Who: Gabe Reed and Elise Daley What: Art appreciation. Where: A bookstore locally When: Recently! Warnings: Nada
Gabe liked bookstores. He liked them before - this was how he thought of it, as before - and he liked them when he could, on cover. They all did what they could, spooks who went deep enough to forget themselves, lose themselves in cocaine hits and life lived where the knife-balance might slip and the blade bite deep until when they scrubbed off the dirt and they shaved, they had no pieces of themselves to pull together, fractured down the lines of too many personas to find a whole one. Gabe liked books; you could sit and wait or you could read and he liked the musty, damp-and-paper smell of the old bookstores that crammed themselves between places, he liked the reassurance of knowledge other people had found and thoughtfully gathered up for those that lacked it. He had haunted a bookstore near their old place for the duration of Lu’s first pregnancy; he had read of fetuses the size of plums and oranges, of fingers and of cravings and of crowning until his appetite to know was satiate, and he could lie with his arms around his sleeping wife and recite facts inside his head until the howling of uncertainty receded enough to let him go. He was nonjudgmental, a bookstore that was glossy floors and coffee bars and women with brightly-colored piles of books on baking and quilting and baby’s developmental process was just as good as a bookstore that smelled like shut-in boxes, like paper and neglect.
Now he chose bookstores for his ability to get near the books. This one was brightly-lit; the sunshine slid sideways through wide, plate-glass windows and the shelves were the blond wood and widely-spaced that reminded him of California. The entrance was wide; wide enough for a man and a cane and it was quiet, small, mole-colored velvet chairs scattered at far enough distances to intimate solitude. There was a vast table in the very center of the store, more of the blond wood and abandoned books and he passed it, his progress slow and methodical and determined, toward the back-wall where the art books were. Gabe liked art for the same reasoning he liked books; art did not unlock understanding, provide information, art was calming because art just was. It did not demand of you, it looked you down, blankly until you either understood it or you walked away.
He was a large figure in that pale-lit store, black coat and black cane and the shuffling-limp progress of something very heavy and halting. He did not have the lingering sense of meandering that so many did between the bookstacks, that lessening of purpose and of relaxing into a browse for nothing in particular. His movement was very particular, it suggested he had been here before and he had worked out an economy of motion that would hurt the least and would garner him what he wanted. The cane was leaned against a corner, propped between an unoccupied chair and the wall. It was the only presently unoccupied chair in the place, but this did not concern Gabe; a cane leaned against anything, he had discovered, largely meant people left well alone, as if it might be catching. He had one broad hand flat against the book-shelves, sturdy enough to take some of his weight, and he leaned there, tilting his head to look at the spines of the books. He was in the nineteen-twenties, not because he had been pulled there by a particular movement but because Gabe was methodical and he had worked himself from the nineteen-hundreds through to this moment in time, until the history of it, the curling, criss-crossing vine of inspiration and intent and madness, made sense to him as much as it could, until he could see the lilt of the same song jolt through the new verses, the new artists who thought they were inventing the sky.
Elise liked bookstores in the same distant and romantic way that she liked most things. It had nothing to do with the actual books. She liked the idea of bookstores. Bookstores were different from libraries. Libraries were decidedly American whereas Elise thought of bookstores as entirely Parisian. Like Shakespeare and Company, where she was once slept for weeks atop the infamous mattresses of passing ex-patriots and Britannic strangers. Those serpentine nights with sundry company and those jewel-glisten mornings with roll-up cigarettes and cafe au lait. Sitting out in the wonderfully dirty sunlight and mapping the blue-purple veins under her skin, marveling over the mystery of what could make blood so red. There were absolute towers of books, many without order or reason. Each stack was the collection of a tourist, a student, or a shopworker. Elise dreamed a lot about the catacombs then, about the dust and death beneath her feet.
But this bookstore was nothing like that. This was a sanitarium by comparison, with its bleached wood and meticulously patterned wallpaper. The smell of chemical-free wood gloss, the cloying pollution of some caramel coffee abomination that was brewing in the store's corner cafe. It was bright like a hospital, and everything was so clean. Elise would have hated it on principle if she wasn't so certain that it's sterile environment was going to be easy to destroy. Like the beauty of stained glass windows, some things just begged for a brick.
Elise was currently seated in the art section with a small mountain of books. Only someone who was not an artist would believe that art made no demands. Art was a psychotic inmate clanging and banging on the prison bars of the mind, wailing to get out or else. She was a rare collection of eccentricities, which made her hard to place. The only thing that was immediately obvious was that she probably didn't belong here. With denim coveralls rolled up to her knobby knees and the frosted dishwater blond of her hair in fuzzy curls, she seemed like some kind of hobo angel. Chewing on a strand of red licorice while she read a bit of Dr. Suess from over the plastic pink rim of her heart-shaped sunglasses. Even if she didn't look up from Green Eggs and Ham, she wasn't blind. Elise noted the man eyeing the art books while moseying nearby.
"Do not step on me," she said without a glance. Spoken with a soft kind of German-tint warning, like he might have had a mind to if she hadn't said anything.
Gabe had visited Paris but his Paris had not been bookstores, it had not been itinerant and sun sparking across the back of the Seine to kindle artistry in the hearts of those who watched it. It had been the dull, flattened vowels of the Swiss border, of shabby meeting rooms and a tie knotted around his throat with the particular care and shaking hands of a hit that required looking into the unconcerned and clear eyes of a man who had no idea what was coming. Paris was death; blood and gritty concrete, the Seine a lap of gray water banked against a city unawares. There had been bookstores but bookstores he had passed, the thin-covered crackle of the airport paperback in his briefcase the only book that had kept company during the trip and he had given it away shortly after.
These books were neither cheap nor thin, there was weight to the glossy snick of of one page sliding over the next. Gabe did not sit, but he had the spines of the books notched up against his forefinger until its tip dented with each spine’s end in a slick run of spine after spine, untouched, uncracked. Cecil Beaton merged into the beginnings of Cubism; Gabe had enough in his head for this to mean black and white rolling over into rioting color. Gabe breathed out a beat; it was not a sigh, it was pleasure in its simplest sense. The twinge in his knee was worth leaning a little more forward to read the scrolling, too-small title stamped down the side of the book and if he was startled by the voice from the vicinity of the floor it was with a sense of gratitude for the prior warning of the obstacle that was the stack of books close by.
The accent was placed smoothly with little effort; Europe, Germany; Berlin? Cologne? Not work; Gabe smiled. It was a bland, easy and inoffensive thing as he took in riotous blond hair, a book he recognized even upside down and from a height. Seuss. In the art-section.
“No intention of it,” he said as solemnly as if he had been gratified by such a warning. “But,” he looked down, this time to the leg a halfstep behind. “I may not be as graceful as I’d like.”
"D'accord, you do not have to dance around me," she smirked from behind the gaudy pink glitter of her Lolita shades with a note on his mentioned lack of grace. Elise had a tendency to slip from communist German to haute couture French with mishmashed English strung all between like the dull green cord of necessity that brought life to the glowing bulbs of romantic language. She either had no understanding of how confusing this could be to the average person.. or she just didn't care.
"You know what would be perfect?" She asked while bringing up her knees, ankles neatly crossed, that children's book with its open pages of primary color pinned to her chest. "If stores of books had little carts to bring one cigarettes and espresso.." Drifting into this thought, she started talking to herself in German, "They'd be so small, however. Who would pull them?" Then seamlessly back into English, "Perhaps some of those miniature ponies?" Blue eyes measured him for response, if he didn't already have the good sense to run away.
Gabe spoke bad German; guttural, with an accent that marked his stay as being of Berlin rather than true, accentless German. The accent belonged to the man he had shadowed, for four months and was not indicative of any particular region nor street but of the influences that had carved grooves into the man’s voice, had handled him roughly enough to leave marks in his vocal clay. He spoke enough to grasp the slide of her voice into the incongruity of it, and though his eyes did not flicker, his gaze moved across the book, and the woman, coiled serpentine in the very center of the aisle. He did not confuse easily, but he allowed a lack of clarity to surface, to be mildly apparent.
“No dancing,” he said with a gravity due a priest at confession, and a small inclination of the head toward fuzzy blond curls and the sort of plastic glasses his daughter would have bee-lined for had she been within the vicinity. His words were accentless American; the flattened edges gave the smallest of aural hints that perhaps he was not from New York nor the South but from somewhere a great deal more ordinary before the genericism had been cultivated. “The idea’s great in theory, but who would you have clean up after the horses?” Gabe’s smile was small, polite. It was the sort of smile that followed perfectly ordinary talk rather than standing in the aisle of a store with his weight almost solidly borne by books on surrealism and speaking to a woman who rather personified it.
He looked back, steady brown eyes and not a hint of anything but seriousness.
Elise's German accent was all memory, so maybe it was difficult to place by a man that built his life and his tongue around such things. Her mother's would have been more specific, a Polish lilt with a Jewish flicker that vanished beneath the floorboards of Nazi Berlin. Who could say, Elise knew nothing of her ancestors or her mother. Everything was dreams and wild imagination in that regard.
She rolled her eyes at his question and dragged the plastic sunglasses down her nose for removal. Folding the shades, she shifted to tuck them with secret discretion into the bookshelf behind her for someone else to come across and find. "You're reasonable, that's disappointing." Ponies were a nice fantasy without the cleanup.
"What are you doing in this aisle?" Art was not for the reasonable.
Gabe could have stood across and analyzed the pieces that made her up; the plastic glasses and where they came from, the markers of age and time and socio-economic background that made her up (was she young? She was not young - she looked as though she might have been jaded) but instead, he smiled and it was small but it was not hidden, at the hiding of the flamboyant eyewear. He did not, he stood there with his serious eyes and his vague little smile like mist before rain, and he watched her with neither visible approval nor disapproval but something of appreciation instead. She was odd and Gabe appreciated odd the way some admired music or gourmet eating.
“I am very sorry to have disappointed,” Gabe said gravely, as though perhaps the disappointment was a somber and weighty thing. There was a flicker of mirth in the brown eyes for all of that, a dimple that came and went in the cheek that said he was not sorry at all, and having picked his book - the simplicity and richness of a history caught up in modernity - he heaved his weight back against the book-case until he was positioned close enough to the chair to sit.
“I like this aisle.” Mild, inoffensive. Even placid.
"That is well.. alright." The words slid from one to another, trying to find the one with the precise definition before there was a momentary stalling, after which Elise gave up altogether. Alright. He was looking at her strangely, or perhaps in just a way that Elise considered to be strange. In the industry, they fawned over her like a princess of flippant mania. It seemed to her that the general population found her quite strange; face perpetually buried in a Nikon, talking to everyone and no one, sharing kit kats with the birds. So this.. middle ground, this ambivalent wave of smalltalk was unfamiliar.
When the silence came, her attention moved to the book in his hands. Her sky blue eyes traced the words a good three or four times before they actually registered. The languages were a virus in her head. All of the back and forth, back and forth until ultimately landing on some semblance of meaning. "Are you an artist?"
She gave him the look of small children disturbed at some very intricate game, cross dismay at being so side-tracked by intrusion; Gabe’s smile slid, it was a small thing but it was dimples and creased-corner eyes, and real and it came without calculation, without an attachment of location and descriptors, to bind up the wild-haired woman perched in the art-books aisle of a bookstore seemingly ill-suited to her in the concrete of government-gray.
“No,” Gabe said agreeably, and it was kind, it was generous but it came with no other words of explanation, nothing to say what he was instead. He loomed, instead, all coat and shoulders and the awkward angle of his own still-broken body, and he held his book to him with the ease of not needing to read it several times for it to undo itself, to relinquish up its meaning. “Are you?”
"No," she admitted as well. With a glance down to the colorful cover of her own book, Elise traced the outline of a Suess creature while wondering about things like the cross-contamination in imagination and madness. Then she glanced back up at him with a smile that competed regally with the shining lights above them. "Not in the way I think you mean."
She thought to clarify while leaning back against the shelves. "I do not paint or draw. I do not make.." She ran her hands over something invisible just before her, something conceived and living only in her mind. ".. sculpture." Oh, but she would like to. Elise made a note to purchase some play-doh on the way home to experiment with. Thoughtfully, she glanced back up at him with an honest and deceptively youthful smile. She was no threat, although like reporters, Elise was accustomed to being viewed as one regardless. "You have an interesting face, has anybody ever taken your picture?" She held up two L's with her hand, connecting them in a rectangle to symbolize a camera while making a little click sound with her mouth.
He had had no meaning at all, surrounded by books that classified art as photographs and as sculpture, as found things and as made things -- Gabe liked art because it needed little stricture, because it undid itself as you tried to get hold of it, because it was not words or rhythms but the quiet emptying of a mind into medium and there was nothing at all that could be put into manila folders and filed until it could be located by bland description. He looked at her, all the lines on his face had smoothed out to bland surprise and then he smiled, amusement tying itself up in vague uncertainty. She was not - this little blond artist who was almost certainly not the intended clientele of a store that devoted itself as much to the coffee served in it as the books scattered as much as afterthought as purpose - easy to follow as her thoughts skipped, jumped.
“No,” he said, agreeably. They had not; Gabe was exceptionally careful to avoid photographs. The nightstand in the motel, it held a small collection of portraits, haphazard as they were, all the paraphenalia of a life with two young things that grew from photograph to photograph and the tired, quiet eyes of the woman with them, here and there and less so, as each child could stand alone, pull faces at the camera by itself. “You’re a photographer?” There was no threat at all in that; not any longer. The leg twinged. “I think that counts as art.”
She only shrugged in a maybe kind of way while considering her life's work as art. Elise liked to think that she hadn't made anything great, not just yet.. but somebody she would. It gave her a reason to want to stay alive at least. Some days even that wasn't enough, but most of the time it was. She didn't want what most people wanted out of life. She had no family, and the idea of marriage was painful, even her career was barely maintained as she stormed through agency doors. But there was this strange idea that had infected her a long time ago - see, Elise didn't matter. It was the pictures that would live on, and who thought about the photographer when they could think about the subject? She was here to document everyone else's lives while playing the shadow puppet in the background. It was grim, but it was also kind of reassuring in a way. To know that no mistake was too great, because it just didn't matter in the long run.
"You will let me take your picture someday, then?" Elise had a tendency to ask a lot of people for pictures, but she didn't hound them for it. Those natives were right about a picture capturing some part of the soul, and Elise preferred to get those kinds of things just like the Devil. No pressure. She pulled out the journal with its endless pages of phantom script, pulling a pen out of the leather spine with the intention of writing his deets down if he'd let her.
Had he stopped to think about it, Gabe would have perhaps, considered that photographs might now be permissible. He was not going back, to grim hotel rooms and slate-gray skies, to blood under fingernails along with the ink of a thousand files and reports, to reciting a number instead of his name. To the middle of the night dreams of his wife, his children, lost in some poorly-conceived revenge effort aborted only once he was too late, to water streaming down the back of his neck, choking his throat in a training exercise un-permissible beyond the realm of Uncle Sam. His face, in black and white or perhaps bland color, would be his once more, Gabriel Reed, son of (unknown), married to (none), father of (here, the faces of his children, forever to be kept off office desks until this stint as the mechanical man, pulling levers instead of fighting the fight. But Gabe did not; he thought of cooling flesh, of Main’s voice emotionlessly describing December, he thought of waking up screaming.
“No,” Gabe said, calmly. There was no apology to it; no, he did not permit his face to be taken down and made into art, this was not something Gabriel thought merited an apology. He nodded at the journal, “Notes? Or lists? They’re helpful.” There was something steadying about how he said it, very composed man to the curled up woman on the floor, with her shrug for art, for her creation. She was odd, but in a way beyond government buildings and those who killed for money or for drugs or for the myriad reasons people murdered one another for a bottom line. He liked that.
“Are you in one of these?” He nodded toward the shelves.
There was a pout, it was unavoidable. It was an expression better at home on the fuzzy, lonely things in petshop windows rather than a grown woman. It was the big blue eyes and the quivering lower lip, high doses of adorable by all accounts. Not very many people had the kind of balls that it took to tell Elise Daley no. She might just go jump off a bridge now, and it would all be his fault!
Histrionics always made her smile, and the pout fell away, totally forgotten. Sometimes it was fun to play the suicide card with people, but this guy didn't know her well enough to even understand it was a possibility. Distracted, she glanced down to the journal in her hands when he mentioned it. "Oh no, is like.. journal. Is mine, I did not steal it," she clarified. Although the gold engraving on its leather cover boasted initials that didn't resemble her name at all. She thoughtfully covered the engraving with her hand before smiling up at him.
The question about herself was enough to set her back for a moment. So used to prying past everyone else's layers, she wasn't typically aware of herself in the way that most people were expected to be. "Oh.." Wouldn't most authors and artists have checked out their own books at some point, just to see what had been said? Shifting where she sat, Elise turned to glance up the shelves in the photography column, searching for if anything was familiar. A few caught her eye after a bit of perusing, and she pointed them out. Best of Vogue. Urban America. Through the Lens. "Some."
Gabe had seen pouts done properly, quivered lower lip and eyes gone starry with moisture. Phee, when full dramatics (when, Gabe privately thought, most like her mother) was stormy gray eyes and clinging brown curls and the end of her nose gone red with anger. The expression dusted itself over the woman sat in the aisle, the flexibility of the very young and the same halo of blond, and Gabe smiled, reflexively. It was the half-amused and barely-there of the parent; it darted in and out of the dimple in his cheek and was gone just as quickly as it came but the amusement uncoiled something, smoothed relaxation across his shoulders. It distracted him; he did not glance at the journal in her hands for a half-second, and then the solidity of the brown gaze turned shrewd, sharp, slid beneath all that mild temperment like a knife sliding home beneath skin.
“Can’t say your stealing it was the first thing that came to mind,” Gabe remarked. His voice was quiet, it was even, the way people spoke in libraries, in churches when they both wished to be heard but respectful. Gabe did not raise his voice often. He followed along the line of her finger obligingly, and he took in a panoply of modern American art, of black and white vision, of paper and ink that said she was not simply a waif in the aisle of a bookstore with odd taste in eyeglasses, but an artist.
“Some.” He repeated it, and the laugh held itself politely back in the throat, melded into the word like sugar stirred into coffee. “I’d say that made you an artist.”
Elise's smile was bright, although it shrank to something coy when she ran her hands over denim knees. Getting justification was a welcome thing, even from strangers. Even from strangers who knew absolutely nothing about art.. although he was looking through this section of the book store, wasn't he? He must have had some appreciation. Or he was bored. She typically ended up at the teenage vampire romance section when she got bored. The people watched was priceless, and the books were simple enough to understand for the most part. Reading came easier than listening, anyway. Perhaps because reading was a solitary, self-involved activity. It was futile in arguing against the fact that she was a selfish person. There was nothing to do at this point but live with it, expand on it, profit.
She watched her hands for a moment, suddenly saddened by how clean they were. She missed the days when her fingers were raw from photo developer and papercuts. She needed to get past this block and start working again. Suddenly, Elise glanced back up at him with a conclusive grin. "You are warm, but you have sad thinking eyes.. I like that." From an entirely artistic standpoint, of course.
Gabe could have talked about art and its evolution in his slow, thoughtful voice. He could have articulated the history of impressionism, of where cubism had come from, how the world wars could be seen screaming through oil and canvas, through the sadness of hundreds of those articulate enough with brush and paint, with mediums to translate it to all those who had only to look. Gabe knew art like he knew books, something he could read haltingly but no less securely, something he could follow along until he was certain and steady in it. He did not, he tilted his head and he watched her coil in upon herself, like something small but glowing, a firefly observed in-situ, and he folded his hands and he watched until she spoke once again.
He had been told of sadness before (by a woman who stood very still when she did it, who smiled at him like she’d known the answer to the question she’d asked before she’d asked it, elbows tilted back against a bar in a country he would never admit to having been in, that had not been marked down in a passport). Gabe had smiled then and he did so now, an echo of something not sugar nor warm in it but cool, all shadow. “Thank you,” he said, without modesty or without abashment. He seemed neither affected by the remark nor otherwise, it rolled across his shoulders like water on oiled silk, and the smile lifted just a little to his eyes.
“Do you often ask people in the art section if you can photograph them?” He was curious. The question came before he was quite sure he was going to ask it.
Elise studied his smile in quarantined silence, mentally etching the details, pushing it into a diagram comparison with every other smile she ever remembered seeing. There was something different about his, but Elise could not figure out what it was. She didn't realize that it was the same smile she could wear at times. The big fat lie. In the next moment, though, his smile seemed wholly different. Not like it was something that he put on, but rather it was something that actually became a part of him. Organic in the way it finally met his eyes. That kind of smile could warm a woman down to her toes, and the thought made Elise laugh softly. She made no mention of that thought, however. Resting back against the shelves, she shrugged before pulling a fallen strap onto her shoulder once more. "I ask people everywhere if I can photograph them," she laughed.
Looking down at her hands, Elise pushed the books away that she'd collected and studied during her time in the aisle. "Most people say no, but sometimes they say yes." Despite her earlier pouting, she did not seem to take that kind of privacy personal. "I do not enjoy people to take my picture either."
She looked at him, Gabe thought, the way he imagined the psychiatrists did - they were behind glass thickened on one side, dark as if he were sitting solely by himself in a room all mirrors but she was not, she studied him and the cant of her head was serious, as though she could see through to the books behind him. He wasn’t sure, out here in the world where the safety was always on and people didn’t smell of blood and of smoke, they screamed when they were hurt instead of calculating trajectories - that he liked it, overly much. But her laughter tugged out the smile once again; she reminded him, in the butterfly-rhythm to the pace of her speech, mostly of Phee, of the seven year old girl who spoke about things with the self-importance of the young.
“You understand,” he said gravely, of portraits and the dislike to feature in them, as if his dislike of doing so was something of souls, of smoke and of mirrors, of black and white potraiture or perhaps a vanity to do with the dimples. (He had scars, none so visible as his face - the leg was a mass of them, twisted with scar-tissue but no one wished to take pictures of his leg). He reached for the cane, hooked on the back of the chair and he levered himself to his feet with less difficulty, more rhythm - as though there were a knack to it, and going up easier than going down.
“What’s your name? I’ll look out for it in the art books.” The smile wrinkled the corners of his mouth.
Elise had a lot of experience with the way that psychiatrists looked at a person. There was a time when she'd cycled through them like tossing cards into a hat. She never really got bored with them, although after awhile she came to understand that they were all the same. Nobody could help her, the disease was of her own creation. Her own child, nurtured through chaos and self-doubt. Sometimes it felt like the sadness was such a big part of her that she'd no longer be herself without it. Artists were supposed to be sad, weren't they? She bought into the trademark, just like everyone else.
When he asked her name, she smiled. That distant expression brightened instantly. "Elise Daley." Then her eyes dropped back down to the books she'd been studying initially. There was a quiet re-opening of Dr. Suess, while she studied his cane from the corner of her eye. People were fascinating.