Stray Love (7 page)

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.

T
ONIGHT
, 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 much and I do things differently.”

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

O
LIVER AND
P
IPPA 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.

He put in a request for his first foreign assignment and asked his editor to consider his qualifications. Had he not proven his dedication?

When Pippa eventually returned six weeks later, Oliver
behaved as if she had never marched out. He complimented her on her new black dress and Pippa eyed him with suspicion, as if waiting for him to say something mean. She seemed almost disappointed when he didn’t.

While this went on, I stayed by her side, taking deep breaths to fill myself with her smoke and soap smell, and to verify that she was really back. I trailed behind her as she walked around the flat opening the curtains and windows, saying: “Why is it so dark and stuffy in here?”

Soon after that, one night when I returned with Mata Hari from Mrs. Harling’s flat carrying a loaf of bread and reciting scenes from
The Avengers,
Pippa and Oliver both rose to greet me. They exchanged looks; then Oliver cleared his throat.

“We were just discussing things,” he said. “We were wondering whether you would you like to spend more time with Pippa?”

It took me a minute to comprehend this. Finally, I nodded and walked over to Pippa, wrapped my arms around her waist.

Oliver promised to come back, improved.

I probably would have been more worried had he used the term
war reporter
but what he said was “foreign correspondent,” which, in my mind just evoked a faraway scribe. Oliver was going overseas.

“Actually, Kenya for starters. East African Airways, Flight 006, disembarking at Nairobi Embakasi Airport. After that I fly to Kampala.”

It was a golden opportunity. “Chance of a lifetime,” he said. He was tired of covering House of Lords luncheons and break-and-enters and casino busts in Mayfair. “Foreign correspondent” had a calm ring to it. It conjured an image of
Oliver travelling by lumbering elephant through game parks, one hand raised to block the sun, then, on solid ground again, shaking his pen and blowing on the tip as he jotted down his impressions.

There were vaccinations and visas and forms to fill. There were provisions to buy: Ovaltine, Twinings, Marmite, Nescafé. I was fairly relaxed until we visited Silverman’s surplus store in the east end of the city to get Oliver “kitted.” On any other occasion, I would have considered the shop a Mecca, but now I followed Oliver through the aisles with growing concern. At Silverman’s, the provisions were more sinister: mountains of khaki and camouflage and webbing. What on earth were we doing in a place that sold ration packs, helmets, boots and tactical vests? I picked up a thick silver disc and read the label out loud.

“Respirator canister.
What’s this for, Oliver?” I asked, as casually as I could.

“It fits onto a gas mask.”

Oliver was holding up a tan jacket. He lifted his glasses and perched them on his head, studying the weave of the fabric.

“Is it indestructible?” he asked the salesclerk, a tiny man with a puff of white hair.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Can it repel animals?” Oliver asked, giving me a wink.

The clerk looked at him with some confusion.

“Sir,” he said calmly, “it’s a simple jungle suit.”

“Yes, but my son wants to know, is it thick enough to deflect a rampaging rhino?”

“Perhaps.”

“A stampeding hippo?”

“You never know, sir.”

In this surreal mood of preparation, the days passed. Oliver grew silly, buoyant and generous.

And at the same time, my initial enthusiasm began to wane. The exciting prospect of spending more time with Pippa was now accompanied by the dreadful feeling that Oliver’s departure had another personal meaning: even though he called me his “son,” I feared that he had given up on me. It was only a matter of time before he disappeared, just the way my mother had.

“Oliver?”

“Yes.”

“Take me with you. Take me to Nairobi.”

“I can’t.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Several weeks. I don’t know.”

“Will you come back?”

“Of course I will. Now go to sleep.”

I watched as Oliver packed water purification tablets, parachute cord, a pen knife, mosquito netting, earplugs and a shortwave radio. I watched as he folded clothes for hot, dry and monsoon seasons, clothes that made me wonder,
What kind of place was he going to where he would need both a fancy suit and a rubber rain poncho?

Oliver walked around rehearsing basic phrases in Swahili—
Jina lako ni nani? Nina swali. Kwa nini?
—which he explained was the lingua franca of much of East Africa and would be necessary for his work there.

“Oliver?”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if you’d consider not going for a year or two?”

“Don’t be silly. I won’t be away long and I’ll call every week.”

I walked across the room, returned with a framed photo of myself and passed it to Oliver to pack. Then I lay down on the bed and placed my head on the pillow. I reached my arms out on either side of myself feeling paper everywhere. Itinerary notes, marked-up phrase books and puffily folded maps.

“Oliver?”

“Yes?”

“Where did you say you’d be going after Nairobi?”

“Kampala.”

“You’re sure that’s safe?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Silence.

“Look, Marcel, Pippa has promised to help you keep up with your studies. She will be in touch with your teacher and the headmistress.”

I nodded. “I’m going to learn to ride my bicycle while you’re gone. Then you’ll let me come, right?”

Silence.

“What if my mother comes back while you’re gone? If you leave the country, you might miss her.”