Chapter 14
I made myself look presentable—a long-sleeve minidress and knee-high boots that a stylist once paired for me somewhere along the way.
I brushed my hair out and left it down. I’ve come to understand that I have good hair, or at least plenty of it.
When I got downstairs, Kai was already there, leaning against a pillar in the lobby, wearing a black suit with a narrow black tie.
“Wow,” he said. “God, you’re beautiful.”
“Thanks, Kai. You aren’t hard to look at either. What’d Matthew get us?”
“Any guesses?”
“I’m hoping it’s a car. I heard he gave a motorcycle to every member of his stunt crew after his last movie.”
“Oh. Well, uh, prepare to be underwhelmed.”
_____
In the SUV—all black, leather seats, driven by a suited chauffeur—I asked Kai where we were going.
“I was talking with Matthew about what I should get you as a wrap present, and he said that experiences last longer than possessions.”
“What a Matthew thing to say.”
“Yeah. And he was like, what does she like, and it occurred to me that even though we’ve talked a lot, I don’t know what you like. I know you don’t love baseball…”
“I don’t.”
“But I don’t know if you, like, love knitting.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, presumably you like something and so I could get you a pottery class or a visit with a professor of eighteenth-century French literature or whatever, but I actually don’t know if you like any of that stuff either.
The only thing I know you like is art, but you say you don’t understand it.
So I told Matthew that you liked art and maybe I could take you to a museum with a tour guide or whatever, and he said, ‘I’ll arrange something,’ so we’re going to the Carnegie to see whatever he arranged. ”
“That’s very thoughtful, Kai. Also,” I did not know how else to say it, “you’re making my wrap present look really bad.”
“The iPad case? With the Warhol Soup Can on it? I fucking adore my iPad case! Do not talk bad about my beloved iPad case.”
_____
When we arrived at the museum, a small woman with short bangs was standing outside, looking at her phone.
“Kai and Juniper?” she asked, and we nodded, and she introduced herself as the senior curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum.
She was perhaps forty-five, large-eyed and serious.
“I heard you like our Joan Mitchell triptych,” she said to me.
“Yes, but I don’t understand it.”
“Oh, I’m not sure there’s as much to understand as you may fear,” she said as she unlocked the door to the museum and ushered us inside.
We walked up a staircase into a long, narrow gallery.
I stopped in front of that Kerry James Marshall painting of a woman in a gallery again, as the curator explained to me that Black skin had often been neglected and painted poorly.
Artists like Marshall sought to capture skin in new ways while engaging deeply with art history, a point emphasized by placing the figure inside a gallery.
Across from me, Kai was staring at a churning, energetic painting of what looked like a semi-deconstructed stadium.
“Ah, Julie Mehretu,” the curator said. “One of my favorites. I’ve always thought this maybe reflects what it’s like to be an athlete in the Olympics or something—a swirl of flags and nationalism, of fear and pride. ”
As we walked through the next gallery, looking at Monet’s Water Lilies and Van Gogh and Boudin, the curator said, “Art often seeks places language cannot seek, to express what cannot otherwise be expressed. Of course, art criticism is an intellectual exercise, but it’s attempting to apply academic rigor to a field that is fundamentally beyond rigor.
Anyway, in the next gallery you’ll find our Joan Mitchell triptych. ”
She explained that caring for this painting, titled Sans Neige, or Without Snow, was one of the reasons she’d moved to Pittsburgh from New York for this job.
“Mitchell painted many triptychs—you can see the work comprises three equal-sized canvases pressed together—but for me this one seems uniquely alive.
“In Renaissance paintings,” the curator said as we stood before that immense and intoxicating painting, “when you wanted to paint innocence, you painted the infant Christ, and when you wanted to paint redemptive suffering, you painted the crucified Christ. But of course, these are not images of innocence or suffering; they are metaphors for innocence and suffering. How do you paint the thing directly—the feeling? This is the question that artists like Mitchell and Agnes Martin set for themselves. So what do you feel when you look at it?”
“Entranced,” I said. “Engrossed. It’s almost a world I want to step into.”
“And you said you don’t understand art,” the curator said. “Mitchell called these paintings landscapes, even though they don’t look like traditional vistas. You want to step into it because you’re looking at a place.”
_____
As we walked through the halls, Kai grabbed my hand, his fingers interlaced with mine. I felt my pulse increase. Kai’s hands were soft, his long fingers pressed against my knuckles. His skin felt so alive against mine.
I thought it might happen that night when he brought me back to his apartment to watch a movie.
It was a rom-com and everything—one from the nineties about the president falling in love with an environmental attorney.
We sat next to each other, me with my feet curled up on the couch, and I could feel his breath rising and falling as he sat with his hand around the back of the couch but not quite around me.
I kept looking over at him, but he was always watching the movie, smiling faintly, his face gleaming by the changing light of the film.
I couldn’t quite identify our Obstacle. I wanted him so desperately in that moment, but something still invisible lay between us.
We had talked so much across the weeks, but there was still something unspoken.
If we could’ve said it, maybe that night might’ve been different, but instead, as the credits rolled, Kai jumped up and suggested we make our way to the roof deck of our apartment building.
Up there, I drank an iced tea while we talked about how it was almost like in the movie, how in the film they sit on a roof and talk about Andy being gone, and how all of us will be gone soon. It got quiet, and after a while he said, “I will miss this. I will miss you.”
“Me too, Kai. I don’t think I’ll ever do a movie quite like this one again.”
“Maybe we’ll end up in a ton of movies together.”
“That’d be fun,” I said, “but probably not.”
“Probably not. Thanks for getting me through it. I never understood it before now, but acting isn’t really about you. It’s about the people you’re listening to. Your scene partners or whatever.”
“The magic isn’t in what I do or what you do, but what happens between us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly. I really love you, Juniper.”
“Back at ya, Kai,” I said at last, and I could feel his smile even though I was too shy to look over at him.
_____________
Making a movie is like going to summer camp.
You feel certain the relationships are so real, so deep, that they will last a lifetime, but then the Cinematographer dumps you after the movie comes out, and your regular group chat with your costars drifts into occasional happy birthday messages, and the only reason you even know their birthday is because they post a cake on their Instagram.
It turns out that the main reason you were friends is proximity, and having shared some strange intense experience together.
In the rough seas of the real world, you can’t get the magic back of being on a rooftop in Pittsburgh with someone you’ve finally accepted you love.
I figured that in the night sky of my life, Kai Laramie would be one of those shooting stars that streaks across the sky but then burns up almost before you can even get excited.