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Joan Wilking
reads
A Larger Map of the World
in Real Audio format.
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The man wrapped around Laura’s daughter Olivia was laughing and running his fingers through her white blond hair. A tall graceful girl, Olivia’s shape was complimented by the black boots, blue jeans and thick black turtleneck sweater she was wearing, and by the man whose color, an almost exact match to her sweater, stood out in sharp contrast to the slice of skin left visible in the gap between it and the waistband of her pants, in even sharper contrast to her swinging, almost white, hair. They made a handsome couple, standing so obviously at ease on the sidewalk in front of the Thai restaurant, their heights perfectly matched salt and pepper shakers.
Olivia caught sight of Laura and waved. She angled the car into a space a few doors down. Before she could pull the key from the ignition the door whipped open and a voice called to her in a lilting accent she couldn’t quite place, French tinged with a hint of something else, “Allow me to help you.”
Behind the voice Laura heard Olivia’s laughter, and, “She’s not that kind of mother. She’s perfectly capable.”
“But this is our first meeting. It is the least that I can do, open the door for your Mother. How do you do,” he said, his fingers jabbing at her as she levered herself out of the hulking SUV.
Laura took his hand and let herself be guided onto the sidewalk. His grip was self-assured, surprisingly familiar, comfortable.
It was at moments like these that Laura was glad there was no one left to have to explain this to, no one left to argue it out with. It was a relief they were all gone, her parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, all of them disappointed when she became a painter instead of a teacher, scandalized when she married Jack, not because he was a drunk, but because he wasn’t a Jew.
“ A goy? You’re going to marry a goy?” her grandmother had said, her voice sharp as a paring knife.
What would she have thought of this? The very idea left Laura feeling stupid, stupid to find herself thinking about what her long dead grandmother would have thought about Olivia’s choice of men.
Long ago Laura’s daughter had instituted her own international exchange program. In high school, when she fell in love with a good natured Haitian boy whose head barely reached her shoulder, Laura let her move him into her room. That was the summer before Olivia left for college. Laura would be the first to admit it wasn’t the best idea, but that was the year Jack fell off the wagon again and set both of them spinning out of control. She knew she was being more than a little selfish. They were feeling so bleak, and the boyfriend was so relentlessly cheerful; they used him to prop themselves up.
Laura’s marriage and Olivia’s love affair fell apart for good just in time for Olivia to jet off to school in the Midwest. They’d gotten over it pretty quickly though, she and Olivia. She wasn’t so sure about the boyfriend.
Since then — it was already six years ago — there had been a string of others. Now here she was, Laura’s usually serious Olivia, standing arm and arm on 67th St., teasing another one, someone from Zimbabwe whose name Laura suddenly couldn’t remember although Olivia had repeated it and spelled it out for her several times.
Laura envied her daughter, always so sure of herself. Olivia had surpassed her in her self-confidence, her ability to get things done, to craft a life for herself even after the chaos of the marriage she had watched growing up. She had followed Laura’s example, up to a point, had gone where her own internal compass pointed her.
She’d wandered around after graduation, left her magna cum laude in a drawer and adventured, as she called it, first to Colombia, then to Peru, and finally to the West Coast. A year of fighting forest fires was enough for her.
“I’ve had it with this,” she’d said when she called to say she was coming home, “I woke up this morning to find I’d singed my eyebrows again.”
It was the “again” that had left Laura groping for something to say.
Now Laura was relieved to have her firmly planted close to home. Olivia worked for a charitable foundation, building databases and evaluating proposals to fund microeconomics projects; planting fig trees in Bolivia, building water treatment plants in Ecuador.
When it came to men, Olivia had had the good sense to push the wrong ones away - over and over again. How her choices fit into a classic psychological profile was of less interest to Laura than the fact that Olivia had gone beyond her somehow, leaving her proud and intimidated at the same time. She found herself careful, measured in her responses to her.
Inside the restaurant it was dark. Enormous embroidered panels, glittering elephants, marched across the walls. They were spangled and stitched with brightly colored threads on a background that looked black, but as Laura grew accustomed to the dim, turned out to be deep blue. It took the three of them a minute to adjust, the lack of light leaving them squinting.
Shina, it turned out that was his name, the “s” sibilant, the “i” sounded like a long “e”, walked forward to tell the hostess, “Three persons for the nonsmoking section, please.”
Then he swept back to them and draped an arm over Olivia’s shoulder. Laura didn’t miss it when his hand brushed her breast and the two of them giggled.
“They must reset a table for us. It will be not much more than a minute before we will be seated for lunch.”
He smiled broadly and Laura marveled at how white and even his teeth were. She found herself tightening her lips over her own before she spoke again.
“Olivia loves Thai food. The hotter the better. When she was a little girl she used to eat the chili peppers whole, she’d suck on them until her eyes
teared.”
Olivia made a face followed by a strangled noise as if Laura had just produced a baby picture of her lying naked on a bear rug. The hostess signaled to them and they followed her single file through the crowded restaurant to their table.
“I am familiar with your
work. I saw an exhibition when I lived abroad,” Shina said. “Such an unusual use of color, such... What is the word? ...vibrancy. And the borders, so interesting.”
“You must have seen the Paris show,” Laura said. “That was a long time ago. The new work is quite different.” She hoped she didn’t sound dismissive.
“Shina lived in Paris, Mother. For quite a few years.”
“I studied art and then again here in New York I received my degree in architecture. It was then that I won the prize and returned home...”
Olivia went on for him, “Can you believe it. He won this big prize to redesign the capital city and then the financing never came through. How many years did you work on it?”
“Nine,” Shina answered, looking chagrined. “Such a disappointment, after all that, for it to have come to nothing.”
Laura nodded in agreement as she worked the calculator in her head. Nine years in Zimbabwe, at least four in the states before getting his degree. The years in Paris. Olivia was only twenty four. He had to be well over thirty.
“So what is it that you do now? Do you work for a firm here in town?”
“Oh no. I no longer practice architecture.”
Olivia interrupted again. “Shina’s a portfolio manager.”
“Yes, that is right, I’m here for five years only, to make money, “ then that smile again and Laura had to admire the texture of his skin, his hair, the same color, both of them black but not a monochrome, a black infused with color, so much color that color was overcome by it.
The food arrived. Steaming platters of Red Curry with little yellow corns and bright green pea pods peeking out, and mounds of translucent Pad Thai sprinkled with crushed peanuts. Laura tried not to stare as Olivia hand fed him a taste of this and a bite of that, then cooed as he licked her fingers clean.
The next morning Olivia called early. “So what do you think?” she said.
Laura readjusted the cell phone and sat down, the damned thing was so small, convenient out on the street but a pain indoors. She took her time. The streetscape beyond the loft studio’s wall of windows was draped in haze. Lower Manhattan was still waking up. Delivery trucks rumbled down Broome St. Laura always preferred to get an early start on the day.
“Are you still there? I asked you, what do you think?” Olivia said again.
“Don’t you think it was a little premature? I mean subjecting him to your mother so soon. You only just met him.”
She reached for the take-out cup of coffee she’d left to cool and sipped at it.
“It wasn’t like that,” Olivia said. “You and I already had plans. He just tagged along. So, did you like him?”
“What’s not to like? He’s handsome. He’s well read. He knew my work, knew Gehry’s work and not just the museum in Bilboa. He loves the work of the Hadid sisters.”
“The Ha...whos?”
“You must have been in the ladies room powdering your nose when we had that conversation. What was it that he does again? For a living that is.”
Laura blew on the surface of the steaming liquid, still too hot. She put it down again.
“He’s in finance, Mother. I’d attempt to explain it, but you never understand those things.”
“Try me.”
“He trades. You know, stocks, bonds, that sort of thing. He watches the fluctuations of the market, plays them against each other. It’s all computerized these days.”
“He isn’t one of those day traders, is he?”
“For goodness sake, Mother, I don’t know. He does something that has to do with money. But you have to admit. He’s really sweet, isn’t he?”
With those last few words Laura knew it was pointless to worry. Sweet meant he was doomed. With Olivia it was a short step from sweet, to needy, to annoying, to it’s over. The poor man didn’t know it yet, he was history.
There was that brief time when Laura was still naive enough to believe the world could really change overnight. When it seemed they might all come together, live in harmony, make peace with one another; all the other usual clichés that came to nothing.
But then she had also believed her life with Jack would eventually even out, that he would mellow over time, settle down. Boy, had she been wrong about that. Maybe that was what had pushed her, what had made her so ambitious, so intent, so brave. But she was not Olivia. Her daughter had plotted
her own trajectory into the world.
In an art magazine interview, the writer, a frazzled young woman in red rimmed glasses that were much too big for her face, had once asked Laura, “Where do your images come from?”
“That’s a stupid question,” she had answered at the time. “Where do anybody’s images come from. The work is the work. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.”
She still believed it — the part about the work standing alone
— but the interviewer was right. Her paintings did come from somewhere. Everything she did came from somewhere. Every sight, sound, smell, every conversation added up to something, a careful piling up that sometimes resulted in art, sometimes in nothing more than an afternoon spent watching TV, spooning ice cream straight out of the carton.
For so many years she tried to control where she let the piling up take her, but it really didn’t matter anymore. Everything came to something eventually, coloring her life whether she wanted it to or not.
And Olivia was going to live her own life, colored by her own piling up, so different from Laura’s girlhood music, so few notes. Olivia’s world had been full of color early on, a carefully cultivated coloratura, multi-color trills up and down the scales. Laura had made certain of that. And if the truth was to be told, she liked the idea of having some sweet brown grandbabies, even if their father might turn out to be a financier or a day trader or whatever.
She imagined herself pushing a stroller through Washington Square, bumping into one friend after another.
“This is my granddaughter Imani (or Shekishia or Roshumba) ,” she would say, and the friends would admire the baby’s golden curls, her caramel colored skin. Her own little United Nations,
that would be nice.
Laura’s pictures, her increasingly moody Maps of the World, kept getting larger. Her early works were six inch squares, gessoed boards, painted in washed out road-map pastels, the palest pinks, blues, yellows, lavenders and greens, the colors brushed on, then drawn over with hair-thin pencil lines, depicting delicate highways, and roads leading to colored dots, directions to places no one had ever been. Laura’s world still seemed so big then, so many possibilities, so few disappointments. Love and air were all she and Jack needed to live. His sculptures were tentative, but he was still making them then.
“Come here Puppy,” he would shout to Olivia when she was still a little girl.
He would rig up a rope and lift her up onto one of his works in progress, usually something built out of rusted I-beams. “Now swing, ” he would say, and she would swoop down, clutching the rope, shrieking, “Look at me Daddy, I’m the Queen of the World.” And he would catch her in his arms, swing her around and lift her up to do it again. It surprised Laura, how the good memories hurt so much more than the bad ones.
The colors changed, and the pictures grew, both in size and technique. Primaries intensified with fluorescent pigments, acid blues, glow-in the-dark greens, bright red freeways spiraling into fantastic interchanges, clashing orange criss-crosses of longitudinal and latitudinal lines. As her work got bigger, more aggressive, Jack’s sculpture wasn’t working at all
— in fact, Jack wasn’t working at all. The best he could do was suck on a beer bottle and babble impossible schemes, rolling papers printed to look like dollar bills, giant toasted marshmallows. She hung on because of Olivia, because it wasn’t the way a marriage was supposed to be, because he stopped drinking for a while, because he started and stopped again and again. Laura bordered her pictures with checkerboard squares, thick encaustic walls to hold the colors in.
They sold very well.
And now, when the world felt pin-prick small, her daughter grown, her husband gone, the work had swelled to monumental size. She found herself working on enormous sheets of deckle edged paper, handmade, charcoal gray, alone. She covered them with layer upon layer of tar black oil-stick, rubbed on, then carved away with sharpened sticks, back down to the naked paper, careening highways bisected by broken lines. She told herself it was fine, that it felt good actually, to be alone. She was free now to scrawl screaming yellow scribbles into seas of black, into oceans of black-green, swirling away to nowhere without wondering, or for that matter caring anymore, about where the images came from.
“These’ll sell?” Olivia asked, changing the subject from her father to one of Laura’s pictures.
Laura didn’t like the tone of her voice. It had an edge to it.
She had made her usual mistake, had asked the question, knowing it would set Olivia off, “Heard anything from Dad?”
“Still out on the West Coast last time I heard. House
painting or something. He claims he’s straight, but, well you know...” Olivia had turned nasty then. “He wants me to come visit, if I pay for my own ticket, of course.”
She and Shina had stopped by the studio unannounced. The afternoon had turned gloomy outside and in.
“I think they have a peculiar sort of calm to them, ” Laura said indicating the new pictures pinned to the wall.
Olivia ran her finger down one of the jagged highways, “I think you need to get out more often Mother. These are positively gruesome.”
Shina pressed his hip to Olivia’s, “I can’t agree. I find that I like them. I like them very much, such an unusual use of color.”
Olivia rolled her eyes.
Uh, oh, Laura thought.
Pulling on a pair of white rubber gloves, she selected an oil stick, turned it edgewise and began applying broad overlapping strokes.
“Don’t touch those bare handed,” Laura warned Olivia who was reaching for one of the sticks, “The stuff is a bitch to get off.”
But it was too late. Olivia was already drawing sweeping lines on a sheet of scrap.
“Oh gross,” she said.
The warmth of her hand had started to melt the stick down, leaving a greasy black smear across her palm.
“Turpentine,” Laura said pointing to a gallon can on the loft windowsill. “ It’s the only thing that works, but it’ll leave your skin stained. You’ll just have to wait for it to wear off.”
“For some of us,” Shina said, holding up his own hand, flexing his ebony fingers, and smiling at them, “It never wears off.”
Outside it had started to rain. The patter on the wall of windows escalated to a roar. Water streamed down the glass in uneven sheets, warping the view on the other side.
Shina found a rag.
“May I?” he asked.
“Of course,” Laura answered, “Of course, you may.”
He had caught her off guard, had left her feeling vaguely ashamed. She wanted to say more, but no words came. She had come to like him, come to hope that maybe he and Olivia would stick, but today she felt awkward with him, with them. It bothered her, the feeling of unease. Laura pushed it away.
Shina tipped some turpentine onto the rag and handed it to Olivia. She began to clean her palm saying, “It must make it even harder, coming from a place where you never had to worry about being followed around by the store detective in Saks...”
“No fear of that at home. We have no Saks,” he laughed and Olivia softened and laughed with him.
“No, you just have to worry about being picked off by some gun-toting twelve-year-old sniping out a broken window in Harare. So awful.” Suddenly Olivia wanted to apologize to both of them for something. But for what? She didn’t know. For anything? For nothing?
Olivia tugged at Shina’s hand and led him to the other side of the loft where she started flipping through a stack of Laura’s older work, pointing, gesticulating. For an instant, from that distance, Laura thought she could have been watching herself, all those years ago, when she would do the same thing with Jack, trying so hard to make him understand. He never did.
The next week, when Olivia called to say, “I dumped him,” all Laura could think to comment was, “Already?”
She hoped she hadn’t sounded too much one way or the other.
“It wasn’t working out. I just couldn’t get into the money thing. Can you believe it? He has this five year plan. Five years to make five million. He’s already made one point five and is worried he won’t hit his target. Those are his words
— his target. I just couldn’t get into it. I mean what kind of life could I have with someone like that, someone who’s just about money, but he was sweet wasn’t he, Mom?”
“If he’s really got one point five, maybe I’ll marry him.”
Olivia cut her off, “I’m running late, meeting a friend for a drink, plays in an African Music ensemble, Django’s his name.”
“How did he take it?” Laura started to say but Olivia had already hung up.
She flipped the phone closed, put it down, turned back to the blank wall and mounted a fresh sheet of paper.
The table to her left held an array of pastels, oil-sticks, wax crayons. The colors all had names printed on their bright paper sleeves; Ivory Black, Lamp Black, Carbon Black, Cadmium Yellow... but something else kept creeping in...Jingo, Django, nasty words.
Laura reached for one of the black oil sticks then stopped and picked up the yellow instead.
What was it she’d read? If you want a cranky baby paint the nursery yellow.
She applied a layer, then another, and another, building the surface into sunny little peaks, a vast microcosmic mountain range, but she couldn’t get those words out of her head, couldn’t pull herself away from them. Jingo, Django, they stuck like burrs imbedded in a dog’s coat, so tight, so prickly, the only way to get rid of them would be to cut them out.
And pictures too. From when she was a little girl. Indelible images, moving pictures of her grandmother after dinner one Sunday night, after what was left of the roast capon and the asparagus hollandaise and the new potatoes coated with melted butter and chopped parsley had been cleared from the table, after the dishes had been washed and dried, after they’d all settled themselves in front of the
TV, her father in his wing chair, she and her mother and grandmother on the matching blue and green plaid sofa, waiting for the show to start.
Then, there he was, singing and dancing, his glass eye looking off into nowhere, Sammy Davis Jr., prancing across the stage, back-slapping the host.
And there was the sound. Such an ugly sound. Her grandmother’s voice, her twisted mouth, her wizened face surrounded by blue curls fresh from the hairdresser, her voice lowered, the one she used whenever she was about to confide terrible news.
“Whenever I see him, I can only think of one thing,” that poisonous voice was saying, slowly enunciating every word, spitting them out as if she’d been fed a piece of meat that had gone bad, “I can only think of that beautiful Swedish girl he married. That gorgeous blonde, Mai Britt.
Laura tried to push the image away, but it crept up on her again. At once Mai’s face was replaced. It was Olivia’s face Laura saw as she heard her grandmother going on and on with such obvious distaste, “All I can think about is that beautiful face - that beautiful white face kissing those lips
— those black, black lips.”
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