A Thousand Tiny Truths Page 6

  As we made our way out the door, she murmured into my ear, “Are you ready to have your head spun around?”

  I tried not to laugh when we walked into Pippa’s flat. But it looked as if someone had tipped all of the guests out of their chairs onto the floor. There were artists sitting in clumps of three or four around the living room, stuffing themselves on what I soon discovered were Polish dumplings her sister, Stasha, had made. There was loud crashing piano playing on the stereo. A woman in a long orange dress put a bowl of food in my hand and led me to an empty spot on the cushiony rug. Beside me, a man and woman were having a conversation about something called “chance paintings.” The man poured himself some wine and drank it in one gulp. The woman talking was dressed in a striped satin bathrobe. “What I’ve done,” she explained, “is I’ve randomly stained bedsheets with ink and marbles—”

  Just at that moment, the music stopped. I turned towards the stereo and saw Oliver fumbling with a cord that had caught around his ankle. The man sitting cross-legged beside me closed his eyes and bobbed his head back and forth to the silence.

  I loved Stasha’s friends—their theatrical clothes and strange relationship to furniture—but it was clear to me that Oliver did not. He walked around clumsily, grimacing, as if there were tiny rocks in his shoes. After an hour, he retreated to a back wall. I looked for Pippa, who was gliding effortlessly from conversation to conversation, her eyes sparkling, her warm skin glistening. I watched the way she made a party seem like something good and fun. Then I turned towards Oliver, seated alone on a piano bench. Finally, with a sigh, I dragged myself over to join him.

  I could barely admit it to myself but I was beginning to feel ashamed of him. He had chosen to wear a tie, a cardigan and an ugly tweed jacket. For the first time I wondered what Pippa could possibly see in him. I had noticed that her sister, Stasha, could hardly stand his presence. When we arrived, she had flicked her fur stole at him in a dismissive greeting, and then proceeded to give him the cold shoulder.

  Why couldn’t Oliver be more with it? Why couldn’t I have been adopted by the man with the tight velvet pants, the one who called himself “Ben”?

  I saw Pippa heading in our direction. She thumped down between us.

  “You’re a bit mopey this evening, Oliver. Everyone has been asking about the ‘sad bookkeeper’ on the piano bench. What’s wrong? Crowd not to your liking?”

  “No,” he said bitterly. “Frankly, Pippa, I think they’re full of shit.”

  I don’t remember falling asleep at the party. They must have carried me home. But later I awoke to the sound of arguing. I placed my ear to the wall.

  “How can you be so sure of everything?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you act that way—as if anything that doesn’t settle into your view of what’s important is meaningless.”

  “I’m sorry, Pippa. But those people were complete phonies.”

  “Since when are you an expert on art?”

  “I’m not saying I’m an expert.”

  “That jacket, Oliver. Please take it off. It’s horrible.”

  “I tried to be open-minded.”

  “Then you can keep trying. Please, Oliver. We must agree to bend for each other. Promise me you’ll try a little harder.” She said this in a sweet and patient voice that made it clear she was feeling extra impatient.

  There was a little silence before he said, “If I must. If you insist.”

  And he did try. I found his tweed jacket folded in the rubbish bin the next morning. Over the next few days, he asked for Pippa’s opinion on Lamaism and Palmistry, the importance of good posture as an aid to digestion, and other topics he knew were of recent interest to her.

  Occasionally, she would stop whatever it was she was saying or doing and stare off into a corner, as if she could see someone there, and he put up with this too.

  WE DO TRY FOR THOSE WE GROW TO LOVE, don’t we. This morning, for example, I walked into the living room to find Iris playing dead.

  “It’s not playing dead. It’s called corpse pose. It’s the most important posture in all of yoga. What I’m doing,” she says, pausing for dramatic effect, “is rehearsing my death.”

  “Lovely,” I say, stepping over her. “Just let me know when you’re done.”

  I sit at the kitchen table and watch her while I drink my coffee and wonder if this sophisticated New York act of hers is covering some hidden damage. I’ve seen it before: a child playing urbane companion to her single mother, young girls behaving like mini-women.

  Another minute passes and she’s still lying there.

  “Don’t do that, Iris,” I say finally with a shiver.

  “What?” she says. Her eyes open.

  “Don’t play dead.”

  “Oh, come on, Marcel,” she says, making a space. “Just try it.”

  I hesitate for a moment. I look up at the ceiling, where I notice the paint is cracked and peeling. Then I make my way onto the floor and lie down.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, Pippa made every effort to include me, lavishing me with spontaneous hugs, asking for my opinion. She seemed eager to have me around. She took me to a shop called Mary Quant’s Bazaar and her favourite salon on the Edgware Road and asked my advice while she tried on clothes or had her hair done. But sometimes Oliver insisted that they go out alone for dinner or to the cinema, so he could have Pippa to himself. On such nights, Pippa called up her friend Martha to come keep watch.

  Martha Harling (whom we called “Mata Hari”) had a small place on nearby Clonmel Road in Parsons Green. She lived with her mother, Mrs. Harling, a vigorous white-haired widow in her early eighties. Mrs. Harling had been a successful stage actress in her birth country, Austria, and still wore thick pancake makeup and spoke in a quavering theatre voice. Once a week, she baked delicious loaves of raisin bread for her favourite neighbours, who lionized her for her efforts, thus fulfilling what Pippa called Mrs. Harling’s “fame needs.” Otherwise, Mrs. Harling sat in her doily-festooned parlour watching Candid Camera on the telly.

  Her daughter, Martha, had quit hairdressing and was now officially “in between jobs.” We called her Mata Hari because of her preference for bangles and wispy scarves and her dyed jet black hair. I liked to imagine that she was an exotic dancer or a spy.

  Sometimes she would spend the whole evening in our flat without removing her coat, claiming she was losing heat, and I could almost visualize it being siphoned off her. Sometimes she brought her white cat with her. It was a long-haired Persian and she would carry it as if she were holding a Salvador Dali clock to her chest. Often she carried books. Some of them had strange titles, such as Magical Mandalas and Virility & Vitality, and were crammed with clippings and notes on torn paper.

  Mata Hari was just one of the many rootless people who entered and exited and re-entered the flats on New King’s Road. There were a lot of visitors in those days, a lot of artist types in black ponchos, cast-off tuxedos, and moulting fur hats. Oliver complained that Pippa had a weakness for “the poor, the transient and the unstable.”

  Some of her visitors spoke English with strange accents and apologized for their poor pronunciation. Most of them had little experience with children and treated me as if I were a small grown-up. One man sat at Pippa’s coffee table and rewired a clock so that the hour, minute and second hands would tick backwards: anti-clockwise. Another artist was creating an all-white chess board with all-white pieces. (She told me that she wanted to see how long opponents could conduct a match with uncertain sides. How does one advance when the adversary is identical to oneself?) Oliver thought it was all idiocy. Pippa offered her misfit friends the respect normally bestowed upon prophets and great statesmen, and Oliver hated that. He hated the idea that people were living by rules of their own invention.

  Pippa’s lack of convention was growing more alarming by the day. She seemed incapable of staying indoors for very long. Trading her favourite high-heels for flat-soled loafers, she would
set off from her flat and walk for hours. Sometimes she walked so far that at nightfall she would have to borrow a telephone and call Stasha to pick her up.

  I was travelling on the bus with Oliver. It was Sunday afternoon and it had rained recently and the streets had a damp metal sheen. The bus had just turned the corner onto Bayswater Road, past the cash and carry when Oliver slapped the window and said, “Christ. That’s Pippa.”

  He leapt up, called to the driver to stop, and pulled me off the bus. I wanted to yell out to her, but Oliver held my arm and said, “Shh.”

  She was walking towards the entrance to Kensington Gardens. He nodded in her direction and said, “Look, Marcel, we’re going to play spy for bit.”

  I thought it was a fun game at first. We tailed after her at a distance to avoid being seen, listening for the gentle clopping of her shoes on the paved path as she slowed down. She was lost in her own thoughts and didn’t appear to notice us. I saw, as we got closer, that her hair was wet.

  After a short while, I started to feel nervous. What were we really doing? I looked over at Oliver, my hands waving, gesturing, Why are we hiding? He raised a finger to his lips.

  There was a tree up ahead along the path, with dark, glossy leaves and sooty branches that intertwined to form a canopy. She stopped under it. Oliver stepped back between two shrubs and pulled me with him. We waited to see what she would do.

  The ground was littered with faded petals and swollen buds that had fallen off the branches. Pippa bent over to inspect these. I watched as she tried to pry several buds open, manually bloom them, kneading, coaxing, slowly peeling, in one case revealing a frill of perfect satiny pink, which seemed to glow in the grey air. More buds fell from the tree, as if shaken.

  Two women strolling by noticed the shedding tree and hurried past, holding their hands over their faces to protect their powdered noses from any scattering of moisture.

  Pippa looked up, staring at the canopy of leaves. She lifted her arms as high as she could reach, and then opened her hands. The buds she had been holding fell with tiny splashes around her feet, with the weight of small tired birds. The ground was strewn with soft, beaten flowers. I felt a sudden chill.

  Pippa pushed her wet hair back from her face and crouched down, carefully making her selections—squeezing each bud between her thumb and fingers like a woman choosing the best oranges at a market—and putting them in her coat pockets. What criteria determined her choices? When she was finished, she stood, hiked up her sagging skirt and gave her bulging pockets two satisfied pats. She then turned her attention back to the shiny pavement and resumed walking, her soles lined with trampled petals.

  I reached out a hand, but something held me back from calling to her. I watched as she floated off—gone.

  When I looked at Oliver he was squeezing his eyes closed. I was beginning to understand that there were feelings he had that had nothing to do with me. But it still shocked me. I had never seen him cry before.

  I decided he had been crying over her beauty, in the way grown-ups sometimes cried over beautiful things that made them happy. I couldn’t understand, then, when he started to accuse Pippa of being overly concerned with her appearance.

  Why nail polish, satin nightgowns, new shoes? Why such high heels?

  Pippa stamped his forehead with kisses and said, “Relax, Oliver, I love you, I love you.”

  But he continued: Why were her socks damp? Where had she been walking? Why was she so cheerful? He even wanted to know when she had started drinking coffee instead of tea.

  “You have a lot of anger, Oliver,” she said.

  “Of course I do. What do you expect?”

  “But what have I done?”

  “You still think about him,” he said. “It’s obvious that he’s always on your mind.”

  “Of course he is, Oliver. But I’m here with you now, aren’t I?”

  I touched her arm. “Who’s always on your mind, Pippa?”

  She looked down at my hand and answered, “My father.”

  “What about your father? Did he go somewhere? Why do you look so sad, Pippa? Is your father okay?”

  She looked at me for a moment, and then with a strange half-smile said, “Don’t let it concern you, Marcel. My father will get better.”

  One day, when Pippa left her flat to run an errand, he checked her coat pockets, her desk, her purse. I begged him to stop but he would not. When I asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for his keys. When Pippa was home, he began listening to her end of the phone conversations.

  Once when she was at our place and in the middle of doing dishes, he informed her that he didn’t want her having dinners or parties that included men any more. “They’re all obsessed with you,” he said.

  When she said he was being ridiculous, he whipped a wet dishcloth at the window. Then he drove his fist into the cupboard door and almost broke his hand.

  While Pippa prepared an ice pack and studied the damage, he winced and moaned, “Why do you do this to me? Do I deserve this? Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?”

  “Oliver, you know perfectly well it’s in your head. You do it to yourself.”

  “In my head?” He glared at her in disbelief. “How dare you!”

  A second later, we watched him grab his coat and stagger out of the flat, down the steps, across the street. Pippa stared after him with her hands clenched at her sides. “Don’t worry,” she said, with a weak smile. “Everything will be fine.”

  But later that evening when he hadn’t come home, she seemed less sure. “What’s wrong with him?” she said, staring at the broken cupboard door.

  The next morning her eyes flitted over me as though I were part of the furniture. I felt my whole body grow cold. I watched her stand up, and make her way towards the door, and then I listened to the clang of the front gate as she walked away. Now it was my turn to cry.

  TONIGHT, when Iris finished her book report, she wanted to know if I thought artists noticed things more than average people. Do they have stronger vision? Would they make better crime scene witnesses? I didn’t know what to say, but the question made me consider my own declining perceptual powers. I used to really look at things. I’d look and look and then I’d store details away for the future. At some point I stopped looking closely and I don’t know exactly when that happened.

  It’s a sad paradox that expertise has made me less watchful. Perhaps that’s why the wiser artists venture into unknown territory—to disrupt that fatal momentum. They know that art requires a balance of experience and mystery, control and surrender.

  Iris is grinding an ink stick against a flat wet stone while black ink spatters her arms and shirt. A few minutes ago, when I relented and opened the door to my studio, her eyes lit up immediately: the overladen shelves, the tins, sticks, brushes, my old-fashioned dip pens and best Swiss pencils and brand new Pentel colour markers. The desk, which I had custom built, runs around two sides of the room. Now she is walking around without saying much, just gently lifting and touching. She becomes reverential at unpredictable moments. The sky beyond the window and skylight is white, making everything in the studio look crisp and cut-out. It’s the look of jars of ink—glowing black potions—that always gets to me.

  I watch Iris walk over to a lightbox and run a finger around a drawing I’ve been working on for a feature about ocean pollution.

  “Wow,” she says. “Is there anything you can’t draw?”

  I give her a modest smile and shrug. I have published thousands of drawings, ranging from tiny thumbnails in magazines to large posters in subways. I have drawn everything from plants to animals, celebrities to vagrants, the medical to the architectural. (I do not draw product images, I do not draw dead bodies.)

  She says she’d like to watch me work, so I sit down at the lightbox and quickly sketch a deep-sea diver.

  When I’m done, I ask her if she likes drawing and she says, “Sometimes, but, you know, I don’t like to draw from life very m
uch and I do things differently.”

  Then she tucks in the tag at the back of my shirt and offers to give me drawing lessons.

  OLIVER AND PIPPA DECIDED to take a pause from each other.

  I had seen it coming but it still depressed me. Pippa went to Paris so she could have “room to think,” and the postcards she sent me only depressed me further. I couldn’t put my mood into words but it was a feeling that some magical seal of protection had been broken.

  Oliver’s unpredictable behaviour didn’t help matters. From the moment Pippa left, he was a nervous mess. He seemed to pour all his energy into worrying about me. The everyday world was suddenly a place of looming danger. Germs. Traffic. Bad roads. Leaning trees. Strangers. Street bullies I thought Oliver was calling “Nancy” scum until I realized he was saying “Nazi.” Meningitis. Drug pushers. Nails in the grass. So many awful things could happen. I could feel the grit and meanness of the world entering me.

  On weekends now, Oliver found excuses to stay at home with me. He had never been the type of parent who played games, but with newfound enthusiasm, he taught me chess and poker and showed me how to bake ginger snaps while Mrs. Bowne recited instructions over the telephone. At night we continued with my “vocabulary expansion” and read from The Hobbit. We avoided the park. In fact, our entire existence seemed designed to avoid contact with the outside world.

  Oddly enough, Oliver began filing his best stories around this time. His reputation had been building ever since he landed an exclusive interview with Prime Minister Macmillan following his return from Africa. The focus of their conversation was his recent Wind of Change tour and his thoughts on independence. (“The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.”) Oliver landed a second interview with the prime minister following the election of John F. Kennedy in the United States. That same month he broke the story of a Soviet spy ring in London. His editor at Novus was pleased. He began spending more time reading the foreign news. He rushed to file his own stories, then read the latest dispatches and cables from around the world. Algeria. Kenya. Paraguay. Sierra Leone. Angola. He said big things were happening. The Empire was being shaken at its roots.