Читать книгу The Scarlet Macaw - S.P. Hozy - Страница 12

Maris had sent an email to her brother Ray telling him her arrival time and asking him to meet her at Vancouver airport. After nearly twenty-four hours of travelling, she was never so glad to see anyone. He stood head and shoulders above everybody else, his fierce blue eyes fixed on the automatic doors as they opened and closed, ejecting three or four people at a time, like a giant Pez dispenser. His dark brown hair was almost black and clipped close to his head, but even so, the unruly curls he had always hated could not be tamed. He looked younger than his thirty-five years, maybe because he was so thin, or maybe because he wore a yellow stretched-out T-shirt with a smiley face on it, under a plaid flannel lumberjack shirt whose sleeves ended an inch above his wrists.

“Ra Baby,” she called as she pushed her luggage cart through the gate. “Am I glad to see you.”

Ray rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna start that again?”

“Start what?” she said.

“You know I hate that name.”

She laughed and threw her arms around him. “Okay, Ra Baby,” she said, hugging him so tightly he couldn’t escape. “I won’t call you Ra Baby any more. I promise.”

He smiled and shook his head. “I’m glad to see you haven’t grown up yet, Maris. Because if you grow up, that means I have to grow up, too. And I’m not ready.”

While Ray went to get the car, Maris thought about what he’d said. Growing up had never been on the agenda while they’d lived on the commune with their mother, Spirit. In fact, the whole idea had been to stay close to the soul of childhood, to embrace innocence, and even to hold on to a kind of unknowing, especially about the outside world. “I want you always to remember how precious and special your life is now,” their mother had said. “Don’t let anyone take that away from you, not your father, not society, not your lovers when you have them, and not your children when you have them. Promise me?”

Of the three of them, only their sister Terra walked in the shoes of an adult. She had been married for fifteen years to a stockbroker and they had two daughters, Emma and Alison, and a huge, faux-Tudor house with a kitchen that was bigger than Ray’s whole apartment. Terra had opted for the comforts of the conventional life, just as their father had, and who could blame her for that? There were things that Terra never had to worry about in this life. Like who she was, how she was going to pay the rent, whether or not she was doing the right thing. Her parents had named her well. Terra’s feet were firmly planted. She was the least introspective of the three of them and could make a decision without waffling. “The buck stops with Mom,” she always joked about herself. “And Mom always knows best.”

Ray, on the other hand, was living in a rooming house in East Vancouver. He was unmarried and still lived like a student. When they got to his place it was Maris’s turn to roll her eyes.

“Ray,” she said, “you’re such a cliché. Look at this place.”

“What?” said Ray. “This is my home you’re talking about.”

“Oh, please,” said Maris, shaking her head. “I mean, empty pizza boxes and beer bottles? The unmade bed? And — yuck — green stuff growing in the sink? There’s no way I’m opening that fridge.” She laughed. “I still love you, but I’m glad I don’t have to live with you.”

They had hauled her suitcase and the trunk Peter had left her up two flights of stairs. All Maris wanted was something to drink and a place to sleep. “Which is my room?” she asked, looking around.

“Ha ha,” said Ray, “very funny. Since there is only one room, you can either have the pull-out couch with the dirty sheets or the futon on the floor with the sleeping bag.”

“That’s a tough one,” said Maris. “Uh, can I see the sleeping bag?”

“As it happens,” he said, “I actually had it cleaned after my last camping trip. But only because I accidentally made my bed on a pile of bear shit that I didn’t see in the dark.”

“So bears really do shit in the woods?”

“Yes, indeed they do. Luckily, it was fairly old and fairly dry bear shit, otherwise we might not be talking because I’d be bear shit myself. But I did think it would be a good idea to have the bag cleaned. It was pretty disgusting. I even went for the ‘sanitized’ option, with deadly chemicals.”

“Hmmm,” mused Maris. “That almost sounds like the grown-up thing to do. But I’m betting Terra would have burned it and bought a new one. That would be the really grown-up thing to do.” They both laughed.

“Dare I ask if you have anything to drink? I’m dying of thirst.”

“Well, I have beer … and beer. Which would you like?”

“Uh … I guess I’ll have a beer. You mean you don’t have any pomegranate juice?”

He pulled two bottles of beer from the fridge and unscrewed the caps. “If you want pomegranate juice, go stay with Spirit. And if you want Perrier, stay with Terra. I’m a beer and pizza guy right down the line. You will not find a single lentil or a Brussels sprout in this house.”

“I sure hope you have coffee. I’m going to want some tomorrow, whenever I wake up.”

“Ah,” he said, “coffee there is. A nice Colombian dark roast, freshly ground today for a French press coffeemaker. My one luxury.”

“Ooh la la,” said Maris. “I’m impressed.”

They drank their beer and Maris told him about her flight. She’d had a three-hour layover at Narita airport in Tokyo and hadn’t slept at all. She’d watched three movies and eaten several meals and snacks, all of them tasting the same. Maris had a theory that all airline meals were made out of soybean product, cut into the shapes of various foods, dyed the appropriate colours, and injected with artificial flavours.

“God, I’m tired,” she said. “What time is it?”

“It’s 11:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time,” he answered. “Time for bed.”

Maris slept until ten the next morning. When she woke up — on the futon, on the floor — the place was miraculously tidy — no pizza boxes, no beer bottles, no old newspapers. Even the stainless steel sink was gleaming. Ray had been to the bakery and bought fresh croissants and cheese Danishes. He was sitting at the table reading the newspaper when she stumbled across the room.

“Did you do all this for me?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “The fun’s over. Where’s my real brother? Where have you taken him?”

“Contrary to previously observed and incriminating evidence,” said Ray, “I’m not actually a complete and total slob. I only have occasional lapses. Coffee?”

“Yes. Absolutely. But let me take a shower first. I feel like I’ve been on a plane for twenty hours. Come to think of it, I have been on a plane for twenty hours. And why did I dream about bears all night?”

Ray got up to plug in the kettle. “The blue towel is clean,” he said.

“And sanitized?”

Ray sighed. “Gee, you’re even funnier than I remember. When are you leaving?”

She stuck out her tongue. “How about the day you get married?”

“How about the day you get married?” he retaliated.

“Touché,” she said. “You’re funnier than I remember.” She closed the bathroom door. “Oh, wait,” she shouted through the door. “I forgot. You’re not my real brother. He’s been kidnapped by aliens.”

Ray smiled as he measured coffee into the French press. He really had missed her.

Maris devoured the croissants and Danishes and savoured the coffee. “Mmmmm,” she kept murmuring, until Ray told her to stop.

“You’re a hummer,” he said. “It’s annoying.”

“I’m a what?”

“A hummer. You hum, you know, ‘mmmmm,’ while you eat.”

She laughed. “You’re kidding. I don’t. Do I?”

“You do. And it’s not an endearing trait. It’s probably why you don’t have a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “We won’t go there.”

“You’re right. We won’t go there. Not unless you want to talk about your non-existent ‘girlfriend.’”

“I only have two words on the subject,” he said. “Biological clock.” He put up his hands to stop her from responding. “That’s all I’m going to say. End of discussion.”

She grabbed a section of the newspaper and glared at him. She was definitely not in the mood for this conversation.

After a few minutes of silence he said, “Do you hear something ticking?”

“That’s it!” She jumped up and started swatting him with the rolled-up newspaper. “You are such a pig!”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” he laughed. “I’m just softening you up for Spirit. You know she’s gonna want to talk about it. She’s on my case all the time. ‘You need to have kids, Ra. They’ll centre you.’ Yeah, I wanna say. Centre me in a deep hole that I can’t climb out of.”

Maris sat back down. “I know,” she sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to have kids, it’s just that … well, I’m not sure I want to raise them alone, the way Spirit did. It was rough for her, despite what she says. And I wonder what she might have done with her life if she hadn’t been shackled with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, as an artist. She’s very creative, you know. Where do you think we get our artistic sense from? Do you think you would have been such a good photographer or I would have been an artist without her encouragement?”

“I notice you didn’t say ‘good’ artist,” Ray said. “How’s your work going, anyway?”

“Not so good,” she said. “Ever since Peter died, I haven’t been able to see things in colour, if you know what I mean.”

Ray pointed to a wall of framed photographs behind him. They were all black and white. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But is that a bad thing?”

“It is for me. My art is all about colour. I ‘feel’ colour; it’s a mode of expression for intense emotion, which is what I try and paint.”

“But your paintings are so … so … almost sterile,” said Ray. “And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s just that they’re so clean, so precise.”

“But that’s the point,” she said. “I don’t want you to be distracted by technique when you look at my paintings. I want you to respond to the purity … no, that’s not the right word … to the …”

“Essentials?”

“Yes,” she said. “To the essentials. What all of us share as human beings, beyond all the encumbrances of culture and personality, what we wear and what we eat, what we look like, or what we want to look like. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do. Maybe that’s why I shoot so much in black and white. With photography, you can’t control the ‘message’ in the same way as you can with painting or something you create from scratch. You have to deal with the reality that exists in the frame. I can control the composition and the colour, or lack of it, the shadows, the depth of the perspective, but even that I can control only in a limited way because it’s a two-dimensional image. Colour, for me, is distracting. Like you say, a technique. In photography, colour is a technical component. How do I know that the red I’m seeing is the same red you’re seeing? The only way I can control that, to show you what I want you to see, is to strip out the colour. That way, maybe we’re all looking at the same image. At least to some extent.”

“Control,” Maris said. “You think art is about controlling the image? Controlling the perception?”

“Yeah, I guess I do. I mean, a writer gets to pick and choose his words. He controls what you’re reading. Why can’t a visual artist control the elements in his creation?”

“I didn’t mean you shouldn’t control the elements in a painting or a photograph, as much as you can. That’s the art, the craft of it. But you can’t control the viewer’s perception or their interpretation. That’s totally subjective. I mean, maybe it’s none of my business how you interpret what you see. Once I hand it off, it’s not mine anymore. It belongs to you, and you can see it any way you want to. Hell, you can cut it into little pieces and eat it, for all I should care.”

“Ah, but you do care,” said Ray.

“Yes, I do. I’m not sure how to get to that place yet.”

“Is that the place you want to get to? Not caring?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you want to talk about Peter?”

She thought for a minute, took another sip of her coffee. “Not today,” she said. “But maybe later.”

“Okay,” he said.

It was early afternoon before Maris thought about opening the trunk. She and Ray had gone out to lunch at a funky diner down the street that served the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the world, according to Ray. The bread was thick-cut from a French stick, and buttered on both sides before it was browned on the grill. The smooth, nutty Gruyère oozed out the sides as it melted. And the fries were cut thick like the bread, done crisp on the outside and moist and firm on the inside. Ray was right. It was the best grilled cheese in the world.

“What’s in that thing?” Ray asked as she started to undo the leather straps and locks.

“I don’t really know,” she answered. “Peter left it to me in his will. I looked through it quickly before I left, but I’m not sure why he wanted me to have it. There are some old books and paintings, and I think I saw a bundle of letters.”

“That’s weird,” said Ray. “Do you think they’re valuable?”

“Might be, but he didn’t have them in the store, so maybe they aren’t. Unless the books are first editions or something.” She lifted the lid and they looked inside. She started handing Ray things and he spread them out on the floor around them.

“Edward Sutcliffe Moresby,” he said, reading the spine on one of the books. “Collected Stories. Who’s he? I’ve never heard of him.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Maris said. “I think we read one of his stories in school. He was British but he travelled all over the world, starting before the First World War, I think. Especially to the Far East. I think he wrote some novels, too.”

“Yeah,” said Ray. “Looks like they’re here, too.”

Maris looked over his shoulder. “Are they first editions?”

Ray scanned the title page of one of the books. “Could be,” he said. “This one’s copyrighted and printed in 1921. It’s in pretty good condition. Maybe Peter wanted to look after you in your old age.”

Maris smiled. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said. “He would do something like that.”

“What about the paintings?” asked Ray.

There were several small canvases, each wrapped in brown paper. Maris carefully unwrapped the first one. It was a framed watercolour, about eight inches by ten inches, and covered with glass. The painting was of a young Chinese woman, heavily made up, staring with vacant eyes at something outside and to the left of the frame. There was something very moving about the image. It looked like the woman was gazing into her own past and seeing nothing there. Both Maris and Ray stared at the picture. Neither spoke.

Then Maris said, “Wow. I wonder who the artist is.”

“Is it signed?” asked Ray.

Maris examined the bottom of the painting. “It looks like there’s something in the corner here, but it’s kind of faint. Do you have a magnifying glass?”

“Do I have a magnifying glass?” said Ray. “I’m a photographer. Remember?”

“Just get it, smartass. You can give me your résumé later.”

Ray was already on the other side of the room rummaging through the stuff on his work table. “Got it,” he said.

Maris turned on a lamp and looked at the signature through the magnifying glass. The initials AS had been inscribed with the tip of a fine brush.

Who was AS? she wondered.

“I wonder who it was,” said Ray.

“Don’t know. I wonder if they’re all by the same person.” They unwrapped the rest of the pictures.

“Yup,” said Ray. “Looks like it.”

“Yes,” said Maris, gazing at each of the paintings. “And they’re all portraits of Chinese women. How interesting. I wonder who he or she was.”

“If we knew the name, we could Google it,” Ray said.

“What about Edward Sutcliffe Moresby? Let’s Google him,” she said.

Ray went over and opened his laptop. “Oh yeah. Plenty about him. Born 1887, died 1965. Hey,” he said, “the year you were born. Synchronicity. Cool.”

“What else?” she said, reading over his shoulder.

“There’s a list of his books. Wow. They’re still available on Amazon. That’s amazing.”

“Great,” said Maris. “I can see if any of them are first editions.”

They went through the pile of books, checking each one on the Internet. Every one of them was a first edition.

“Amazing,” said Ray. “I wonder what they’re worth. Must be fifteen or sixteen of them.”

“Twenty-five, actually,” said Maris.

“Even better.”

“Maybe Peter wanted me to read them,” she said.

“Maybe. Did he leave any instructions? Like in his will or a letter?”

“No,” said Maris. “But his death was sudden and probably a lot sooner than he expected. Maybe he would have done something like that later.”

“Yeah,” said Ray. “It must have been really horrible. Being with him at the time, and all that.”

“It was the most terrifying, sad, depressing experience of my life. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

“No, probably not. I’m the last person to suggest this, but what about counselling? Have you thought about it?”

“I’ve thought about it but I don’t think I could do it.”

“You mean you don’t want to do it.”

“I mean I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it with a stranger. I don’t even want to talk about it with a friend. I’m afraid that if I start, I don’t know where it will end.”

“You’re afraid it might make you ‘normal.’”

“Yeah, something like that. I don’t want to mess too much with my psyche. I don’t want to over-analyze myself, you know what I mean? If I start explaining what I’m about, maybe all the stuff that I need to do my art will get sanitized.” She laughed. “Like your sleeping bag.”

“Better to keep all that garbage inside,” said Ray. “That what you mean?”

“Yeah, in a way. If I start putting it ‘out there,’ then it will be objectified. It won’t be my shit anymore. It’ll just be a bunch of sentences.”

Ray laughed. “Believe it or not, I know what you mean. If you untie all the knots, all that will be left is a piece of string. How boring is that?”

“Exactly,” she said. “Maybe I can work it out through my art. At least, that’s what I keep hoping.”

“Yeah,” said Ray. “Keep that myth alive: the tortured artist. I have a hair shirt around here somewhere, if you want it.”

But she had tears in her eyes, and he knew he had gone too far.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, and put his arms around her. “I’m stupid and a little insensitive. Well, okay, very insensitive. I’d probably be a basket case if I’d been through what you’ve been through. I wouldn’t be able to handle it at all.”

“I’m not handling it,” she said, drying her eyes on his shirt. “I’m kind of paralyzed by it.”

“Well,” he said, “you have to start somewhere. Maybe you should read some of these books. Take a break. You can stay here as long as you want.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I want to go see Spirit at some point, but maybe I’ll spend some time at the library. See what I can find out. See if I can figure out why Peter left me this stuff.”