Parts Unknown (20 page)

“So where will you all be next year, then?” Josh asked the table.

“I hope to be working as a bank teller,” Trevor confided. “My dream is to work at Barclay’s Bank. Every day I go for job search, and every day I look for posts at banks. They have all been filled so far before I have had a chance to interview, but I am not concerned. There will be the job for me one day.”

“You bet, Trevor,” I encouraged him. “You’ll get that job.”

Dov slurped his bitter, talking out of the side of the glass. “I better the hell not be here, that’s for sure,” he slurred.

“If you hate it so much,” countered Josh, “Why are you here in the first place?”

“Oh, like you’d have any idea, rich boy,” sneered Dov. “We don’t all get to choose exactly where we want to be, and we don’t all have the money to even joke about writing our poncy fancy-ass novel. I’ve got a British passport, alright? And I’ve chosen to take my chances getting blown up in an IRA subway bomb instead of getting blown up on a bus in Tel Aviv, or having rocks and hand grenades thrown at me because I’m a soldier patrolling the Gaza strip.”

“Don’t pull that crap on me,” said Josh coldly. “You’re the biggest slacker I know. Don’t act all noble and self-sacrificing and shit, when you chose to bail out of your army service and smoke pot all day in London instead.”

Dov pounded his fist on the table. “You American Jews know nothing! You’re all smug in your little capitalist bubbles. Like sending money to Israel really makes up for what we have to live with every . . . single . . . frigging . . . day.
You
don’t wake up every morning wondering if you’ll survive the day.
You
don’t think twice about going inside a supermarket or getting on a bus. Well, listen, you little cocksucking --”

At this point Trevor forcibly intervened, putting his hands on Dov’s shoulders and forcing him to sit down again. He whispered audibly in Dov’s ear, “It’s Josh’s last night. Try to be polite, for heaven’s sake.”

I squirmed uncomfortably. I was so out of the loop, I couldn’t even begin to parse this animosity between these two Jews, thrown together in a foreign country and hating what the other represented. At least I knew now why those two had never gotten along. And I knew I had little hope of understanding Josh’s world, or Josh’s family—the family that knew nothing about me.

Dov was seething, at the bottom of his third pint already. Josh looked ready to bolt.

“So,” I interposed with forced cheer, attempting to recapture some shreds of conviviality. “We’ve figured out where we’ll be next summer, then. But what about five years from now? What’s everyone going to be doing then?”

Trevor said gamely, “I will be by then working in the back office at Barclay’s Bank. I have always wanted to do the behind-the scenes transactions. Tabulating the foreign exchange totals. Calculating the day’s trades.”

“You just want to wear a suit,” Dov teased him. “And you’d have a perfectly folded white handkerchief in your breast pocket.”

“You’ll look smashing,” I smiled, and Trevor flashed his even white teeth at us.

“I’m going to still be traveling,” Dov said. “Once I have enough money saved—I’m going to do what the Aussies and Kiwis do. They leave home and travel for, like, five years. They just keep going. And when they run out of money they pick up odd jobs here and there. So that’s what I’ll do. I figure in five years, I’ll be in Japan or Hong Kong. Maybe picking up work at a travel agency there or something. So what about you, nosy girl?”

I looked down thoughtfully at the patterns of circles the bottom of my glass had left on the cardboard Strongbow Cider coaster. “In five years . . . I want to be somewhere with my art. Really make a commitment to it, you know? Kind of like Josh with his writing . . . it’s silly, I guess, but it seems to be the one thing I’m kind of good at. And I want to get it out there in the world. Have these little pieces of me floating around out there, I don’t know, in people’s houses, and galleries, and coffee shops.”

“It’s not silly,” Josh said vehemently. “You know that. We’ve talked so much about this.”

He pulled me closer to him, really tight so that my lungs were squeezed. “Anyhow, in five years we’ll be married, huh,” he grinned. “With a couple little rugrats running around . . .”

I kissed him lightly. “You bet, big boy.” Everyone was laughing, good humor restored.

“Maybe,” I ventured, “In five years . . . or ten years . . . we’ll all meet again. Wouldn’t it be neat, to see each other again sometime. In some fabulous international location, of course.”

“Paris,” Trevor suggested, and Dov agreed.

“We’ll all meet at the
Jardin des Tuileries
,” Dov decided. “You two can bring the rugrats. Trevor will have a hot bank teller on his arm. I’ll still be a drunk pot-smoking loser, but I’ll fly there for free with all the frequent-flyer miles I’ll have from slaving away at international travel agencies for ten years, and I’ll get us all discounted hotel rooms.”

We clinked glasses. It would be time to leave soon. I miled sentimentally at all of them, grown-up boys on the verge of their real lives.

Chapter 10

Wednesday morning, I was waiting impatiently outside Blick Art Materials on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles ten minutes before it opened. The minute the doors were unlocked, I whirled through the aisles, restocking—stretched canvas, tubes of lovely creamy acrylic paint, palette paper, new bristle brushes. Acrylics instead of oils, because I was in too much of a hurry to wait for oil paint to dry. Acrylics instead of watercolor because the pastel, blurred hues of watercolor were not at all what I needed. I could hardly remember when I’d last felt such an intense
need
to put brush to canvas. Long before Lucy was born.

But today, I was burning, restless, awareness zigzagging through me in jagged arcs. I was so alert I could almost see colors that didn’t exist; everything around me pulsed with a bright energy that I could suddenly tune into. It was amazing, to feel so sharp, considering I’d slept just a few restless hours each night since Sunday.

Now that Josh was near, I had miraculously unfrozen. Thawed. I was becoming myself again. Finally, I knew the theme for the series I was going to paint, the one that would compose my artist’s portfolio. It would be called
Incineration
. Large canvases; thick, deep, dripping colors. Bodies rising phoenix-like from ashes. Forms writhing, twisting together, afire with passion or destruction. Great gouts of indian red, purple madder, venetian red, flung against the canvas with force, fading to rose madder on the edges, on a ground of dioxazine violet. Death. Conflagration. Rebirth. In which order, I wasn’t certain.

I set up my old travel easel in the kitchen so as not to stain the living room carpet. Unfolding the French easel was like a meditation—each wooden part pulling out, interlocking, tightening screws, shifting angles, until what was the small shape of a wooden backpack was suddenly a full-sized easel. Like those Transformer toys Alex played with when he was small—presto, from boring wooden box to instrument of inspiration. Opening the easel I inhaled whiffs of past painting sessions, each smell a memory—the lingering, acrid scent of turpentine; faint undertones of the easel’s wood; the musty, plastic-y smell of dried acrylic paint. Then, meditation over, not even bothering to take the time to coat the canvas with another layer of gesso, I began painting frantically, not wanting this feeling to end.

I’d never painted abstracts before, but I did now, till I had to pick up Lucy. I was ablaze, determined, filled with passion transmuted to brushstrokes on canvas. Thick, wild strokes that swirled, taunted, and danced. Each brushstroke was a release, yet it was like painting with my own blood. Parts of me splattering on the canvas, no longer the whole, self-contained person I was before—but fragmented, in pain, joyous but panicked at the same time. I couldn’t live the same life I had been, knowing he was out there. Josh was coming, and after Saturday, I could no longer be the same.

~ ~ ~

I was so distracted that afternoon when I picked up Lucy at Happy Hands preschool, I walked straight into Astrid as I shepherded Lucy out toward the car. I’d signed up to bring marshmallow Peeps to the class party on Friday. I even scrawled PEEPS on my hand with a leaky pen I found in my purse, so I wouldn’t forget. I couldn’t wait to get home and put Lucy down for a nap so I could finish that painting. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, or a crossword, where you’re almost at the end and just have a few pieces left, only a couple trivial words, and you’ve solved the puzzle. I was this close to being done, and nothing else mattered . . . ooof.

“Viv, look out! You’re a million miles away,” choked Astrid as I barreled into her.

“Sorry sweetie, you’re totally right. I didn’t see you at all. Listen . . . I’m painting again!” I exclaimed, glad to be able to blurt a tiny part of the truth to someone.

“Oh, good for you!” Astrid enveloped me in a warm hug. Lucy and Astrid’s son Mario had already run off to play together in the grassy enclosed area near the parking lot. “I’ve been waiting for this to happen. I knew you had it in you!” She pulled back and looked at me appraisingly, hands on my shoulders. “Look at you—you are on fire. Your aura’s totally pulsing, there’s orange
everywhere
!”

Astrid was the only real friend I’d made since Lucy was born. She lived a couple blocks away from me, and we’d run into each other so often at the preschool and at the tiny park at Curson and 8
^th
Street, it was almost inevitable we’d become friends. With her wild nimbus of super-curly wheat-colored hair and her bird-like bone structure, paired with her almost six-foot height, she looked like a stretched-out pixie. Her plumber husband Fernando—large, solid, and very much of this world—grounded her, but not by much. She sometimes did psychic readings in her home and during the preschool’s annual carnival. Due to her utter sincerity, she was extremely successful selling products for Herbalife. She genuinely believed in her spiritual powers, and although I couldn’t say whether any of her predictions had actually come to pass, I couldn’t think of any that hadn’t, either. Cautiously, I reserved judgment.

All these traits hampered her desirability as a friend, even in loosey-goosey Los Angeles, which was a relief for me. The more people avoided her, the more I could keep her for myself. As I’d discovered in my eight years living here, it was very hard to find a niche here, and a group to belong to. The poverty-stricken, artsy types I’d hung with on occasion during my Kingsley apartment-dwelling days didn’t mesh with the life I led now, spouse of a reserved statistics professor, mother of a young child. We lived in different worlds—creativity, versus parenthood. Thank goodness for Astrid; she grounded me in both of them.

Plus, I had no idea how to deal with other mothers—I couldn’t figure out how my experience could mesh with theirs. The parents at Happy Hands preschool always seemed to be so busy and sure of themselves, the kind of people who would actually converse about how their kids were “growing up too fast.” The kind of people who could spend a perfectly nice afternoon at the park dissecting potty-training strategies with each other. I spent so many hours a day with Lucy—the last thing I wanted to talk about with other grown-ups was my child. That probably made me seem like I was some sort of half-assed parent, which wasn’t true. Most of the time.

With Astrid, I didn’t have to worry about all of that. She was some fusion of Julia Cameron and Sylvia Browne. She was self-actualization in action.

“Listen, I can tell you’ve got stuff on your mind. But you wanna meet at the park later?” Astrid offered.

I jumped at the chance. “Sure, how about three o’clock? Lucy should be up and around by then.”

“Deal.”

I strapped Lucy into her car seat. She was singing tunelessly, over and over:

This little light of mine

I’m gonna let it shine

This little light of mine

I’m gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

It was one of those catchy little preschool songs that lodges in your head and refuses to let go. By the time we got home, I was singing it to myself, hummed it all the way to Lucy’s room with her. “Mommy, are leprechauns real?” she asked. They’d learned about St. Patrick’s Day the week before.

“Well,” I answered carefully. “I’ve never seen one, but I’d like to think they’re real.”

“Like Santa Claus?”

“Sure, like Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy.”

“What if they aren’t? What if we hope they’re real, but they’re not?” Lucy’s face was woeful.

Never underestimate a kid. “We just have to believe in them, honey. And maybe if we believe hard enough, they stay real.” She let her breath out in a big relieved
whoosh
. “I’m gonna believe, all the time!”

“Me too.”

Once Lucy had maneuvered herself into her ill-fitting nightie, I lay down on the floor next to her, curling my body around her warm one for a moment, feeling her relax almost immediately into sleep.

Because she had once been a part of my body, I felt a strange connection to her, which was never more apparent than at the moment she fell asleep. It was as if my whole body was always on alert for her when she was awake, making sure she hadn’t hung herself accidentally from her doorknob with a jump rope, or closed herself up inside a dresser drawer, or any number of ridiculous fates only a parent could envision. But the moment she fell asleep, my body knew it. Asleep, no harm could come to her of her own making. My body would relax too, in tune with the soft, slow vibes emanating from her little body.

In a state of half awakeness, cuddling her close, I thought about money. Since the weekend news of Bear Stearns’ collapse, George kept obsessively checking his retirement funds in his Fidelity account, although, never a daredevil, he had everything invested in low-risk treasury bonds and CDs. I had no retirement funds and no personal savings to worry about. George was my retirement security; our joint checking account was my only means of spending power. Love kept me with George, but money bound me to him.