Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
An Elliptical Path
By Lillian DaviesApril 2024
“I’m in Paris. For a flash. You can give me your manuscript at the reading, March 28th.”
So Joan promised she’d be there, though she hadn’t actually been invited to the reading, at least not by the people who organized it. She’d reached out to her dream publisher on a impulse, too much caffeine one morning, that easy tap of the send button. No delay.
The bookstore she knows, of course. Signed up for their newsletter ages ago. Idolizes their program, loves all their authors, except this one, oddly, the reader booked for Maundy Thursday.
“Love one another as I’ve loved you.”
The Last Supper.
The Last Supper.
So. OK then, Joan. Rule #12. Go.
Time to polish it up, or get out the remover? Her nails are still pink. Barbie pink, she realized as she washed beetroot purée off her fingertips thanks to Shrove Tuesday. “Beetroot purée,” what contemporary poetry is, Hugo, who Joan had thought was a painter, wrote in his poem with no name.
Free cotton tote bags flying, Joan’s in a panic when she enters the bookstore on rue Pernelle, pushing her way through the hipsters crowded outside, smoking between readings, philosophizing, an alchemical rush of brown tobacco, cherry flavored vapes and Guerlain in the air, and knocks over the publisher’s chic display of books, and vinyls. Why are there vinyls? Who’s the musician? And the overpriced pens? Those pastel colored ones with the little animals at the end. To the young woman who’s rushed towards the fallen structure from behind the cash register, rolling her eyes in exasperation, Joan mouths Pardon. In her shame, her horror, she rushes back out of the bookstore and onto the street.
Just like Joan had at P’s gallery, in London, when she ran into that lead sculpture, literally not seeing the thing, as she locked eyes with the guy she’d flown to Moscow with just a few weeks before. They’d been stuck in a blizzard the day they were meant to catch their return Aeroflot, snow had blown open the window of their cheap room in the high rise near the airport.
And so Joan hadn’t looked down. Look up, look up, they always say and Hold your chin up, Your posture! and so Joan hadn’t seen the thing, the sculpture, the whole arrangement of metal objects on the floor, and so she’d kicked into one, and damn thing, it hadn’t just fallen over (it had to be round) it rolled, with the pull of gravity, on an elliptical path, it rolled all the way across the gallery’s waxed parquet with a sound, a thumpy lopsided beat, that the metalworking sculptor had forged in an underground foundry. At Cambridge. His work picked up speed in the tilt of the earth, the slant of the upper floor of the classified building adjacent Saint Martins in the Fields.
The fucking thing rolls and is stopped not by the foot of the guy she’d locked eyes with, he’d lifted his retro Jordan high-tops with a wink to let it pass, let it keep rolling. Let her mistake keep unfolding with that wink. Finally, it’s the high-heeled gold Louboutins of the gallery’s director that stop the thing. She doesn’t wink but narrows her eyes and emits a dry laugh. She picks up the displaced sculpture with her manicured hand. Mouths the word Oops.
Joan walked backwards towards the stairs, reaching one hand sideways for the banister, mouthing Sorry and digging her other hand into her give away canvas tote for the packet of cigarettes, American Spirits (from the carton she’d bought at Sheremetyevo). As a treat for making it to all of her classes that week, all her shifts at the exhibition in the East End and the frame shop in South Ken, she allows herself to tear open a pack on Friday night.
Joan hasn’t eaten all day, nearly finished the 2 liter bottle of Evian she bought at Tesco before her first class, and so as she steps down the granite staircase towards the paved sidewalk, and touches the brown stick with the lighter she lifted from the hotel in Moscow (where the winking guy snuck them into the hotel for a free buffet breakfast, after they’d danced all night in the club they’d accessed through the subway tunnel) and takes her first drag… Her vertigo kicks in. Her vision goes black for an instant and she sways inside her worn ballet slippers. Soles thin and flexible enough that she can feel the surface of the earth. Like La Loba, she says when her course director points out they are absolutely the wrong shoes for English weather. Joan likes to feel the street’s lumps of dried chewing gum, rough paving stones, with the soles of her feet, gripping her last hold on the planet with her tense toes.
A woman walks up slowly next to her, “Gimme a light?”
In the corner of her eye, her vision still blurred with exhaustion, the dark haired woman, her bright, fitted jacket, looks for an instant like Frida Kahlo, that pose she struck in the courtyard of Casa Azul, with a green parrot on her shoulder, for Leon Trotsky.
But it’s just Grace, who’s named her black swans for the pair.
“Don’t tell me you were in there?” Grace says looking up at P’s name engraved on the brass plaque, freshly polished to a golden shine. “Such an asshole that guy. And absolutely no taste.”
American Spirits! Cyrillic lettering on the package.
“I’ll trade you a Parliament Light.”
“Where’d you get those?”
“My reading in New York.”
Grace is carrying copies of her new book in a filthy cotton tote.
“I’d rather spend money on books, wetsuits, than a fucking handbag.” Grace always says.
“More importantly, Joan, What are you working on right now?”
“Can we go for a walk?” Joan asks.
Grace looks down, at Joan’s worn ballet slippers, her blistered feet. “Great shoes. I think I’ll just take mine off. Horrible after the flight. So happy to come back to earth. And find you here. Let’s walk along the Thames. It’s nearly low tide.”
The manuscript, the scraps of green paper, the poems, the sketches, whatever. Are still in Joan’s bag. She reaches her hand in again.
“I have something too.” Joan says looking up at Grace, her face glowing between those green earrings Nicolas got her in India.
“I don’t even know if they’re even real,” Grace had said when Joan had complimented them once. “But aren’t they fabulous?”
The way they caught the light, Joan snagged on her vision again. Realized, there, with Grace beside her, she’d seen color for the first time in weeks. “Can I show you something I wrote,” Joan asks, and pulls out a notebook and a scrap of paper the color of the chestnut leaves just starting to sprout from the trees.
Gravity elipse
Place Joachim de Bellay
Spinach green glass plate
Hyaluronic
rue Pernell and Nick Flamel
Immortality
Place Joachim de Bellay
Spinach green glass plate
Hyaluronic
rue Pernell and Nick Flamel
Immortality