Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [68]
“It makes you a solo flyer. Charles Lindbergh aiming for France. Not a group migration of geese.”
“But I don’t make paintings for myself, they are for other people. For the world. I want them to bring the world something more than its ordinary light.”
“But you also want it known that Gundi made that light.”
“Well, I want to get paid for my paintings, sure.”
“Okay,” Jax says, stretching his limbs. “Say I’m a genial millionaire and I will pay you a stellar salary to live on Rancho Copo and paint the great paintings, and donate them benevolently to the universe. Then you wouldn’t sign them?”
“I think I would, still.”
“Why?”
“Because I would want people to know this was the work of Gundi, and it didn’t fall out of the sky.”
“Gundi alone, apart from all other paintbrush-friendly members of the breed.”
“Well, what about you, Jax? Would you perform your music with a…with a grocery sack over your head?”
“I have, as a matter of fact. As a courtesy to my listening public.”
She inclines her head again, smiling. Her beaded earrings struggle in the air like small hooked fish. “Would you like to take a bath?” she asks him. “I have a Japanese tub, four feet deep, you float in it.”
“I don’t float. I sink like a Cadillac.”
Gundi laughs. “No, really, it’s totally relaxing. I’ve used it almost every day since the workmen finished it.” Jax can imagine Gundi kissing each one of these workmen on the day they departed. She stands up, and he finds himself once again following the irresistible gravity of a woman.
The room with the Japanese tub is the deep slick blue of a starless night, entirely tiled except for a tall window that opens onto a westward exposure of empty desert. Gundi sheds her clothes, which seemed only provisional anyway, so it isn’t a big step. Jax follows her example while her back is turned, as she adjusts the steaming water. They sit on opposite sides, waiting for the deep, square hole between them to fill.
Jax with clothes on looks impossibly thin, but without them he is something else, articulated limbs, long and fine without excess. Exactly like his hands. Gundi glances at his legs stretched on the dark blue tile while she attends to the water. The gleaming faucet grows too hot to touch, and she winds her hair around it to protect her hands when she needs to adjust it. She is wearing only earrings and a fine gold chain around her left ankle.
“It’s a lot of water,” Jax says, looking out the window at dry mesquites and one lone saguaro, its arms raised in surprise or invocation. “Don’t you feel guilty, with all those thirsty plants staring in at you?”
Gundi shrugs. “They are plants.” She sits across from him, facing him with the full ammunition of her body, her back very straight. A square, steaming lake is rising between them. “We don’t really belong in this desert, you and I,” she says. “When we have used up all the water and have to leave, the plants and snakes will be happy to get rid of us.”
“What about your unconscious Hopi desires?”
“Sometimes I feel I belong to this place. Other times I feel it is only tolerating me with a curled-up lip.”
Jax curls his lip. “Did you see how much H2O the blonde puts in that tub?” he asks in a cactus voice.
Gundi laughs. “You should write a song with all this angst.”
“I think I was. Before you and Bill the Mailman impeded my progress.”
They both watch the surface of the water, pummeled by the incoming stream but still glossy and intact.
Jax asks, “How do you claim your position as a citizen of the human race?”
“I don’t know,” she says apologetically. “Register to vote?”
“But how can you belong to a tribe, and be your own person, at the same time? You can’t. If you’re verifiably one, you’re not the other.”
“Can’t you alternate? Be an individual most of the time, and merge with others once in a while?”
“That’s how I see it,” Jax says. “I’m a white boy, with no tribal aptitudes. My natural state is solitary, and for recreation I turn to church or drugs or biting the heads off chickens or wherever one goes to experience sublime communion.