Chapter 92

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”
—Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

I TALKED TO JOAN about the blank wall in my bedroom and the concept I had for it. I’d been afraid to touch it for fear I’d ruin it. I tried drawing it out on paper and could not find whatever talent it was V2 had that created the graffiti painting I’d blanked out with Kilz. When she heard what I had in mind, she kissed me.

“I could help,” she said. “If you’d like. I have about twenty variations of it in my sketchbooks. It wouldn’t have to be identical to the patches we have.”

“Would you? I’m so afraid I’d just mess it up and I want it right.”

“I could ... um ... come over this evening and work on it a while. Then when we get up in the morning, I could just paint behind you while you play,” she said.

“That would be ... Joan? Did you just invite yourself to spend the night with me?” She blushed. “I’d like that a lot.”

She wanted more colors than in the original artwork and said she’d stop by Home Depot on the way over. We told the rest of the girlfriends what we had in mind and both of us got kissed soundly. Nanette lingered with her lips near my ear.

“She’s less sure of herself than any of us. Treat her well, Jacob, and listen to what she wants. She’s very vulnerable.”

By the time Joan got to my house, I had the tarp spread and all the painting gear I could muster laid out. I went out to her car and brought in half a dozen quart-size cans of paint. Joan was in a pair of shorts and T-shirt that had definitely seen paint projects before.

“Oh. I like your red better than the one I bought,” she said. “Let’s lay in the sketch first and we can adjust it according to what we see. I haven’t done a rendering this big before.”

One of the features of the logo she’d developed for our pod was sweeping curved lines. That was what I was most worried about creating. There’s an old joke about not being able to draw a straight line with a ruler, but curved lines are even harder. I’d been at the point of drafting an oversized French curve so I could trace the lines.

I understood the functions of a Euler spiral and had used them in mechanical specifications years ago. By the time I retired as a mechanical engineer, computer-aided drawing programs had become common and the standard was to use Bézier curves, which could be plotted and scaled correctly. My efforts to measure and reproduce the curves in Joan’s original drawing with a French curve on smaller paper had come out looking mechanical instead of the free-flowing lines of the original.

I watched, fascinated, as Joan simply made sweeping arcs on the wall with a soft pencil or charcoal, occasionally erasing a portion that displeased her and redrawing it. It was that free-flowing movement of the lines that my mechanical drawings had lacked.

When she was pleased with the general outline, we started painting them. It was nearly eleven when Dad stuck his head in my room to see our progress.

“That’s impressive,” he said simply. “Don’t forget to get some sleep tonight before you get up to play in the morning.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “I didn’t realize how late it was getting.”

“Good night,” he answered.

His little interruption was all it took to remind me that I had a perfectly beautiful lover in my bedroom and was spending all my time with her working on a painting. We stepped back to look at the painting and I slid a hand around Joan’s waist. She turned toward me and we kissed.

“How about if we clean up now and start again in the morning?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Let’s do that.”

It was another of those moments when I realized the importance of doing interesting things with my girlfriends and not just having sex with them.

I knew that, of course. I’d been married. V1 had a household and children. A lot of my time together with Rebecca or Renie had been spent engaged in the mundane. We cleaned house. We took the children on adventures. We cooked. We tended the yard and garden. How was it those things had seemed like they were tedious chores instead of time we could share together? Joan and I had talked a lot while we were painting. We told jokes and laughed. And continued to do that as we cleaned our brushes and went to take a shower together.

It was so easy to forget to connect with my girlfriends like this when our time together was so limited and we wanted to show each other our love in a physical way. I was thankful again that Nanette had reminded me of the many ways people could connect. That was something V1 and his Sharon Long never figured out. As the Eagles put it, ‘They had one thing in common. They were good in bed.’ Joan and I weren’t sublimating our sex drive into the project. We were sharing on a different level.

That didn’t mean we weren’t interested in sex, too.

We lay in bed about one in the morning, satisfied sexually as well as emotionally. I traced the pattern of the pod symbol on her left butt cheek. She hadn’t had the tattoo done but put it there with henna ‘to see if it was the right place and size.’

“I’m scared to do it,” Joan said. “I’m afraid I’ll be like one of those soldiers who had a girlfriend’s name tattooed on their arm before they went to war. Then they spent the next fifty years with the name of an ex tattooed in their flesh as an eternal reminder of their foolishness.”

“Do you plan to become our ex,” I whispered. She pressed her face against my shoulder as she shook her head.

“But I’ll be the only one with a tattoo. I’m the only one old enough.”

“That’s not true. Emily is old enough. Nanette. Sophie doesn’t dare get a tattoo because it would end her dancing career. The thing is, I think it’s a personal decision. I don’t think we can decree that everyone in the pod is going to have a tattoo,” I said.

“It was my idea. I’ll look like a chicken-shit if I don’t have it done,” she said.

“I think I need to talk to my sister about it when we go out to San Diego over spring break,” I said. “She sounded all enthusiastic but I don’t think she’s done it yet, either.” Joan looked up at me and caught her lower lip between her teeth—that adorable look that girls have.

“Can I go with you?” she asked. “To see Emily?”

“Um ... I don’t know. We’re planning to drive and it’s a long trip to be stuck in the back seat with my little sister. We’ll have to ask my parents. And Emily. I mean...”

“I wouldn’t have to go for all of it. I could fly out for a couple of days. I feel like ... you know ... Emily is where I’ll be in a year. I want to know how she’s handling it.”

“Let’s talk to her tomorrow before I talk to my parents. K?”

“Yeah. I love you, Jacob.”

“I love you, Joan.”

The camera setup Sunday morning was a lot like I’d arranged when Sophie danced behind me. I framed it carefully so the wall and Joan would be visible, but they’d be in the background. I’d be far enough forward to give her room to work and she’d just paint while I was playing. The focus would still be on me and my guitar, but she would be a dancer painting behind me. I chose a program of Segovia pieces and just lost myself in playing, paying no more attention to the monitor than I did when a girlfriend was curled up next to me.

When I was finished with the thirty-five minutes of music, I turned and saw Joan was still painting, swaying as if she were dancing to the music that still rang in her ears. I was caught in her simple beauty and started playing again. What I was seeing was not sexy clothes or carefully applied makeup. I was seeing a woman caught up in something she loved, drawing me into her circle.

I didn’t face the camera to play, I played facing Joan, often just improvising rather than playing from my list. This was more akin to playing face-to-face with Cindy than to having a girlfriend sitting beside me. I could tell we responded to each other and both the painting and the music were affected.

I saw Joan heave a deep breath and lay down her brush. I strummed a closing chord and silenced the strings as she turned toward me. I clicked off the recorder just before Joan landed on my lap while I held my guitar out to the side.

“I feel so much better now,” she said. I held her as we both looked at the wall. It was subtler than the original artwork she’d made for her tattoo. It had more colors and depth with shadows of the figures reappearing in the background. “I’ll get the brushes and paint cleaned up while you edit your music video. Then, let’s make love again.”

The last thing I did before uploading the video was to turn the camera back on and focus on the wall painting. I faded to that as my last musical chords faded.

“Mr. Hopkins?” Ms. Levy said as Brittany and I started to leave class Monday morning. I turned to her. “Wednesday?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. She was smiling so I was hopeful that she was okay with what I’d written. I hadn’t turned in many things in a red folder of late, but this story ... I kind of got lost in describing the folds of a girl’s sex, her flavor, and scent. The story didn’t really go anyplace. I just tried to capture what it meant to me ... what I felt when I made love to one of my girlfriends. The non-private description of the girl in my story was probably recognizable as Ms. Levy if she looked for that. I had no idea how the descriptions of her privates matched.

But it didn’t look like she was mad or upset, so I’d find out at lunch Wednesday.

“That was intense,” Beca said as we gathered for lunch.

“And long,” Livy added. “You don’t usually play for an hour.”

“I was going to cut it down, but it just seemed right to leave it uncut. Until Joan attacked me,” I laughed.

“I love the artwork!” Desi said. “Joan, that is the best representation of us ever. I wasn’t sure about a tattoo before, but I think I could handle something as beautiful as that on my butt.”

“I hope you treated our girlfriend really well after the camera was turned off,” Brittany said. “I mean really well.”

“It was nice,” Joan said.

“Nice? Nice is all it was?” Rachel smacked me on the arm. “Couldn’t you have put forth a little more effort to make it better than ‘nice’?”

“Don’t, Rachel. Don’t,” Joan pled. “It was ... I don’t have words for it. I fell in love with Jacob all over again.”