Page 36 of All That We Are Together
“Excellent. So that means…”
“You owe me an explanation.”
“Did your kids spike your coffee this morning?”
“Don’t try to joke your way out of this,” she warned me. “I want to know why you’re so interested in this girl. We may not have worked together too long, but I know you well enough to seethere’s something special that’s made you get so involved. Don’t worry, Axel. I don’t bite. For now.”
I held back a smile. “It’s her. She’s the girl I talked to you about.”
“The one you were in love with?”
“Yeah.” I struggled to get the word out.
“You didn’t tell me much of anything, Axel.”
“Well, now you understand…”
“Did you really need to get weirded out for weeks just to tell me this?”
“It’s not easy for me.”
“I can tell. So what’s the plan?”
“I just want the exhibition to be perfect.”
I kept back the most important part, the fact that I was finally keeping the promise I made to Douglas that night at my house when I renounced my dreams and stuffed them away in the closet, choosing instead to commit myself to the dreams of another. I shivered when I remembered his words:“Axel, you paint or don’t, and one day you’ll love or you won’t, because you won’t know how to do things any other way.”
How fucking right he was.
“You want us to do something special?”
“I don’t know.” I stroked my chin. “My idea is something with a family feel.”
“Family?”
“Yeah. She’s from here. I want it to be cozy. For people to come and not just take a look at the pictures and go. I want them to feel like they can stay a while and talk…”
“I think I understand. Remember that exhibition where we hired the caterers? With Leah, there’s not many pieces on display, but we could still do it.”
“Yeah. And plus, we could bring some more pieces in just for the opening. She’s got a couple that are…unclassifiable.” Sam looked at me with interest. “I don’t think they’re right for the catalog, but we could reserve one room for them for twenty-four hours.”
“You should probably talk it over with Hans. But I like the idea. It’s been a while since we’ve had a strong exhibition, and if the girl’s from here, that always brings in more people. It could be interesting.”
36
Leah
Frida Kahlo said one time, “My painting carries a message of pain.” The day I read that, I got more interested in the work of the real woman who was hidden beneath the growing popularity of her work. The woman who had loved, suffered, screamed. Something connected me to her. That’s the magic of literature, music, painting, and any other art, the way you find yourself in something another person has created.
Sometimes we feel alone: we’re individualists, and we think only we have felt that emotion that twists our soul or that idea that makes us feel so strange. Then one day, you realize that isn’t true. There’s an immense world out there full of people, experiences, lives. When you accept that, you realize two things: first, how much there is around you, and that makes you feel smaller, like an ant running back and forth and suddenly learning its anthill isn’t the only one, there are millions and millions more. And second, you’re relieved to feel understood when you encounter traces of yourself in a song, a poem, or the lines of a picture.
That’s a way of not feeling alone.
I thought about this for a while as I coated the tip of one of my brushes in paint. I was working on a girl with her back turned, with long dark hair, and colored butterflies were flapping out of her mane, along with musical notes and flowers that symbolized memories. Some had wrinkled petals, others were freshly blossomed. I used impasto, thick layers of paint, mixing bands of color on the canvas, making it more real. It was important to note the angle of every stroke so the paint didn’t get away from me, and I was so concentrated on what I was doing that for a long time, I didn’t realize it was night.
I cleaned my brushes, gathered my things, and left.
When I got to Landon’s apartment, he had already eaten and was on the couch watching a comedy series he loved.