White Oleander - Janet Fitch [94]
“Don’t be scared,” he said, holding up his hands, the nails like horn. “Look at all these people. I won’t touch you.”
She swallowed and nodded, closed her eyes as the man came close, lifted a section of her dark hair gently on the tips of his fingers, like it was a flower, and breathed in the scent. She shampooed with rosemary and cloves. The smile on his face.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and backed away without turning around, leaving her standing at Cahuenga and Sunset, her eyes closed, clutching her bag of photographs of a different person entirely.
CLAIRE TOOK ME to see the Kandinsky show at the art museum. I’d never liked abstract art. My mother and her friends could go wild over a canvas that was just black and white pinstripes, or a big red square. I liked art that was of something. Cézanne card players, Van Gogh’s boots. I liked tiny Mughal miniatures, and ink-brushed Japanese crows and cattails and cranes.
But if Claire wanted to see Kandinsky, we’d go see him.
I felt better when I got to the museum, the familiar plaza, the fountains, the muted lighting, the softened voices. The way Starr felt in church, that’s how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. Kandinsky wasn’t all that abstract, I could still see the Russian cities with their turbaned towers, and horsemen three abreast with spears, cannons, and ladies in long gowns with high headdresses. Pure colors, like the illustrations in a picture book.
In the next room, the pictures were dissolving.
“Can’t you feel the movement?” Claire said, pointing out a big angle on the canvas, the tip facing right, the fan left. The edge of her hands following the lines. “It’s like an arrow.”
The guard watched her excited hands, too close to the painting for his liking. “Miss?”
She flushed and apologized, like an A student who’d overslept once in her life. She pulled me back to sit on a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. I tried to let myself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren’t there, that might not be there.
“See,” she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. “The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.”
The red, the yellow, this well of dark green — expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other’s shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows.
“And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?” She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side.
I had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. But this was Claire, and I knew she really wanted me to understand. I stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.
In another gallery, Claire stopped in front of a bunch of pencil sketches. Lines on paper, angles and circles, like pickup sticks and tiddlywinks. Like what you’d doodle while you were talking on the telephone.
“See this angle?” She pointed at a sharp angle in pencil, and then gestured over to the massive composition that all the sketches and oil studies led up to. “See it?” The angle dominated the canvas.
She drew my attention to various elements of the pencil sketches, circles, arcs, and I found them in the finished composition, in vibrant red, and a deep graded blue. He had all the elements right from the start. Each sketch held its own part of the idea, like a series of keys that you had to put all together to make the safe open. If I could stack them and hold them to the light, I would see the form of the completed composition. I stared, dumbfounded at the vision.
We walked arm in arm through the show, pointing out to each other details that recurred, the abstracted horsemen, the towers, the different kinds of angles, the color changing as a form crossed another form. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought