Odalisque
Fifty-two
SATURDAY WAS CHILLY in the morning, but when we turned all the lights on under our new tent, the temperature rose. Twenty-five volunteers worked hard from the moment the temperature hit fifty until we were wiped out after five. The tent had the added advantage of blocking the wind so we were comfortable inside.
Maybe too comfortable—at least for me. Kate wanted to work near me, which was sweet, but disastrous. I had my headset on and was in my zone when I noticed Kate laying in a shadow before the highlight. When I corrected her, she frowned at me, but did it my way. A little later she was spending way too much time on a detail and I asked her to move on so we could finish the focal point before quitting time. The third time I turned to correct something she was doing, she laid her paintbrush down and left. Shit! I kept painting, but then kept having to go back and re-do things I had already done. By five when I told everyone to clean-up, I was tired and pissed. A few of us had been working on focal points but nearly everyone else was doing field work which meant that for the first time since we began the project, there were almost as many grid squares with paint in them as without. That didn’t mean they were finished. But they had paint in them.
I went home to a quiet house. The boys were back with Jack for the weekend. Kate, I was told, was out. Wendy was at work. Melody said she was spending the night with Bree to watch TV.
“Okay, what happened?” Lissa asked. She was the only one of us who hadn’t been on the job at all today. She was pretty pressed to get schedules and shipping arranged for Nationals.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play innocent, Tony. Kate stormed in about three o’clock, cleaned up in her room and stormed out again. She never said a word, but the sound of the doors was eloquent. Melody barely said a word during dinner and went to watch TV with Bree. When’s the last time you can think of that she watched TV?” Lissa asked. “What happened?”
“I criticized Kate.”
“In front of everyone?” Lissa exclaimed.
“No. We were working together and she just wasn’t getting the feel right. And when I suggested trying it a different way, she got all huffy and stormed off,” I said. I was a little miffed and didn’t want to talk about this. But there you have it.
“A different way.”
“Yeah.”
“Your way.”
“Well…” Shit! “We were just so out of synch. We were supposed to be working on the same part, but it was like we were working on two different pieces. It just wasn’t blending. What should I do?”
“I don’t know, love,” Lissa said, cradling my head. “Let’s take a bath and go to bed. We’ll hope we can see something better in the morning.”
I realized I really didn’t know why Melody was upset.
I cued up the music I was going to paint to today. The day started in the mid-forties, but it was warming up rapidly and under our makeshift tent it was already over fifty at nine o’clock because of the heat generated by the lights. I hadn’t seen either Melody or Kate this morning, either at home or here at the jobsite. It was making me nervous and upset. I drank another cup of coffee before climbing the scaffold, knowing full-well that I’d end up having to stop painting to go piss. I was cued up with Seattle Grunge, starting with the classic Nirvana piece “Nevermind” and Pearl Jam’s “Ten.” I kept loading the list with Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins, Green River, Mudhoney, and Blood Circus. I mixed in some Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. I was going to shake the scaffold if I wasn’t careful. But I was a little angry and there was only one place on the painting I could focus in this mood.
Bree and Melody stopped me at the ladder as soon as I was sure everyone had their assignments. I looked at Melody questioningly and she smashed herself into me in a hug.
“I’m sorry, Tony,” she said. “I shouldn’t have shut you out.”
“What’s going on, Melody?” I asked. “Why were you mad at me?”
“Because Kate was. When she left yesterday, she was really angry and she brushed me off when I went to find her. I was so upset that I couldn’t talk about it. I should have come to bed with you last night.”
“Liss and I were worried.”
“Bree picked me up and I spent the night there.”
“I don’t know what to do, Meddy. I didn’t mean to get Kate angry. We just weren’t in sync yesterday. I was probably an ass, but I haven’t seen her to try to make it up,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Bree said, hugging both Melody and me. I wrapped an arm around our friend. “It will work out. Get some painting done.”
“Slave driver,” I said. We shared a kind of mournful chuckle, kissed each other and headed to our areas.
“Ames!” Amy called to me. She hadn’t been able to work yesterday because of roller-girl practice. I was a surprised she was on the platform so early this morning. Sometimes those girls stay out all night.
“What’s up, Ames?” I asked.
“I just want to make sure you have us where you really want us,” she said. “I think I’d be better on the secondary focals than on the primary. Keep Jim, Maggie, Doc, and Kate on primaries and let me fill in this background detail.” She was holding a sheaf of pages from the rendering book and I went through them.
“It sounds like a plan,” I said. “Doc won’t be here until noon and I don’t know about Kate. If you want to head the secondaries team, why don’t you start drafting the scene painters. It’s perfect for them.”
“You got it, boss. Paint on!”
With everybody working, having their paint mix together, and able to coordinate with Bree and Deb on the site, I was finally able to go do some painting. I don’t know why I reserved the starting point for myself today, but I figured I’d be in the first and second tier near the top as I painted the fireball. There was no way to do this painting without acknowledging the fact that for all its beauty and innocence, the Tent City had been firebombed. But I’d transformed the object so that instead of descending into the encampment, the ball of flame was ascending as a kind of reverse shooting star. It was the light source for all the rest of the painting.
I’d just put the first streak of yellow paint on the wall, a sweeping arc that touched seven different grid blocks as Kurt Cobain started his muddy guitar riffs in my ear, when I felt her presence. I was focused on the wall, but I could feel Kate beside me. I turned to her slightly and started to pull my headset away from my ears. She touched my hand and shook her head, holding the headset in place. In her other hand, she held up an identical headset. She spent a minute looking at my player and tuned her headset into the same frequency as mine then snapped it onto her head. We stood there on the platform looking at each other as the same music filled both our heads. We were nodding to the beat—listening to the same music.
We were connecting.
As Linkin Park hit their opening strains of “What I’ve Done,” Kate leaned in and gave me a quick kiss. We bent as one person to dip our brushes and raise them. From then on, we were lost to the world.
It was like painting with two hands at once. In fact, if we each had two brushes, we could probably paint four-handed. As Nirvana spun up “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” we launched a star into the sky of the wall. We were working so closely that we were able to wet blend the arcs, curves, and highlights. We worked intently and in complete synchronization. It was like playing racquetball with Lissa!
Kate and I were dancing.
It felt like we could just keep going and paint the whole wall without stopping. In reality, we’d covered about twenty grid blocks and bled into a couple dozen more when we started slowing down. I turned to look at Kate and she had a kind of scrunched up look on her face. We were still plugged in together, but we were coming out of our zone. She gestured and pointed at her crotch. Huh? I pulled the headset away from my ears and Kate did the same.
“You want to have sex here?” I asked in disbelief. She laughed.
“No, silly. I have to go pee.” I laughed, too, and realized my system was screaming at me for relief. Oh yeah. That coffee.
We pulled our headsets the rest of the way off and sealed up the cans of paint. Then there was applause. We looked out and saw most of our crew, twenty-five or thirty people standing on the grass looking at us. Someone had raised the front of the tent when the day got hot. When did that happen? It felt like it was close to seventy.
Kate and I came down from the platform and Doc, Melody, Bree, Lissa, Whitney, and Wendy met us on the ground. I wondered when Lissa, Whitney, and Wendy had arrived. I didn’t remember them on the list for volunteering today.
“We didn’t think you were ever going to stop,” Doc said. “We’ve been standing out here watching for the past hour. Everyone else has cleaned up. This was a great day.”
“Cleaned up? What time is it?” Kate was dancing back and forth.
“It’s after six,” Melody said.
“No wonder I have to pee!” Kate screamed as she ran for the restrooms. I was close on her heels.
When we got back outside, I started up to get our paint supplies but Bree waved me back.
“We got it,” she said. “Everything’s cleaned up.”
“That was so cool to watch,” Whitney said. “It was like watching you and Lissa play racquetball. You were just like a single person.”
“If we played racquetball like that for that long, you’d have to carry me out on a stretcher,” Lissa said.
“I knew you could do that after I watched you on the exercise in class this week,” Doc said. “Connections aren’t just on the canvas.”
“We are definitely selling tickets to the next performance,” Bree said. “That was amazing. We could raise a bunch of money just by letting people watch you two paint.”
“Yeah, but we all need to hear the music,” Sandra said. “I want to dance, too. We need the music piped all over out here so we’re all hearing the same thing.”
“Are we okay, Kitten?” I asked quietly as we were walking toward the car. We really hadn’t said a dozen words to each other all day.
“We are so okay,” Kate said. “I’m sorry I got so mad yesterday.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I was a real ass. I love your painting and had no right to criticize how you were doing it,” I said. “How did you come up with the idea of getting a matching headset?”
“Wendy,” Kate said and beckoned our Tiger into her other arm. “I went to the restaurant last night and just waited until she got off work, then we went to Denny’s and sat there together for a couple of hours. Wendy told me I needed to hear the same music. I had to wait for Best Buy to open this morning before I could come to work.”
“Thank you, Tiger,” I said. “I was pretty torn up last night, afraid that I’d really messed up our relationship.” Wendy smiled at me and growled. She made a playful tiger-paw swipe at me.
“Don’t do it again,” she said. “I cry when you fight.”
I pulled the two to me in a hug and we kissed. Before long, our other four companions were in the mix.
“We need food,” Bree said firmly. I had to agree.
What a day!
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