David and Ameena

by Ami Rao

  Ameena made a left out of her building, stopping to admire, yet again, the solitary splendour of the Chrysler, piercing the night sky like a bejewelled spear. She started walking westward, past the church, past the dog park, past the beautiful, decaying brownstones. She looked up as she walked, peeking, as was her habit when she was on her own, into other people’s windows, creating little imaginary worlds. She loved this about Manhattan, that you could speculate like this about the stories of strangers; it felt to her like being inside six novels at the same time, but that night, mostly all the windows she walked past were dark.

  She walked to the end of the street and then considered which way to turn. She didn’t have a destination in mind, she’d only wanted to be out, she’d wanted the night air. She stopped at the lights, then looked around her, hesitating to commit. From where she was standing, she could see the diner on the corner a few blocks down, its neon lights flashing, beckoning her somehow, and, thankful for some sort of waypost, she decided to walk towards it.

  Over on the avenue, the rubbish collectors were out, their large truck taking up the whole width of the road. Two cars waited impatiently behind the truck, the drivers willing it to move, not daring to blow their horns at that time of night. The truck inched forward languidly. Impressive, she thought, how much rubbish this little island collected on a daily basis, how when you came out in the evenings, just as the shops were closing, you could see them, piled up on street corners, bags and bags of rubbish, and how they were all gone in the morning, like some kind of Houdini’s act that happened in the middle of the night.

  As she walked past, one of the men noticed her. He was whistling a tune, she recognised it – a David Bowie song, but she couldn’t remember the name. ‘Morning, miss,’ he called out merrily as though he was completely free from worry. He did this as he hauled whole fistfuls of the black bags into the back of his truck and resumed his whistling. She returned the greeting, thinking how so much of life is pure conjecture, for no matter how many windows one stares into, one never really knows what is going on in someone else’s life. Then she thought about herself, how she must look from the man’s perspective, what a curious figure she must cut, a lone midnight walker in a man’s too-big sweatshirt and baseball hat. An unintended endorsement for the Yankees, she realised suddenly – particularly ironic given she didn’t understand the first thing about baseball despite all of David’s infinitely patient attempts to enlighten her.

  A few minutes later, she arrived at the diner. She peered in through the window – it looked open but empty. She was just about to walk on by when her glance fell on the laminated menu that had been wall-mounted just by the entrance. Something caught her eye. On a whim, she decided to go in.

  Inside, there were two men sitting at the counter drinking beers. Neither so much as glanced in her direction. Another thing she loved about this city: nobody judged you in New York, they were too busy judging themselves.

  A solitary waitress with an impressive number of tongue piercings, finished her yawn, pointed to a table and then, with a look of such extreme anguish that Ameena couldn’t help but speculate on its many possible causes, asked what she wanted. Ameena ordered herself the ice cream sundae that had grabbed her fancy on the menu outside but when it came out a few minutes later (but how can anything be ready so quickly?) a tall, cheerful glass filled right to its scallop-edged brim with vanilla ice cream, smothered in sticky caramel, scattered over with nuts and topped with an unnaturally red cherry, her heart sank.

  What decent girl eats a ‘Crazy Caramelicious’ (despite the name) in the middle of the night all alone in a diner?

  Later, she would wonder what had prompted her to have such an abrupt change of heart. Maybe the two men had paused their conversation to stare curiously at it. But then again maybe they hadn’t, maybe they had barely noticed it just like they had barely noticed her, but all the same, she felt a sudden prick of shame. She muttered something to the waitress, left some money on her table, over-tipping by an amount she could not mathematically explain, and left as quickly as she had come in.

  Back on the avenue, the rubbish truck was gone, turned down some other road, carrying away unwanted remnants of someone else’s life. A sort of blessing, really. A couple of cars sped by her, going about their own night-time business, but when she turned onto the street leading to her building, it was empty and so quiet she could hear the dull thud of her own footsteps. She felt uneasy suddenly – this didn’t feel like New York. Where was the vibrancy that accompanied the lit-up steeple of the Chrysler Building? Where was the exuberance? Where was the dream? Ameena quickened her stride.

  A sudden gust of wind blew a window shut above her, and somewhere far away she heard the sound of a dog barking. It smelled like rain, and maybe it was that, the scent of rain, that made her feel then, at that moment, the need – it was a need, precise and particular – to call her mother. She missed her mother, she realised with a kind of astonishment, and immediately, a deep feeling of melancholy filled her. She missed her mother and her father and her brother and her mother’s cooking and her books and her bedroom that she had thought was small until she arrived in this city and understood the many shades of the word ‘small’. She missed all that. She missed it more than ever now that she was the girl who had almost eaten an alliterated portmanteau alone in the middle of the night.

  She was never going to tell David she’d done that. If he woke when she returned, she’d say she’d gone for a walk. That’s all. Couldn’t sleep, went for a walk.

  She fished for her phone in the large, soft, fleece-lined pocket of David’s sweatshirt – ah, there it was. And something else. Another rectangle, small, bright orange plastic. A lighter. A lighter? David’s? But he didn’t smoke? Almost involuntarily, she lit it, curling her fingers around the body, her thumb flicking the wheel, hearing the click, watching the steady blue-yellow flame. Did he? Then slowly, she released her thumb, watched the flame collapse back into the tiny, perfectly round orifice, and slipped it back into the pocket, her forehead creasing into lines she knew had no business being there. She exhaled deeply, feeling vaguely disorientated, then she looked at the time on her phone. It was a quarter to three in New York. Morning time in Manchester. They’d all be just waking up, her mum and dad still in their bedroom, talking in low voices under the heavy cotton quilt, her brother walking to the bathroom with his eyes closed, blinking incredulously into the mirror.

  Tentatively she dialled the number, the only landline number in the world that she knew off by heart.

  It rang a few times with no answer, then she heard a click.

  ‘Hello?’ her mother answered in her typically singsong manner. She sounded groggy, not yet awake.

  Ameena said nothing.

  ‘Hello?’ Zoya said again, this time with that imperceptible touch of impatience. Ameena knew her mother hated being woken from her sleep.

  Hello Mummy, Ameena wanted to say.

  And then she wanted to tell her, desperately wanted to tell her mother about David and about New York and about her life. About her work at the magazine, and about how she was an artist now, a real artist, and how people thought her work was of some worth, and how she was having her first show tomorrow. Her first show as a real artist!

  I am so proud of you, Ameena, her mother would reply, barely able to conceal her excitement. All of us! All of us are so proud of you, she would exclaim.

  ‘Hello? Who is this please? What do you want?’

  2.13

  Daylight came.

  In some other city, the birds chirped.

  Outside the apartment, the sirens blared. Inside, the buzzer rang.

  Peggy answered the door and almost keeled backwards at the sight of the pair standing in front of her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said immediately, ‘wrong apartment?’

  She was just about to shut the door when one of them interjected politely
.

  ‘Howdy, miss,’ he said in that charming Bill Clinton accent, ‘this is apartment 15B isn’t it? We tried to buzz from the street…’

  ‘…but the intercom’s broken?’ finished Peggy.

  He smiled and nodded. ‘We’re here to transport some artwork to the…’ he looked down at a piece of paper in his hand ‘…Suzy Lipskis Gallery? Lips? Kiss?’

  ‘Oh,’ Peggy exclaimed, opening the door wider, ‘right! Well then come on in.’

  Ameena, lounging in the kitchen with a morning cup of Earl Grey, had caught only bits of the conversation, but knew that Suzy had arranged for packers to wrap and transport her artwork across for the show.

  ‘Is it someone for my art?’ she called.

  ‘Uh. Yup,’ Peggy replied, in what Ameena thought was a very odd voice.

  She had just started to walk towards the door to introduce herself when she stopped short with her mouth open and her eyebrows raised all the way up, making her face look somewhat like a caricature of itself. With that same expression, she turned to look at Peggy, who, at that moment, was attempting to suppress a giggle with a long, endlessly troublesome cough, for standing in the entryway, looking at them with identical boyish grins, were her art packers – a duo sporting matching muscle t-shirts, blond spiky hair and faces so similar that only a mother could tell them apart.

  She clamped her hand over her mouth and squeezed herself wordlessly between Peggy and the wall to give them room to pass. ‘Good Morning,’ one of them hollered cheerily as he walked past her, looking enquiringly around the apartment, then at her face. ‘Bedroom?’

  Ameena looked at Peggy and Peggy looked at Ameena and both girls carried an expression on their faces that told them instantly that if either one had the temerity to start laughing, neither would be able to stop.

  Peggy coughed again. Ameena said, ‘This way, follow me please,’ in a funny high-pitched tone and led the way to her bedroom, where she had stacked all the paintings in a neat pile next to the door the night before.

  Then she came back out, closed the door behind her, and instantly burst into a fit of giggles.

  ‘Oh my GOD,’ Peggy whispered, ‘Tweedledee!’

  ‘Tweedledum!’ Ameena countered.

  ‘Double trouble!’ Peggy said, wiping her eyes.

  ‘TWO hot!’ Ameena shrieked.

  And so, two genetically identical sets of exceptionally muscular arms wrapped thirty pieces of artwork expertly in bubble paper, packed them into wooden cartons and brought them to the front door and as they were leaving, the brothers smiled affably and said goodbye in that laconic southern drawl, their biceps bulging with the weight of the boxes they carried.

  Then when the blond one with the spiky hair said, ‘All done! Down yonder then, to Lips Kiss!’ with a wide smile, and the other blond one with the spiky hair said, ‘Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise,’ with the same wide smile, a few seconds after the first, neither could, for the life of them, understand why the tall woman with the blond hair and the short one with the dark hair were holding each other and laughing uncontrollably like a pair of giggly schoolgirls on a high.

  And in this way, heralded by the sound of laughter that could be heard all the way down the hall, causing an elderly lady waiting for the elevator to adjust her hearing aid and smile, and dissolving, at the very same time, any man-made constructs that may have otherwise existed between the two room-mates, Ameena’s art was transported to the gallery for her first show.

  2.14

  And Zoya in her bed in Manchester was lying in the deepest sleep when she was woken by a snore from Yusuf.

  After that, as she lay for hours tossing and turning between the sheets, listening to this man rumble beside her, she wanted to cry from a feeling of such deep despair that she herself was shocked by its intensity.

  It was a hot, muggy night. The scent of rain was thick and heady, but everything was still, and no breeze came through the windows that had been left open for precisely that purpose. Inside the little bedroom, the humidity pressed down – suffocatingly, Zoya thought as she flung the covers off her, cursed under her breath and prayed for sleep to come. She wondered who had called so early that morning, who had called and then held the line like that without speaking when she answered. Wrong number most probably, must have realised when they heard her voice that it was not the voice they had called to hear. Still, it had been strange.

  Next to her, Yusuf snorted again, then turned on his side, his hand touching her leg accidentally, and she pushed it away with force and felt in that moment a kind of violent anger towards the creator of this horrible noise, this body – she couldn’t think of him at that moment as her husband, or even as a person, only another body lying next to her own – that had robbed her of one of life’s little remaining pleasures. She felt a sudden urge then, as she pushed away his hand, to push the whole of him off her bed, and then felt immediately guilty at the terrible thought she had just entertained, especially over something so small.

  And yet it wasn’t small because Zoya, now fifty-nine, knew that there comes a time in life when there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more precious than the deepest sleep.

  2.15

  The seasons tripped, with a gentleness and lightness often felt by young people in love. Fall mellowed into the very beginnings of winter. Once again, the city became a shifting palette of colours and shapes and light.

  Ameena’s debut show had taken place and everyone agreed that it had been a success on several fronts. She had sold seven paintings on opening night and another nine over the rest of the ten-day period. Ameena herself had been somewhat disappointed, feeling a kind of secret shame in taking back the fourteen unclaimed pieces, but Suzy had taken her aside and spoken to her, not unkindly but in her usual clipped, businesslike manner.

  ‘Can I tell you a sad story?’ she had said.

  ‘No, please don’t.’

  ‘I once had an artist,’ Suzy pressed on, ignoring her, ‘a very promising young man. He started off as an underground graffiti artist and morphed into a painter, he was sensational, stunning – this was New York in the 80s and his work was genre-busting stuff. But we weren’t able to sell anything on his first show. And I told him it was okay. It’s normal in the art business. When something doesn’t look like anything you already know, it’s hard to recognize it as great. But he took it so badly, the failure of that debut show, he stopped painting.’

  Ameena had nodded. ‘That is a sad story.’

  ‘Yes, but do you know why it is sad?’

  ‘Because he didn’t sell anything?’

  ‘No. Because he quit.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ameena had said.

  ‘Not okay, Ameena, not okay. I felt for him, for many years, even now when I think of him, I possess it, this feeling… in Russian, we call it toska, a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for. You understand?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Suzy had sighed. ‘You don’t understand. Never mind. What is important is that you did wonderful. Superlative. You sold more than fifty per cent of your inventory. On your first show. That is great, an incredible achievement. So, don’t sell yourself short. This is a tough game. And New York is a tough city. Which means if you want to play, you need to be tough. We will do another show in the spring.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. Because I believe in your work. So, we will have another show and this time we will try and invite some important people. And you will work hard for it, harder than you have ever worked in your life. But for now, go home, celebrate, rest, relax, make love, drink wine, enjoy your success.’

  There’d been an article about her in the newspaper a couple of days after the show. David had spotted it first, then Suzy had called to alert her to it and to congratulate her. ‘Good press is good,’ Suzy told Ameena on the phone. ‘Not as good as bad press
is bad, but still good. Congratulations.’

  ‘To me,’ David read aloud, ‘an art lover, not a critic, her work is fabulous: it feels fresh and contemporary, with a hectic, deeply human sensibility. It’s beautiful and busy, young and timeless, graphic, chaotic, arresting, rhythmic, packed with ambiguous codes; there’s a questioning of identity, and an artistic engagement with life’s polyrhythmic dimensions. A definite feather in the cap for Suzy Lipskis and co. – you could stand in front of an Amena Hamid painting and be fascinated for hours.’

  ‘Wow,’ David said, putting the newspaper down, ‘just wow.’

  ‘But they spelled my name wrong!’ Ameena replied.

  2.16

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

  Late one night – it was a Tuesday – Ameena had been home alone working on a watercolour that wasn’t quite turning out the way she saw it in her head. She stepped back and looked at it with a frown. Then she stood up on her bed and scrutinised it from there. ‘Any which way you look at it,’ she said aloud, ‘this blows.’ She wondered if she should call David over to get his opinion – he was painfully objective about her work and, she had to admit, always at least partly right. She picked up her phone and was about to call his number when she realised he was at a gig downtown that night. Where are you when I need you? she whispered into the blank phone. For a moment, she held the screen against her cheek, feeling its coolness on her skin, then put it away and decided instead to settle for a glass of water. Yup, she thought, wiping her forehead with the paint-streaked back of her palm, nothing makes panic recede faster than a glass of water. She went into the kitchen and ran the tap, waiting for the water to turn cold. She was standing like that, feeling the sensation of the running water on the tips of her fingers, like she was washing off all the anxiety, when she heard the click of the front door and Peggy walked in, looking flushed and happy.