The gallery had large windows through which I saw photographs of several artists hanging in different sections. It was a student showing and several of the artists standing by their work were near our age.
Then I saw her.
I stopped.
She did not see me walk up, so I tried to hide the slightly large gift behind my back while I watched her talk to someone, presumably another one of the artists. Then she laughed.
I watched her there for another minute, then drew the Holga to my eye and snapped a frame of her laughing and leaning forward with her arm across her stomach. She had straightened her black hair so that it hung just to her shoulders. She wore an Oxford-blue dress that was neither expensive nor new, but wrapped her slender form tightly enough to spark my imagination.
Jo stood up and drew her hair back behind one ear then she looked at her watch and turned to see me standing in the window. With a smile she came to the door.
“You’re late.”
“It was worth it.”
Her smile grew.
“Well, I’m ready for a hot chocolate if you are.”
“I’ve brought you something,” I said revealing the gift I had wrapped in the funny pages of this morning’s newspaper.
Her smile faded to curiosity as she took it.
She tore back one corner of the paper and then another; peeling it all away until her eyes grew.
“Alex…how?”
It was a sixteen-by-eighteen inch print of the double exposure of her grandmother, framed in an aged, whitewashed wooden frame.
“I know a guy who lets me do some developing in his darkroom, and he has the gear to make larger prints than what we can at school,” I replied.
She stepped down to the last step in front of me, put her arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.
“Thank you,” she whispered into my ear. I could feel her warm breath against my skin.
The clean, sweet smell of her skin and her hair and her lotion and whatever perfume she was wearing all drew me further into her–past her; into scenes I had read in books, of winds carrying jasmine across the Arabian dessert or the balm Solomon rubbed on his beloved’s skin. If I could bottle her and sell her to the world I could make a fortune.
“There’s a café at the back of the gallery,” she said pulling back.
I took Jo’s hand and followed her past the art, some of which was interesting, some of which really was not.
“Are these yours?” I asked stopping at a wall of very large, floral prints framed in black. “The detail is amazing.”
“I love flowers, but all of the photographs I see of flowers are of perfect flowers. I can’t relate to perfect, but I feel like I can relate to these,” Jo said tilting her head in a direction that mimicked the orange gerbera daisy dropping its petals before her. Then she put her gift down behind the reception desk, and we sat at a corner table at the back of the artsy café that had old wooden church pews for booth seats.
If Jo had a shyness I couldn’t tell; she wasn’t bold or forceful either. She just seemed to be happy with who she was. This was extremely unusual to me, being around teenagers most of the time. It was like she was older somehow.
When we sat down, Jo kept my hand and we drank our sweet drink.
We talked about photography and school. I told her about my mother who had raised me on her own since I was born, chasing one failed business opportunity after another, from Texas to Minnesota, trying to find a way to take care of us both.
Jo told me about her sister and her parents. She said they were supportive of her art, but didn’t understand it or her friends. They were both strong Christians. Loving, but trying a little too hard to make her the person they wanted her to be. She would go to church Sunday morning and family lunch Sunday afternoon, but her mind would be lost in some photograph that she had yet to make.
“Jo, someone’s asking for you,” a young Asian woman said leaning in from the gallery door.
“Hey Chun, this is Alex. Alex this is Chun, the gallery director,” Jo said rising from her chair.
“So this is Alex. Hi Alex, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Finally meet me? Have you been talking about me?”
Jo blushed.
“Yes. She has.”
“I should get in there,” Jo said.
“It was nice to meet you too Chun.” Then I reached out and took Jo’s hand. “So, can we continue this over dinner some time?”
She smiled. Differently than before. This time in a slightly flirty way.
“Well, do you want to come back in a few hours after the show’s over? I’ll probably be pretty hungry then.”
“Oh, I might just hang around. I know an artist,” I told her. “The guy who did the baby feet.”
One of the installations was of ink prints of baby footprints interspersed with photos of babies’ feet.
“Really,” she said rolling her eyes and laughing. “Well, the show ends at ten. If you’re hungry.” Then she got up and walked away.
I watched her walk away.
Just before she left the café she turned and looked at me. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
Four
I wandered around the exhibition for the next few hours trying to look interested in the art, but I wasn’t. Some of the photos were good, but Jo’s work was the most interesting. My favorite was of a red and yellow rose with frayed edges that had so much detail I thought I could touch it. The colors were beautiful too, like the colors of a sunset on a cloudless night.
A current of people flowed in and out, nibbling bits of cheese and sipping the free Champagne. I was getting anxious. And hungry.
Finally, it was ten and the lights turned out.
“Thanks Chun,” Jo said, stepping out into the night. “So, where do you want to go? I don’t know about you but I’m seriously starving.”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I know of a really good Café on Platte River Drive that’s open late. They have sandwiches and stuff.”
“Paris on the Platte?”
“Yeah, have you been there?”
“God I love that place. I have a friend who is manic about chess who took me there for my first Chai,” she said as we started walking.
“I know right? Their Chai is amazing. They also have a really good eggplant sandwich.”
She grimaced.
I laughed.
“Yeah, it’s surprisingly delicious. And, I wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of eggplant. Do you have a car nearby?”
“Nah, I took a bus in.”
“I can drive us. How much time do we have?”
She looked at her watch.
“I’m supposed to be home by midnight, but I can get another thirty minutes if I call and let my parents know I’m doing something. But let’s walk. It’s amazing out.”
I liked this idea. I had invested three hours mulling around an art gallery hoping it would pay off in some slow time with her after.
“Do you get into Lodo much?” I asked.
“Lodo?”
“Sorry. Lower Downtown.”
“Ah, not as much as I’d like. I get down once in a while to spend an afternoon at the library but that’s about it.”
“Well, there’s something I want to show you after dinner.”
“Oooh, intrigue. I like it. So, what did you think of the show?”
“My favorite had to be the ones of the fast-food-coffee cups, and I loved the nasty piss-yellow tint they all had.”
“Really?” she said laughing. “Yeah, I don’t know WHAT those were about. I mean was he trying to say ‘drink as much coffee as I do’ or ‘please DO NOT drink as much coffee as I do?”
I laughed with her. “I don’t know. You seemed to have more than a few people wanting to talk to you about your work though.”
“Yeah,” she said, stopping modestly. “I sold a couple of pieces too so that was really great.”
Oh good, so you’re buying dinner, I al
most replied, but I still wasn’t sure how serious she had been about her cheap comment a couple of days earlier.
“Well, congratulations. A professional already,” I said instead. “How does it feel selling something?”
“Really great! You create and create and create and wonder if what you’re doing will make any sense to anyone else then suddenly someone hands you a check. It’s exciting and a little jarring,” Jo said putting a hand on her forehead. “But I think I’m pretty ready to have a few days off from thinking about photography.”
“Yeah, I don’t blame you. I can’t imagine how much work must go into putting together a show like that.”
We made our way to dinner talking mostly about how I had lived in Minnesota off and on for the last five summers with my mother, who was constantly going out to visit my grandmother and an older couple she knew who owned a small, half falling down, half fallen down bar slash bait shop slash pool hall slash grocery store sitting on the edge of where the Canon river meets the Canon lake.
My mother would sit with Stella and laugh over several cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes while I sat out on one of the docks hoping to catch something other than a damned bullhead. I never asked her, but I think it was important to her to give me some sort of life outside of a big city, and since she didn’t have much money to give me much, she fought to at least give me that, and I loved it.
On those afternoons I would fish for a while then I’d walk around the edge of the lake for a while. Then I’d play with some of the Mexican kids for a while whose parents brought them up to Minnesota, for the summer, to live in the trailer park around back while they were off working in the Minnesota fields. Then a few hours in I’d go get a pizza or cheeseburger from Stella at the bar and maybe shoot a game of pool on their decades-old pool table.
More often than you would think my mother would go out, bait a hook and sit with a line in the water herself. I can still see clearly the setting sun reflecting off the water while she sits in a lawn chair, with her blonde hair, watching her fishing line and smoking a cigarette.
“What about you? What was growing up like?”
“Well, I’ve lived in Aurora my whole life, in the same house since I was three. I used to get on my pink little bike and go play in the creek with my friend Christie for hours. We would dig around looking for frogs and crayfish.”
“Wait, you used to go looking for frogs?”
“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t into most girl stuff. But, I did do gymnastics until a few years ago.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“I found photography.”
“Ah.”
It took the better part of twenty minutes to walk, but we had made it to our little café.
I wasn’t surprised that Jo had been here before. Paris on the Platte was a beautifully bohemian place where a lot of locals hung out, with its used bookstore and wobbly tables and rows of teas on the wall from all over the world. After Colorado banned smoking indoors, it even became a cigar bar.
“How often do you come here?” she asked.
“Not often enough. Just every few months if I’m lucky.”
We took a table by the window.
“So, tell me what you want to do with your life, once you become a successful photographer that is,” Jo asked.
“I want to travel.”
“Ah, me too.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, you know, the usual places. Rome. Paris. Everywhere twice. How about you? Anywhere specific?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I want to see just about everywhere twice also. But I don’t want to just travel like most people do. I want to go and meet the people. I want to hear their stories you know? See what it’s like to live in those places.”
“Mmm, that sounds good.”
Then we ordered our Chai and our eggplant sandwiches from the bar where I could smell a dozen different teas and cinnamon and coffee.
I listened to her tell me how she had always loved art and tried painting and drawing but never felt happy with the results, until she read in a magazine how to build a pin-hole camera out of cardboard. Jo also talked about her sister, what schools she wanted to attend and how she would go over and bake with her gran when she was little.
It was eleven-thirty.
“I need to check-in,” she said pulling her phone out of her purse and dialing her parent’s number.
“Hey mom. Yeah. It went really well. I sold a couple of pieces. Yeah. Uh huh. Well, twelve-thirty if that’s okay.”
“I can give you a ride,” I mouthed to her.
She nodded with another of those smiles I was falling in love with.
“I’m at Paris with a friend. Okay mom. I love you too,” and she hung up the phone.
“Friend huh? Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”
“Sorry. It’s complicated with my parents. Besides, you might still get demoted.”
I smiled.
“Wasn’t there something you wanted to show me?”
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten,” I said. Then I paid and we left.
We walked a few blocks past a large redbrick warehouse. The spice of the chai was still on my tongue, and the smell of the lotion that Jo had rubbed on her hands after finishing her sandwich was partially hiding the dirty-wet smell of the street.
“My friend brought me down here last summer, and now I come down here once in a while to take photos.”
Down a set of concrete steps you could hear the fast rhythms of African drums. Then we turned a corner.
Forty or fifty people sat around watching a girl with long-blonde hair dance to the rhythm of the drums that two men played while she swung chains with balls of fire that arced through the night air. The smell of kerosene was thick.
“Alex, this is amazing,” Jo said putting her arm around mine as we sat down on one of the concrete steps to watch.
After a few minutes the blonde fire dancer sat and two men stood to take her place. They juggled six torches between them. Then another rose to dance with a sphere of light swinging from the end of a rope, then another and another.
The drums kept playing while the dancers danced on. No routine. No money being collected. Just a group of pyromaniacs enjoying the evening together.
I readied my Holga when a middle-aged man wearing a hat like the mad hatters took the stage.
He dipped a tennis ball in kerosene, lit it and bounced it hard against the concrete, each bounce leaving a flaming spot on the ground that lasted only a few seconds. Then he blew out the ball.
He dipped two more in kerosene and lit all three. Then he juggled the flaming orbs so fast he barely touched them, forcing each to bounce off the ground and into the air before catching it, creating a hypnotic illusion of more than three mini-suns existing at one time.
I looked at Jo and could see the fire of the juggler reflecting in her eyes. Then she leaned into me for warmth.
When the balls had spent their fuel, the maddest of hatters put them into his bag, picked up his bottle of kerosene, took a mouthful and blew a dragon’s breath of glowing heat out over the river.
I snapped the shot.
Now past midnight, this apparently was the grand-finale. Everyone including us packed up and left.
“Alex, I think this goes down as the best cup of hot chocolate I have ever had,” she said looking down at the ground then up at me, playing with the charm on her necklace.
On the drive to her house Jo kept playing with the button on my sleeve while I wondered if things had went well enough to warrant a kiss or if I was being presumptuous. When we arrived I turned to her and saw her looking at me. Then I leaned towards her and we kissed.
None of the girls I had kissed before felt like this.
As Jo gently slid her tongue past my lips I felt like she was disarming me. Past make out sessions felt like I was trying to prove something, felt like I was trying to be a good kisser, but this was entirely different.
Then she said goo
dnight.
Five
The next morning I couldn’t stop thinking about her while I jogged around the park near my house. It was probably too soon to call and ask her out again, but it seemed like things had gone well and I had a pair of tickets to the pool in Glenwood Springs so I decided to pick up the phone and push my luck.
“Hello?” she said clearly just waking up.
“Hey, it’s Alex.”
“Alex?” It took her a second. “Hey.”
“I just thought I’d call and say good morning.”
“Well.”
“Well what?”
“Well, are you going to say it?”
I laughed. “Good morning.”
She sounded still half-a-sleep and all soft and beautiful. I was imagining her with her hair tossed around her face trying to squint across the room to see a clock on a distant dresser or maybe on her wall.
“Good morning. What time is it?”
“9:30.”
“9:30? Shouldn’t you still be asleep?”
“Meh, I jog in the mornings. I just wanted to see if you had plans for the day.”
“Uh, I guess not. What did you have in mind?”
“I thought maybe we could go swimming. I have a couple of tickets to the pool in Glenwood Springs.”
She was quiet.
“We could stop at BeauJo’s for lunch,” I said trying to tease a yes out of her.
She laughed.
“Oh, all right. If you’re going to pull the BeauJo’s card.”
“How’s 11:30 sound?”
“Sounds good.”
I hung up the phone.
Glenwood Springs. I didn’t think she’d say yes, but now that she did I was nervous about how I looked.
I got into the shower and stood for about fifteen minutes in front of the mirror, tucking in my stomach and flexing my muscles this way and that. I didn’t look too bad. A little lean but not bad.
I picked her up at 11:30 and we began the three-hour trip, making a stop in Idaho Springs for some BeauJo’s deep-dish pizza. I ordered the New York special and she had the mother-load mountain pie, which impressed me.
If I Lose Her Page 2
