Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart_ A Novel - Alice Walker [6]
Drifting off into a minor squall of despair, an eddy of disappointment, and while hugging her pillow with the mixed emotions of loss, lust, and resentment, he fell asleep. And began immediately to dream. There is a path just ahead of him. Now he sees a large brown foot, hesitant, upon it. A green hobbitlike creature sits on its big toe, riding it as if it were a pony. The toe turns into a side trail. The trail disappears in the brush. The hobbit creature vanishes from sight, his green eyes, like his green leafy cap, sparkling. You are lost, my boy, the spirit being says.
Wait! he calls. Which way to the river?
His own shout, and the desperation with which he calls out, awakens him. He lies cradling her pillow, suddenly knowing it isn’t over between them. That it will now never be, no matter that they may soon part. He has somehow joined her journey.
Hallelujah, he shouts, flinging aside the comforter, kicking away the covering quilt, giving her pillow a loud smack of a kiss, and heading jubilantly for the shower.
It blesses him. Never before, he feels, has he understood water. It cascades down his tight, healthy skin, and covers him, where the sun falls, with crystal beads of light. It astonishes him that in its purity, in its speed in covering his body, it has no scent. He smells only himself, earthy, rich, a friendly scent, he thinks, bemused, and the soap he holds, which is lemony. Also earthy, he thinks.
He thinks of how they met. She’d pursued him. After seeing one of his paintings of the desert. How can it move me so, she’d cried, gazing in rapture at a large canvas on which there was little other than space, sky, brown earth, and a large cactus. It is so empty!
Because emptiness, space, is our true home? he’d replied, amused by her enthusiasm, and that she’d called in the middle of the night to again pose the question.
It is, isn’t it? she’d said, after a long pause. And the blue of your sky! she said.
He’d turned over in bed, happy not to have a wife beside him to disturb, and lit a cigarette. The habit of smoking (terrible, dumber than stupid, he knew) had taught him about emptiness, the need to fill internal space, the huge internal space existing within all of us, with Something. He was grateful he could smoke. Though he knew there were women who dismissed him the instant they saw him light up, because they could not imagine kissing him.
Do you know what O’Keeffe says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night’s exhibition.
What?
That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.
He could feel her thinking. Savoring this idea. Her mind carrying her into the far reaches of the heavens, of space, long after there was no more earth.
But if we’re not here to see it, she finally asked, will it still be blue?
He laughed, and asked her where she lived.
He recognized her immediately when he saw her again. And what he recognized was her energy, which seemed to precede her. As if her spirit were thrusting itself forward, into the unknown; dazzled, charmed, challenged, hopeful, happy to be energized by the mysterious, loving the adrenaline rush of surprise.
She was some years older than him and made no pretense of being younger. Her hair was graying; she would tell him later she was the sort who forgot to dye it, even when she tried to remember. She also felt humiliated to be eradicating some part of her hard-won existence. Don’t people who try to look younger miss part of their lives? she queried, seriously. She also held a superstition she didn’t tell him: that if you lied about your age, the number of years you took off were subtracted by the Universe. That’s why so many people died sooner than they thought they would. She had her adequate cushion of estrogen fat on tummy and hips; her full breasts swung lower than ever before; her eyes sparkled to find herself still vitally alive. An artist who was passionately enchanted by the real, however odd or singular it