I toss my keys in the living room as I pass.
The owls are still staring, and nobody talks.
The door closes behind me and I am standing in the corridor with three heavy bags, a laptop, and nowhere to go.
I can’t barge in on Julian like this. It would not be right. Just because we are in love, he must not feel obliged to adopt me like a stray dog.
So I turn towards the lift. One door down I ring the bell.
Abbie opens in a rather sheer pink dressing gown and fluffy, sparkly pink slippers. She has rollers in her silver-blonde hair, and something bright green smeared over most of her face.
“I was expecting you,” she says, and makes way.
“You were?” I say, confused, dragging my scruffy luggage through the doorway with a groan. I have never been especially close to Abbie. She is a sort of friend I suppose. But then, it seems to me that she’s a sort of friend to almost everyone.
“Yes. I hear things, you know. The walls are rather thin.”
I nod.
“I just need to leave these here for a few days, while I find a place to stay.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I am leaving home.”
She nods. “And a good thing, too. I shouldn’t say so, I know. I should have helped. A long time ago. I will never forgive myself.”
“It’s ok. I had to help myself, I suppose.”
“You were just a child. I should have helped.”
I shrug. “With ifs and woulds you could put Paris in a bottle, a friend of mine once said.”
She smiles, which in her current state of cracking green paint, is a rather grisly sight.
“Have cake. We will make plans. I’ll go fetch Julian. Or Julia. Whichever it is today.”
I look at her in some surprise.
“Oh, I knew you would end up together. I saw it coming days ago. I am so happy for you. For all three of you.”
She disappears in the bathroom for a while. Her tabby cat jumps on the table and delicately takes a crumb of cake from my dish. When Abbie comes out again, she’s human-colored and nicely coiffed. She’s a good-looking woman, in a somewhat wasted, gone-to-seed way.
“Have a shower. And pick whatever you want out of my wardrobe, dear.”
I wash myself in Abbie’s pink bathroom. Everything smells of roses and violets. The fluffy rugs in front of the lavatory, sink and shower are pale pink and immaculate. I am horrified by the steel dust that sheds out of my clothes and all over the place.
Her wardrobe, when I shyly open it, smells of lavender. There is nothing I could wear in there, though. Much too much pink-and-ruffles for my taste. It’s not Aunt Luisa style of pink. Some of these skirts are much too short or split much too far up for the Aunt Luisas of this world. But it’s still pink. I end up fishing a faded t-shirt from my rubbish bag. Tomorrow, I will go buy some new clothes. Lizzie’s beautiful things are gone, but I will never, ever wear rubbish again.
When Abbie comes back, Julian is close on her heels, with a rather shocked look. His hair is loose and wild, distinctly Julia-ish, for once.
“Are you all right, honey?” he asks.
“Never better. Just slightly homeless. I will fix that though.”
“We will fix it together.”
I smile to him, and reach out for his hand as he sits in front of a slice of cake.
****
Eighteen months later
Julia walked through the little garden balancing precariously on the uneven brick path. It was murder to walk in tall sandals on this surface, but the garden, however minuscule, had been irresistible when they had seen the house for the first time, and it was heaven to come back home to it after a day at work out in the grimy city. The house was cramped and it was more or less falling down around their ears, but there was a certain bohemian romance about the crumbling rooms. Even with Julian’s fairly decent salary, they could barely afford the rent now that Nina worked only part-time, but things would work out one way or another. Nina’s art was suddenly attracting lots of attention.
They were not very gifted gardeners, and their one flower bed looked like a horse had slept on it, but there were some very healthy tomato plants growing in huge pots along the south side of the house, climbing elegant, spiral steel poles, each topped by a mirror-polished sphere. The seeds had come from Italy and had been a peace offering from some of Nina’s younger cousins. Some of them were slowly coming ‘round to accept Nina’s “bizarre” choice of partner, although the older generation was still keeping their distance, much to Nina’s relief, in truth. Julia snatched a red cherry-sized tomato on the way, and wondered where all that amazing flavor came from. She had never tasted tomatoes half as good as theirs before.
She made her way gingerly to the shed at the back where Nina had set up her workshop. She could hear the excruciating shriek of a power drill coming through the thin walls of the building and she winced, but even so she walked on. No point bothering Nina while she worked, but she could at least give a look into the workshop through the window before going in and playing for half an hour or so. This was one of the great things about the house, that one could play the piano at all hours without bothering the neighbors.
Inside the shed, Nina was busily drilling hundreds of holes in several large pieces of driftwood she and Julian had brought in from the riverside some weeks back. They had been dried, sandblasted and then waxed and polished to a silvery, honeyed sheen. The wood begged to be stroked, like a lover’s thigh. A few of the sculptures were already finished, and stood against the wall of the shed, under a lean-to, waiting to go off to the art gallery. Planted in holes in the wood were innumerable, thin, curvy, springy steel stems, each topped by a tiny candle-holder. They were dead and still, right now, but Julia knew that at night, with a tea-light on each stem, the whole sculpture would come to life in its own flickering light. The thin stems appeared to wave and sway this way and that, like kelp under the sea. Nina had named them “Dangerous Tidal Streams”. Julia had no idea where that had come from. Most of Nina’s art had some connection to fairytales and mythical creatures. But the Tidal Streams sculptures were her favorite and most successful so far.
From the ceiling of the shed hung a myriad of faintly oscillating mobiles. That was her Aladdin cave. Some were made of mirror-polished steel spheres hanging from thin wires, others of DNA-like helicoid shapes, which, Nina said, were a bitch to buff just right. They danced in the slightest breeze, though, and caught the low evening sun, shooting shafts of dancing reflections in every direction like a disco ball. Nina’s sculptures were made of movement and light as much as steel, and they all had an eerie weightless quality to them. The most stunning piece of all was a pair of aluminum angel wings hanging from the wall. Each wing was as tall as Julia. Every single feather had been cut and hammered to shape and riveted on a light three-dimensional frame so that the wings, even in the current unfinished state, were almost disturbingly life-like.
Julia was ready to turn and go back to the house, when Nina suddenly looked up from her work. She immediately spotted her, although Julia was merely peering in at the window, and she smiled.
“Stop hiding. I can smell you are there.”
Julia laughed. There’s nothing for it, women-women have finer noses. And this perfume is a dead giveaway.
“I didn’t want to bother you.”
“I ain’t bothered. I was almost done anyway.”
Nina put away the drill, tossed her gloves in a tool box and came to kiss her through the window. Her lips were salty with sweat, and Julia felt like devouring her there and then.
“Is dinner ready, woman?” Nina said with a perfectly impish grin when Julia let go of her. “I’m starving.”
Julia pinched her nose. “There isn’t. The handle of the kitchen door fell off. If only there was a man in the house, maybe it would get fixed. But as things are we are locked out of the kitchen.”
“Ah, well, we will have to make do without a man,” said Nina, grinning
, and Julia could barely suppress a snort of laughter. Even when Julian was in the house, he was more likely to cook and sort out the laundry than to tackle repairs and maintenance.
Nina fished out some tools from boxes and drawers with the same nonchalance another girl would pick a lipstick and a kohl pencil, and they walked to the house together, hand in hand, smiling. The afternoon sun was hot on their left cheeks and lit amber-gold fires in Nina’s smoky eyes, but a gentle breeze stirred the air, and Julia’s locks with it.
Nina opened the kitchen door with a tool Julia didn’t even know the name of, and went to work repairing the handle.
Julia walked over to the piano in the next room and played some scattered notes, lazily. Then they became coherent chords, and she started playing, without singing, because she didn’t wholly trust her voice, “Let It Be Me”.
She smiled as she watched Nina working. Nina was dressed in greasy jeans and a torn tank-top. She was wearing a pair of scuffed biker boots and leather gloves, and she was shiny with sweat, after working hard all day in the sweltering summer heat. There was a dark smudge of dirt on the back of her neck. Her short, dark hair was as messy as if she had slicked it back with a handful of motor oil. The jeans were her own size though, and well cut, and the ragged tank-top hugged the muscular, slim curves of her upper body in the most delicious way, accentuating her small breasts, the narrowness of her waist, the wiry strength of her shoulders. Julia knew very well how cute she could be in the evenings, whenever she bothered with some nice clothes and a bit of makeup, but even by day without any effort towards prettiness, Nina was astonishingly, unconsciously sensual, while she worked.
She was such a scrumptious little tomboy.
She was neither male nor female, and a bit of both.
She was … heartbreakingly beautiful.
The End
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Woman as a Foreign Language Page 12
