Page 13 of Seven Summer Weekends

Paresh rode the ferry to Fire Island, he imagined, for the last time. His heart sank when he looked to the shore, noting the absence of his love, who had always been waiting for him there, as if he had never left. He wondered where he would be if he had never left all of those years ago. If he had defied his father’s wishesand acclimated to a city, and a world, he didn’t quite understand how to navigate. Would he have returned home, now, at his age, to his beloved India, or would his life have remained here? He rarely left his present thoughts as he had during this journey, and the sinking feeling he had in his gut reminded him why that was. He recited a mantra that had been kidnapped by Hallmark cards and wooden painted signs, reminding himself:Be present.

Paresh arrived at the house very early Saturday morning and stood quietly at the front door until he heard stirring inside. Only then did he knock. A young woman answered it and took his breath away with her wavy brown hair and olive freckled skin. It could have been Gicky forty years before.

Chapter Nine

“Can I help you?” Addison asked with a serious expression.

The man put his palms together and bowed his head. She found herself returning the motion.

“Hello. I’m Paresh,” he said. “Gicky sent me.”

Why?she thought, and then figured the man standing in front of her was the most likely source of the answer, and said it out loud. “Why?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I guess we will find out together.”

Addison didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

After settling him into his room, she headed to the studio. Her original intention had been to straighten and organize before Gicky’s gallerist visited to collect her work. The date was a few weeks away, but there was a lot to do. But the moment she sat down on her aunt’s bench and took a brush in her hand, everything changed. The feeling brought her back to college, where the pull of her fine arts classes always won over courses in graphic design or print media.

She really wanted to sculpt, but felt that painting was the first step toward that for her. Something about seeing and translating with a brush seemed to come before working in three dimensions. She had excelled in her fine arts classes in college—even though her parents limited her to two per semester, agreeing to support her as a graphic artist with a lucrative future as opposed to a starving artist with none. Their words exactly. After everything she learned from Margot, she was beginning to wonder how much her similar passions to her aunt Gicky had fueled that conversation with her parents.

Besides all that, she hoped her absence would encourage her new guest to entertain himself without her. She was wrong.

Paresh walked in drinking tea from one of Gicky’s mugs, ironically swiped from the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur. Or maybe it wasn’t ironic, maybe it was purposeful. Maybe the two had stolen a long weekend together at what Addison imagined to be a lavish and romantic old Indian palace turned hotel.

She studied Paresh’s features until he caught her doing so. She felt like she had seen him before, though she knew that wasn’t really possible.

“You are a painter as well, I see.”

She noted how his accent made ordinary words sound beautiful. She wondered what her midwestern drawl sounded like to him, though she knew it had definitely faded over the years. She sometimes caught herself sounding like a New Yorker, especially when ordering coffee or water.

She had clipped an old picture of Gicky to the top corner of her canvas. It was a shot of her from behind, staring out at the ocean in a very Andrew WyethChristina’s Worldkind of way.That’s not why she chose it though. It had been a long time since she had painted, let alone painted faces, and she was too insecure to attempt one yet.

“I paint, but I wouldn’t call myself a painter,” Addison answered.

“Semantics.” He smiled. She smiled too. It felt good to be called an artist, even if she didn’t quite believe it. “I’m an architect,” he offered, before changing the subject. “You look just as she did at your age,” he noted, with an obvious hint of melancholy.

He pulled a photo out of his wallet. It was one of those small square-bordered images with the date printed on the corner:July 1972. Gicky looked to be younger than Addison was now, but they were both at that age where it was hard to tell for sure. Everyone had always said that Addison looked like her dad, so it wasn’t a surprise that she would resemble his sister—though she had never noticed it before. In all fairness, her mother had removed all photos from their house after the Big Terrible Thing, and there were few images of Gicky online when Addison had googled her over the years. Putting in her name mostly brought her to auction houses and sites like 1stDibs. But there was no doubt that Morty Irwin and his two daughters resembled their father’s Yemenite ancestors far more than their mother’s Russian side.

Paresh stood behind her, staring at the photo.

“It’s nice for you to paint beautiful Gicky. I was often her muse.”

And suddenly Addison realized where she had recognized him from. He resembled the portrait of a young man that hung in her bedroom.

Curiosity piqued, she no longer wished to avoid him for the weekend. In fact, she wanted a shot at painting him. Gicky could wait.

“Can I paint you?” she asked tentatively.

He smiled, pulling up a cane-backed chair, and sat in it, catty-corner. She had her answer.

Paresh sat quietly for a good long while as the morning light danced across his face. At first Addison was intimidated thinking back to what she remembered of her aunt’s decade-long series of portraits of him, but then she made it her own. Leaning into her fear of painting faces, she went for a more abstract approach.

After a bit, the silence became painful.

“You can talk,” she said. “And no need to sit perfectly still.”

“Gicky insisted on silence and stillness,” he said. “It wasn’t a problem, as I’m quite fond of both.”

---