And Joan would wonder if it was true, that the good child rarely came out on top, and the child problematic since birth, slightly troubled in a way hard to identify, whose undeniable genius swelled in his teens, would win, taking up all the air in whatever room he happened to be in, in the house as a whole, in her every thought, setting she and Martin at odds, another triangle, this time a scalene, all its sides and angles different.
Joan would think back to that day in her old study, when she debated the thing her body first held. Had she done away with it from the start, there would have been no second child, this son blasting everything in his path, but neither would she have had Daniel. She tried holding on to that.
She would remember those parents who claimed they would give their lives to secure the life of their child, how she had scoffed, rejecting it outright. But there was a place that lurked beyond thought, beyond the notion of the now and the real, beyond personal and private dreams. She would wonder if that was what motherhood meant, the way a child could affect the way she breathed, her heart pumping hard, not with love, or maybe some love, but not only love, just the need for life to tick on, instant after instant after instant. Moments that strung out into days and weeks, then months and years, reduced from secret writer to some kind of crazy den mother, then a mother viewed as crazy, all those adolescent denials of Eric’s, before she was eventually proven right. All those years of knowing that at any time, an instant could fail, a person could crack that instant in half, into atomic, then subatomic pieces, and she would still need to be here, in her place. She had given life to them both, she could not allow one to die on her watch.
* * *
But before any of that, there was this:
Daniel sent postcards to Joan, so many that one arrived every single day, telling her what life was like on the road, the nature of highways, of truck-stop diners, the smell of the trees when he was in his tent alone at night, the creaking of branches under the waning moon, the crackle of lightning at dawn, the books he found at the campsites.
I’m reading Faulkner again. Someone left behind that Portable version. I swear it’s the same one you used to read to me. Did you ever read the introduction? Reading about his mythical kingdom is so cool, and it says when he started writing he wasn’t writing for other people, just telling stories to himself, like a lonely child in his imaginary world.
She thought then that Daniel wasn’t totally lost to himself, if he was still contemplating the nature of writing, showing her they were still united, a team.
Eric sent a total of one letter, a list of everything he was learning, that neither she nor Martin understood.
Dear Mom and Dad,
The people are nice, the food is good, the counselors are AMAZING. Yes, Mom, we take showers every day. This is what I’ve learned so far.
Programming - Basic, ML, C, LISP, Fortran, Logo, Pascal, CP/M
Computer theory
Utilities
Peripherals
Machine language
Assembly language
Scripting
Coding
Problem-solving
Software architecture
Graphics
Spreadsheets
Databases
Software operations
Apps
I am working on writing my own program. The counselors all say it’s a great idea.
It was clear Eric was deliriously happy, and at the end of the letter he wrote, “I really don’t need school anymore,” which made them laugh.
Joan marshaled Gus and his men, and Tony and his men, and when the lap pool was finished, a long sweep of darkened concrete filled with saltwater that turned a deep purple in the sun, she planted maiden grass seeds all around it, just beyond the apron of blue flagstone tiles that surrounded it, tiles that led up from the pool in the glen, past the knoll, through the gardens, to the house of nearly all windows, and another set of tiles that marched from their glass master bedroom through the gardens, and down to the pool.
When Martin was free, he and Joan drove into DC, flew for a fast weekend to New York, looking for furniture, a trip so short and directed, she didn’t bother to call Iger. They found what they liked, put the orders in, Joan gasping at the figures.
“We’re fine,” Martin said. “Plus, this is the house we’ll really live in for the rest of our days.”
It was a thought Joan liked very much when Martin said it, instantly imagining herself leaving it for a book tour, leaving it for readings, for panel discussions, for literary conferences, perhaps this time she would agree to participate in those conferences she had refused in the aftermath of her first, then second, collection. She would enjoy being one of the touted writers brought in to talk about her work, lending an ear, perhaps some basic advice, to the young writers so eager to become her, to enter the exalted group to which she had belonged from the start, but would make herself known again with Words. But how lovely it would be, Joan thought, to return to this sensational house when she had her fill of the outside literary world, was content with her place in it, needed the peace, the quiet, the silence to work on the next novel she would write. When she came back home to this home.
The workmen disappeared after the first week of August, their work completed, the house empty except for the furniture she and Martin retrieved from the storage unit, which would be tossed when the new arrived.
On the tenth of August, sitting again at their old kitchen table, the typewriter singing, Joan made the last minor edits to the final few pages of Words of New Beginnings.
The nine hundred–page book was finished. The long-expected first novel she would be proud to publish, that would recall the astonishing nature of her work, cement her reputation—a legacy now, rather than a trajectory, but the book would reconfigure that legacy into a trajectory. She knew it with absolute and immodest certainty.
Joan cracked open a bottle of champagne, meandered through the seven thousand feet of bright space, walked out onto their land, following the blue flagstone tiles as if she were playing a child’s game, through the bougainvillea she and Fancy had planted, the flowers climbing the wooden trellises they had built together, and the lilacs and hyacinth that were hanging on at the end of summer, and the pink and purple of the phlox and poppies and tulips, the wild violets, the lilac bushes, and field of lavender, the scarlet gerbera daisies, past the wooden benches arranged over the years throughout, where sometimes she and Martin sat and had a drink, past the vegetable plots that were dying, because they had mostly eaten out during the construction, so little picked the harvest.
She was swigging from the bottle as she went, the bubbles tickling her tongue, amazed by her accomplishment, amazed that motherhood, in the end, had not stifled her creativity, or her ambition, that she had managed to carve out a writing schedule to which she had mostly adhered these last nine years.
She would let the novel marinate until Eric was back in school, Daniel ensconced at college, then she would read Words through once more. The heavy lifting was done, but one more searching go-through was how she liked to work. Then she would tell Martin about it, call Volkmann, get on with her own life.
Back in the kitchen, with its clean cabinets, its shiny new appliances, the long limestone island so cool to the touch, she ran her fingers over its white swirls, its pale-green comets, took another swallow from the bottle, and set it down. On the bottom of the title page, she wrote in pen, Final Draft: August 10, 2007. She turned the book facedown, picked up the last few pages to read once more.
For ten solid days and nights in their arcadia, rain pelted the meadows and dandelion fields, bled the purpled hills gray, the mountain peaks were lost to the mist, the slow-moving brooks became torrents that rushed and screamed, the energy vortices were extinguished, sopping wet, blown out.
Everyone huddled in their one-room cabins, in their tree houses, in their modernized tepees, in the rooming houses they shared, in their painting and sculpting and pottery studios, th
eir rehearsal rooms, their writers’ alcoves, their music spaces, that they had built together when Devata was founded.
Five years of golden mystical weather disappeared with a thunderclap, the slap of first rain. But even though the muddied streets emptied, and the land’s energy locked itself away, no one stopped working, no one flagged, or took a break, or slept.
Through the lightning, the thunder, the teeming drops big as cats and dogs, everyone carried on, refreshing themselves with bread the bakers baked, with wine from the grapes the vintners nurtured, then stamped into juice, then bottled and let ripen, with cheese from the cows and goats farmers herded and milked, the milk curded, salted, and cured, getting naked for a quarter of an hour with another, to replenish their creative stores.
Anton and Lila finished the final strokes on the triptych they had jointly conceived, a rash of colors unknown to man, ground from the random stones and rocks found around Devata. Lila had been careful with Anton’s tender heart; it had flourished, grown huge, turned a bright, bright red. She had been carrying their baby from the moment they each laid a stroke on the canvases, the third canvas, that first stroke, one they had done together.
Bernard penciled in the final notes of his symphony, a scaffolding of birdsong, its undernotes turned electric and ethereal, that made people believe, when they heard bits and pieces floating from his windows, that if Devata was not heaven, which they thought it might be, then surely a real heaven existed, for the sounds Bernard created were impossible to attain without a belief in something even greater than their own personal talents.
Zena danced like a dervish in the rehearsal space she shared with Minu, whirling and twirling, adagio, allegro, bravura. Whipping fouetté turns, arabesques, grand jetés, tour jetés, and coupé jetés en tourant. There were strings of fast cabrioles, as Zena beat her legs in the air, one of Bernard’s birds gone mad, reaching perfect height and precision, and pas de bourrée courus, as she breathlessly glided en pointe across the varnished floor. She was wearing a delicate ballerina creation, as pale as the underside of a loving cloud, which clung to her body, made her a sculpture in motion. Minu, her lover, who would dance this dance with Zena, for all of Devata, who had helped to choreograph it from its inception, caught, on her camera, frame after frame of Zena moving through space, through the past, the present, and the future.
Bash, who still thought of Goa, still pictured the Italian marchesa in his mind, could easily conjure the faces of his family, hearts plucked free from their chests when they realized he had disappeared, had escaped in the van to the airport, along with the guests who had biked the Tuscan countryside for a week, or two, or three, whom Bash’s family had fed and watered with wine, he had learned a crucial lesson in Devata these years. He was free, unfettered, and it was what he had always known, he had a single life, built one word at a time, until the edifice sparkled, was strong enough to withstand doubt and old memories of hunger and fear and hurt and violence. He had written a glorious novel about his childhood in India, about the little boy who once splashed in the Arabian Sea, who found a seashell on a rock, put it to his ear, and heard the world. On the tenth night of the storm, Bash wrote The End at the bottom of the page marked -800-.
Before dawn on the eleventh day, every Devatan gathered in its center, in the rain. They held hands, turned their faces to the sky, let the water flood their skin, slide into their joints, their muscles, their bones. It felt as if they were waterlogging their own souls, their fervent spirits.
At first no one comprehended the sudden silence, but then they did, they understood, saw that the rain had stopped all at once.
In that sudden silence, the sounds they used to know returned. They heard the trees swaying in the faint breeze, the birds flapping their wings, their own breaths rushing in and out.
The mist dissipated, the hills regained their natural hue, the mountains reared up. The sun peered out from behind them, then climbed and climbed and climbed, a molten monolith, golden again and hot, spreading its rays across Devata, across all of their upturned faces, across all of the earth.
Joan felt her own breath perfectly syncopating, a lightness in her head that was not from the bubbly drink, so different, a miracle of expression, of grace, of epic achievement.
She, who had never believed in God, or in gods, who had felt writing was prayer, and that spirituality could be found in words, she thought she now might believe. Her people did. They had named their arcadia Dēvatā‘ōṁ kī bhūmi, Hindi for Land of the Gods, shortened to Devata; or rather Joan had named her conjured arcadia in that small unnamed American state Dēvatā‘ōṁ kī bhūmi. She had made gods of Bash, Lila, Minu, Zena, Bernard, and Anton, jointly controlling their own metamorphoses, the manifestations of their ripening talents, seeing beyond the horizon, seeing that the horizon no longer separated life from heaven.
She placed those last pages carefully down on the stone island and ran outside, ran across their land, through the high carpet of unmowed grass, sharp ends catching at her feet, through the gardens, then over the knoll, and down into the glen. She was crystalline ecstasy. Surrounded and protected by the tall trees she had planted, had nursed and encouraged. She called out her name, called out Joan Ashby, for that’s who she was, had always been. She flung off her summer dress and stood naked for a long time, feeling the sun heating her skin, feeling grounded to the earth, even as she was flying high. Then, as balletic and graceful as Zena would have been, Joan arched herself out into space, and plunged, for the first time, into the new pool.
19
At noon, on the eleventh of August, Joan was at the post office, a heavy package in her arms. Addressed to the United States Copyright Office, the package contained a copy of Words of New Beginnings and the copyright registration form she had filled out. The form had been so nondescript that she had signed her name with an absurd flourish. Storr & Storr had copyrighted her collections in the normal course, but it seemed right that she herself put this administrative exclamation mark to the long years spent writing the novel that neither publisher nor agent knew about yet. An insignificant but personal way to cap the achievement.
When it was Joan’s turn, she stepped up to the counter and smiled at the large man behind it, but his small red lips did not rise up in return. She placed the package on the counter, watched him drop it onto the scale, weigh it, tap in the zip code, tell her the amount she owed. She reached for her wallet, thinking that such a historic moment demanded something more momentous than this prosaic exchange.
Her cash disappeared into the register and she accepted her change and receipt. With more grace than he seemed likely to have, the man pivoted neatly and threw the proof of her accomplishment into the mail bin with a practiced underhand toss.
“Next,” he called out, and she stood there until he held up his hand to the customer behind her, and said, “Lady, you need something else? You need stamps?” She shook her head and relinquished her spot.
Walking out into the sunshine, Joan thought that certain moments in life just had to be perfect the way they were.
Twenty minutes later, she was driving out of Rhome, headed to the computer camp at the college a hundred miles away to retrieve Eric. Later in the afternoon, Martin would collect Daniel from the house of one of his friends with whom he had camped out across the country.
At four, as planned, Joan, with Eric, and Martin, with Daniel, met on their street. They wanted to unveil the new house together, to say a few words, but the boys bolted from the cars, raced up the walk, turned the handles of the new double-height frosted-glass front doors, and stepped inside.
“Hello, hello, hello,” they called out into the sharp whitewashed spaces, their own echoes welcoming them home. Then they yelled out their names, imprinting themselves on the fresh wood and plaster and paint and pale hardwood floors, alerting the house to their existences.
The family ate at the old kitchen table, wandered the house, swam in the saltwater pool, finished packing Daniel for college i
n short increments. He suddenly did not want to leave. “I want to stay forever,” he said, following it up with, “I’m just kidding,” but there was an undercurrent of truth.
They were all out by the pool when Daniel said again that he wanted to stay in the new house, stay with them all, and Joan said, “We don’t want to interfere with the fun you’ll have, but come home every month for a weekend. If you want to. We’ll all be waiting for you at the train station. Come and stay in your great new room, the new beds will be in soon. And you can swim in the pool, we’ll get you a timer so you can track your times, and you and Dad and Eric can watch movies on the flat-screen that will be in the den, and it will be great.”
Across the prone bodies of his father and brother, Daniel smiled at Joan, then came to her side and flopped down. Looking at him, she thought she ought to start swimming again seriously, was about to say she would follow his example, but then he picked up her hand and held on for a long, long time.
Eric was a motormouth since computer camp, wanted everyone to listen to the endless details of the beta program he had built there, which none of them understood, asking Joan and Martin over and over, “When does school begin again for me? When does Daniel leave? When can I talk to you both?” “Later,” they kept telling him, “once Daniel’s at college, we’ll focus entirely on you.”
Then Daniel was at school, in his dorm room, grinning away, telling his family he was fine, that they could leave, that he wanted them to leave.
“Please go already,” he said, and he walked them down the hall, past girls and boys as young and fresh-faced as he, all at the university early for team tryouts in their various sports, their families unpacking bags and boxes, and when Joan and Martin and Eric were back in the car, Daniel said, “I’ll call you after I race, tell you if I made the team or not, and thanks for the new cell phone.”
He turned on his heel, waved at them without looking back, then jogged to the front door of his dorm and disappeared inside. Joan watched him the whole time.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 20
