David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  But that wasn’t entirely true because sometimes, she let Peggy watch.

  It was therapeutic, Peggy had told her once, to follow the movement of the brushstrokes, that rhythm, that flow. And so, sometimes, while Ameena was painting, Peggy was allowed to stay.

  She was in the middle of it now, that brushstroke. And Peggy was sitting behind her, studying, as she described to Ameena, the process of ‘taking that wild leap, of creating something out of nothing’. To Ameena, it wasn’t quite as mysterious as that, because more often than not, she could already see the finished product in her mind’s eye. She usually worked like this, painting the painting in her head many times before she brought it to paper. Like having a baby, she often thought, it grows inside you and you nurture it and you feed it and then it grows too big to be inside you, and you feel that push, that urgency to bring it out, to give it its own life.

  ‘I like David,’ Peggy was saying. ‘He’s nice.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ameena said as she picked up a brush, and sketched the outline of a tree, loose and wild, ‘he is.’

  ‘What are you painting?’ Peggy asked.

  ‘I saw a girl cycling along the East River the other day, the sun was out, the river was calm, just lying there sparkling, and she had these flowers in her bicycle basket, bright red flowers. It was so striking, the red against that blue-gold backdrop. I’m trying to paint all that – the encounter – just without the girl.’

  ‘Why won’t you paint the girl?’

  ‘Oh.’ Ameena shook her head. ‘It’s a decision I made a long time ago. I painted all these people once, a whole set of portraits, and it was probably my best work, my most authentic expression of self…’ Peggy noticed Ameena had a distant look in her eyes as if she was delving into the memory of something that had once been significant. Then she snapped back. ‘But… well, it all got very complicated.’ She sighed. ‘So, I decided I would never paint figures again – not in the traditional form, at any rate, just go directly to the substance of the real thing. I try to make the representational subject dissolve into the brushwork.’

  Peggy watches as Ameena picks up a brush, dips it in pale blue paint and brings it to the easel. At first it is just a line, delicate and flowing, then a sweep of swift, swirling brushstrokes. She mixes in another shade of blue, darker, more complex. The colours blend and follow their own laws, and the paint is allowed to work for itself. And then, it is a river. Just lying there. It is not sparkling yet, but Peggy knows it will. Soon enough, it will.

  ‘Is he like your dad?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘No, I mean people say women end up with men who are like their fathers. So I was wondering – is David like your dad?’

  ‘Oh that,’ she said, but she kept working, her eyes focused on the painting, which, she realised with sudden pride, had just started to breathe. ‘I guess David can be a bit of a pacifist. My dad’s a pacifist. I dread that about him, about both of them, come to think of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ she said as she painted a building overlooking the water, its edges soft and diaphanous, ‘pacifists usually end up disappointed.’

  Peggy nodded. ‘I know nothing about mine, except that when he was very young he served in a war he didn’t believe in, and then after I was born, he had these delusions that the Vietcong were going to take us away, my mother and me, to the jungle and spray napalm on us, and so he ran away before that could happen, so he wouldn’t have to face it, our burned and disfigured bodies, our pain. My mother told me that. She was more than twenty years younger than him, you know.’

  Ameena said nothing. There was a disjointed rhythm in her painting.

  ‘And then…’ Peggy continued almost as if she was speaking to herself, or to the river in the painting, the one that was now sparkling, ‘the one I knew was hardly a shining beacon of fatherhood.’

  ‘You must hate him so much.’

  She shrugged. ‘He was a stranger.’

  Ameena took her eyes off the painting and looked at Peggy, whose vivid green eyes were closed. Her face looked empty like a beautiful, abandoned house.

  ‘But her? I hate her something awful. She was my blood.’

  2.9

  Desire for a city is primal.

  Ameena was walking along the fancy shopfronts of Madison Avenue with its furs and its fashion. They are beautiful, these shops, beautifully designed, beautifully displayed, something to be stopped and stared at.

  It was a Friday morning on her day off and she was walking like a native New Yorker would walk on a Friday morning on their day off, window shopping, people watching, revelling in the singular delights that only this City offers. Soon she would find a diner and sit at the counter and order a coffee and pull out a book from her bag and perhaps she would talk to the stranger next to her, and perhaps she wouldn’t, but she would spend a few delicious hours doing some of those things that make her feel that she can do as she pleases and nobody cares. But now she was just walking. She stopped to look at a shop window, it was a jewellery shop, the window display was stunning. She stared at a necklace, a single strand of emerald-green beads with a gold and diamond clasp.

  She had passed this shop before. She had admired this necklace before.

  Someone brushed by her then in that instant even as she was looking at the necklace, then he was behind her, too close for comfort. Her grip on her handbag tightened and she was about to move away, but he touched her shoulders, strong hands, shifted her slightly to the right. She wanted to scream, wriggle free, but before she had a chance to react, his voice was in her ear. ‘You gotta look at it like this,’ he said.

  And then he walked away, a tall man with a closely shaven head in a beige trench coat with a briefcase in his hand. He didn’t look back and she never saw his face.

  Her immediate reaction was one of outrage. But then she saw what he had done. In the reflection of herself in the window, the emerald beads hung in a perfect oval round the curve of her neck.

  Later, many years in the future, when Ameena is older, as old as her mother was then or even older, she will think of this moment and remember it as a demonstration of the plurality of people and of places. Of this City in particular. Of how it is raw and real and free and indestructible, and when you are a part of it, you are all those things too. She will tell her grandchildren, who are pale-skinned with green-gold eyes and look nothing like her at all, while she is teaching them how to make the badam kheer that her own grandmother taught her to make, she will tell them about this City, how beneath the hardness lurks a liquid softness, thick and gooey, like the rich, sweetened almond milk in the pot they are all stirring together in her kitchen. She will tell them this, about her City and theirs, and she will tell them other things too, about love and about dreams and how you have to be clever to figure out this City and if you do, she says, allowing them to lick the wooden spatula one by one – if you do, it offers you in return, occasional spurts of unexpected generosity, which is the best kind of generosity there is.

  2.10

  Autumn rolled in languidly and the early mornings turned delicate and cool. In Central Park the hawthorns were covered in red berries, the sassafras bloomed yellow then red then purple. The church below Ameena’s window stood stark and white, untainted by the flamboyance that surrounded it.

  David took Ameena to Rhode Island for Labor Day weekend. Immediately, she felt the difference in temperature; it was much cooler here by the sea than in the city, the wind off the bay sharp and brisk, the salt air fresh and clean and briny in that typically New England way.

  ‘Are you religious?’ Ameena asked David as they walked along the jagged coastline hand in hand.

  Earlier that morning, David had taken her to Point Judith Lighthouse, where his father had proposed to his mother all those years ago. They’d been so young, David said, only a pair of kids. David and Ameena stood t
ogether at the broad octagonal base of the structure and looked up to the very top.

  ‘What?’ David said, noticing the odd expression on Ameena’s face.

  ‘Nothing, it’s so silly.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Ameena!’

  ‘I’m moved that you brought me here. That’s all. That’s what I was thinking. You kind of make me want to cry. Okay? Told you it’s stupid. Anyway,’ she said a little too quickly, ‘can you go up all the way to the top?’

  ‘I wanted to bring you here,’ David said, palms on her cheeks, holding her face in his hands. ‘It was important to me.’

  Ameena nodded.

  ‘She was the love of his life,’ David said gently. Then he changed the topic, also like Ameena, a little too quickly. ‘They only recently restricted access,’ he said, addressing the second part of her question, ‘but even before that, you couldn’t really go inside unless you were on official business, though they weren’t nearly as strict back then. Dad and Mom and the coastguard’s son were the same age, good friends too, so the coastguard – Sad Mr Jones – that’s what we used to call him when we were little, because his lips curved downwards in that cartoony sad-faced way.’ David grinned at the memory. ‘Though in reality,’ he continued, ‘Sad Mr Jones wasn’t sad at all, pretty funny guy actually, constantly cracking jokes, making people laugh. Anyway, Sad Mr Jones was only too happy to let Dad propose to her inside, so he allowed them to go all the way up the spiral staircase to the very top, to that little balcony – up there, look.’ He took a step back and pointed to the top of the lighthouse. ‘Just the two of them and the dome of the sky and the sound of the waves crashing on the rock face. This is the first time I’ve been back here since she…’

  Ameena looked at David intently. She could see that this meant something to him, something serious and symbolic, and that he had been moved tremendously by the experience of showing this place to her, and she found herself even more touched by it, by his emotion, and that he would share it with her in this way, something so personal and so private.

  Then they walked a while and he showed her the stretch of beach where he and his brother had run as kids under the open skies, even in the wintertime, back and forth from the foaming ocean to the shoreline, with their windblown hair and shirtless little bodies, not feeling the cold in the way little children don’t feel the cold or for that matter any kind of discomfort, nor danger, nor anxiety, nor fear. How many carefree days they had spent on that beach, counting the boats, naming the rocks, not realising the significance of that place in an existential sense until they were much older, young men really. Only then would they ponder, though always separately, not daring to share such intimate thoughts even with each other lest they be deemed sentimental or soft – but what if she had said no, they would think, what would have become of us then?

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Ameena said, ‘so wild and free and… well just utterly romantic. I can see why he picked this place to propose. And I can absolutely see why she said yes. I mean I’m sure she’d have said yes anywhere, but it’s impossible for anyone not to, here.’

  ‘Impossible?’ David’s eyes gleamed in amusement and then he threw back his head and laughed when he saw the look of alarm cross Ameena’s face as she realised what she had said, what he had taken from that.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said, putting his arm round her, ‘I’m not going to propose to you. Not now, at any rate.’

  She pushed him away playfully. ‘That’s not even a little bit funny.’

  They walked some more along the beach, right along the water, the waves touching their toes, and they talked, and exactly how much time passed like that, just walking and talking, they didn’t know, nor care. And then suddenly, in this way, she asked if he was religious.

  The fog had rolled in over the bay, suddenly as it does, and you could feel the weight of it in the air, the heaviness of the fog and the salt from the sea. A colony of gulls circled, gliding on the wind. A lone fishing boat dotted the bay, hidden all this time, only coming into view now as the fog shifted and moved. The gulls squawked loudly, spotting the boat gleaming white under the white sun, swooping down noisily into its icy wake.

  ‘No,’ David replied slowly, as if he was still considering her question, ‘I sort of lost my faith when my mother died.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In everything.’

  A pause. Then he added quietly, ‘I’m sorry. I know that must sound selfish.’

  ‘No, not at all. I understand. Faith is fragile.’

  ‘Are you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Religious?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I don’t pray,’ she said.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I drink. I don’t fast. I don’t cover my hair. I ran away from home. I’m with you.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ he asked.

  ‘That I’m with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. Is it bad that you’re with me?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Then we’re okay...’ she looked at him as if searching for something from his face, ‘...aren’t we?’

  He nodded. ‘We’re okay.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  Then, ‘Can you do something for me, David?’

  ‘You mean, besides bring you to Narragansett for the weekend so you can feel what it’s like when the fog comes in and the wind makes your blood freeze?’

  She laughed but he could see her eyes were serious. ‘Is that the strange sensation my body is feeling? I thought it was just goosebumps from being this close to you. No, seriously, Piano-man. Can you?’

  ‘Okay, seriously. I can. Go on.’

  ‘Do you think we can leave religion and politics out of our relationship? It’s not something I think I’m going to know how to handle.’

  David nodded but he looked surprised. ‘Is it that much of a big deal to you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said honestly, ‘but if we let it into our house, I don’t know if I know how to ask it to leave.’

  The wind had picked up and Ameena’s hair and skirt gathered together and blew upward towards the sky. David felt a tenderness for her swell up within him, and a longing that was not sexual, only a kind of softness for the way she looked in that moment, standing bravely against the press of the wind – and for what she had said, the honesty of it. Then the screen door of the seaside diner opened as a young couple came out and David ran to hold it open before it banged shut and Ameena ran behind him, laughing, and then disappeared gratefully inside into the warmth and David followed, leaving only the last strains of their laughter lingering in the golden light.

  2.11

  The first time he brought it up, her reaction surprised him.

  ‘Will you move in with me?’ he asked softly on a Wednesday evening, as they sat in David’s apartment and watched the lights of the city come on – rhythmically, symphonically, as if someone somewhere was carefully orchestrating the event for maximum emotional impact.

  ‘Ameena?’

  ‘Hmm…?’

  ‘I asked if you would…’

  ‘I know what you asked.’

  ‘So?

  ‘So… what?

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think.’

  And he looked so crestfallen, and his eyes looked so sad, that she felt when she looked at him a kind of great love, and that great love compelled her to offer an explanation that she hoped would close the matter, if only temporarily, although she knew that he knew that it was just that – an explanation that she hoped would close the matter only temporarily.

  ‘David, I need space that I can work in… this place is even smaller than mine. This thing with the gallery, it’s kind of a big deal, you know. I neve
r expected anything like this could happen to me and then you came into my life, and you wielded some sort of magic wand, and then, miraculously, it happened, it’s happening – I’m in it now!’

  ‘I know that Ameena, I wasn’t suggesting you come here. I was… I thought… I thought we could look for a place together. I was so sure you’d want that too.’

  ‘I love you David…’ she said, and he knew she meant it, ‘…but you know the way I feel about my art when it’s done.’

  And then she noted his bafflement, and she said gently, ‘Your idea as it sits in your imagination will always be superior to the actual work.’

  David said nothing, but inwardly he thought, and not without some wonder, that Ameena was like an expert jazz musician. She could make something up on the spot, and then one minute later, or five seconds later, she could make something else up on the spot, and somehow – a talent – she could make both versions sound equally authentic.

  2.12

  The day before her debut show, Ameena went looking for sanctuary in the middle of the night. She didn’t know what time it was, she hadn’t checked, she just decided, lying sleeplessly in bed, that she needed to go for a walk.

  She got dressed in the dark and closed the front door behind her quietly, so as not to wake David, who had stayed over, or Peggy, who always slept with the door to her bedroom open, for as she had told Ameena once in a way that made her blood run cold – some childhood fears never die but end up owning you.

  Once she stepped out into the hallway, she checked the lit screen of her phone. It was nearly 2am.

  There was nobody in the hallway, nobody in the elevator the whole way down, nobody in the lobby, nobody out on the street, no cars, no people. The city lay cool and black and silent. Only an occasional breeze made the leaves on the dark trees rustle.