Part VII -- The Paris Stories

(Part VII) "I Didn't Know Art" 

With powerful energy, their love burned brightly for a fortnight in Paris.

They wanted everything, to do everything, seeing the city from every angle on either side of the river; they felt it was the first time they’d lived.

“I’m an artiste, Charlotte. I’ve become strong enough to concentrate on my work, vigorous enough to calculate what’s in my head, and brave enough to paint it,” Charlotte smiled. His roots bled into her like indigo ink on a canvas he'd drawn.

He continued, “Medication affected me. An artiste is the last person in the world who can afford to be desensitized.” “The drugs carried me along fine, but I had no zest—it was, how do you say it? Mediocre. I didn’t like or dislike it, actually; it was just existing, not living.”

“It wasn’t good for me, but I didn’t know Art yet.”

Charlotte could see his pensive face as he told her. She agreed, “Your art lives through you, Gabriel, you’re dedicated to it, it runs deep.” “Thank you for sharing this with me.” At the same time, their toes carried on a conversation without words; the relationship was tangling like the soft cotton sheets.

Photo©A. C. Akin

“Is what I draw really Art?” he questioned her. “With a capital-A”. Charlotte considered this question awhile as they laid next to each other, intertwined.

“I don’t know how to define it, but some things I know are faking to be art.” She laughed, “it’s like an old law professor told us about Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who said once, I don’t know how to define whatever it was he was defining in the brief, but I know it when I see it.”

“I believe that art influences other art. The work of one discipline can inform and inspire another. What you do, drawing in such detail, gives me the confidence to try to write in a different way, or play guitar--of course what you draw is capital-A, r-t”.

Charlotte told Gabriel that in the law they’re taught to look to what others have said in règle du précédent; but in art one gets to be original - saying further, “what I like about your use of angles, measurements, and the exactness of your shapes, is that you’ve taken what is Known, and created the Unknown.” She was mesmerized but most all, calm. Her heart's rhythmic beating was strong, but barely perceptible.

“You think so?” He said as he sat up in bed. “I get lost in those designs.”

She added, “You borrow from the abstract realm, like nature’s sequence, and mathematics, or geometry; but this is a fundamental style, I know the order you seek in life is represented in your drawings.” “When do you think you’ll have an inner need to add color to your art?" Charlotte was thinking out loud: “I don’t know if adding color to your abstract art would have the same psychic effect as it does with impressionism?” 

It was a valid point, but wasn’t addressed then; they were hungry.

Public Domain Photo

The couple rose late in the morning, the sun's ivory rays warmly flushed the room, making bright boulevards to their bed, and revealing dust in the air like snowflakes. They ventured over a block to one of their favorite bakeries for breakfast and dark, French-roasted coffee.  ##

Fiction 2018©Mark H. Pillsbury

The Law Student in Paris (Part II)

Part II from Paris:

Cafe Society ©Mark H. Pillsbury (2015)

I’ve often remembered how complicated this relationship appeared on its face; but at that age, at that time, it fit like a glove. Without similar backgrounds or cultures, common-ground came from far more intrinsic personality patterns, where they fell on the arc of our lives. 

His English proficiency allowed us to communicate, but our rapport grew slowly, partly because of our separate styles. Gabriel leaned shyly toward introversion, but his eyes sparkled, connecting with mine when we met.

My strong, gregarious “American” persona, smooth as my tanned legs, pressured his French manhood, yet as artists we were noncompetitive; drawn together by his earnest skillfulness, far more interesting than mine. 

He loved to debate politics, or the legal system. I assumed my sophisticated, cerebral “aura” caught his fancy, but he told me later that he first noticed me wearing a simple red Hermes scarf tying up my long, wavy brown hair.

Even though both of us were “breaking-out” of entrenched patterns; we went about it differently. Trading my logical conformity and linear thinking with sublimity, artistry, and creativity, became more art than science. On the other hand, Gabriel escaped deep-rooted archetypes of chaos and disorder through focus and concentration on life’s blueprint, which he found in nature’s precise mathematical models. As representatives of yin and yang, I believe we came together at the starting point of these changes; like two halves chasing each other, seeking balance. ##

[*This is a work of fiction, all references are coincidental and photographs are used under the "Fair Use" doctrine]

Part IV: The Dreamer

No one has fully grasped what the dreaming mind is doing.

It doesn’t turn off during sleep: brain cells fire, the mind spins; current or past circumstances play out like a movie. Gerri never dreamed, usually knocked out by drugs and vodka; however, since the funeral, images, motifs, and drama haunted his sleeping hours.

Surely these apparitions inform Gerri in some way about his grief. He hoped to understand this condition, then healing could begin and balance restored to his waking life. But his latest dream, unlike any other, drove him deeper into depression.

In the dream Shelby walked up to Gerri in a crowded place, as if they happened upon each other by chance, along the boardwalk in Venice Beach. Stunning, alluring, and radiant in her youth; she seemed just as he remembered her twenty years ago when they fell in love.

As she stood there, the morning light beaming from behind, Gerri could almost see through her; but the colors weren’t faded, on the contrary, everything about this dream popped.

Gerri believed God allowed him to interact with Shelby to lighten the immense guilt burdening his daily life since her death. The relationship between the significant and the fortuitous existed in God’s realm; he did not question the dreams, they were in a reality over which he had no control, indeed he was grateful for the Shelby’s appearance.

“Baby, do you realize how much I miss you?” Gerri asked her. “If I could go back to 1992 and marry you again, I’d do it, but I’d act differently this time!” Unlike Gerri who was plaintive and serious in these conversations, Shelby acted ethereal and joyous.

“Stop, that G.” Shelby said with a wry smile. “We can’t be going back there anyway.” “Let’s talk about right now,” she insisted. Shelby looked around, with her head on a swivel, making sure no one bumped into her on the busy boulevard.

“My love, I can’t stay long!” Shelby urged Gerri when he got distracted. Shelby held a Bible in her hand which looked like the old one from her childhood that sat on their home bookshelf, untouched. No white robes or halos over Shelby Austin, just comfortable jeans and flats with a colorful top, her hair pulled back in a girlish ponytail. Desultory, he was self-conscious for being heavier and much older than Shelby in this dream.

“What do you see of us down here?” Gerri questioned. She grinned, knowing his curiosity, adding seriously, “I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell you very much at all.”

As the conversation wound down, a strong breeze blew across the boardwalk and on the horizon a storm gathered with dark, foreboding clouds. The crowd thinned out, flags swirled and snapped in the breeze, and big fat raindrops smacked the pavement, reminding Gerri of tears he shed during the day. [Never did a drop hit Shelby, which appeared very strange to the dreamer].

“My expectations were wrong when we got married, sugar.”

“Marriage was on my checklist. I did not take it seriously; I should have tried to understand what you were going through, instead of helping you with your self-image issues, we medicated our pain away,” Gerri continued, “once we got on that stuff, you never really came back to reality.” So filled with regret, the tears literally oozed from his eyes as he spoke, spilling down his cheeks in streams.

Shelby reached out to him, just beyond their touch. She searched his eyes and lovingly assured him through her tone and pitch, once again using her angelic voice, “Gerri, listen to me baby; none of us do what’s right, most of the time we only think of ourselves, even in marriage.”

“God showed me mercy, taking me from this world,” she looked around the scene, “I was a bad influence on Bobbi Kristina!” Now Shelby seemed remorseful, “Can you believe that I exposed my only daughter to the things that took me down?” “What role model is that?”

“I behaved badly; there were natural consequences for that down here, although it was all forgiven when I got home,” Shelby looked off toward the roiling surf. “It was like the prodigal’s feast.”

“And I can sing clearly again where I am Gerri,” she beamed, looking him directly in the eyes, unashamed; “Heaven is a good place. Your job is to take care of her now, your second chance is with your daughter; I will know how grown-up you are by what you do with her, Gerri.” That was all for now, then she turned and walked north back up the avenue.

 Stunned, Gerri just stood there fixed to the concrete. In just a moment looking down, Shelby blended in with the crowds and disappeared. He jogged toward where she had walked but she vanished as if a ghost.

Would Gerri say this correctly describes the dream: A ghost story? Or a love story?

©Mark H. Pillsbury

[fiction composed Feb. 19, 2012]