41. Hope
Summer
I was ready in fifteen minutes, because I wasn’t doing the full-on beauty thing anymore. Ready, but still so languid and sleepy.
I told Roman, when I came upstairs to meet him again—he was in the same outfit he’d worn on the day I’d driven him to Dunedin and tried not to look at him: charcoal trousers and a slim-fitting white dress shirt that showed off every bit of chest, thighs, and flat abs, but only hinted at the arms that I might be growing a little obsessed with—all of which I did my best to ignore before I thought, Wait. I don’t have to ignore how his body looks anymore, or the warmth in his eyes when he looks at me …
Wait. Where was I? I was horribly discombobulated here, which was why I was using words like “discombobulated.” I pushed back my hair, even though it didn’t need pushing back, crossed the room to him, concentrating on those eyes and the smile on his tough face that told me he didn’t just like what he saw, he liked who I was, and?—
All I ended up saying was, “Hi.” And when his hand came out to touch the pretty but inexpensive Art Nouveau comb holding back my hair on one side, then rested lightly on my hair, I did my best not to tremble and tried to marshal my wayward thoughts. My thoughts were like cats. My thoughts were like …
His hand was on my cheek now, and I was swaying toward him just a little. I’d forgotten, this past year, how much more powerfully feminine I felt walking in heels.
I finally got out more syllables, at least. Unfortunately, the syllables were, “My thoughts are like chickens.”
A deepening of the crinkles around his green eyes, and his hand was still on my face, then brushing over my hair again like he wanted to touch it. Maybe because my hair was fine and soft, and his was nothing like it. It was thick and dark, and looked like it wanted to curl but was cut too ruthlessly short to indulge in such frivolity. Like the rest of Roman. What would he be like without the discipline, without the reserve? I wanted to know, because I was pretty sure there was fire under there.
Fire burns.
He said, “Chickens?” And when I blinked at him stupidly, “You said your thoughts were like chickens.”
“Oh!” Get it together. “Like herding cats, only worse. Herding chickens, and they’re all running around and clucking and not letting me catch them. I’ve been so focused these past weeks, or to be honest, for about a year now, and all of a sudden, it’s like I’ve lost it all. My energy. My drive. I feel like I could just lie down and sleep for days. Scary stuff. I’m all … fuzzy inside.”
We surely needed to leave, but he didn’t seem in any hurry. He kept his hand on me—how could a man’s hand do that? Be that comforting and yet thrilling at the same time?—and said, “Maybe you’ve finally relaxed, and high time, too. Because, ‘for about a year now?’ Sounded more like your entire life. Maybe it’s time to give it up.”
I considered that. It isn’t easy to consider when a tall, broad, dark man is standing about nine inches from your too-aware body with his hand in your hair, but I did my best. “Maybe. Dangerous. I could fall asleep again.”
“Time for me to share my own thought, then,” he said. “I ate about half my weight at that hangi today. Unless you’re too hungry, we may want to eat later and do something else first. Something that may wake you up.”
I tried to eye him suspiciously. Unfortunately, my suspicion transmitters seemed not to be functioning. “If you want to have sex,” I said, “you could have said so before I did my makeup.”
He laughed. If I was relaxed, so was he. So focused and aware, but relaxed at the same time. Was that a thing? He said, “Nah. I thought of something you might like, that’s all. As we both seem to be in a receptive frame of mind.”
“It’s a surprise?” My heart lifted for no reason I could discern.
“It is. I think you’ll like it.”
He held my hand on the way to the car, and then he held my door. Another experience I hadn’t had for quite a while. It was probably stupid—I was perfectly capable of opening my own door—but it felt so good. I stepped carefully inside, folded the full skirt of my yellow dress in with me, and watched him shut the door, and then he was out into the Saturday-evening traffic and heading over the same bridge I’d driven across earlier.
“We’re going somewhere else,” I said. “Not walking to this surprise, or to dinner.”
“It’s not far.” That was all he said as I watched the city of Tauranga pass by with its low buildings, hills, and sea, until he pulled into a carpark in front of a modern building, all white concrete and curves, and was opening my door again.
“Mysterious,” I said, “but OK.” He put out a hand to help me out, and I took it and felt … pampered. Cared for. A feeling I’d have said I didn’t want again, because it was better to care for yourself, to trust yourself. But maybe, for one night, it was all right to indulge it. I could start caring for myself again tomorrow. I knew how.
The sign on the door said Closed. It also said Gallery. I said, “Nice idea, but it’s closed.” And tried not to be disappointed, because there was a picture window in this gallery, and inside it was a … well, a picture. A painting, to be exact. Square, large, and abstract, in soft yellow and orange and green and blue, but somehow suggestive of a gentle landscape, even though it clearly wasn’t a landscape. The colors were bright, but the effect was soft and feminine, maybe because of the way the saturated colors blended into each other and the absence of any straight lines.
Nobody was going to hire me to write any reviews on art, because I couldn’t describe it any better than that. I just knew the thing was beautiful, but that was probably all wrong, with art. Art was supposed to be edgy, not gorgeous and dreamy. Just like good books were hard to understand and good movies had sad endings or were hard-hitting dramas about war or mental illness or something. There was a reason I hadn’t pursued a career in the arts, besides my lack of talent. I clearly didn’t get it.
“No worries,” Roman said. “Private showing.” And sure enough, a slim man in a dark suit appeared, turned a lock, and opened the door.
“You want to buy art?” Stupid question, because why else were we here?
“If I see something I like. And I want your opinion.” That was all we had time for, because we were stepping inside, his hand brushing my lower back again, and into a white room lit in the way galleries generally are, with plenty of soft, indirect light to go with the soft light outside as the day slowly faded. I could have told Roman that my opinion wasn’t worth much, but here we were, so … whatever. He could just consider the source.
I forgot that, then, because I was surrounded by washes of color. Or bursts of color, except that that sounds too harsh, like a red splotch on a white background, and that wasn’t what this was at all. Some of the abstract paintings reminded me of the sky, others of the sea or swirls of handblown art glass or maybe that landscape idea, and the colors were vibrant and soft at the same time, nothing I’d ever have thought Roman would be interested in. He had some art in his house in the Catlins. Abstracts, but not like this. More of the geometric type that had always left me a little cold. Splashes of color, maybe, and sometimes not even that, because they tended more toward blues and blacks. Not exactly splashes of warmth. But this? This was …
I said, reading a framed sign on the wall, “You can get signed prints of some of them. That’s cheaper, anyway. How would you even choose, though?”
“Like I said, I was hoping you could help me do that.”
“Yeah, right. I’m the last person.” But I was wandering. Here a painting in a creamy white, with washes of pale cerulean blue and soft pink, and a texture on part of it like crumpled silk. That was nice. Very calming. Another in Chinese red with a gold-swirled area rucked up in a way that reminded me of a couple of many-armed starfish. A painting in deep blue with a circle of white on it, all of it looking like a cloud-splashed moon on a midsummer night. That was possible, maybe. More masculine. Not as beautiful as the others to me, but a good painting for a quiet room looking out on a Japanese garden. If Roman had one of those. Which I doubted.
I said, “I guess, for you … this one like the moon, or the Chinese-red and gold one? That maybe has a bit more yang.” Doubtfully, because honestly? Did it look like any of Roman’s art? Not even close.
“Yang?” he asked.
“Masculine energy. Boldness. Maybe, because they’re all just too … too beautiful, and too curving, and too soft to be yours. Even the red-and-gold one.”
“That’s how you see me, eh.”
“No,” I said, “that’s how you are. How I am, too, come to that.”
“Really. How so?”
“Software engineer, remember? Straight-ahead thinker. Logical. Decisive. Practical. I have no yin. I never have had. That’s what nobody sees. They see my face, but my face isn’t me. My mind is me. My life is me. My face? Not so much.”
There was one of those backless benches in the middle of the big room, the kind you sit on so you can view the paintings from a distance. Roman sank onto it, and I sat down beside him. It was only polite, since we were talking. I glanced at the man in the suit, who was standing behind a desk near the entrance doing something on a computer, and said, “We’re keeping him.”
“He’s happy to be here. Seems you’ve forgotten how to be rich.”
“I wasn’t rich,” I said. “I was married to somebody rich. Temporarily rich. Fitfully rich. Not reliably rich.”
“Ah,” Roman said, and took my hand. His fingers threaded through mine as he looked at the wall of paintings, his expression abstracted. “And you think you have no intuition. No subtlety. No shadow.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said. “That’s how little intuition I have.”
“There’s a difference,” he said, “between the person you are inside and the person you’ve had to be.” My hand jerked in his, and he looked at me, dark brows drawn down, and asked, “Isn’t there?”
“I thought that about you,” I said. “Yesterday. Today. Sometime.”
“Who we’d be if our lives had been different. Yeh. I think about that sometimes as well.” He smiled. “Not often. When I’m tired, maybe. Driving. Like that. No worries, my life’s been all good, but I think it sometimes anyway. But you’re saying these paintings don’t call to you. That you’ve got no poetry in you, no softness.” He paused. “No surrender.”
Oh, boy. I said, hearing how unsteady my voice was and unable to help it, “I don’t know what you want here.”
“Maybe to hear you say these are beautiful, if you think so.” Nothing but directness in his gaze. “To hear you tell me which you like, and why.”
“Because you want me to tell you I’m soft,” I said. “You want to think I’m soft.”
“No,” he said. “Because I want to know you.”
I swallowed. Then I stood up. Out of my depth, and way, way out of my comfort zone. In the fuzzy ground of the intuitive, but he’d asked, so I did it. I looked, and looked, and looked some more, forgetting any art-critic judgment and just falling into the color, the sensuality. Coming back to one piece, then thinking, No, and moving on. And being pulled back until, finally, I stood before it and said, “You need to ask somebody else, because this is my favorite, and obviously, it’s all wrong.”
“Ah.” He came to stand beside me. “Why?”
“Why? Because it’s pink. You do not want a pink painting.”
“Not why I shouldn’t want it. Why it’s your favorite.”
“This is not what I’m good at. Explaining abstract things.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said. “Best you can. You aren’t getting marked on this exercise. You’re just talking.”
“Because …” I looked at the thing some more. It wasn’t actually just pink. It faded to near white at the top and deepened to rose at the bottom, though not in any sort of precise way, and the color, laid down in thick layers of paint, swirled and shimmered, bright and saturated and ethereal as a sunset. “It’s this gold bit,” I said, reaching out a hand toward it, careful not to touch. “And the texture around it, and how it’s darker up here, see? It’s like a little golden bird, the fluffy kind, with its wings stretched out, hovering here, and the darker spot is its head. Or like a window ripped into the surface so you can see all the way to the heart of things, maybe, but to me? It’s a bird. Soft and bright and so pretty. It reminds me of Pandora’s box.”
“Pandora’s box?” His face was quizzical.
“Oh, you know. You have to know. Pandora. The first woman on Earth. It’s a Greek myth, I think. She opens this box she’s been told never to touch—sort of an Adam and Eve deal, and why is the woman always the one who can’t control herself? Not my life experience. Anyway, she succumbs to curiosity, and out fly all the bad things that plague the world. Guilt and fear and sickness and hatred, big and harsh and ugly. Like ravens, I always imagined, with those dark wings, swooping around her. She’s frozen, horrified at what she’s done, at the evil she’s brought into the world through her weakness, and she slams the lid shut just in time to leave one last thing in the box. It’s tiny, but it’s not dark, and its wings aren’t black. It’s shining. It’s Hope, down at the bottom of it all, still there to hold onto.” I laughed. “I can’t believe I even remember all that, but I guess I liked the story. Like … life can be so hard, but it’s not always that way, or we couldn’t keep going. We hope that the hard times will pass and our lives will get better again. And that’s how this painting makes me feel.” I tried for a better word, but the only thing that came was, “Happy. It makes me happy to look at it, so soft and so bright and hopeful and just … beautiful. Like a bird, or an open window to something better.” I stopped, then, and laughed again. “I told you I was bad at describing. Soft and bright. That’s what I’ve got. Tell me which one you like, and buy it, because that’s all the introspection I have.”
Roman raised a hand, and when the man in the suit came over, said, “I’ll have this one.” And handed over a credit card. “Write it up, and I’ll give you the address to ship it.”
“You’re joking,” I said. “I know it’s not a present for me, because—oh, that’s right. I’m living in a caravan. For a few months, and then I’m off to points unknown. Where are you going to put your big pink painting? In your office? That’ll be startling. The thing’s called ‘Breathe You in My Dreams’!”
“I don’t have dreams?” he asked. “Or breathe? I’ll put it in my place in Auckland, maybe. Like my mum said, it’s all over glass and steel, and the walls are white. Could use a bit of softening, I’m thinking.”
“Pink softening.”
“Too right, pink softening. Expanding my mind. Expanding both our minds. There’s a poem about that, right? As we’re being metaphorical. About the road you didn’t take, and where it may have led you. Some American fella wrote that. He takes the overgrown one, I think. I don’t remember it well. Sadly, I wasn’t much chop at English and all those fuzzy subjects, but I remember that. You and I took the straight-ahead track, the well-worn one, and we’re still doing it. Maybe it’s good, though, not to be completely—which one is that? Yin and yang, one of those.”
“Not completely yang,” I said.
“Right. Maybe we need more yin energy in our lives.” He gave me that lopsided smile. “We’ll start small.”