41
They have walked an hour out from the shoreline, across an arid plain dotted with shrines and temples left intact when the people were relocated and the land was flooded. Once the monsoon season arrives in earnest, the reservoir will fill up and submerge even these ancient structures, turn everything into an Indian Atlantis.
The lake, all greens, browns, and blues, is still a serious walk from where they are and it is busy there, over the water, where birds are congregating and socializing, the sun pebbled by shadows when the birds streak across the sky. She watches them floating on eddies of air, then diving, their watery world all flapping wings and screeches.
“Do you prefer them?”
Willem nods, and Joan likes that he understands her question.
“Because of the purity: the specifics of their life-spans, their migratory passages, their needs so basic, just sustenance and shelter.”
“Do you think they experience emotions the way we do, like disappointment or loss?”
“Sure. Not so easy to identify, but love is apparent when they preen together or share food. Anger, when they wing slap, lunge, or outright attack. Happiness in the way they sometimes hum. Fear with the same fight-or-flight response we have. Even grief shows up when a bird is listless or drooping, or searching for a lost mate or a chick. Spend enough time with birds and you’ll notice they mirror our human behaviors when we feel love or anger or any of the other emotions we experience with frequency.”
Thirty minutes later, they reach the edge of the shrunken reservoir. Willem unfolds his collapsible tripod, readies his camera, lifts the binoculars to his eyes.
“They’ll come soon,” he says. And they do.
He is a beacon for the birds; they sail in gracefully and land, or dive-bomb the ground, but no matter how they arrive, they all wade into the shallow water, stand still, fetchingly turning their heads and opening their beaks, as if they know they are posing for their close-ups.
Willem shoots and shoots, switching lenses, removing the camera from the tripod, walking, stalking, or tiptoeing toward his subjects. Sometimes he ululates funny sounds, or sends out into the air low whistles. The birds circle and dart and allow Willem to do his work.
It is late afternoon when he packs up his photography equipment and they begin the long trek across the wrinkled reservoir floor to the far shoreline. It is strange walking on ground that will soon be underwater. Joan can feel the earth waiting to be fed by the monsoons, by snow that will fall in a few months, by the melting of that snow come next spring. She feels elementally attuned, miniature in the universe, nonessential to the ebb and flow of time. In this cratered landscape, with its sinkholes and its pecking flocks, she and Willem could be the last two people on the planet.
At the reservoir’s border, a muddy fen rides the shoreline. Willem loads Joan down with his equipment, photography bag around her neck, tripod in her arms, and he lifts her up and over the black slop, his boots squelching in the muddy terrain, even though just behind them the land is dry and hard-packed. When he sets her down, she feels the tiniest bit of loss. It was lovely being in his arms.
The lodge seems deserted when they return, and Joan wonders if they are the only guests. The reception area is a barely decorated space, an elevated stone desk, a stone floor, a small chandelier hung on too short a rope from the ceiling. When she looks up at the wooden staircase, its hard angles seem like a solvable mathematical problem.
They climb the stairs together. On the fourth floor, Willem says, “Meet up on the roof in an hour or so?” Joan nods and walks up the next flight. She hears Willem walking down the corridor, the key in the lock of his door.
She pushes open the door to her room. Puritanical furnishings—two single beds covered in blue chenille blankets, a blue grosgrain rug on the floor—lit up in sunset gold from the windows someone has opened for her. She is used to the colors of India, the various shades of red and yellow, all banned from this room. It has the feel of an old boarding-school dormitory. She leaves her mud-caked shoes near the door. Standing at the windows, it is easier to recognize the bruised beauty of the wetland. Beyond the reservoir, the granite bulwark of the Dhauladhar range soars upward from its green base, peaks blanketed by an eternal glacial snow that Willem has told her will never melt.
She steps out of her grimy clothes. The bathroom is more luxurious than the room: large shower and tub, modern sink and toilet, a full-length mirror. She looks relaxed, the faint lines around her eyes erased, her cheeks flushed from the sun. In the shower, she is amazed by the dirt washing off her body, out of her hair, spinning down the drain. She stays under the water a long time, then twists her hair into a high knot and stretches out naked and damp on the bed. Her ass, thighs, and calves feel taut and sore from walking such a distance on uneven ground wearing inappropriate footgear; her thick-soled tennis shoes are not up to the task, she needs hiking boots like Willem has.
The golden-red sun is hovering above the peaks when she dresses in the Indian tunic she bought in the Kotwali Bazaar, slips on her golden crystal sandals. She unravels her hair from its knot, and it falls like a black river down her back. She contemplates her reflection, leaves it down when she feels the trigger of something unrestrained within.
Willem and Joan are not the only lodge guests, because this place is too remote for a casual drop-in meal, and there are other people already dining on the roof. A young Indian couple in traditional dress sits at one table, glowing like characters in a Bollywood movie, the air between them fraught with flirtation within preapproved limitations. Nearby, two old Indian women are watching over them, chaperones picking at their dinners. At another table, a middle-aged father and his teenage son are speaking French. There is an empty space between them, a missing wife and mother. The father wears a look of retained power, but he seems lost, and Joan wonders which is responsible, divorce or death. The boy might be fourteen or fifteen, his eyes revealing something painfully adult that makes him appear worn, older than his years. The others look over and nod when Willem and Joan sit down at a table. Despite where they all are, at the edge of a reservoir, on the roof of a lodge in the middle of nowhere, there is no easy informality, no introductions, no exchanging of stories about how or why each party is in this isolated place inhabited primarily by birds.
Willem has brought with him a bottle of his Montepulciano, which a server quickly uncorks. When he clinks his glass against hers, he says, “I’ve done this for a very long time, and I’ve learned firsthand that when I’m having a rough time in life, watching birds alters everything, provides the right perspective on the world.”
* * *
Their second morning, an hour into their walk, Joan feels a thrill of recognition; she can identify a few of the birds she saw yesterday, recall their names. She is quick now to sight the binoculars where Willem points, to focus and find what he wants her to see, and it is still early in the day when he points out the Sarus cranes perched in the shallows.
He is good company, the way he provides just the right amount of educational information, before they again walk in silence. She watches as he scans the sky, the shallows, the mud, the small shipwrecked water in the middle of the deserted landscape. He has a list of birds he has been trying to sight over the years, to photograph for his own purposes, but today he is searching for buzzards, the subject of his next National Geographic piece.
“Are you aware we have a pack of flies following us?”
“My fault,” he says, and pulls from his backpack packets of raw meat that he opens and heaves in all directions. “Maybe this will entice them.”
They wait for hours, Willem on his knees, his eye at the camera that stands on the tripod, Joan on the ground, watching and waiting. It is peaceful sitting still in the midst of this preserve, listening to the blood sluicing through her veins, feeling the beat of her heart, the sunshine hot on her head, the way her eyes are fluttering closed on their own. Thoughts enter her mind and she lets them go, doesn’t try to hang on. It is the bes
t meditation she has yet experienced. Hours later, in their same places, not a single buzzard has come forth to claim the meat.
* * *
Up on the roof that night, a glass of Willem’s wine in her hand, the sky is its own dark lake, a sea of dazzling stars high above, their twins reflected across the land, bouncing off the water in the distance. They eat and drink the good wine, which makes them loose and quick to laugh, but she’s aware they skirt the personal, the facts about their individual lives, don’t talk about those wishes strangers talk about, the ones kept at the back of the mind. Willem has not asked if she is married—he would not have learned that information from her books or from any of the articles once written about her—or why she is here on her own. She has not asked whether he has found romance again in the years since his wife died. He is a man of angles and contradictions, happy in solitude, talented at conviviality. He talks with directness, does not mince words, but there is an innate diplomacy to his speech, even when he speaks bluntly. Joan wonders if it is a Dutch thing to not inquire too closely about the lives of others.
At the fifth-floor landing, Willem brushes his lips against her cheek, the kiss as soft as she imagines a bird’s feathers to be. She is disappointed when he continues down the next flight and disappears into his room at the end of the hall.
She’d left the windows in her room open, and the night air is warm and dry, the sky as impenetrable as she has ever seen it here in India. She thinks again about the pressure walks she and Martin started taking in March, distinct from their meandering neighborhood walks. After, Martin is always on a mission. He ignores their sweatiness, dispenses with their ritual kisses and caresses, instead he strips her, flips her over, and plunges in. Her hair in his fist, her head yanked back to the point just before pain, a forearm clasping her from shoulder to shoulder, hands gripping her ass, pulling her onto her knees, fingers wrapped tight around her throat, then driving back in—a fantasy she once enjoyed—but she never orgasms with him those times. The first time, it was the tenor that confused her, startled to be taken by her husband turned unfamiliar. That her pleasure was irrelevant to him had heated her blood in anger, until the air atomized. She had surrendered then, allowed him to press her head down into their pillows, aware he wanted her to dance at the end of his cock. That mental submission triggered the physical sensations, but still she had not come. When he finished, he had kissed the back of her neck and said, “I love you so much,” and left her belly-flopped on their bed, shiny with their sweat and their liquids, shocked, a hint of bruise spreading across her jugular that would not bloom until the next day. Martin had turned back once more and when she smiled, she had not known whether her smile was real, whether she meant it. Over the surging shower water, she heard him whistling, a pleased taker of that which he wanted, demanding in a way that was new. After all their years together, new for him too, she had hoped. The sweat on her body remained moist, and Joan did not know what exactly she felt. The act had excited her. She and Martin still had the habitual lovemaking down pat. Once or twice, sometimes three times a week, year in and out, but the frenzied need they used to feel for each other, that had endured despite one baby, two babies, and life itself, had dissipated, then fallen away. Only when Martin headed into another part of the house had she moved, taken a bath, touched herself while imagining Martin holding her throat firmly, forcing her to arch and arch, he thrusting and thrusting. She had come in less than a minute.
Here at the Pong Wetland, in her scholastic bedroom on the fifth floor of the lodge, wishing perhaps Willem had swept her away, Joan tosses her clothes onto the other bed, and climbs naked under the chenille. For the first time since arriving in India, she replays that particular scene with Martin in her mind, substitutes Willem for Martin, shivers deeply when she lets go, and is asleep in an instant.
* * *
Late in the afternoon on the third day, Joan takes herself, and the small notebook in which she’s recorded the names of birds she’s seen, to the empty rooftop restaurant. Has this venture, these birds, taught her anything about her plan for the future, about herself? Is there something in her old life not yet fully extinguished, or in these pages of notes she has taken, in these fine days she has spent with the Dutchman, the trips to the reservoir, sitting at shrines, wandering through stone temples, tracking the birds, that she can use?
She scribbles away, surprised to find she’s written Vita, Camille, Ela, old woman in the blue sari on the train.
Hesitant. That’s what she feels. When she rolls the word around in her mouth, it is as hard as a marble, capable of choking her if it slid down her throat, and Joan knows she has arrived at a truth. But hesitant about what, specifically? To recommit herself to her work? She makes it a statement, says to herself, I fear I will not be the writer I once was, but the statement sounds false, like she is telling a lie. Is she hesitant because of what she may need to do in order to return to her writing? That thought squirms down into her heart and nudges itself into place, next to the knots formed by Daniel. However wonderful it might be, but a love affair with handsome Willem Ackerman is not going to resolve anything. What she needs to resolve is her own life. Should she take the theft of Words of New Beginnings as a sign to rebuild, or not to rebuild? She turns to a fresh page in her notebook. When Willem arrives on the roof, camera around his neck, carrying two glasses and a bottle of champagne, her pen is still poised in the air.
“A treat,” he says, pulling out a chair with his boot, placing the glasses on the table. “The kitchen staff kept it cold for us since we arrived.”
He pops the cork and pours and Joan is glad that he does not touch her glass with his, or make a toast. Their silence feels right, any words spoken a pretense about their ability to mold civilization. There is the snap of the bubbles and the sun gasps its last flares before it vanishes behind the mountains.
Willem fills her glass back up and says, “Joan Ashby, I think it’s time I took you to bed.”
42
Since returning with Willem Ackerman from the bird sanctuary and reservoir, Joan is at last writing. Her first evening back, she wrote a second letter to the Dalai Lama, and Kartar delivered it that night to His Holiness’s secretary. The next morning, at eight, she sat down at her pine desk with her tea and her lentils, and opened the laptop to a blank page. Eight until one every day now, a firm schedule that buoys her each morning when she wakes.
There were egregious attempts: tortured pages about what brought her to Dharamshala, then tiny fictional stories that balled themselves up so tight no string she pulled could release them.
She aborted everything, and ceded at last, or perhaps finally, to the older women who refused to budge, standing firm as schoolmarms in her head. The illimitable Vita Brodkey, the stalwart Camille Nagy, the serene Ela, women who might have taken themselves to Joan’s imagined Devata when they were in their twenties, and still lived there all these decades later, making their art, growing aged and wise, oracles handing down their earned nuggets about life, its vicissitudes, its joys.
Vita, Camille, Ela, and even the old lady in the sparkling blue sari on the chhotey train with her milky eyes and broad smile, have transfigured Joan, and her time here. No longer does she smell the rancid aroma of a son’s betrayal, the rageful odors her own body gave off. Time itself has altered, is shaping itself into a resurgence and revival of her creative intelligence. She realized she wants what these women possess—the sensate truth that they are remarkable, even if the rest of the world barely spares them a glance. Each woman has a trumpeting call of Here I am, listen and learn. And Joan has been listening and she has been learning, taking up her own instrument again—the right words on the page—figuring out the way they ought to slide up against one another, or sing, or crash, filled with grace, with blood, with bravery.
She started fresh, warily constructing one sentence, then another, and then the one after that. It took a few days before she realized the stealthy steps were working. She felt like a burg
lar silently jimmying the lock and entering the house of her mind, of the minds of those older women, of all their individual dreams, hoping everyone’s treasures would be out on display. Now, each morning, Joan keeps her steps light when she returns to the intriguing search, careful with the gems she is finding—the precious stones of miraculous and original lives lived, the semiprecious ones reflecting truths learned in the nick of time, the false gold of failures socked away in some cabinet in the farthest reaches of those houses, secret places no one wants to remember.
* * *
Joan pulls open the marigold curtains and returns to bed with her notebook and pen. It is early, hours before her writing day begins, and she wants to jot down everything in her head:
Paloma Rosen in downtown New York, in SoHo, in a vast windowed loft where the seventy-nine-year-old sculptor has birthed her sensuous minimalistic forms by chopping at marble and wood and twisting her chisels, hammers, mallets, and rasps. For the last fifty years, sliced free of life’s normative strictures, Paloma Rosen has worked privately making her art, without need of outside approbation, never seeking an agent to represent her, a gallery to proclaim what she renders. Though she has no sign on the door, does not advertise, is not a grand dame of the art scene, serious collectors find her, her name whispered along, as the greatest sculptor of the century, a truth Paloma has always known, does not need to hear sung.
Her hands are arthritic from working her soulfully hard materials, the force required to carve into the hulking elements that the earth throws up—massive stones and exotic tree trunks transported on cargo ships and hoisted by pulleys through her windows. Knees bad from decades of kneeling as she carves, from climbing the double flights of steep stairs—a replica of the staircase at the Pong Wetland Lodge—six from pavement to home, five from pavement to studio, fifty internal steps between loft and studio, thirty-five steps from loft to roof deck and garden, all those stairs growing ever harder to manage. At this late stage of her life, Paloma will take in a lodger, a Sherpa to run all her errands, to traverse all those flights.
The Resurrection of Joan Ashby Page 45
