Eames (plagiaristic) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-20 13:07:00 |
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The approach to the Mandarin was concrete and granite, glassed in windows like so many eyes gazing out on neon and crystalline, on a day and night never allowed to go dark. Saint did not look up at the byplay of neon and fantasy, of plastic glamor and false excitement. The town before this had been stars spread out thickly above, freckling the sky and clear-sweet air to breathe. Vegas was the grit beneath nails, the grimed stucco of the buildings off the Strip, the places in between. He was late, late enough that someone might hurry - quicken steps, perhaps dig out a cell phone and make a call, voice snap-quick and apologetic, unctioned with guilt. Saint did none of these things. He was unhurried feet on the pathway, the battered leather of boots scuffed by dirt from a hundred cities and the steady eyes of someone who did not impress by buildings, by architectural fantasies. A solid grey gaze flickered over all that stone, all that smoothed-over cement and he dug his hands into his pockets and walked up and in. It was the orient inside, but an orient scrubbed clean, a vision that was Western opulence, Western preferences; Saint remembered opium, he remembered crammed tea-houses and the jostle of elbows, of the thin wail of sweet-sad instruments a background to the milky-distillation of the tea. He was a figure in the doorway, one who stood still where others passed, the swish of silk and linen, the sweet smells of perfume and of unctions. Saint was clean but in a rumpled way that suggested motel linens and communal places, that was crumpled black shirt worn thin over whippet-frame, the unconsciousness of someone entirely confident due to lack of care. He waited, and he watched, and he drew close to the hostess only when he was entirely certain he would not sit alone in the center of blue and gold, an ode to a China that had never been, that he had never seen, and when he was pointed toward the table, it was loose-limbed stride. The man from four, five years before had not changed a great deal. He was serious grey-dark eyes in a calm face and the shaggy-dark hair of someone who rarely made time for cutting hair unless it was with scissors over a motel bathroom sink. He was a little thinner, perhaps - Saint was a rangy man with lean muscle tightly corded over bone and little spare flesh to lose on the next travels. He sat down and he disturbed nothing in his surroundings, jarred no cutlery nor disturbed the table itself, a silent taking-up of space that was impression left like a thumbprint in sand, ready to be wiped away. He looked at Wren expectantly, and he folded his hands - musician’s fingers - on the edge of the table, oblique and obvious. The camera was slung over his back, under his jacket, a bulk just above his shoulder-blade but it wasn’t there, just then. Wren had almost forgotten what the Tea Lounge was like. Once, a lifetime ago, last year, she'd come here often. She liked the jasmine blend, and she'd been able to afford twenty dollars for a pot and some quiet near the large windows. She'd swathed herself in decadence, then. She'd made herself feel safe and comfortable with wealth that came at the end of a crop. She'd been ice and pale. She barely remembered it all now. She shifted on the seat, a slim dress in cream that had once been fashionable, but faded now, and camel flats that had seen better months. Her hair was dark, rich and chestnut, and it had needed a cut for weeks. Blonde to brown, but neither of those things resembled the girl Saint had known. She'd met him on a street in Boston. Nineteen, and she'd been heading south after leaving New York and Luke and herself. Two months into running, and four months pregnant, and she'd been hooking and living with a group of homeless teens beneath the cover of an abandoned tenement. She'd looked dirty, and she'd been hungry. Cinnamon hair and pained grey eyes and already gone skinny. He'd been nice. She remembered that. He'd been nice. And, when the weather had turned, she'd gone south. Florida, and she'd already started coughing bright and red at the time. She looked up when he entered the Tea Lounge, and she smiled an uncertain little smile. He looked much like he had then. She'd thought him handsome, and she'd liked the way he'd never asked her things, and the way he'd never asked things of her. She waited until he folded himself into the chair, her thumb twisting her wedding ring out of habit, and the smile on her ample lips a genuine one. "You're like seeing something from the past," she said candid, quiet-husky soft, and a voice that hadn't changed, despite the very evident changes of girl to woman. "A ghost," she added. Saint didn’t look at things like hair color or the cut of clothing; he didn’t know fashion one year from the next and the shirt looked equally like he’d bought it from Goodwill or from some upscale place in a moment flush with cash, the ambiguousness of quality in the dull black fabric. He didn’t look at these things but his measured gaze took in the corners of her eyes, the curve of her mouth, the way she sat behind the table and folded her hands - Saint looked at the slope of her fingernails rather than her shoes. There was the ambivalence of a camera lens in the careful, muted looking and when he was done, his eyes were steady on her face. She had looked different, the last time, Saint thought. She had looked then like she didn’t know the names of places that charged these kinds of prices, like sitting in them might draw attention she didn’t want. She’d been a little girl with a bird name, a little girl who had fear written in the corners of her mouth. He thought perhaps the photograph would look like an echo, a shadow. Something formless from which she had been made. She’d been the long-limbed promise of something beautiful beneath the dirt, something butterfly-tentative. He’d bought coffee before but in small places. Cheap ones. He didn’t look at the menu, and he didn’t flinch at the prices - when the waitress hovered, Saint tapped something written in Mandarin at the side of the English listed items without bothering to read it off, and he looked toward Wren, eyebrows raised. And then he shifted forward, digging for his wallet, and he pulled out something small - black and white, and the composition placed her in the lower left corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, bare feet on the chair - caught half-looking to camera. It was striking, the shot. He placed it on the glassed-over top and he slid it with his left index finger over to her, without saying one word. Just a smile. "Jasmine," she told the waitress. Just that, because that was all that was needed to get a pot that smelled like heaven. She couldn't afford this place anymore, but she had a folded twenty in her purse that she was willing to abandon to the guilty pleasure. She had trouble with her newfound poverty, as if she didn't think she could handle remembering what it had been like before the crops and the whips. She'd liked those creature comforts, had come to cherish them in the way someone cherishes a favorite stuffed toy. The waitress departed, and she was quiet as he dug through his wallet. Silences had always existed between them, even when her breathing had begun to be a rattle, when she had so many things to say, and yet no real desire to say them. It was like that now, most days, when she could get lost in the silence of her own thoughts for hours. She had to remind herself to talk sometimes, especially to Gus, who was already too quiet for a child his age. She took the picture between her fingers, and she looked down at it. She remembered precisely what it felt like to be that girl, because that girl was her nightmares. Forgetting wasn't an option, and her fingers ran along the edges of the picture. Her nails were clean now, so clean, and her fingers had lost their wind-cracked lines, but the grace in her bones was still the same as it had been then, strangely otherworldly and linger-slow. "Thank you," she said, putting it back down again. "I'd considered giving it to someone, when you said you had it, but now I'm not sure," she admitted. Stark and striking, yes, but she wasn't sure that would be a good thing. The tea came, and she reached for his palm-sized pot. "Do you want me to?" she asked of pouring for him. She'd learned the tea rituals in Seattle, just as she'd learned countless other forms of etiquette, hoping they would net her a rich protector. Saint thought photographs were photographs. They meant little, they were fragments of time rather than of the people in them and the print on the table of a young woman whose cheekbones were etched out of youth by poverty, by too little to eat was exactly that, a print. There were no ghosts for Saint or nothing that he carried with him. He was the clean smell of fresh air beneath the Las Vegas scent of dirt and something smoky layered in along with it, cigarettes and something else. He watched her instead, and his fingers itched but hotels didn’t charge twenty bucks for a pot of tea if they were all right with photographs amidst all the quiet-stately people. It wasn’t China and it wasn’t real. It was the kind of illusion that rode his spine beneath the shirt and made him itch, just a little. “I have others,” he said finally. Saint’s voice was quiet-thin. It was a mid-range timbre pitched low; either he talked little or he was used to not being heard and the voice was soft as smoke and then he shrugged, a little fidget of movement. Saint sat very still; there was no restless jerk of the knee, no motion of the hands. He kept himself as nothing as the landscape, painted himself bland and featureless. He looked at the teapot, and he looked at the swansneck turn of her wrist and the clean pottery cup to one side. He nodded. It served as invitation and of thanks; he looked instead at the seam of Wren against blue-gold attempt at orientalism, at how it was almost invisible, almost completely absorbed. Saint didn’t think much of shoes and clothes or the effect they had except critically - now, he thought, there was something of smoothness lacking. Something unbroken about the line. She wouldn't have understood his approach to the photographs. For her, photographs were memories, and sometimes memories could hurt. At times, the hurt was good, once it had gone numb and soft. She had no pictures of her maman, but she wished she did. Thierry had some, but she'd never asked for one for her own, and now Thierry was gone, and she wasn't sorry he'd left. But she would have liked a picture of her maman, even if having it would have made her sad. "You don't see them the same way, do you?" she asked of the photographs, something in the way she watched her giving it away. "It's art to you, and that's all." And maybe she sounded a little bit sad about that. His assertion that he had other pictures, made her tip her head to the side, curious and birdlike, wide grey eyes and curiosity. She wondered if he kept everything. She didn't think he kept her pictures because he liked her, nor did she think he'd kept them because she'd mattered. She'd been young, dirty, hungry and nothing that anyone would desire or crave, not really. Sex work wasn't about being wanted, so there wasn't a contradiction there. But he hadn't even wanted that. She poured his tea, all twist of elegant wrist and the care that belonged to a clay teapot somewhere entirely different. She poured, and then she poured, and she sat back with her cup, fingers light and careful and somehow suited to wealth and this place, her faded clothing discordant with the setting and the knowing touch of her fingertips to porcelain. "Why did you come here?" she asked him, though she knew very little about why he went anywhere at all. She didn't offer anything up, because he didn't ask. He'd never asked. Saint read a question in the cant of her head and he was long fingers folded carefully around his own cup, his fingernails scrubbed clean but flat-tipped and cut close. He did not fit at all with the wall hangings and the thick carpet and the soft, hushed sound of the hostess and the waitresses’ voices but he fit perfectly enough with the curls of jasmine-scented steam, with the green tea in the small cup settled between his palms. “I see them like photographs,” he said, and he picked it up, the one on the table, the edges fit between fingertips, held like a shard of glass. Saint looked at the photograph and he held it up beside her face, the shadow of a jawline the only thing at all similar, and when he put it down, he smiled - wing-beat quick. “You don’t look that way anymore. I would need to take another,” he said and he took a small sip of the tea. Some men would be off-put by the delicate femininity of the teahouse; Saint paid it no attention but the long lines of his collarbones, the straight angles of his jaw were pleasing juxtaposition rather than jarring in the space, even if the boots beneath the table were cracked and scuffed. He was not changed, sat there, as he had been in a small cafe near enough to where the girls waited - he was solidly the same, wrapped around the bones and there was a surety there that went further. He did not look at her even now with the kind of interest that might be expected of a man who invited her to tea - there was nothing in his eyes that was expectation. “A story,” he said, after a pause. Stories were the reason Saint went anywhere, stories to sell or stories he wished to listen to or tell. There were stories in most places and when one finished, the next one would call. Saint thought most people just didn’t listen long enough. A smile, as if to say ‘I’m here now’. "I don't understand," she admitted candidly, fingers curled around her cup and the sweet, warm steam warming her face. "What if it's of someone you care about? Is it more than a photograph then?" she asked, honestly curious. She wore her heart on her sleeve, and she couldn't imagine a life without it there, beating, and she had such a hard time understanding apathy. She understood that there was no desire in his eyes when he looked at her, and that there was nothing like warmth, but she didn't understand that same kind of nothingness for everyone. She judged herself differently, and she could understand that disinterest, but not the rest. "I'm older now," she agreed, putting her cup down and refilling it. "And not as skinny. And my son is four," she added, because this entire setting felt a little unreal to her, like it was something that floated just above flesh and blood truth. Gus made it real, and he brought the conversation down to the place where she lived now, below skies and apathy and pretty things that didn't leave bruises on the skin. She thought about his stories, while she sipped. And, eventually, she fixed him with an intense grey gaze that held more confidence than it had when he'd known her last. She didn't look away, and she didn't flinch or fidget. "Do you have a story?" she asked. Saint did not photograph well. The lines of his face blurred beneath a camera lens, the quiet intelligence in grey eyes washed out to nothing. He looked awkward, then - stood at the sides with his hands shaping empty air as though he were reaching instead for the camera. For something he knew how to do well. He looked neutral, the kind of neutral suited to other people layering themselves over it - but his smile, when it came, was a truth soft and worn as it was. He smiled now, and he sipped again the strange familiarity of something last drunk with the tonal-hum of Mandarin all around him, a blend that was not exact but close to it (possibly, Saint thought, they could afford to ship it out) and he looked at the photograph once again. “Sometimes they’re more.” Sometimes they were intimate, private - innocuous amongst the others. Saint sought stories, found people now and again. He shrugged, slant of shoulders and a small movement before lapsing into stillness. “But if I lose the negatives, I keep them here.” A tap, index finger against the loose cotton over his chest. “They don’t hold meaning because I don’t let them.” It was a lot of words, all at once. He looked again at the girl who had once been a model and was now a woman. Wren had been a story at the beginning. But he had known how easy it would be to sell the photographs, had the perfect print by the third shot. The returning sessions that faded into ambiguity, the camera silent and still on his back, had been about the girl, not the story she told with her slight, fearful hands. It wasn’t a warm look, Saint’s eyes on her - not the oblique warmth of someone used to showing things. It was smaller, a knowing. It creased the edges of his eyes. “I have a story,” Saint agreed, but he didn’t volunteer what it was. He looked instead at her hands, at the worn places, at the slope of her cheek. He thought the little boy might have been good for the girl who had not had friends to throw the pastel-tinted parties of welcome for her. “Four.” Saint looked thoughtful for a moment. “I liked trains. When I was four.” Another smile. Something of the volunteering of information, careless amidst the tea-cups. “You look well, Wren.” Wren had never held a camera between her fingers, but she thought - just then - that she might like to. Once, ages ago, she'd wanted to learn everything. She'd believed that it would make her more valuable, and value had been more important than experience, then. She'd let herself be bent over a piano once, just to learn the notes. And she'd danced in nothing, just to learn a waltz. But she'd never considered learning pictures, and she'd never wanted to. But now, when life was more than a value proposition, she wanted to learn. "I want to try," she admitted, pointing at the photograph and sounding like that dirty girl on the street, the one with simple words and simple thoughts, and all the maelstroms hidden beneath her skin and in the grey of her eyes. "Have you ever fallen in love with one of them?" she asked, curious. She didn't mean the photograph; she meant the subject. The lens did things, she thought. Things that brought out secrets, and she thought it would be easy to fall in love with some broken little thing on the street. She knew what he took pictures of. She'd seen him with his camera before he'd ever noticed her. "Do you ever take pictures of pretty things?" she asked a moment later, simplicity in the question and the belief that ugly things could never be beautiful. It was the reason she had trouble appreciating herself at all. That line was starkly drawn for her - good and bad, beautiful and ugly. She looked up as his fingers tapped his chest, and she gave him the briefest of smiles when he said he didn't allow the photographs to hold meaning. "I think they hold meaning, even if you don't let them," she said quietly, perhaps astutely. "He likes animals. Giraffes, this week. He thinks we should buy a zoo," she offered of Gus, a tiny tidbit, a nothing that was worth so very much. "Merci," when he said she looked good, and she gave him a smile that was warm, familiar. "You look the same, which means you still look good." Saint took photographs of things that were broken and things that were beautiful. He found the grey places, the palette of shades that were uncertain of which they were entirely and the girl in the photograph was, Saint thought, sitting in the center of the spectrum, cool-eyed and fearful. Ugly things were not always so, the line was smudged, written in damp sand. He sat very still, and he looked again at the girl in the photograph and the woman sat across and his eyes flickered over the soft curve of her jaw, where living better, living somewhere warm and clean and with food, had layered flesh over hard bone. “Everything I photograph is beautiful,” Saint said, as simply as the question had been, and he considered the next one, slotted alongside the first like pearls on silk. “I have,” but he didn’t say who and he didn’t say how. Saint showed love in tones, in greys and blacks and bright-lit whites. He took photographs the way others laid on hands, the stroke of lover’s finger along spine was camera-lens, coaxing intimacy and leaching it onto paper. Whether it was the camera at fault or the lover made the camera more intimate, he didn’t know - the photographs were taken too often, too quickly, to be certain. He shifted - notional movement, the shrugging off a jacket as worn-thin in places as the kinds of things people threw away and the utilitarian strap of the camera became apparent. He loosened it, his hands careful-strong and he looped the strap onto the polished surface of the table, the camera set down with a quiet click of glass. His smile was an echo, a Narcissus-shade of hers. “Thank you.” Saint took compliments in the same simple way he gave them, an acknowledgment without overt pleasure in them. It was a small, comfortable thing worn across his shoulders, a solid self-confidence that neither needed compliments nor avoided them. “Will you?” he said, of the zoo. "Is it the photograph that's beautiful?" she asked. "Or is it what you took the photograph of beautiful?" She thought there was a difference, because taking a pretty picture didn't mean you wanted to get to know the person that the picture was of. She leaned forward, her fingers touching the black and white image that rested between them on the table. "I remember that day," she said after a moment of thinking. "I remember how my stomach grumbled so loudly that I thought you would hear it, and I remember how my head swam with fever. I remember knowing it was getting too cold, and I remember not wanting to leave all the same. I'm not sure any of that is beautiful," she said, and that was why she was having doubts about showing the photograph to Luke. What if he only saw bad memories in it? She bit her lip, worried it, and she thoughtlessly tucked one leg beneath herself on the seat, her shoe coming loose at the heel as she settled back against her shin. His confession that he had fallen in love with a subject (she assumed, a subject, and not a photograph), made her look up at him once more. "What happened?" she asked, watching with birdlike curiosity as he shucked the jacket and set the camera on the table. She leaned forward again, reaching for the strap and the black and white machine that had produced the photograph. Her fingers touched the strap, benediction in the swipe of fingertips, and she looked up at him again. "Can I?" The question about the zoo earned him a shake of her head and a young smile. "No. I think zoos are pretty expensive, and the rent is hard enough most months," she admitted, concern seeping into her expression. "The hotel makes it hard," she admitted, as if she just remembered where she'd spoken to him, just remembered that he had a door too, somewhere in a dark and dusty hallway. Saint didn’t clarify the distance between the beauty of the thing and the beauty the lens made of things, paring them back to their bones and leaving them stark. He didn’t clarify because he didn’t see it: Saint saw beauty where few other people did and the girl in the photograph was beautiful simply because she was, despite the soft grey-scale that said color in the cheeks, and the way she’d clasped her arms across her belly, like she was holding herself in and the world at bay with the barrier of thin sleeves and caution. She had a broken-glass quality to the way she sat now, curled feet beneath her and the cock of her head and Saint’s palms spread wide, the lines in them very clear in sun-stained skin, a nod of permission and the camera fingertip-nudged across the top of the table until it bumped up against her hands. “What happens to most people,” and Saint’s eyes were very clear, the softness of memory and of remembered happiness and very little of the sorrow of forgotten things. His smile creased; he was thinking in the quiet, careful way of people alone, “What happens when anyone falls in love.” And perhaps the photographs held some charm in their way, some interest in their angles and composition but a photograph was not warm breath and skin, was not the clasp of hand around a hip. Saint shrugged, the freedom of being able to walk away from such things and the ghosts lingering where they were laid. “Tell me?” It was the same, old phrase. A quiet encouragement, his hands curved around his cup in the same gesture they’d had for scrubbed-clean, cheap places in Boston and mugs of coffee. It wasn’t command; Saint’s voice had a softness that sounded as though he didn’t know how to command at all. He looked briefly worried, a fracture of an expression more to do with the rent than the hotel. “People said it’s hard.” She smiled a shy and thankful smile when he nudged the camera. She gave him another look, one last request for permission or denial, and then she picked up the heavy camera with two hands, as if it was more fragile than the teacup she'd set aside moments earlier. She set it in her lap, finding it heavier than expected, and the metal rested on faded fabric and settled until the warmness from her knees carried through the fabric and warmed the camera itself. She ran her thumbs along the edges, curious, birdlike touches and flights of fancy that didn't stay still for very long. "Is it hard?" she asked of taking pictures. She'd taken her fair share of pictures with her phone, and the question made her remember. She curled one hand around the camera on her lap, and she tugged out her cellphone (Selina's cellphone) and handed it to him. The camera icon was there, on the main screen, and it showed hundreds of pictures of a little boy, brown hair and eyes that were wide grey and much, much too old. Too, there were pictures of Luke in his uniform, and of Evie and the baby, and of Jack on the couch. The pictures were straight-on, no posing or composition, and too much bright lighting. "I don't think those count, not like that," she said, pointing at the photograph on the table. "Can they come back?" she asked of whoever he'd lost. Because it had worked that way for her, and maybe it could for other people. As for his tell me, it made her look at him for a long span of silence, deciding. But she'd known him at her worst, and maybe there was a little trust. "I can't hear her, or sense her. She can't hear me, or sense me. She gets in trouble a lot, but my- my husband's person is worse. He gets hurt a lot, and Luke doesn't come home for weeks sometimes," she admitted, and it felt a little like betraying Luke, saying it aloud like that. She looked down at the camera, and she pushed at a rounded switch with her thumb. "Can I take one?" she asked. Saint kept cameras like others might collect CDs or buy clothes; he had battered things that took shots in only certain lights and he had the light, high-tech kind that took photographs no matter when or where. The camera on the table was a Pentax, a good decade old and the metal was rubbed away to dull in parts but it was easy, and he leaned over, cool fingertips and rounded nails and he tapped lightly at the various parts, “Aperture and shutter-speed,” the finger moved, pale skin on gun-metal, “Press there.” He sat back and he took the phone instead. It looked strange, incongruous in his palm - Saint did not carry a phone that did things, but a chunk of plastic that was utilitarian-useful and old. The pictures were the usual kind, the glassy light and composition of a camera phone but he saw the curve of Wren’s mouth and the age of her eyes in the small boy, and Saint was gentle with the phone in the same way he was careful with people. “They don’t need to,” he said, to a question about people returning, and Saint’s voice was quiet-thoughtful and faint surprise. There was nothing of the need to hold onto things in that explanation and nothing further to elaborate, nothing that sketched out why goodbyes could be said that didn’t cut and didn’t hurt but were warm just the assumption that they could. “Is your husband’s person... harmful?” Saint spoke carefully and his focus was on the cup in his hands and the sweet-smoky curl of the steam of the tea, and he glanced at Wren and the camera in her lap with the concern shown across his face like light behind rice-paper, quietly oblique as to whether it was her or the idea or something other, something beyond tea and teahouses and the hushed beauty of money. Wren didn't know enough to tell if the camera was old or new. To her, it was simply heavy, something unexpectedly tangible. She found it more pleasant for that tangibleness, for the grounded reality that weighed solidly against her fingers. She watched him lean, and then she watched his fingers on the metal, the movement of skin against the button she needed to push. "Is that really all?" she asked, because she didn't comprehend that aperture and shutter-speed were something she controlled, but she had the intelligence to understand that there was more to his kind of photography than pointing and clicking. She watched him with the cellphone, and she looked at him through the viewfinder, and she pressed the button just as he looked up, that faint surprise making her finally depress the button with a smile and a bite to her lower lip. "Why don't they need to?" she asked, her own confusion evident as she weighed the camera between her fingers again, away from her face, loathe to put it down. "If you love something, and you lose it, why wouldn't you want it back?" And the simplicity of the question did a lot to showcase the way she perceived love, as something to be held close and never truly lost. She wasn't naive or innocent, and she hadn't been either of those things in a very long time. She knew bad relationships, and she knew people that had bad relationships, but she didn't think Saint was one of those people, somehow. She didn't think he was the kind that slammed doors and hurled ugly words, and she wondered why he would leave, and why he would let something go. She worried her lip, and the camera was finally set down upon the table once more. She touched her fingers to the cool teapot, and she poured the last bit into her cup. "No, Luke's person isn't harmful. He's heroic, and I think that's worse sometimes," she explained quietly. She sat back, and she sipped, willing to drink the very dregs for the pleasure of sitting in this place that she wouldn't have thought anything of months ago. "Do you know anything about yours yet?" she asked. Saint did not flinch at the familiar shutter-click, a rhythm that was as regular as breathing. The camera in his hands was not separate but extension, living entity and the look through the viewfinder was stiff and waxen-rigid, the patient set to his spine an awkward sense of not-quite-right. He smiled, but it was hesitant - an echo of the one on Wren’s face behind the camera and his head dipped as he pushed too-long hair back from his face, the look of suddenly shy and caught seen for a second by glass and print and negative. It did not require the explanation of shutter and aperture, of timing the moment appropriate to the thin-delicate light the tea-house permitted to filter in through the window. There were faces enough to filter to the surface, to emerge from liquid memory black-on-white and clear as photographic paper to think of, when Wren spoke of loss and of love in the same breath and heartbeat as he would death. Saint did not think of losing as a parting - there was an ending to every beginning and he looked at Wren now with the obscurity of understanding and something of patience in the soft grey. “Sometimes,” Saint said and the tinker of teaspoons on china was louder than he, “It’s enough to have had it.” He reached for the camera, gathered it back into his lap, “I can look out an old one.” He thought perhaps she would be good at it; she had known how to be seen, perhaps she would know how to look at others. “I know a little,” and it was nothing, nothing given but a smile to blunt its edges, and Saint’s wallet was beaten-leather, folded and worn to white-cracking places, but he pulled out enough of the crumpled green to cover both small teapots and some over, and he folded the notes into pleats as he pushed them under the nearest plate. “You really think that’s worse?” He saw that she did, that the girl who feared hunger, feared the emptiness of the streets in the burgeoning chill of the early mornings, feared something else entirely. She thought over his words. She wasn't sure she could understand them. She wasn't sure there could be enough, and she wasn't sure that having had something was okay for her. "I don't want the things I love in the past tense," she explained, quiet conviction and the kind of knowledge that came with growing up, with understanding oneself. It wasn't absolution or approval, but it was the knowledge that she was who she was, and a layer of paint wouldn't change her, not anymore; it would only make the world see something that wasn't real. "I don't like letting go," she added quietly, without any of the madness or fervor that should accompany that sort of confession. "How do you do it? Let something walk away, when your heart breaks to even think about it? How is remembering enough?" His offer of an old camera brightened her smile, the grey of her eyes going from rain cloud to gloaming. She hated charity, but there was something different about something old and unloved, as she supposed whatever he found would be. "Merci," she said, her accent something silken learned at her maman's knee, lending anachronistic refinement to the woman in the faded dress and threadbare shoes. She watched him pay, and she pulled a five from her purse, leaving the decadent twenty-dollar bill untouched. The five joined his bills he had set upon the table, and she gave the teapot one last, lingering brush of fingers, before collecting the black and white photograph and tucking it into her purse. "I think it's better, and I think it's worse. I think it's good that he's heroic, but I think it's bad that all the bad guys want to kill him all the time." She shrugged her shoulders the tiniest bit. "My world is small, Saint. I want the people I care about safe and protected. Being a hero doesn't make that very easy, even if it's a good thing." Saint was broad brush-strokes watercolor amidst the lividity of a setting that expected cash and a lot of it. He was thoughtful there, as he folded the wallet away, eased it back into his pocket and his fingers were still, pale and spider-like on the cooling china of his cup. He thought of leaving as inevitability, as enjoyable as the beginnings - the circularity of it appealed in the same way as the shades between black and white. “The world is very large,” he said gently now, as if that explained all of it, as if Wren’s world was neat and orderly in desires and wants and keeping things only as small part of much wider, messier whole. He thought it was different enough to be interesting, a world-view condensed to the people that orbited within it, a need to hold tight - Saint’s hands were slack now and they were slack always. “My heart doesn’t break,” Saint thought of hearts the way perhaps mothers thought of them, stretching-elastic, all encompassing. He was calm in the stretch of his spine, the tips of his fingers very light on porcelain and he smiled like there were no cares left at all in him. “Things can be beautiful, even if temporary.” A beat, as he watched the photograph slide into the gloom of a purse, the shy-shard of a smile disappearing on trapped-teenager’s face. He had the negatives; he would give her herself back again if she wished. “Being good is not the same as heroism,” he said and he stood and he stretched. Saint was not a tall man but he looked for a moment then, all dust-colors and greys and the black of his shirt and his boots. He looked as though he didn’t fit, as though the blue and the gold abutted him gently, ocean moving around a rock in its path and as if he cared as little as the rock might. “I hope your world is safe, Wren.” "The world is very large, but we live in very small bodies, and in very small spaces," she said. Yes, the world was a big place, but even travelers only saw a little bit of it, and even travelers lived with themselves, at the end of the day. It didn't bother her, that smallness. She would rather have condensed and close, than wide and lonely. When she thought of a very big world, she thought of not connecting. She'd lived like that. She'd gone numb and quiet, and that hadn't been very much like living. She gave him a smile that was knowing, understanding. "I like tight and messy," she admitted. She was quiet and odd, strange and whimsy, but she liked things against her skin. Not everyone. The number of people she wanted that close was very small indeed, but she liked it that way. She wasn't trusting, and trust was required for large circles and a big world. "I hope it never breaks," she told him, because she believed all hearts could break. Once, she'd believed love was a lie, a fairy tale, a fallacy. Now, she knew better, and she knew how the world could break and crumble. She thought, maybe, that he just hadn't felt that that double-edged sword of bliss and ache. "I know lost things can be beautiful. I just don't understand how you can't yearn. Remembering, it isn't enough for me. I want to touch and to be. I spent a lot of time living in memory, and I didn't like it very much," she admitted, and his entire life sounded like memory. It made her a little sad. She watched him stand and stretch, but she didn't get to her feet. "I know there's a difference," she said. She smiled, and she let that be her answer. "I hope yours is too, Saint," she said, a last glance, a smile. She would go soon, but she just wanted to sit there awhile longer. She wanted to think about the photograph, and she wanted to decide if she was going to share it. She wanted to soak in the ambiance that wasn't anything real, but that was still more decadent than anything she'd had in months. Maybe she'd buy more tea. She turned her attention to the window, after giving him a little nod goodbye. |