Parts Unknown

Chapter 7





I let myself remember, finally. Think back once more to 1998, to the memories I’d shoved aside, so successfully, for so long.

Josh, Trevor, and Dov were my new, better family. After our night at the pub, so long ago, Dov held my elbow, steering me through the door. He pressed more closely against me than he needed to, probably, but I didn’t mind. I felt nothing for him but simple affection. After knowing him for just one evening, he felt, already, like my brother. Dad had Andrew, a “protegé” of his who’d confessed the strip club visits to me at a Christmas party this past winter. Sleazy as it was, Andrew was Dad’s substitute for Alex. Perhaps Dov could help me to forget that Alex was untouchable and Marty, unreachable.

In my drunken haze, I felt that these unlikely men were part of a new, different family—better than the one I’d left behind. It would be so nice if we could all live together in that little flat, forever.

I was lying in bed half-asleep near midnight when Josh came bounding in. He tossed himself on top of me and kissed me madly for about five minutes, his hands behind his back the whole time. I could tell he was hiding a bulky something. “What do you have there?” I laughed, failing to wiggle free, his weight pressing me into the soft mattress. Josh played keep-away for a few minutes as I chased him around the room; then, realizing that Josh’s room was directly above Boris’s, I stopped, fearing some brutal Eastern reprisal, got down on my knees, and wrapped my arms around his legs. “Please, please . . . I’ll be good if you give it to me . . . I’ll do anything you ask . . .” We were both laughing, but I felt his arousal as my head pressed against his crotch.

“Okay,” he relented, pulling a bag out from behind his back. “It’s for you. I know you left all your art supplies back home, and you’re really talented, so . . .” He shyly thrust it at me. Boldly labeled “Cass Art,” the plastic bag crinkled with promise as I squeezed it, feeling with my fingers what could be within. A hard bulk—a pad of some sort. A small box. And the unmistakable feel of brushes. I couldn’t stop smiling. “You didn’t!” I exclaimed.

“C’mon, silly, open it—you don’t know what it is yet!”

I opened the bag slowly, and peered inside. A thick D’Arches watercolor block, cold press paper. A small box of hand-selected Winsor & Newton watercolor tubes, just the color names making me dizzy with desire. Aureolin yellow. Rose madder genuine. Cerulean blue. Hooker’s green. Raw umber. And my favorite—alizarin crimson. The color of blood; the color of passion.

A small plastic travel palette, two watercolor brushes—one filbert, one round—and a natural sea sponge, for fixing mistakes.

“This really nice sales lady helped me out. I didn’t know what to get exactly—but she gave me the 4-1-1. I hope she picked the right stuff.” He shrugged, too casually.

“Josh—it’s perfect. But this must have cost a fortune. You didn’t have to do this.” That one bag must have cost him at least a day’s pay.

“Oh, but I did. I know how much you love painting, and I know you shouldn’t let it go. I remember you like to paint in oils, but maybe these watercolors will be okay, for now?”

I kissed him deeply, trying to flow all my love and gratitude into that one kiss. “It’s the best present anyone has ever given me. And yes, they’ll be more than okay. They’re wonderful. I’m going to start painting tomorrow.” I pulled off his shirt, urgently. I knew exactly what my first subject would be.

~ ~ ~

Painting was always the hardest thing I’d ever done, and the easiest. There was school painting, the kind of painting I hated. Last winter, freezing outdoors with my Composition II class near the edge of campus, painting the snow-covered athletic building with straight Cadmium Red Light from the tube (Professor Hutchens glaring at me disapprovingly; using straight tube color instead of mixing was the height of laziness). I couldn’t compete with Tranh anyway. She was a hyper-realistic painter who Prof. Hutchens loved. He was drooling over her perfect use of three-point perspective just then, in fact. I swiped some straight Cad Yellow Medium from the tube over the Cad Red roofline. Boring. Who wanted to paint that heinous 1960s-era structure anyhow, when I had a new shipment of doll heads from the vintage toy catalog waiting for me in my room? A whole box full of doll heads—the still life possibilities were endless. I shot Tranh a cutting look. She could shove her three-point perspective in . . .

So there was that kind of painting. Always competing mentally with the “better” painters. Never doing it right, the way a person was supposed to paint.

Make sure you have diagonal lines cross-cutting the canvas.

Don’t use too much white; it grays out your colors.

Don’t use black paint, either.

The main subject should never be in the center of the picture.

Your light source must be consistent.

Don’t put colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel near each other.

A whole list of don’ts I kept failing to remember, always alarmed to find I’d broken one of the rules, always too late.

And then there was the painting I did for myself. There were no rules. There were no consequences. It was freedom, it was like a drug, it was the only thing that was ever real.

Before I’d found the year abroad flyer that had saved me, I’d been so frustrated. In a frenzy of anxiety, one night last fall I’d clamped a piece of primed bristol board to my easel and grabbed my Gumby figurine and a hotplate I’d snarfed from home. I sometimes used the hotplate to heat up ramen noodles when I was too lazy to go down to the dining hall, but I had a more sinister purpose in mind that day. I turned it on and set Gumby on the coils. With Hansa yellow, I sketched in a light outline of Gumby, then began painting in a frenzy. When I was done two hours later, Gumby’s lower half had been reduced to a plastic puddle. Round eyes crazed, little plasticene arms reaching out to . . . someone.

My room smelled pretty toxic.

I collapsed on my bed, spent.

It boiled down to this: why even try when, like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass, no matter how hard I attempted to move forward, I was always stuck in the same spot? I wasn’t any different from Gumby. And art both saved me and held me back.

~ ~ ~

The next morning I woke up at six a.m., my brain in an exhausted but preternaturally alert state that frightened but pleased me. When I felt like this—anything could happen. I’d paint, and wouldn’t know who or what was moving my arm—as if my own unconscious was directing me. Dinosaur toys. Dishwashers. At the right moment, anything could call out to me in its living wash of color and shape. But this was more: more real and necessary than any mere object I’d ever painted before.

Josh was dead asleep. I filled a tumbler half-full with water, then methodically wet down the first page in the watercolor block with the filbert brush. I quickly sketched in Josh’s outline in aureolin yellow, then in fast electric strokes painted him in, swirling bright colors. Not bothering to mix, just letting the colors flow together and mingle, creating strange, organic whorls and patterns. Rose madder genuine, cerulean blue, aureolin in a light watery wash, making sure the light of the paper showed through, transparent yet substantial. Josh began emerging like a merman from the rough paper surface. Then, with the pointed round brush, I filled in the details—dark bristles on his unshaven chin (raw umber, hooker’s green), his hair sticking up in the back (alizarin mixed with umber), his sleep-flushed cheek (rose madder genuine). Quickly sketched in on the very bottom, Love always—Vivian. Gave it about fifteen minutes to dry enough so that I could prop it up on his nightstand, so it would be the first thing he’d see when he woke up, then got back in bed and snuggled close to him, feeling the warmth of his body. Asleep, he tightened his arm around me and pulled me close.

I was his. I belonged to him.

~ ~ ~

And so our days settled into a rhythm. I would paint, sitting on the floor, my back against the wall. Painting was now necessary, crucial: the most important thing I’d ever done. I couldn’t believe I’d thought to abandon it. Painting, with Josh nearby, I felt more vibrant than I ever had. In fact, I wondered if I had actually been alive before. Slipping through my days confused, purposeless, half-dead. No longer.

Meanwhile, Josh would lie on his bed, a wide-ruled pad of paper in front of him, a couple chewed pens on his nightstand. I’d paint anything I saw—an old hubcap I dragged in off the street, magazine photos, the view from his window. And Josh would write, in sharp jagged bursts, followed by lengthy lulls in which he’d lay his head down on the pad as if trying to transmute words directly from brain to paper.

“It’s all thanks to you,” he told me. “I was so stuck—wanting to write, not able to. Just waiting for something to change. And now that you’re here, I can do it. I’ll always be grateful.”

I felt the same. We filled each other, enabled each other to create when we couldn’t before.

Some days we’d take our supplies to a park—any park; a different one each time. Regent’s Park, Hyde Park, Green Park, the Heath. We’d hardly speak, but the air would sizzle between us. He is my soulmate, I would think. I owe it all to him. I wouldn’t need to say it, because I knew Josh thought the same.

Painting was like an electric pulse. Josh believed in my art, so I believed in it too. I’d never felt so free—as if by being with Josh, I had the key to the universe. It was a high, followed by pints at the Lamb and Castle—the nearby pub—or smoking cigarettes in the backyard with Josh, with my own pack of Silk Cuts now, pulling the smoke deep into my lungs and feeling lightheaded and clever. The brush moving over paper was a release and a necessity. I had never painted better in my life, pouring all my frustrations into that paintbrush, letting the anger and passion transmute into streams of color and light. Painting was like sex, on paper.

I took to carrying a little packet of salt with me in my knapsack, and a spray bottle of water, along with my painting supplies. I could sit on any bench, pull out my watercolor block, and start painting. Sprinkling salt on the damp paper caused the wet watercolor to surge around crazily in star shapes, glimmering abstract motions. I’d spray the paper and watch the color swirl madly, becoming something new and entirely different from what I’d intended.

Intent on Josh and on painting, I was unmoored from anything I’d known before. After just a few days, it felt like I’d been living with Josh for years. I had no Internet access, and limited funds to make international phone calls. Instead, my world consisted of Trevor, Boris, Josh, and Dov’s early-morning footsteps, across the hall.

And the familiar face of the matron behind the counter at the off-licence on the corner, her dull brown hair always set in rows of impossibly tight curls. I wondered if she wore a hairnet to keep those curls exactly in place, but I could never quite tell, furtively peeking as I handed her the heavy pound coins for the milk I’d buy in real glass bottles—milk that only lasted a couple days after peeling back the foil cap.

And the Pakistani man at the fish and chips shop, who wore the same rumpled white button-down shirt the few times I went there, and wrapped my fish and chips in real newspaper, just like they did in that old Andy Capp comic strip. His fingers were long, slender, and delicate, and I recognized the hands of a fellow artist. As he wrapped the fish I noticed his nails, specks underneath of paint colors that hadn’t washed away—oil paint, probably, it took forever to get that stuff off your hands—and I wondered what he painted and whether he wanted to be there, frying fish, right now. I smiled, and took my greasy package, and never asked.

I needed to go back to the hostel to pick up mail—friends and family had my address there, and had probably written—but I couldn’t find the time. Everyone I knew before was so far away, they might as well have lived on a different planet.

I halfheartedly scribbled a few untrue postcards. I wanted to write to everyone:



I have fallen madly in love. My life is changed forever.



But Josh felt like he should be just my secret for now, a precious gift that should not be shared. Instead I wrote variations of the following:



London is great! Big Ben and Westminster Abbey are as gorgeous in person as they are in the picture on the front of this postcard. Wish you were here.



But to Alex, I wrote this:



Everything is falling into place.



Out of everyone, I knew he’d understand.

Wilfully forgetting my past, I concentrated on the present. I quickly learned how to deal with London. How to go to the Lamb and Castle with Trevor and Dov, and order a pint of bitter, or a pint of Guinness. My change at the ready—always a pound and sixty-five pence. We’d sit in this one booth on the far left side, carved wood with ancient burgundy leather seat covers, worn soft by decades of bottoms sitting on them. We’d sit till closing time, drinking pint after pint—me, slowly, and only a couple—Dov amusing me and Trevor with silly magic tricks involving coins pulled from unlikely locations on our bodies, and telling stupid jokes: “Why is a cemetery a good place for shoes? Because it’s full of dead soles. Get it? Soles!”

Trevor would try to describe heat to us, like it was in Nigeria, dispelling the cold rainy night outside:

“It is like nothing you have ever known. It feels like it can enter your body, like it is alive. But when it gets cold, like here, I desire it. I wish the heat to eat me up!”

I’d smile uncomfortably, knowing the feeling: it was how I felt with Josh. And those nights at the pub felt like high school again, long evenings killing time with friends, holding off on homework till the last possible minute—and here, I was holding off on obligations too, for a while. As if this temporary belongingness could be my new reality for ever.

I knew the tube map by heart within a week; in fact, could not navigate my way through the city without it. Covent Garden to the Strand? Not far, but easier to simply pass my travelcard through the tube gates, go down some escalators, and emerge eventually at my destination.

I started speaking with a faux-British accent, adapting myself chameleon-like to my surroundings. I’d say “brilliant!” and “bloody hell” and “cheers,” just for the pleasure of saying them, even though I knew no British people.

I got used to the towel holders in public restrooms, always with an endless loop of cloth towels instead of paper towels to wipe your hands on. I figured out how to purchase tights, by denier thickness. Josh was taking me to see Cats, and I wanted to look fancy.

I’d often run into Dov in the kitchen. He had these four crocheted hacky sacks he was always juggling, even while scrambling eggs on the crotchety stove, whose gas fire kept sputtering out, always needing to be relit with match after match. On the back of the stove, Trevor always left a pot of stew, which he reheated whenever he needed a meal. It seemed a sure route to food poisoning, but what did I know—Trevor was always bright, and smiling, flashing white teeth.

“Will you teach me to juggle?” I asked Dov one day when we met up at breakfast time. “I never could figure it out.”

“Sure!” he agreed, “If Josh lets you out of his sight for a minute.” Dov was munching an Aero candy bar while scrambling eggs. I’d never seen the man without something in his mouth – food, beer, cigarettes. Trevor was using the built-in ironing board in the kitchen to press his undershirts, as he did every morning. In fact, he ironed everything: t-shirts, pants, even his underwear, probably, though not when I was around. Finished, he stacked the shirts neatly outside his bedroom, tightened the laces of his running shoes, and jogged out the front door. Without him, the kitchen felt too small. It didn’t have room for both Josh and Dov, looking at each other through narrowed eyes.

I half-turned, feeling Josh’s arms slide protectively around me. He was always touching me, or near me, and I was immensely comforted by his presence. When he’d go to work in the evenings, I’d feel untethered until I could search out Trevor or Dov and bask in their companionship. I didn’t want to be alone, not for a minute. If I did, I might think too much.

I met Dov’s chocolate-y eyes. “Anytime Dov, okay? Or maybe when Josh goes to work. You know.” I turned and smooched Josh, ignoring the slight narrowing of Dov’s eyes, not so friendly anymore.

Back in the present, I shook my head to clear it. Enough of these ancient memories. It was all in the past, a silly fantasy world, a month of dreams turned to dust, so long ago.