5
They ride to the city, Sadie’s head on Taiwo’s shoulder, Taiwo’s head against the window, both pretending they’re asleep. When they get to the station Taiwo wonders whether Sadie shouldn’t contact this professor, bring the essay over now? They’re closer to Brooklyn, she explains, at Grand Central; they can take a cab there then the subway uptown. Sadie says it’s awkward, like, to call a professor, that she’ll simply leave the essay in the mailbox with a note. She produces a manila envelope, on the back of which, cursive, “No 79 Huron Street, Brooklyn, New York.” A gruff Russian driver assents with some grumbling to take them, cash only, over the Queensboro Bridge, wondering what one could possibly want besides maybe kielbasa in Greenpoint on Sunday at ten? Taiwo peers out at the store signs in Polish, white fences, the brick, has never been here before. When they arrive at the building, she frowns out the window. The driver, equally dubious, “Seventy-nine. This is it.” Number seventy-nine Huron looks more like a bunker, a little brick warehouse or garage, than a home, with its huge grid of windows with industrial casings too high to see into, a rusting front door. Taiwo asks Sadie if she’s sure about the address; exactly what kind of professor lives in a two-car garage? Sadie says a professor of feminist theory at Yale and is opening the door on her side when Taiwo, feeling newly protective of her sister, tells the driver, “Run the meter,” and gets out on hers. Sadie, suddenly anxious, hands the envelope to Taiwo. Taiwo, suddenly gallant, says, “Stay in the cab,” and hobbles-slides across the heaps of snow hiding the sidewalk to get to the door of the strange warehouse-home, and is looking for a letter slot or mailbox in the doorway when, squinting, she sees it.
The name by the bell.
6
Kehinde is listening to Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, the screaming of a kettle and the heat’s steady whir. Though he’ll remember hearing rustling sounds and going to investigate, he senses (not hears) that there is someone at the door. In his chest, on the left, a light tugging sensation. He abandons the painting, the kettle, the heat, coming calmly to the entrance, down the hallway to the doorway. Not the mailman on Sunday, he thinks, but who else? The only people who know that he’s living in Brooklyn are his assistant in London and his dealer in Bern. (All the rest seem to think that he’s holed up in Mali or, judging by his auction results, that he’s dead.) He is holding a brush dripping blue on the floor, brilliant ultramarine mixed with white as per Fez. He is wearing what he always wears to work: spattered sweatpants, an NYU T-shirt, Moroccan babouches. He is thinking that he maybe should have turned off the kettle or put down the paintbrush before coming out, that the blue needs more white, that it’s cold in this hallway, a scatter of thoughts, and the fixed one, of her, when he opens the door, scattered-thinking, not looking, so hearing (not seeing) his sister.
“Is it you?”
She is standing in his doorway, a taxi behind her, the passenger door opening and Sadie getting out. Her eyes, which are his eyes, are filling with tears, as are his. She is touching his cheek, jawbone, chin, the faint beard he’s been wearing since summer (a new thing, the one thing that makes his slim face not her face, the one thing of all things that have come in between them in months of not speaking that they can both see), she is touching this, barely, her fingertips skimming, a pianist, a blind woman taking it in, this new difference between them, new distance between them, her eyes open wide as she touches him, just, as if pressing too firmly might cause him to vanish, might ruin the illusion, that they are here, now, after all that was said and unsaid came between them, that all that remains of this distance is fur — when her hands start to shake, with the cold, he might think were it not for the heat in his fingertips.
Shame.
Hers. Of foreign origin, now familiar, unmistakable. Her shame, which he feels as if it were his shame but is not, albeit born of the same place and time, much like they, separate shames at the same sudden thought. We shouldn’t be touching. She thinking, he feeling, she dropping her hand and he dropping his eyes, saying, “Yes,” then, “It’s me,” to his paint-splattered fingers, and she, disbelieving, “Is this where you live?”
• • •
It is: above the studio, a two-story workspace with massive brick walls painted white and skylights and nine half-finished portraits against the back wall that he hopes they won’t see from their chairs by the door, painted blue, the original, a massive garage door that he kept when he purchased the building last year from the elderly Yugoslavian who lives at the corner, who used to fix cars here before he fell ill. Little foyer by the entrance, a “reception” for guests, should they come, with a rug, raw-log table, three chairs, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, a gift from a now-dead admirer, a critic, in exchange for a portrait he’d done. Nothing else. Just the paints and the one work-in-progress stretched out on the concrete, some seven feet long, so-called mudcloth, the new thing, a departure from the portraits he’s made out of beadwork since going abroad.
At the top of the stairs, overlooking the studio, is a mezzanine with kitchen and bathroom and bed, like the top of a duplex with two white-brick walls and one floor-to-ceiling window that leads to a deck. This is where he lives. For a year now, just over, the doctors having decided it was safe for him to do, after six months of in-patient chitchat and relaxants and rehashing all the reasons that he’d wanted to die (just the one) in a room overlooking a garden, very drizzly, very English, but calming somehow, underwater, all greens and grays, porcelain nurses and porcelain service for pain meds and tea, half a year sitting facing and painting that garden, the scars turning taupe and the gray branches green, until one day in August, “You’re ready,” Dr. Shipman, his bushy white eyebrows uplifted, “to live.”
This is where he came to. Left London in August, the flowers gone mad with the heat in the parks, asking Sangna to pack up his flat and to ship it, unable to face it, the scene of the act. As she’s done. Saintly Sangna, the assistant-cum-accountant without whom he’d cease to exist in the world. In his mind, in his skin, sure, could go on without her, a spirit, just visiting, a dream, passing through — but the outside world? object world? art world? the body world? Not without Sangna. No. Not for a day. He’d drift, red balloon-like, away from his body and up through his art to the clouds, where he’d pop but for Sangna, the string twirling earthward below him, unfurling in air like a braid come undone. Sangna who, having been yanked out of RISD by her family and remanded to LSE for reform, had approached him at an opening: “Mr. Sai, I am Sangna. I have a degree in business management, and I can mix paint.” He was twenty-six, young with the newness of money, the strangeness of money and fame and the world; she was thirty, looked twenty, the long braid and glasses, as skinny and browned as he’d been as a child, grounded, grounding, clipped accent, Gujurati, no nonsense: the dealers all feared her, which made them both laugh, on the floor of his flat where they often ate dinner, aloo ghobi and chapati homemade by her aunts. Sangna, who’d flown to New York for the week on a tip from a buyer, “there’s a warehouse for sale,” rode to Greenpoint with cash, spent an hour with Hristo, brought the price down by thousands and bought him a home — and who’d called, early morning, from London, October, “I found her,” voice steady as ever, “New York,” with an address for a place on Lafayette Street in Soho to which he’s gone nightly, bang nine, ever since.