Chapter Nine
“Can I help you?” Addison asked with a serious expression.
The man put his palms together and bowed his head. She found herself returning the motion.
“Hello. I’m Paresh,” he said. “Gicky sent me.”
Why?she thought, and then figured the man standing in front of her was the most likely source of the answer, and said it out loud. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I guess we will find out together.”
Addison didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
After settling him into his room, she headed to the studio. Her original intention had been to straighten and organize before Gicky’s gallerist visited to collect her work. The date was a few weeks away, but there was a lot to do. But the moment she sat down on her aunt’s bench and took a brush in her hand, everything changed. The feeling brought her back to college, where the pull of her fine arts classes always won over courses in graphic design or print media.
She really wanted to sculpt, but felt that painting was the first step toward that for her. Something about seeing and translating with a brush seemed to come before working in three dimensions. She had excelled in her fine arts classes in college—even though her parents limited her to two per semester, agreeing to support her as a graphic artist with a lucrative future as opposed to a starving artist with none. Their words exactly. After everything she learned from Margot, she was beginning to wonder how much her similar passions to her aunt Gicky had fueled that conversation with her parents.
Besides all that, she hoped her absence would encourage her new guest to entertain himself without her. She was wrong.
Paresh walked in drinking tea from one of Gicky’s mugs, ironically swiped from the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur. Or maybe it wasn’t ironic, maybe it was purposeful. Maybe the two had stolen a long weekend together at what Addison imagined to be a lavish and romantic old Indian palace turned hotel.
She studied Paresh’s features until he caught her doing so. She felt like she had seen him before, though she knew that wasn’t really possible.
“You are a painter as well, I see.”
She noted how his accent made ordinary words sound beautiful. She wondered what her midwestern drawl sounded like to him, though she knew it had definitely faded over the years. She sometimes caught herself sounding like a New Yorker, especially when ordering coffee or water.
She had clipped an old picture of Gicky to the top corner of her canvas. It was a shot of her from behind, staring out at the ocean in a very Andrew Wyeth Christina’s World kind of way. That’s not why she chose it though. It had been a long time since she had painted, let alone painted faces, and she was too insecure to attempt one yet.
“I paint, but I wouldn’t call myself a painter,” Addison answered.
“Semantics.” He smiled. She smiled too. It felt good to be called an artist, even if she didn’t quite believe it. “I’m an architect,” he offered, before changing the subject. “You look just as she did at your age,” he noted, with an obvious hint of melancholy.
He pulled a photo out of his wallet. It was one of those small square-bordered images with the date printed on the corner: July 1972. Gicky looked to be younger than Addison was now, but they were both at that age where it was hard to tell for sure. Everyone had always said that Addison looked like her dad, so it wasn’t a surprise that she would resemble his sister—though she had never noticed it before. In all fairness, her mother had removed all photos from their house after the Big Terrible Thing, and there were few images of Gicky online when Addison had googled her over the years. Putting in her name mostly brought her to auction houses and sites like 1stDibs. But there was no doubt that Morty Irwin and his two daughters resembled their father’s Yemenite ancestors far more than their mother’s Russian side.
Paresh stood behind her, staring at the photo.
“It’s nice for you to paint beautiful Gicky. I was often her muse.”
And suddenly Addison realized where she had recognized him from. He resembled the portrait of a young man that hung in her bedroom.
Curiosity piqued, she no longer wished to avoid him for the weekend. In fact, she wanted a shot at painting him. Gicky could wait.
“Can I paint you?” she asked tentatively.
He smiled, pulling up a cane-backed chair, and sat in it, catty-corner. She had her answer.
Paresh sat quietly for a good long while as the morning light danced across his face. At first Addison was intimidated thinking back to what she remembered of her aunt’s decade-long series of portraits of him, but then she made it her own. Leaning into her fear of painting faces, she went for a more abstract approach.
After a bit, the silence became painful.
“You can talk,” she said. “And no need to sit perfectly still.”
“Gicky insisted on silence and stillness,” he said. “It wasn’t a problem, as I’m quite fond of both.”
“Not me. Silence makes me nervous.”
“I guess you don’t meditate, then.”
“Not a chance. I tried once. It was torture.”
He laughed, a laugh that lit up his face. She wished she could capture it.
“Gicky claimed meditation elevated her art to a higher level. Your aunt said a true artist hears with their eyes. Do you feel that way?”
“I hate to disappoint you, but I am not a true artist. I’m a sellout. At least I was till I lost my job a few weeks ago.”
“At the advertising firm?”
Addison put down the brush and approached Paresh.
“Can I ask you a question?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “If Gicky kept such close track of me, even shared where I worked with her friends, why didn’t she ever reach out?”
“It’s hard to say. I know the rejection from your father left her wary of opening her heart. Plus, she feared giving him ammunition against her. She worried that contacting you behind his back would have angered him more. She always hoped he would come around.” Paresh looked into her eyes, and she found it hard to turn away.
“But please consider this—she is reaching out now.”
“Isn’t it too late?”
“Not at all. Sit with me.”
He opened up the closet, pulled out a threadbare rug and two cushions, and placed them on the floor in the corner of the sunlit room. He sat with his back against one wall and motioned for Addison to do the same on the other.
“I told you. I don’t meditate.”
“Indulge me.”
She sat, copying his posture, back straight, shoulders relaxed, eyes closed.
“Focus on your breath. Notice the sensation of the air as it enters and exits your nose. Place your left hand on your belly, and lose yourself in the rise and the fall—the rise and the fall.”
Out of respect more than conviction, she dove in. She knew from prior experience it was only a matter of seconds before her thoughts would stray to any of the million little things that kept her up at night. She had never possessed a quiet mind—and Paresh seemed to read it. Maybe it was just Meditation 101, but as soon as she began to drift, he said, “Be present, Addison. Don’t fight your thoughts and distractions. Acknowledge them without judgment, and then gently bring your attention back to your breath.”
She did, but a short time later, she was thinking about how her once best friend, Phoebe Thomas, stole her cupcake in the fourth grade. She couldn’t even keep her thoughts in the decade, let alone the moment. She focused on wrestling the random memories and distractions, hoping to return them to whatever corner of her brain they had escaped from. The experience reminded her of a childhood toy. An unsuspecting can of mixed nuts that, when opened, released a coil-covered snake that sprang out, offering a surprisingly satisfying prank. She had quickly excelled at wrangling the snake back into the can.
Her grandfather had brought her that toy on a visit from Florida. Her thoughts floated to her mother’s father, whom she had adored like no other, and who had become a far greater disappointment than Phoebe Thomas.
Focus on your breath, she heard Paresh say, unsure whether he had actually spoken again, or if she had remembered his words from minutes before. Either way, she complied, pushing aside the upsetting thoughts of her grandpa and placing her left hand on her belly and silently chanting, In, out, in, out.
She managed to breathe like that for a minute or two, but it didn’t last.
She adjusted her gaze to meet his eyes. No words were necessary.
“Sometimes listening to a story helps. Can I tell you a story?”
“Please do,” she said as she crossed her legs and lowered her gaze, giving it a real try.
With his quiet voice rising and falling within the syllables of a word in almost a hypnotic way, he told the tale of the weaver and the princess.
“Once, there was a talented weaver who created beautiful and intricate patterns on his loom. He was known throughout the land for his artistry and skill. One day, the weaver was commissioned by the king to create a special tapestry for his daughter, the princess.
“The weaver accepted the challenge and worked on the tapestry. However, he found he couldn’t create anything that satisfied him. He worked for many days and nights, but the tapestry remained incomplete.
“Feeling frustrated and defeated, the weaver took a walk in the woods. There, he met a sage who asked him what was troubling him. The weaver explained his situation, and the sage said, ‘Love is the thread of creativity. Without love, your work will remain incomplete.’
“The weaver realized he had been so focused on the technical aspects of his work that he had forgotten the love that he had for his craft. He returned to his loom and wove a new tapestry with love in his heart, pouring his passion into the task. He thought of his adoring mother and his beautiful wife. Of his young daughter who clung to his hand when walking through town. He thought of his grandmother who had raised him. The patterns he created were dense with the energy of his love, and his work came to life. When the princess saw the completed tapestry, she was amazed at its beauty and wept with joy.
“The weaver realized that the sage was right, love truly was the thread of creativity. In order to create beauty, you need to have a warm heart.”
The story sank in and left her with a palpable feeling of loneliness that she didn’t quite understand. It felt hard to breathe. Addison blinked her eyes, surprised to feel tears coming on. One escaped, and Paresh noticed it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. But Addison knew he wasn’t truly sorry. Had Gicky sent him there to crack open her heart? She wiped her eyes and stood up. She felt naked and vulnerable in a way that made her very uncomfortable. She badly wanted it to stop.
“I’m going to head to the market to pick up lunch before the afternoon rush.”
“Isn’t the afternoon rush the best part?”
“Not for me.”
At the market, she decided to err on the side of caution, and filled her basket with ingredients for a salad, operating on the assumption that Paresh was a vegetarian.
On the bike ride home, Addison thought of Paresh’s words—in order to create beauty, you need to have a warm heart. With her grandfather still top of mind, she thought of the day her heart turned cold. Though cold may be too harsh—more like temperate. Her heart was temperate. Welcoming of warmth, but wary of heat. Never willing to risk what it would take to get carried away by someone else’s love.
Addison had adored her maternal grandfather with all of her heart. His warm smile, his hearty belly laugh, the way she and her sister took turns dancing on his feet. His hugs when he greeted her, wrapping his arms around her little frame in a layer of love and strength that Addison carried with her long after his visits ended. At twelve, when he passed, she promised herself she would carry the feeling of his hugs with her always. But always didn’t last more than a day.
The cousins were bored at the shiva and decided to play a silent game of hide-and-go-seek. With dozens of people coming in and out of their grandparents’ house, no one would know they were missing except for the kid who was seeking (at that point, her cousin Astrid). Addison slipped into her grandparents’ room. She lifted the lid on her grandpa’s mahogany humidor and breathed in the scent of Cuban cigars that had always engulfed him. She slipped one out, waved it under her nose, and placed it in the pocket of her dress for safekeeping before taking her favorite hiding spot under her grandparents’—now only her grandmother’s—bed.
Within minutes, she heard the door crack open and squeezed her eyes tight, waiting for Astrid to call her out. But the stockinged feet that approached the bed were not Astrid’s. They were her grandmother’s. Her grandmother lay down above her, her slight frame barely indenting the mattress over Addison’s head. Addison thought of wiggling out and climbing up on the bed to comfort her. Surely it was more important than winning hide-and-go-seek, but her grandmother began to cry and, feeling as if she were invading her privacy, Addison chickened out. Soon her mother entered and sat on the bed, causing a slightly bigger indentation. Addison inched away from it.
“Hey, Mom,” her mother said to her own mother.
The bed moved, and Addison imagined her mother rubbing her grandmother’s back, as she had thought of doing a few minutes earlier.
“We all miss him,” she said sweetly.
She could feel her grandmother roll over—presumably to face her mom.
“Beverly,” she said, “when I die, I want you to make me a promise.”
“You’re not dying, Mother,” she said, in her all-too-familiar sarcastic tone.
“Just make me a promise.”
“OK,” her mother agreed, “anything you want.”
“I want you to bury me with my back facing your father.”
“Mom. That was a long time ago.”
“Your father was unfaithful to me from the day I married him till the day he died. Promise me you will bury me with my back to him, the way I was forced to sleep through most of my marriage. I will never rest in peace if you don’t promise me this.”
Her grandmother let out a painful wail, and Addison felt it pierce her young heart.
It never fully recovered. She had rolled under that bed a child and had rolled out a cynic.
“New rider on your right!” a guy yelled now as his wobbly child approached on a two-wheeler.
Addison, deep in thought, overcompensated and veered left, swerving off the sidewalk and toppling off her bike. Radishes and cucumbers rolled in all directions.
“Sorry,” the dad yelled, still running behind his wayward son.
Addison collected her produce, sat down on the grass, and cried. She wasn’t really sure why she was crying, but there was no controlling it. She cried for the aunt she never really knew and the grandpa that broke her heart. She cried for the career that she had put everything into that hadn’t returned the favor. She cried because she knew she hadn’t properly nurtured the thread of love in her heart. And of course, as fate would dictate, at the exact moment she sat crying in the dirt, up walked the man from the ferry.
“Hey. You Again!” he called out from a few feet away.
Addison quickly pulled on her sunglasses, but it was too late. You would have to be blind not to see the rawness in her eyes. For some reason, she found herself explaining her state of mind to the tall stranger—You Again.
“I’ve been cracked wide-open,” she said, now all out sobbing.
He sat down on the sidewalk next to her. “Can I put my arm around you?”
“What would your girlfriend think of that?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Did you and the woman you picked up at the ferry break up?”
“Oh, her? She’s gay, and also my sister.”
Addison laughed, and tapped her shoulder as if it were an invitation. She could really use a hug, and a half hug would be better than none. He threw his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. She sank in a little, and his touch eased her suffering until a few seconds later, when awkwardness set in.
“I feel better. Thanks.”
He jumped up, clearly feeling awkward too, and reached out his hand to help her. She took it, and they both held on a little longer than necessary. Upon realizing that, embarrassment registered on all four of their cheeks.
At least, that is how Addison interpreted it. This guy was pretty obviously flirting. Or so she thought. She always found herself wondering if she would be able to differentiate mutual attraction from one-sided attraction.
He picked up her bike and held it upright while she collected her salad ingredients from the sidewalk.
“Uh-oh,” he said, pointing to a deer munching on her iceberg lettuce.
Addison laughed. “I guess I’m heading back to the market.”
“I’m heading that way too. Maybe you should try walking for a bit.”
She agreed, even allowing him to walk her bike. There was something so comfortable about this guy.
“So, who broke you? If you don’t mind me asking. Wait. Let me guess—your mother?”
“No, I haven’t given her that kind of control in years.”
“Was it a guy?”
“Yes, but not that type of guy.”
“Your boss?”
“No. I’m bossless right now, which may partially account for my little breakdown. I called my boss a nepo baby in front of the entire company—accidentally—on Zoom.”
“Oh man. I think I read about something like that in the Post?”
“Yes, it made the Post, next to an article about erectile dysfunction. As if it weren’t bad enough, the penis in the photo seemed to be pointing at me. I’d always thought it would be fun to be on Page Six.”
“It rarely is,” he said, adding, “Let me guess one more. Was it your shrink?”
“No. An architect.”
“Of life?”
She laughed. “No. Of buildings, I presume. He taught me to quiet my mind, and I guess in the end I didn’t like what I heard.”
“Ohhh. That’s happened to me. I took to my bed for a week once after taking ashwagandha with some swami at a sweathouse in Joshua Tree.”
She laughed at the way he said took to my bed, as if he were a southern belle—or her mother.
“Really?” Addison asked.
“Yes—the guy kept repeating one sentence over and over again.”
Addison waited for him to spill—but he didn’t.
“What was it?” she asked with more than a hint of impatience.
“I don’t like getting it stuck in my head.”
“Oh my God. Just—whisper it.”
He took his hand and gently pushed her hair away from her ear. She could feel his warm breath on her neck, and the intimacy stirred her until his words set in.
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
She jumped back.
“Oh my, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
They both laughed. Hard. Like old friends in on an inside joke.
They arrived at the market, where he gallantly placed her bike in the stand and joined her in the produce section. He grabbed a head of lettuce and tossed it to her.
“You Again! Think fast!”
She caught it, and he seemed weirdly impressed.
“Since we keep bumping into each other—maybe it’s time we exchanged names?” she suggested, with an awkward laugh.
“I don’t know, I was kind of enjoying this little ‘You Again’ flirtation we have going on,” he laughed back.
Aaaaah. She knew he was flirting. The confirmation felt good though.
“Is that what this is?” she teased, with a coy smile.
“It’s been a while, but I believe so. There’s a big block party this Sunday night on the bay. Want to meet me there on purpose and maybe flirt some more?”
“Sounds good.” She smiled, reined in the pheromones a bit, and headed out.
At home, Addison found a note from Paresh. Well, it wasn’t much of a note; it was more a word.
Wandering.
At first, she was relieved. Whatever path he had taken on his walk, she was glad it wasn’t the path to her enlightenment. But, as the day went on and the sun began to set, she found herself pining for his return. Eventually, she gave up on any attempt at mindfulness and embraced mindlessness instead. She made a bowl of pasta with butter, crawled into bed with her laptop, and watched Love Is Blind. It was just the decadent thing to do that she had never had time for when she was working.
In the morning Paresh was standing over the sink, looking out the kitchen window, drinking tea. Even in his seventies, she could see the beautiful young man in the painting by her bed.
She wondered where he had been but wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Late night?” she asked, fully aware of the absurdity of her question.
“I sat on the beach for hours. It was a buck moon.”
“What’s a buck moon?”
“A full moon named for the new antlers that appear on the male deer in July.”
She stretched out her jaw and pressed her index and middle fingers into the spot where the mandible and the maxilla meet. She must have been grinding her teeth all night. What used to be a once-in-a-while thing seemed to be a regular occurrence since losing her job. He noticed and approached.
“Can I?” he asked, holding four fingers in the air as if he were about to make air quotes.
She nodded, though had no idea why she was agreeing. She only knew that she had woken like this every day for nearly a month. He sensed her hesitation.
“Trust me,” he said.
She winced. Trust was a hard thing for Addison.
He held her face in his hands and circled his fingers deeper and deeper into the spot where her jawbones connected. And the tension began to release—at first slowly, but then quite suddenly, until it felt as if there were only one layer left. One impermeable layer. He looked into her eyes.
“This is more than a lost job. What are you holding on to?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know. Her eyes welled up again, the third time in as many days. She was not usually a crier.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, maybe it is time you found out.”
The rest of the morning was a repeat of the day before. He modeled, she painted. He asked her rather ordinary questions about her life, and she surprised herself with her candid answers. She was hoping to get at the trust issue that, if she were to admit it, definitely played into every decision and indecision in her life.
Trying unsuccessfully to capture the soulful quality of his eyes, she painted them and painted over them half a dozen times before giving up entirely.
“Should we try meditating again?” he asked.
She agreed, and they sat on the floor, where the rug and pillows remained from the day before.
“So, you and Gicky? Was it love?”
“I like to think of it as a love story. Though some may call it tragic. I have a big family in Delhi, and while I had my freedom for a while and got to embrace nature and my spirituality—and Gicky—my independence was short-lived. I was called back to run the family business.
“Gicky was fiercely independent. Living in India, being tied down to one place, was not something she could stomach for too long. I never really loved another as I did your aunt. We were so young when we met. I was working at a farmhouse outside of Delhi. The owner was a famous architect who had met Gicky at a show in Greenwich Village and brought her to India to paint a mural on one of his buildings. It was an avant-garde idea at the time. It was supposed to take a month or so, but she ended up staying the year. Mostly because of me. We fell in love after one week.”
“That quick?”
“You say it like you don’t think it’s possible. I’m here to tell you it is.”
She nodded in agreement, though she didn’t at all agree.
He stood, and stretched his back before sitting down again.
“How about you? Have you ever been?” he asked.
“To India, no. But it’s on my list.”
“That’s nice, but I meant in love. Have you ever been in love?”
“Oh. I was engaged once—to my college boyfriend. Well, we didn’t go to the same college. I studied graphic design and visual communication at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was a finance major at UChicago. We met our sophomore year at this dive bar everyone went to called McGee’s. It was a funny mix of the artsy types from my school with the brainiacs from his. We bonded over beer pong—do you know what that is?”
“I don’t.”
“I could show you. It was a long time ago, but I was pretty good at it, though I doubt Gicky has any red Solo cups in the house. Can’t imagine she was much into single-use plastic.”
Paresh looked at her rather blankly, and she became über-aware that she hadn’t answered his question and was instead spewing utter nonsense. She paused, contemplating the thing she had never really admitted, even to herself. She stopped beating around the bush and babbling to this serious man who could obviously see right through it.
“No. I don’t think I have ever really been in love. I mean, I love my family and my friends, and I was mad for Trixie, my childhood cat, but looking back at my relationship with Philip—my ex-fiancé—I really liked him, and thought, at the time, that he loved me enough for the both of us. And that felt really good, and really safe, until the day the wedding invitations were mailed, and it suddenly didn’t. I ran—I ran all the way to New York.”
“If you have to wonder, you were not. I think it was a blessing that you lost your job. I think you lean toward the status quo when you’re meant for so much more.” He quickly changed the subject, preventing her from arguing with him.
“Gicky said that she left something for me, a painting, I think. Have you seen it?”
She went back to the storage closet where Margot had found hers. Paresh’s gift was leaning against the wall. A frame, covered in brown construction paper, tied up in string. He took it and slid it under his arm. She was bursting to ask him to open it but felt it would be invading his privacy. She imagined it as a painting of them in the compound in Delhi where they met, a Garden of Eden.
Addison hugged Paresh goodbye at the ferry.
“Thank you. I’m so honored to have learned meditation from you—you were much better than the YouTuber who I learned it from the first time. You must have had an excellent teacher.”
Addison pictured him learning from a great sage at an Indian ashram.
“I learned on YouTube too!” He laughed.
“Really?”
“No. Your aunt taught me. I was never interested in any of it until I met her.”
The ferryboat pulled into the marina, and suddenly their goodbye felt too rushed.
Paresh reached out for another hug.
“Thank you for a lovely visit,” he said with more than a hint of melancholy. She stared into his eyes, memorizing them so she could paint them one day. She promised she would keep trying to meditate. He told her to keep an open heart, which she ridiculously followed up with a promise to teach him how to play beer pong the next time he visited. They both knew there would be no next time.
Tears fell down her face as the boat fell away.
“Open, enlightened, and present,” she whispered out loud, “kind of sucks.”