Page 98 of Catch a Kiwi
“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 tothinkI’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’spink.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 oneyoulike, 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.”
42
MURIMURI AROHA
Roman
I’d meant the trip to the gallery to be something interesting, something fun, and, yeh, possibly a sensual experience. In my world, a “sensual experience” meant sex, but I could be grasping that Summer had a broader definition.
I’d kissed her once, and it had been good, but it had also happened only when she’d already let go. When else had I seen her fully in the moment, forgetting the caution and surrendering to the joy? Not circulating carefully at the hangi today, checking to see if anybody needed her help and deciding, too often for my comfort, that the person who needed it was me. No, it was those other times when it had been just the two of us. Walking the beach in the dawn light, feeling the thunder of the waves and watching fur seals lumber their ungainly way into the water. Swimming in the sea or sliding into that plunge pool, shocked by the cold and possibly excited by the danger. Even sitting on the patio with me in the warmth of the fire with a million stars around us, eating pizza she’d succumbed to because it was delicious and I’d made it for her, and she wanted it.
