“Really?” Gavin muttered. “Easy for you to say.”
“No,” miss moon shine responded. “Not easy for me to say.” The way she enunciated the words caused the temperature in the class to drop, and no one said anything else.
Gavin was now in the NBA, following his own primeval need to earn loads of money. “No starving in a fucking attic for me,” he’d said when the subject of art as a career came up. Yet, he’d been the best artist in miss moon shine’s class. She’d said so herself, aloud, at the end, but that hadn’t swayed Gavin from his path. He told Christopher he’d only signed up for the course because he’d heard that nude models were coming to pose, and Christopher suspected this was a rumour miss moon shine had spread herself so that not only girls would take Introduction to Painting.
Once the dollars started rolling in, Gavin bought three of Christopher’s canvases, works that miss moon shine would’ve considered too dark, and violent. He’d also collected half a dozen of miss moon shine’s flowers.
Christopher had kept in touch with her for a few years after he graduated, and then the correspondence had dwindled to nothing. In one of his last messages, he’d asked her if “moon shine” was her real name. And she’d replied, “It doesn’t matter. When you try to paint the moon, just focus on the shine. Light is everything. They used to call me Alice when I was growing up.” Typical bullshit. Why couldn’t she have just answered the question?
He found out years later from Google that her birth name was Li Ying and that she was still teaching and painting, though she had neither Facebook nor Twitter accounts—something Stephen had forced him to have, despite his contempt for social media. “No ignoring it in this day and age,” his friend and agent stressed over and over, but miss moon shine obviously did.
When he’d told Lidia about her, and her obsession with light, Lidia had agreed that his paintings were overly dark. She even wondered audibly at times if they reflected some hidden anger. In their occasional heated quarrels, she had more than once snarled, “Go take it out on your frigging canvas and leave me alone.”
The darkness he portrayed connected with other viewers though, because his paintings sold, and sold well. He had Stephen to thank for some of it, but the rest was because of his talent. He wasn’t shy about admitting that. And Lidia recognized his skill even if she didn’t like all the paintings that hung in their loft apartment. To amuse her, and perhaps send a message to miss moon shine—if she ever came across his work, he’d started adding a random flower in the corner of his ominous cityscapes. Lidia laughed when she saw the first one, but she’d still thought he had a long way to go.
He wondered what she would’ve made of the paintings he did after her burial. Each stroke had felt as if he were stabbing her killers, slashing them to pieces. Except they were already dead. Blew themselves up afterwards. Each time he thought of them, the ball in his chest grew harder.
He’d painted for days. And got up at night to continue. Until he could no longer raise his right arm, and a bump bulged at his wrist. His doctor diagnosed tendinitis, sending him to an osteopath, but he ignored the exercises prescribed. Afterwards, with his left hand, he shredded the canvases he’d completed, while the two artists he shared his studio with looked on in panic, wondering what to do. When he had finished hacking, he slumped to the floor, sitting with his legs wide open like a child.
One of the artists, Féliciane, rushed for her mobile and called Stephen.
“Do you think this is what Lidia would’ve wanted?” Stephen asked him that night. And for the first time since her funeral, Christopher cried. He wanted to tell Stephen about the other thing he’d done, after the police called him to the morgue to identify Lidia’s limbless body. But the shame stopped him.
* * *
He wasn’t aware he’d slept until the soft knock came at the door. He opened his eyes and squeezed them back shut against the glare flooding the room. He’d have to ask her to do something about the curtains.
“Yes?”
“It’s me,” Miss Della said. “What time you want your breakfast? Or we going to exercise first?”
“What time is it?”
“Six thirty,” she said cheerfully. He groaned in response. Like nephew, like aunt. Stephen was always sending him phone messages at dawn, messages he saw only hours later because he’d begun turning off his phone when he and Lidia went to bed.
“Does that blasted man ever sleep?” Lidia had asked. “You two should be roommates.”
Except that wouldn’t have worked. Christopher went to bed late and slept long, while Stephen did the opposite.
“Okay. I’m getting up,” he told Miss Della through the door. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
He lay in bed for another ten minutes or so, looking at the ceiling and the patterns on the faded white paint. Miss Della needed a new roof. She’d shown him the buckets in the corners of the bedroom the evening before, telling him where to place them when it rained.
He eased off the mattress and shuffled down the corridor, his forty-four years feeling like eighty. One bathroom was at the end of the hall and the other en suite from Miss Della’s room. She had given him a tour of the place yesterday evening, showing him the four bedrooms upstairs, in addition to the living and dining areas below. He splashed cold water on his face, knowing that the tap for warm water didn’t work. If he wanted a hot shower, he’d have to heat up water in the electric kettle, add it to cold water in a basin, and pour it over himself, Miss Della had told him. It wasn’t worth the trouble.
He changed out of the shorts he’d slept in and put on light loose pants of Indian cotton that Lidia had bought. She’d said he looked “manly” in the orange-and-black triangular patterns, but he’d never worn the pants in public. Downstairs, Miss Della was already on the balcony, wearing a mauve tee-shirt and matching jogging trousers, twisting her torso from left to right. He joined her and began doing the same movements.
“You ever play basketball?” Miss Della asked, as he leant forward to show her the sun salute. It was the first posture Lidia had taught him, one Saturday morning in Prospect Park.
“Yes, in high school. You?”
She stretched her arms up, and her laugh tinkled. “Well, I used to play netball long-long time ago. It wasn’t something for a career though. When I leave high school, I work for a bit doing accounts. Then a few things happen here and there, and I decide to go into the nursery business.”
“You mean taking care of kids?” He wondered if that was how Stephen had come into her life.
“No, taking care of plants. Growing and selling them.”
“Oh.” He felt his chest constricting.
* * *
He and Lidia had no choice but to meet. She grew up in Firenze, Italy, her mother Italian and her father Iranian. And he was born in Firenze, Alabama, his mother Jamaican and his father American—a Vietnam vet who refused to eat the rice and peas his wife so loved. “I ate enough rice during the war to last a lifetime,” his father would say. Christopher had spent his first twelve years in Firenze, near the famed Beta Shoals studio where fading soul singers came to revive their careers with a last-chance recording. Millie J., Bobby Mack, these were some of the names who’d created dream songs there, his father told him. It wasn’t until his family moved to New York and he was in high school that he’d realised another Firenze existed, a place of different masterpieces.
Yet they hadn’t met in either of the Firenzes, but in a Brooklyn park. He’d gone there to sketch, not flowers but the cityscape behind the cherry blossom trees—making the outlines jagged and threatening as he did. He’d been immersed in his work, unmindful of the woman looking over his shoulder at his rapid hand movements, the black lines jumping off the paper. He was used to passersby stopping to have a look when he worked outdoors.
“Nice,” she said.
They all said that.
He glanced up and then looked again, struck by the face above the olive green of the park uniform, the wi
de almond-shaped eyes with the translucent brown pupils, and the curly black hair escaping from its bun. Maybe she was on some kind of photo shoot?
“So you’re an artist,” she said, stating the obvious.
“Hmmm, and you?”
“I guess I’m a gardener, or maybe a flower grower, plant caretaker, or something like that. Official title: landscape architect.”
So, not a model. She looked too down-to-earth and smart for that, he thought, while at the same time scolding himself for his prejudice.
He chatted with her as he continued sketching, and they discovered they were both Firenzines, which became a running joke from then on. It wasn’t until weeks later that he found out she was “Dr. Zarin,” with a PhD in financial economics from Columbia Business School.
“Why did you stop playing basketball?” Miss Della asked as they did the final posture, each supine on the beach towels she had brought out.
“I’ll tell you later. Just concentrate on your breathing for now.”
“Hmm mmm,” Miss Della said. “But why?”
“Didn’t enjoy it anymore. Art was more interesting. Up until now.” He sighed.
She said nothing else, and he listened to the whisper of their breath, in and out in unison.
* * *
Miss Della had already prepared fried dumplings with ackee and saltfish for breakfast. Now she began frying the slices of plantain that she’d left covered on a plate. The smells brought back his mother’s cooking, and he felt the instant connection, the slide to childhood. His mother had embraced her American life, but never the food. Her cooking bridged the space between her and the island, filling his nostrils with scents of a place that seemed farther away than it was. As if smell and taste should suffice, she had taken him “home” only once when he was growing up—information that Stephen had greeted with disbelief.
“You went only once? Only once?”
And he tried to explain that when you lived in Firenze, you couldn’t really be American and something else. You had to choose your identity, as his mother had done, for herself and for him, except for the food. Before flying to the island now, he had told his father where he was going, and the old man had been surprised. “Your mother would’ve liked that,” was all he said.
Like Miss Della, his father now lived alone, but that was the extent of the similarity. In the six years since his mother died, ending the onslaught from breast cancer, his father had grown more sullen and withdrawn. Only Lidia had been able to make his face glow. And he was getting forgetful too, repeating the same line he’d said five minutes before. Christopher knew how much his father missed Lidia, especially her laughter, but since the funeral, they hadn’t referred to what had happened.
Before Christopher left this time, his father asked him once again when he planned to come and collect the boxes of soul albums he had sorted for him, and Christopher sighed. “When I come back, Dad. I promise.”
He paid the wife of the building’s caretaker to check on his father every day and prepare his meals. And he gave her Stephen’s number too, just in case. He hoped she wouldn’t need it.
While Miss Della fried her plantains, the burnt-honey smell filling the kitchen, Christopher looked out the window at the yard. The dogs—in various stages of somnolence—eyed him back. Only Stripey stood tense, staring at him with an unnerving look of expectation.
“Why do you have so many dogs? For protection?”
“Only two is really mine, the one-dem that follow me everywhere,” she answered. “The rest come here after the landslide.”
“Landslide?”
“Yes, bout seven months ago, after all the rain. Hurricane season, you know? So everybody have to leave, the government say it was better. Normally people would ignore the fool-fool politician-dem, but a little bwoi die when it happen, and even though people might risk dem own life, dem not going to take chances when it come to dem pickney.”
“So, where did they go?”
“All over. Some just in town. You didn’t see the new house-dem, like little box? Other people gone farther away.”
“And you stayed?”
“Yes, the house okay, as you can see. Just the leaks.”
He looked round the kitchen, at the pots on the thick wooden shelf that ran high along one wall and the mugs on the hooks underneath. The shapes made him compose a painting in his head. That had always been his thing. Shapes, not flowers—something even miss moon shine had come to understand. She’d told him that his future might lay in graphics, or architecture.
“Does Stephen know?” he asked.
“Not everything,” Miss Della answered, without looking up. “Just that it rain hard, and a few of the plant-dem get wash way, and the house leaking here and there. No need for worry.”
She told him where to find knives and forks, and he set them on the table. When she brought the heaped plates over, he realised why Stephen hadn’t said anything about lunch.
After breakfast, he accompanied her with the dogs along the other side of the path from which he’d ascended and discovered that here was a shortcut down the hill, to the town, with a less steep incline. From the tyre marks, he realised that cars could come up to the street this way. He could’ve taken a taxi from the market square yesterday after the minibus from the airport had dropped him off in town, if only he’d paid better attention to Stephen’s directions.
Miss Della showed him where her nursery had been—a plot now occupied by weeds and mosquitoes.
“They say you should build your house on high ground, but nobody ever tell you bout landslides, right?” She laughed without humour. “Thank goodness I had enough save up to start over, and Stephen always such a big help. Don’t know what I would do without him.”
The new nursery was on flat ground, on land she rented from her doctor. As they walked, trailed by the two canine bodyguards, she told him how she’d cried after the landslide. Not only because of the child lost and the damage to her neighbours’ homes, but because of the plants and flowers swept away.
Christopher listened and felt the ball in his chest getting bigger, weightier. After the attack in the park—which had killed women, children at play, and three city employees tending the flowerbeds—people had been further outraged at the destruction in the city’s gardens that they’d woken up to a day later. Someone had gone on a rampage, ripping up plant after plant, trampling petals into the earth. It had outraged people, who spoke and posted about it for days. To Christopher, it had seemed they valued plant life more than human life. But now he guessed it was what the destruction symbolized that had so horrified the city’s residents. They thought the two attacks were linked, that the second was like pissing on someone after creeping up and knifing them in the back.
A smooth-skinned woman in her forties and an older man, both wearing khaki shirt and pants, greeted them at the nursery, exchanging jokes with Miss Della.
“So, who is your handsome young friend?” the woman teased.
“I bring him for you, Lorraine,” Miss Della replied, and the younger woman laughed, shooting Christopher a flirtatious look. But he could see it was just a game. He noted the thick, expensive-looking gold ring on her left hand, screaming out her status to the world.
He shook hands with the man, whom Miss Della introduced as Mr. Jordan. “Him is the best farmer round here, best orange, lime, and everything, but he come sometimes just to help me out.” Mr. Jordan smiled at her with what Chris saw as deep affection.
The nursery already had more than thirty different species, Miss Della told him proudly as he followed her, and the place was still growing. She led him between the rows of potted plants, pointing out yellow bells, anthurium, and amaryllis. She asked which ones he preferred.
He selected the yellow bells, their golden tones contrasting with the glazed sea-green of the ceramic pot. He would start with this.
* * *
They got into a rhythm over the next days. He learned to get up early and help her feed the
dogs. Afterwards they exercised on the balcony before the sun was fully up, and followed this with the big breakfast, washing down plantains, callaloo, and mackerel with sweetened mint tea.
When she left to go to the nursery, with Stripey and pal in tow, he set up his portable easel in the yard, placing the flowers on a folding table she had provided. The remaining dogs watched him as he worked, tensing when he cursed at a wrong stroke. He knew they were warming to him though; the wagging of tails wasn’t far off.
It was like learning all over again as he tried to capture the flowers on the canvas board. But he would keep at it, day after day, until he got it right, until he could depict that light miss moon shine always wanted, the light Lidia had brought. He could feel her at his shoulder, at ease with Stripey gone. She hadn’t asked this of him, but he needed to do it, so they could both find peace.
He would stay months if he had to, sitting among Miss Della’s dogs, until he had enough paintings to equal the plants he’d destroyed that night he’d run amok in Lidia’s gardens, ripping roots from the soil, tramping through the flowerbeds, like an animal gone mad from a shot that should have put it down. He’d felt blinding rage at the garden, those flowers, that hadn’t protected her.
He hoped she forgave him. Now.
“Nice,” she said, looking over his shoulder, and her laugh rang out.
chapter two
LPs and Drawings
I hope Christopher comes soon for the records. I’ve packed them up and they’re waiting for him in the back room. More than three hundred of them. Three hundred and thirteen to be exact. Eight from Percy Sledge alone. Yeah, he could sing. And five from Johnny Mayhew—Eileen bought those. I never could stand that too-suave voice. Like he’d never felt pain. But she adored him. When he came on TV, staring into the camera with his doe-like eyes, lashes as long as a girl’s, I always felt like switching the channel, but I indulged her instead. The other day I saw a youngish man on ABC who looked just like Johnny. Turned out it was his son. Who would’ve thought!
I guess Chris will chuck the Mayhew LPs out. I hope he’ll keep Percy and Otis and James. And Millie. I can’t remember when I stopped listening to them. One day I had to hear the music, it made me feel so much better, and the next, I couldn’t bear it. The silent house was easier than the memories.
A Million Aunties Page 2
