The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [54]
I think you will begin painting again soon, she says.
He closes his eyes. I’m going to disappoint you, he says. I’m not Bada Shanren.
She tilts his chin upward with her hands and kisses him on the forehead.
Don’t worry about me. Don’t even think that I am here.
I should show you some of my work. Would you like to see it? He looks across the room at the suitcase propped up next to the apartment door; it contains his paints, a few rolled-up canvases, and boxes of slides. He hasn’t opened it since leaving Bangkok.
She reaches across the table and picks up the pencil lying next to his sketchbook. Take this, she says, handing it to him. Draw a picture right now.
Of what?
Her eyes roam across the apartment. That, she says, indicating the window.
What, Hong Kong? No, I don’t do cities. No landscapes.
Not the city, then. Paint the sky.
In the mornings she works on his leg for hours, kneading the muscles of the ankle and thigh, until his back begins to cramp from lying so long on the floor. After lunch and a short rest he sits on a chair and holds his breath as she unbuckles the brace. The skin underneath is almost translucent, webbed with veins; the slightest breeze raises goose bumps across it. She raises the leg by the ankle until it is parallel with the floor, and they begin as they did two months before, with the tiniest possible motions, bending the knee so slowly that with his eyes closed he can hardly tell whether it has moved at all. Only now it is his effort, not hers; with each millimeter extended he imagines the tendons snapping like old rubber bands, and instinctively locks the knee straight again. Sweat stings in his eyes; his fingers grind against the rattan seat of the chair.
Breathe more deeply, she tells him. You are making good progress. Soon we can take the cane away.
I thought we weren’t supposed to expect anything.
She smiles and caresses his ankle.
When the sun sinks into the haze above Stonecutters Island, throwing long shadows across the floor, they rise and go into the bedroom and make love without speaking. Afterward he sleeps, exhausted, and wakes in a dark room, smelling the dinner she has prepared. He reaches for the sketchpad sitting on the night table, and for the few minutes before she calls he draws straight lines and circles with his pencil, enjoying the feeling of holding it in his hand, the flow of the line away from the tip.
Stay with me, he says to her one evening as they finish eating.
Of course. She picks at the remaining rice on her plate, eating every grain. There is much work left to do, she says. You are not well yet.
I mean for good. He picks up his water glass and taps it against the table. We could go back to America. Have a house together. You could easily find a job, you know.
She stares at him patiently, unblinking: as if anything could be possible, or necessary. After a moment she wipes her mouth with a napkin. You want to be married, she says. To marry me.
Yes, he says. That’s what I mean.
You would be a painter again. And I would earn money with therapy?
We could live in Boston. My parents have an apartment in Cambridge—we could rent it from them. I have friends there who would help us. There are many schools there. If you wanted, you could go back to college.
She stacks their plates and carries them into the kitchen, treading silently across the floor. I would like to study again, she says. Improve my English.
And then maybe someday we could go to Krakow.
She says nothing, and he wonders if he has mispronounced the name. Krakow, he repeats. Poland.
I was not born there, she says,