with books.
David walked to the window and looked out at the city lights. The yellow globe of a full moon hung low, softening the hard lines of the buildings, bathing the night sky in thick, milky splendor. Below, on the avenue, tiny vehicles rushed along the perfectly geometric grid lines, creating continuous threads of light, red on one side, white on the other, running parallel to each other as far as David could see – all the way to the end of the earth, David thought to himself with a little smile as he turned away from the window and wandered towards the bookcase. He scanned the titles for a minute, then picked out a book that caught his attention – a collection of photographs of the Ballets Russes. It was signed, he noticed, when he opened it – ‘To: Zvyozdochka moya’ in an elegant slanting hand. It didn’t say who it was from. Zvyozdochka moya, he mouthed the words silently. He didn’t know what they meant, but he liked how they sounded, those Russian words, how they made him feel; there was a certain melancholy to the whole thing, the sound of the words, the curve of the letters. David felt unexpectedly moved, almost to tears, but he couldn’t understand the reaction in himself, as inscrutable as the words themselves. He ran his thumb over the inscription slowly, feeling the slight depression in the paper where the ink had touched it and now resided in its own little valley below the surface, altering its form permanently. Then he quickly turned the page. He had just started looking at some extraordinary pictures of Nijinsky, admiring how the great dancer was able to reshape his head and neck and shoulders like that to suit his different character roles, when he looked up to see her silhouetted against the door frame of her bedroom.
‘Hey,’ she called softly as he glanced up at her aspect, and when she stepped forward into the light, he thought he saw something that resembled apprehension on her face. He understood that look, what solitary angst it concealed within it, for art, like music, like dance, like language, was an exposition of oneself of sorts, you put your whole self into it and then you put it out there, you put yourself out there, into the world.
Then she led him into her room and showed him what she had put out there, into the world.
She’d laid them out everywhere, on the floor, on her bed, leaning against the legs of the chair and the small dressing table, stood up against the windowsill against the glow of the city lights, different pieces like an entire orchestra of watercolours. His eyes swept over them, first all of them at once, taking in their collective beauty, the accumulation of gestures and textures and colours, provocative and performative all at once. Then he studied them individually, each brushstroke, a thing in itself as well as the thing it depicted. How long did he spend? How long was time when he was no longer in that room, but somewhere else, as if he’d entered the paintings, penetrated their space, penetrated her space, as if the room itself was a living thing, organs pulsing, alive with tension and drama – and that living thing was her.
How could this woman, he thought, this slender, small-boned woman, have this inside her – this capacity to, without language, without music, produce so much meaning?
Ameena leans against the far wall and watches him in silence as he walks around her bedroom, surveying her work, one, then another and another, his eyes narrowed in complete concentration. She watches the expression on his face change.
‘Fuck,’ he says finally, shaking his head in amazement.
She says nothing, only shifts her body forward so there is no longer the support of the wall. He is standing at the other end of the room, but the room is tiny, and in a few seconds she is directly in front of him. She notices the faint beads of perspiration that have formed in the smooth crevice above his upper lip.
Fifteen storeys below them, an ambulance wails.
There is an intimacy then in that moment, in the privacy of the moment, and it passes between them like a secret that has been shared and now nothing can be the same again.
‘I thought I made it clear there was going to be none of that,’ she says softly. Then she kisses him once. And then once again.
1.16
Paint spreading. Margins dissolving. Two colours blending into one: Artmaking.
ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ
תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא
ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ
תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא
ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ
תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא תונמוא
ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ ٹرآ
תונמוא ٹرآ תונמוא ٹرآ תונמוא ٹرآ תונמוא ٹرآ
1.17
‘I don’t really want to start going around with my portfolio. If I really wanted to be discouraged, I’d start doing just that,’ Ameena said to David the following morning as they rode the subway together to work.
‘That’s ridiculous, they’re amazing.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever. You asked why I haven’t done anything with them. I answered.’
‘Ameena, you’re wasting your talent.’
‘Did you kn
ow,’ she said, reaching across him for a pole to hold onto, ‘that most of the talent in the world goes wasted. People die with unnoticed capabilities. At this very moment, entire nations you’ve never heard of are wasting copious amounts of talent.’
He cocked his head in acknowledgement ‘Fine. True. Very good point in fact, and I agree one hundred percent. But right now, I care about your talent.’
The subway door opened at Grand Central and a great throng of people squeezed and elbowed their way in. A vast nylon-clad body now stood between Ameena and the pole she’d been grasping. She let her arm drop and David picked it up casually and placed it round his waist. Another body behind her pushed hers closer to his.
She could smell the toothpaste on his breath.
‘What talent?’ she said, trying to focus away from her acute awareness of the proximity of their bodies in so public a place.
‘Is this a British thing or an artist thing or an Ameena thing?
She laughed. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No?’
She shook her head, still laughing. ‘No.’
‘This annoying habit of perpetual self-deprecation.’
‘Look who’s talking!’
‘Me? I’m not self-deprecating. I’m American. And I’m a musician. And I’m fucking good.’
‘You are, are you?’
‘Yeah. Check your phone at noon.’
‘What? This is my stop.’
‘I know it’s your stop. Just check your phone at noon.’
He called her phone at eleven o’clock.
‘It’s not noon.’
‘Hello to you too!’ David said in a faux-hurt voice.
‘Sorry – hello. I’m just informing you that it’s not noon.’
‘I know it’s not noon. Check your phone at noon. But listen, I’ve been thinking about them.’
‘Whom?
‘Your nipples.’
She gasped audibly into the phone.
‘I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Your art.’
‘You’ve been thinking about my art.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s flattering.’
‘I don’t flatter.’
‘Sounds like flattery to me.’
‘Ameena, listen, can I come by this evening and take some photographs of your work? You don’t even need to be there. Just leave me with them for a bit. Go for a walk or something.’
‘You’re asking me to go for a walk?’
‘Or something.’
‘Or something?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re asking me to go for a walk. Or something?’
‘Not really. I’m telling you.’
On the other end of the phone line, Ameena made a noise of defeat. Valiantly, she tried to refocus the conversation.
‘David… I… you’re not making any sense. Peggy’s home tonight.’
‘Okay, introduce me to the scary roomie, then leave me with her and go for a walk.’
‘Stop. Listen. Seriously. I’m trying to work and you’re not making any sense.’
He sighed. ‘Okay, look. I don’t want to raise your expectations, it could turn out to be nothing, it probably will turn out to be nothing, but there’s this woman – Suzy Lipskis – she is… was… a friend of my mom’s. Her daughter Janice and I went to school together and I basically rescued her from flunking out, freshman year of college. Long story, but Suzy owes me. She also happens to be an independent curator at a small gallery here in the city. She’s a pretty daunting woman, she’s Lithuanian, she may have killed her husband.’
‘What?’
‘I’m kidding. She lost her husband, poor thing. Heart attack. Collapsed right there, on the toilet.’
‘Oh?’
‘It seems to happen that way for so many people. I think it’s the exertion that causes it, you know, all the…’
Ameena groaned. ‘David. Please.’
‘Oh sorry. Anyway, look, she’s a formidable woman with strong interests and aesthetic, a kind of creative agent in her own right. She leans toward art that’s not only visually beautiful but that makes some sort of political or social statement. I spoke to her about you. She wants to see your work.’
A pause. Then: ‘Umm, okay, let me understand this. You spoke to someone about me without asking me first?’
‘Yes.’
‘How the hell could you do that?’
‘Because your work is amazing.’
‘David, my work is private. And I’m private. Ugh! This is so frustrating! You don’t even know me.’
‘I know you.’
‘My work is private.’
‘Your work is amazing.’
‘You’re so infuriating.’
‘Are you mad at me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, check your phone at noon.’
At noon, a video message beeped its arrival on her phone. Below the video, a one-line text: i wrote this for you. it’s called ‘when you are near’. hope you’re not mad anymore.
Ameena smiled to herself, then walked to the small conference room and shut the door. It was hot in the room. The midday sunlight blazed in through the wall of windows, casting an array of swirls and squiggles across the long rectangular table. Outside, the towers of Manhattan glistened, a sweeping iridescence of silver and blue. She crossed the room and leaned her back against the cool glass. She inhaled. Behind her, a city exhaled.
She pressed play.
Music filled the room.
David.
David on the piano.
But not David, just his fingers.
David’s fingers caressing the keys… chords, notes, a tune, music, a piece of music. A piece of music, intricate and achingly erotic, she felt it wash over her, pressing down on her in an intensely physical way. She shivered despite the heat.
‘I wrote this for you...’
Ameena played it again, watching his hands, the precise movement of his fingers. She felt something inside her then, a movement of her own, a flutter, a lurch, a creature come alive by those fingers that seemed to touch something within her and summon up a strange ragbag of emotions: happiness, a sudden spurt of joy, shooting up from her toes. But also, sadness, sweet, clenching sadness. And pain, exquisite pain.
And she knew at once that something like this, this bizarre, incongruous, dangerous cocktail of feelings, could only mean one thing.
You’re fucking good, she wrote back, wanting to write one thing, and writing something else instead.
1.18
Three months after Ameena moved to New York, she found herself heartbroken, the breaker of her heart being a Russian-Canadian ballet dancer with floppy hair and strong arms, and ambitions to become the best male dancer in the world.
They had met at a bar; he was there with his friends, other floppy-haired, strong-armed dancers. And she was there with some of the girls from work and he had sent over a drink and looked at her with his blue eyes, looked at her so intently that she had to look away, then he had come over and asked for her number and she had given it to him and then regretted the action later. But she had been taken by his beauty, his supple beauty, his supple, white, blond beauty, unlike anything she had encountered before in such close proximity, not in any of the men she had met through her parents, their friends’ sons, skinny and hairy and all so academic.
Still, she had ignored his calls and his texts at first, not from a lack of attraction, not in the slightest, but from fear and a kind of confusion in understanding what someone like him would want from someone like her. But he would send her videos of him dancing, of entrechats and jetés, his body flexible and fluid and gliding on air, and he danced beautifully, wondrously. And even though she hated herself for it, she couldn’t help but watch him, surreptit
iously, on her computer screen at work, his legs twisting, twisting and twirling and jumping and splitting, creating movement, such beautiful movement. He had pursued her relentlessly and then finally, worn out from being chased – not by him but by her own private fears – she had given in.
Talent is always sexy, someone had once told her. When anyone is that good at anything, it becomes erotic.
So, she had given in to the eroticism of his talent.
And then learned later that he was as skilled a lover as he was a dancer, that his feet were magical even when they weren’t off the ground, that he had a natural rhythm in the way he moved, in the way he made her move, a rhythm and a music and a choreography and a poetry, that the openness of his body was an expression of his passion and his art and that he carried both with him into their private world. That he loved with the beautifully slow and sustained grace of the adagio. That she loved the way he loved.
He taught her about dance, the greatest dancers that ever lived, Baryshnikov and Nijinsky and Nureyev and Vasiliev. He spoke passionately about the music of dance, Tchaikovsky and Swan Lake and the Nutcracker; he showed her the movements – the precision and the discipline of the movements – the five basic positions of the feet, the shapes they made, how to watch for the shapes they made, how the position of your feet changed the whole shape of you.
She sat at her desk at work writing his name on the sides of draft articles that were waiting for her to edit. Writing his name and then her name and then a combination of their names, her first name with his last name. Followed sometimes – but not always because the dancer had said he didn’t want children, that music and dance were his twin children – by their children’s names, pretty names, eclectic names, a mix of Eastern and Western, just as their children would be – if he ever changed his mind – Eastern and Western, true citizens of the world.
And then, when she thought it was all only beginning, it was over.
Just like that.
