The Resurrection of Joan Ashby

by Cherise Wolas

  Fifteen interviews to find that place—people thinking they were interviewing him, he knowing it was the other way around. Then the sixteenth place, with all those endless stairs that he now races down and up several times every day, six double flights to the enormous loft on the top floor.

  That afternoon, when he stepped across the transom into the huge loft, his jaw dropped when he caught sight of the stone and wood behemoths in the vast middle distance. One in black stone, hovering just above the floor, made him think of some kind of encroaching goddess newly emerged from the depths. A second form, in green stone, rose up from a narrow point, seeming incapable of maintaining its balance, and yet it did, holding a shield for a giant, an off-center hole drilled straight through. The third sculpture made him think of lovers, two incredibly long, slender figures in white stone, nearly entwined, one slashed from top to bottom by a thin, narrow recessed rectangle, the other with a hollowed oval where a face would have gone, neither with any obvious human features, but he felt love surrounding them, from the spaces between them, and from where they nearly, but did not quite, touch. The last sculpture was the tallest, would learn later was the wood of a pear tree, the color flesh-tone pink, carved into multiple spirals, like the inner workings of sea shells, or the geometrics of the body, the insides painted a shocking red that instantly made him think of blood, of life and of death.

  He saw the sculptures first, before noticing anything else in the loft, had wanted to run to them, to feel their vibrant angles and curves, to follow the lines of the goddess, put his hand through the shield’s hole, the lover’s oval, run his fingers down the scooped-out rectangle of the other lover, to touch the cold of all those stones, the warmth, he imagined, of the smooth pink wood. The sculptures—The Bones of Dido 1967, Hercules 1970, Gasping Fish 1973, and Silence 1976—stood six, eight, ten, and eleven feet tall, carved by Paloma Rosen early in her career. He didn’t know their names then, or that she had decided never to part with them despite magnificent offers to sell.

  He had stared, floating in some distant galaxy, until a mellifluous, husky voice, tinged with an accent, brought him down to earth.

  “I am Paloma Rosen,” the voice said, and Theo Tesh Park’s spine shivered when he looked down and found a tiny beautiful old woman patiently waiting for his attention.

  “Welcome, Monsieur Park,” she said, and led him into the loft’s living-room area. He sat all the way back on the biggest, deepest couch he had ever seen, his long legs and big feet sticking straight out, jeans pooling around his knees, galumphing tennis shoes horizontal, six inches up from the floor. She had watched him silently as he rearranged himself, until his feet were flat on the white wood planks.

  “You’re an artist,” he said, embarrassed by the hunger he heard in his voice.

  She said nothing, leaned in closer, her stare so direct, appraising, evaluating, weighing him up for a very long time. He felt she was receiving him within herself, like a cookie, a grape popped whole.

  “I am indeed,” she had finally said. “Are you?”

  Was he what? An artist?

  The way she was looking at him, he thought she had to know he was not much of anything, was certainly no artist, unless there was something artistic about figuring out how to get by, the cons and short shrifts to get what he needed, to keep himself afloat, dressed, and fed, with someplace to lay his head at night.

  “I’m not any kind of artist,” he said.

  “You have lovely black eyes, unusual, without a speck of any other hue, no green, no hazel, no dashes of silver or gold, no occlusions. You may not be an artist, but you remind me of someone I was once close to, and he was an artist. But never mind all of that. Sans importance. Hors de propos. You and I are sitting here to discuss whether you might be the person I am seeking, the person I need at this time. Let us see how it goes.”

  Among all the English, she tossed in musical words Theo could not understand, that he realized were actually words in a foreign language, that were as foreign as he felt on her enormous couch in her unbelievable home with those extraordinary sculptures within view. He relaxed a little when he realized she was foreign, in maybe more ways than one, maybe even more than he.

  She was forthright and unsentimental, explaining to him why she had decided to give up her happy solitary existence, to take in a lodger now, some young person to replace the burnt-out lightbulbs, sweep away the decorative cobwebs, kill the spiders that spun them, fetch the basic groceries, make trips way uptown to Spanish Harlem, where prices were cheaper and lug back the staples, wait out the cycles at the one Laundromat in the neighborhood so that her work overalls and shirts, and her scrubbing cloths, with the right amount of softener for polishing her mammoth stone forms, were done right. The washing machine and dryer in the loft were not to be used for anything related to her work, but could be used to wash anything else. She would need him to sweep her studio and not touch anything, clean and sharpen her array of sculpting tools as requested, stropping them with a leather strap. Did he know how to strop with a leather strap? Could he use a whetstone to sharpen the kitchen knives to an inch of their lives? Could he make a mind-bending tuna fish salad, one that included pickle juice and capers and the thinnest chopped pieces of a single jalapeno? Was he capable of setting a lovely table for a formal dinner party? Did he know about all the forks, knives, spoons, glasses, and plates that accompanied such a formal party? Could he turn a cloth napkin into a swan, a turtle, a bow tie? Did he have issues with doing housework, find it beneath him, or consider it woman’s work? Could he wash windows, mop floors, wash the stove, clean the oven, clean out the refrigerator, set fresh contact paper in the kitchen cabinets, scented paper in her bureau drawers?—pointing then to some large space behind the opaque floor-to-ceiling screens he was familiar with; his sobo Chiyo had a small Shoji screen at the foot of her bed, as if that whisper-thin rice could withstand the wrath that sometimes blew through the bungalow.

  Did he know how to clean showers, sinks, toilets? Did he understand that the blue toilet-bowl cleanser had to be scrubbed with a brush, not left to do the work on its own, which it could not, and would only leave unsightly stains if not immediately attacked? Could he unscrew the grids over the air vents, rid them of all the dust clods that built up so supremely it was like seeing penicillin growing, without any need for a microscope?

  Could he do all she needed to him to do, whatever her requests, however mundane, peculiar or illogical, in exchange for room and board and a monthly stipend? When she told him how much she would pay him to live in the loft, to do what she asked him to do, it was a fortune she was offering. He would have lived there and done everything she wanted for free.

  “If you prove yourself, if perhaps you’re interested, if I think it feels right, if you feel right to me, I might train you to become my assistant, an artist’s assistant, teach you everything that you need to know, should know, about the world of creation. Which might actually help you create your own life. Of course, if I decide to spend the time training you in that way, and you prove yourself talented at such work, I would pay you an additional daily rate. But I will not pay you for the education you must undergo.”

  Theo listened spellbound to this world she was painting for him, a world he had never known existed, that he might actually be part of one day, and he wanted her to keep talking about it all, what she thought he might do in this remarkable place, in his own life, even when she came to an abrupt stop and was waiting for him to speak.

  In that long, tensile silence, he stared into her blue, blue eyes, ocean blue, ice blue, a frozen blue, the kind of blue that relaxed the marrow in his spine, a blue so strong it nearly erased the wrinkles lining her face. It wasn’t like that; she was beautiful, but old. Maybe even older than his sobo Chiyo, who cowered and ran to her plain room with her Shoji screen and her Butsudan shrine whenever his mother was back on the drugs, a brown bear on a rampage, blaming everyone, Sobo Chiyo particularly, for how things had turned out. And Sobo Ch
iyo doing her best to care for Theo when he was Emilio Inari Andramuño, and for Poppy, before Poppy disappeared into the desert, until she died, and Theo left home for good.

  On her deathbed, in her fossilized voice, in the Japanese she always spoke, his sobo said to him: I love you, but attend to what I say. You are a child of a weak woman, and I hate to say that about my own, but she has never had the strength to do right by herself, and she’s never done right by you or your sister. I will die knowing I failed her, that she failed herself. But if you make good, when you make good, I’ll know that too, and I’ll rest easy in my grave.

  Sobo Chiyo was buried now in Salinas, in the special hallowed ground in Yamato Cemetery intended especially for the Japanese, which she was, 100 percent. The way his mother was, but not Poppy or him entirely. Theo believed that his sobo had rested easier these past three years, somehow knowing he had gotten himself away, and he was positive that the woman whose name meant eternal, a thousand generations, was finally truly at peace since Paloma came into his life.

  That afternoon, answering the odd questions asked of him in the strange interview, Theo Tesh Park knew Paloma Rosen was the kind of person not made twice, no one else like her existing in the world, and when she said, “Do you have any questions for me?” he couldn’t believe he had the courage, the daring, to ask if she had any children.

  “My artistic nature, the force of my needs to accomplish my work, the way my life works in service to that, would not have mixed harmoniously with motherhood. Early on, I knew I did not want a life of bobbing and weaving between art and family, they fighting for my attention, me always being torn between the two, unable to acknowledge the truth in my blood, that no matter my ability to love, creation of art would always win out. For me, marriage, family life, motherhood were not sacred, art itself was then, still is, the great sacred thing, and from my earliest memories, I have always been devoted to it. So, perhaps more of an explanation than you expected, but non, no children for me.”

  He had been so glad to learn there were no children lucky enough to have her as a mother, and thought his own mother should have made such a choice, not had the children she was incapable of caring for, had failed to love beyond all else. Of course, had his mother been smart, he would not exist, and despite all the hardships, Theo wanted to be alive, perched on the edge of Paloma Rosen’s huge sofa, thinking that maybe the best mothers were those who hadn’t birthed their own, didn’t know some young man was that minute choosing the role for her.

  He had said yes to everything. Yes to being her errand boy, yes to all the mundane or peculiar or illogical tasks she said would be his to accomplish avec empressement, and when he must have looked confused, she said, with alacrity, a word he knew was English, but had no idea of its meaning. “Promptly,” she had said next, and he had nodded and said, “I can do that, I promise.” Yes to all the learning she said he would have to tackle in order to earn the potential of one day, perhaps, becoming her assistant, though he had not a clue what she meant by any of that. New places had opened up in Salinas before he left, galleries bringing suave monied people from Los Angeles and San Francisco, who bought the paintings that hung on walls. Theo had seen those buildings undergoing gut renovations, then the shiny floors, the white walls, cool folk trooping in and out of glass doors in a slinky dance, all of them, men and women, utterly gorgeous. He had walked past and wondered about the canvases he saw, what it all meant, but he had never gone in, had never felt such a place was meant for him.

  Paloma Rosen had been staring at him, waiting for him to answer her question about whether he was willing to be schooled by her, to engage himself in a course of education, and he said, “You’re the first real artist I’ve ever met. So I wouldn’t know what you would want me to do, as your assistant, I mean, but I’ll do whatever I should.”

  Her laugh was true and real, deep-throated, manly really, and she had said to him, “Good, but we shall not worry about any of that now. Mais, time will tell.”

  Though he had seen her at the front door, had followed her to the couch, when she stood up right then, at what he thought was the end of the interview, he had been shocked by her size. There was such power and force within her, the extreme magnetism that caught him, that he could see snaring so many others, but she was little, small, at least a foot shorter than he, with the long thick braids of a child, but pure white, swinging against her waist, and when he expected to see delicate hands, because there was something delicate about her, a serious elegance, she held up one hand, beckoning him to follow her deeper into the loft, when he thought she was going to show him the door, and that hand was outsized, the thick fingers bare, not a ring of any sort, the knuckles shaped like wizened marbles, nails very short, nearly, he thought, cut down to the quick, though she did not seem to him a nail-biting kind of person. That she might make someone else bite their nails, that he could see.

  He had followed her across the entire loft that seemed to stretch out forever, past the ten bookshelves standing on their own, with comfortable chairs and lamps set about like orphans, passing the enormous windows, one by one, each maybe ten feet long and four times his height, and he was nearly six and a half feet tall.

  When they reached a far corner of the loft, she opened a door to a bedroom, and walked in, and then opened another door.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said. “Come in and take a look,” and the bedroom was like being in heaven, all white and windowed and large, its walls filled with art, and he took many more steps forward, and peered around her to see into the white bathroom, that was old-fashioned in a way that the loft was not.

  She had stepped back then, and measured him from his feet to the top of his head, and said, “I think you’re too tall to use the bath as a bath, je suis désolée, but you can rehang the showerhead so it’s higher up,” and he saw she was right, the water would just graze his ribs.

  When he looked back at her, the flats of her palms were flying over the neat comforter laid across the king-sized bed in this room he prayed might become his. Thick fingers smoothing out every stray wrinkle, and she had stopped and looked up at him, said, “I am so sorry, Monsieur Park,” and his heart had roller-coastered into his stomach. “I should have asked you this first, because it’s a requisite—are you good with tools?”

  He was very good with tools, had fixed the family bungalow in Salinas, the fraying electrical cords, the frenzied plumbing, the door hinges that refused to stay put, the doors that never properly closed, the washing machine that bucked at will. He had not been able to do anything about the house itself, but he had kept it running, kept his sobo and his mother and his sister sheltered under a roof that never once sprung a leak. None of the people he had lived with in New York owned tools, wouldn’t know what to do with them even if they had, but he did.

  “I can do anything,” he said to Paloma Rosen. “I can put a tool chest together with all the right stuff.” He didn’t have the money to stock a proper tool chest, but he would figure it out.

  “N’êtes-vous pas doux,” Paloma Rosen had said to him, and he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that means.” She had laughed again, but he could tell that her laughter was with him, not against him.

  “It is French for aren’t you sweet. And, oui, you are très sweet. Do not worry. I own every tool you might possibly need. One last thing—if you do not like the art I have put on the walls, you must tell me. Maintenant, follow me.”

  It was so new to him, how someone could be both warm and briskly dismissive; he was used to only warmth from his sobo and his lost sister, cold from his mother.

  Then he was again sitting on the huge couch and Paloma Rosen was in front of him, a beautiful old lady with mannish hands sitting on a tree trunk that only now he noticed. Its girth so big he imagined the way the tree must have been, so old, living forever, tucked away in a forest no one had ever been able to find.

  “Alors qu’est-ce que vous en pensez? Sorry. So what do you think, Monsieur Pa
rk?” she said. “I assume this is a palace compared to what you’re used to.”

  She hadn’t known, still did not know, the half of it. He had never set foot in any place like Paloma Rosen’s loft, and that he would have a large bedroom of his own, his own bath.… The Salinas house was mean and small, and he had slept for years on a dingy pull-out couch in the canted living room. In New York, he had agreed to romantic entanglements that did him no good, just for a roof over his head, in Manhattan, in Brooklyn, in Queens, small places well cared-for, but sometimes cockroach-ridden, and when his quasi-roommates told him what they paid, he couldn’t understand the fortunes they spent. Three years sharing the beds’ of others, doing whatever they asked of him in all of those other ways. But then he had found Paloma Rosen’s wanted ad hanging from a lamppost: Artist offering room and board in exchange for errands and housekeeping. SoHo. Only serious applicants able to live-in need apply. Please, my days are very busy, I have no time to waste with perverts.

  It had seemed like a joke, but he had written to the email on the notice, and received a confirming email setting the interview. Even when Theo was on the subway coming from the depths of Brooklyn, getting off too early and making his way uptown, to a six-story building on a narrow cobbled side street named Wooster, with two businesses on the ground floor, a coffee place and a flower shop with blooms of every kind and color in metal containers on the sidewalk, it seemed like a joke, that the chance to live in the building, in the neighborhood, for free, for odd jobs, couldn’t possibly be real. But he had taken the chance, had run up all those stairs, neatened the topknot he had worn since he was twelve, and knocked, and then it seemed that the gig was his, if he wanted it. And he did.