All the Days And Nights. Niven Govinden

to be happy in that jumper, Ben? You realize that once I start you’ll need to keep wearing it.

      – That I am aware of.

      – And that we won’t be able to wash it, less we lose any of the marking?

      – I can overdo the cologne to compensate. This is how you want me, isn’t it? I can see it in your face. Your eyes are lighting up.

      – They are not.

      – I know your game. The observer doesn’t want to be looked at, ad nauseam. Well, tough luck! We’re going to be staring at each other for a while.

      – Not if I have you looking down at the floor.

      – And you will, too! Now I understand why some of your subjects were posed the way they were. That little nugget never made it into the notes, did it?

      – Stop teasing, Ben. We need to make a start if you want to catch your train tonight.

      – I thought I might hang around. At least until John gets back. Shoot the breeze. If he’s only in the city, he shouldn’t be too much longer.

      – I wouldn’t have thought so.

      – I can take the overnight.

      – Don’t be silly. Riding the rails through the night like a teenager! Stay over. We’ll make a bed up. I’ll go and speak to Vishni now because I’m not sure what she had in mind for dinner.

      There is an ease with Ben’s decision, built on confidence, and from years of having had beds made in countless other artists’ residences, from poolside guest houses in California to squats in the wrong parts of London. There are some gallery owners who can barely bring themselves to shake an artist’s dirty hand, let alone sleep on a concrete floor; solely interested in the finish. Ben is not one of those. For all the comforts the success of his gallery has brought him over the years, he is still governed by a sense of adventure and an undying fascination in the process. He will spend the night in a tree if he is sure a good painting will come out of it. I hold him still and roll up each trouser leg; tight, narrow rolls that show his ankles. He stops talking now, knowing that he will have ample time to fill during the long studio hours ahead. For now, he is a cipher, who must ready himself to be prodded and pulled. Jumper sleeves are pushed up until they reach the elbow. I point to your shoes that sit by the door.

      – Take your socks off, too.

      – Sure. Anything else?

      – Your jewelry. Watch and ring.

      These are slipped off first, but there’s something slow in the way he moves now; these last moments where he morphs from friend and house guest to subject. From articulate to voiceless. Even though he still wears his trousers, removing his socks seems to erase the final remnants of who he is. He pulls on the shoes and follows me to the door. His shadow and soft steps are yours.

      In the studio Ben moves instinctively toward a row of canvases leaning against the wall. All the care that is given to paintings in the homes they finally end up with is not shared in their places of origin. A sheet protects them from dust, but at various stages they have been handled roughly; marked, nicked in places and painted over. Before perfection – truth – comes digging, dirt. Each canvas bears sign of this excavation, before being hidden by frames and glass. I am a mother bear who carries her cub by the teeth.

      – Look at those afterwards. Let’s get you in the chair first.

      His eyes scan the rows hungrily, calculating how many have accumulated since his last visit. It is clear that he had not expected so many. The eyebrows that frame his widened eyes seem to tremble with the discovery.

      – All these?

      – Yes. But you can only see some of them. After you’ve worked for it.

      Nodding in affirmation, he moves to the center and waits for me to push the chair toward him. The curiosity for pictures overrides everything, even this house, and his friendship with you. He will not leave without seeing what is under the cloth. Having pushed, dragged back, and pushed again, I motion him to sit. Again, his nod is one of compliance, brisk and sharp, knowing that he will wait patiently, for as long as it takes, until he gets what he wants.

      THE EMPTY PLACE set at the table makes the lightness of our dinner talk a fallacy. We sit tightly as if listening to the band on the Titanic after receiving premonitions of our doom. The meal is good but there is sadness in the atmosphere, dulling taste buds and tampering with digestion. Ben does his best to play along, his easy manner and ability to keep the conversation going eventually relaxing us, so that at certain moments it feels like a replication of previous dinners, when the room was filled with the simple pleasure of friendship, and the absent place could be explained away by your fetching the wine, the watermelon, the cheese. It is only at the end of the meal, when interest in Vishni’s rose cuttings and my redundant gossip about other artists can no longer be tolerated, that Ben’s manners evaporate and he becomes testy.

      – Why the hell isn’t he back yet?

      – Soon. I’m sure it’ll be soon.

      – He should be here by now.

      We jump as his hand slaps the table, its echo as hard and flat as his palm. Our eyes meet momentarily before taking them elsewhere, both stabbed with sudden hurt as the realization dawns that you are not there for us. All this had only been a way to pass the time. He has waited all day for you. The world has tilted in your absence. After dinner everyone goes to bed, as if an early night will somehow speed up the process of your return. The table is left uncleared, kitchen detritus left to soak. It is the earliest in years that the house has fallen to darkness. With Ben and Vishni sleeping downstairs, one in the guestroom, the other in her room behind the kitchen, adjacent to the studio, the house feels lopsided. In bed especially, I feel poised to tip; how little it would take to tumble me: a gust from the open window, the telephone’s ring. Before I draw the curtain, I stare up at the stars and wonder whether the city’s neon would hide the bear and the scorpion from your sight; whether you would use the constellations to guide you from Penn Station to Hell’s Kitchen. Remember when you first moved here, you taught me how I could navigate my way home after dark by following the scorpion’s tail from rear end to tip? Imagine being born and raised in the country and never having learnt these skills; what a wonder you were! Every day, there seemed to be a wondrous new discovery to be made about you: setting traps behind the refrigerator that caught the kitchen rat, mending windows, your ability to recite any number of poems from Leaves of Grass that a well-meaning teacher had forced you to learn by rote as punishment for a litany of youthful misdemeanors. All this on top of the paintings. But navigating the stars was a party trick I never tired of. It was like leaving the world behind for the celestial. You made the walk so often from our country station, nothing grander than a platform and a sign thick with dust; you may as well have been blindfolded.

      In the city too, where the steps that lead home are ingrained in your memory, you walk from Penn Station without sight: along Sixth, heading downtown. You pass the fancy shops, virtual museums of aspiration for tourists and office workers, always closed to the likes of you; affordable yet still overpriced; and finally past those less desirable, stores that only stand because it is cheaper to open than shut up completely. Below Avenue A you hit your stride: deep down into the city’s unfathomable bowels. Then, nothing. A hinterland of boarded-up warehouses and tenements, long since abandoned, that now shelter only hobos and the spoils of local crime, theft and drugs. Though you are several blocks away from the Hudson, its dank fills your nostrils. You gorge on a nourishing stink that gives your aching muscles life. It is the closest you will get to milk now you are decades past weaning; now that your parents are no longer here to fight over and nurture you. What you are looking for no longer exists, and yet, there you are, standing outside an apartment that is now a laundry, on a street where life as you know it has vanished. I know this is where you will end because it is the one place you have never showed me. I had to find it for myself during visits to the city. A piecemeal search: riding subway lines and roaming every back street until I could be sure. If you feel the weight of the tenements across your shoulders, find some space among the stars. Drop all that you have