Fire & Water (23 page)

Each piece drew me forward, beckoning me to take in the whimsy and beauty of the next. Each sculpture was so simple, yet they were nothing that anyone but Jake could have created. The pieces wouldn’t endure beyond the next rain, but for this instant they filled me with a sense of peace I couldn’t find words to explain. How could I not be in love with the man who created such things of beauty? This was his essence. That rest was only a symptom—an illness that required a remedy.

I came to the last section of beach before the forest overtook the path. Here were sculptures I had not observed from my perch. Carved ridges in the sand formed two sets of spirals like nautilus shells, each more than eight feet in diameter. One was lined with birch bark and thousands of black and white feathers. The second was the same size and shape, lined with blue flower petals—intricate and ingenious. Where the two circles came together, the edges of them intertwined, a blending of the blacks and whites along with pink, blue, and yellow flower petals. I found myself breathing hard, tears threatening to spill. I knew as soon as I stepped close to it that this was Jake’s sculpture of our family. Jake was all color, and I so black and white. Between us, an image of perfect balance united us.

From behind me, Burt’s rich baritone broke the silence of my thoughts. “I never know what it’s going to be, but it’s always bloody brilliant.” He snapped another photograph of Jake in the distance, then he turned the camera onto me and clicked it before I had a chance to turn away.

“He’s a lucky bastard, that one,” Burt sighed. “I’ve never seen him happier. He’s ass over tin pot for you.” He raked his fingers through his beard as though he might find his next words hiding in there somehow. “I know you’ve been through a bad patch. But Jake’s the most luminous, life-loving bloke I know.”

I looked back down at the spirals of lake water at my feet and then at Jake flinging rocks into the quiet pool of water. His voice rang with unbridled glee. “Kat, come look! You won’t believe the beautiful splashes!”

Burt chuckled. “That is a one-of-a-kind wild dingo we’ve got on our hands.”

“One of a kind,” I said.

* * *

Once Jake had finished creating his sculptures, he had nothing more to do with them. Never once did I see him look at the critically acclaimed photographs Burt had taken of his work, nor at the articles of praise for his artistry. After each of his installations, Jake seemed relieved when wind or rain or surf reclaimed the elements of his art and returned them to the place from which they’d been borrowed.

We attended a lakeside gala in a giant white tent full of Canadian, American, and European dignitaries. Tables flowed with elaborate hors d’oeuvres, and champagne was served by black-and-white clad waiters. A string quartet offered Mozart and Bach in the background while guests mingled.

Jake pasted on a thin smile on as he posed for photographs with wealthy art patrons who trapped him in tedious conversations. His forced tolerance showed only slightly in the distracted look in his eyes. The only people at the party in whom he showed any authentic interest were a pair of attending children. By that point in the evening, my feet had swollen so that they seemed like over-risen dough erupting from my shoes. Heartburn ached in my chest. I found a comfortable chair, fished a TUMS from my purse, and watched Jake’s animated exchange with the children.

“How do you get that stuff to stick together like that?” asked a chubby girl with chocolate at the corners of her mouth.

Jake squatted down so that his eyes and the girl’s were only inches apart. “What do you guess?”

“Very sticky glue. Or maybe tiny little nails.”

An ivory-skinned girl of about eight, obviously the younger girl’s older sister, chimed in. “It’s not glue or nails. I think you just find the way to stack things so they’ll be balanced just so.”

Jake looked up at me and smiled.

“But what I don’t know,” the older girl continued, “is how you get the leaves and petals to stick to the rocks and twigs.”

Jake leaned in toward her and beckoned the smaller sister over with his finger. “Promise to tell no one?” he whispered. The children nodded, their faces shimmering with the glee of the secret. “I spit on them,” Jake said. “My entire career as an artist is reliant upon really good loogie-making.”

The girls giggled and scrunched their noses.

Jake began to feign a cough and continued speaking with a falsely raspy voice. “By the end of a three long days of work it feels like I’ve been eating nothing but crackers and sand. I’m practically all out of spit and so thirsty I think I might die.”

He stood with a sudden jerk and leaned his head back, emptying his water glass with a single gulp. Then he snatched the ginger ale glasses that the children held and gulped them down. The well-cultured girls seemed both shocked and delighted by this small bit of bad behavior.

At first, I felt my muscles tighten. Was Jake losing control again? But almost as soon as the thought came to me he looked over at me, his eyes glistening in mischievous delight. This was the Jake I loved—well-bred enough to know how to behave among aristocrats, but too irreverent and spontaneous to obey their rules of decorum. Jake grabbed a water pitcher and tipped it to his mouth until ice and water showered over him, watering down his clothing and making a huge puddle at his feet. The stuffy party guests, and especially the two children, were nearly in fits, the bigger girl covering her mouth with her hand in giddy horror. Burt’s hearty laugh joined the chorus of chuckles from the crowd.

After the crowd’s gasps and laughter died down, the wide-eyed younger girl asked in the coolest possible of voices, “So have you drunk enough now to do art again, Mr. Bloom?”

“Only if you’ll do it with me, and only if you call me Jake.”

A dignified couple wearing a shared pink of embarrassment came to stand by the girls. “Mr. Bloom, we’re so sorry if our girls have intruded,” said the girls’ father.

“Are you kidding? They’re making this into a party for me. Do you mind if we do a little project together? We’ll go outside to forage for materials, but we’ll be right back.”

The girls’ pretty mother glowed. “Oh my, well. We’d be honored. But only if you don’t mind.”

“You in?” he asked the girls.

They nodded in a vigorous unison.

“All right then.” Jake turned to Burt, who had stepped closer to the commotion. “Burty, I have an idea. Can you get my burlap bag and have some of the interns bring the extra piles of materials up here? Now, let’s see,” he said to the children. “You’re my partners in this project and I don’t even have your names.”

The older sister stood straighter, as if only then remembering her breeding. “Melinda Wesley, and this is my sister, Sarah.”

“All right then. Melinda and Sarah, I’ll only do this if it’s all of us working together. Your ideas too. Full-on partners. Deal?”

The two girls began to jump up and down.

The three exploded from the tent. Their squeals provided great entertainment to the crowd. Partygoers decorated in silk and jewels suddenly became children themselves, trying to sneak peeks at the scavenging committee. Jake and the girls returned barefooted, creating muddy footprints on the shiny parquet floor of the tent, with Jake’s burlap bag bulging and armloads of sticks and flowers. Scanning the room, Jake spied the flower arrangements that covered the tent posts and snatched them, plucking their petals from the stems. Whispers traveled like electricity. With great noise, Jake and the girls spat on flower petals and leaves, wrapping them around twigs and stones and forming stacks in the middle of the tent. Jake pulled off his jacket and tie, flinging them aside. The children’s dresses were covered in mud, their socks and shoes nowhere to be seen. The hypnotized crowd looked on while Burt skirted the edge of the tented room, snapping photographs and laughing. The musicians stopped playing and the waiters stopped serving, equally rapt by the spectacle.

Instructing waiters to pull linens from vacated tables, Jake had them create a curtain that covered the last of bits of their work. Whispers permeated the scrim. The crowd waited. Jake called for a ladder and one was promptly fetched.

Jake and the girls emerged from behind the curtain and a hush fell on the crowd. “Go ahead, Melinda,” Jake urged.

Wringing her hands in front of her, with a tremble in her voice, the girl announced, “As a thank-you for this lovely party, we present you with—” she looked at Jake, who smiled and nodded, “—a one-of-a-kind Wesley, Bloom, and Wesley production.”

“Go ahead, Sarah, you say the rest,” Jake said, smiling.

The younger girl stepped forward, held her arms wide, and announced, “We now present to you, ‘Rainbow to Heaven.’” She curtsied, then added, “The title was my idea.” The room erupted with laughter and applause.

The waiters dropped the makeshift curtains. Standing before us was a nearly eight-feet-high tower fashioned of stacked sticks, each one wrapped in leaves and flower petals: a perfect, vertical rainbow, deep purple at its base and red at its top, with bands of petal-formed rainbow colors in order in between. A pool of multicolored petals surrounded the structure—a sea of color from which the delicate tower seemed to rise.

Applause burst again from the crowd and Jake joined hands with the girls as they all took a bow. Jake had become the Pied Piper, creating a parade that every child and every adult would want to follow. Watching him, I could only imagine how our daughter would adore him.

The remainder of the evening was transformed from a stuffy event to lively party. Jake took me in his arms and began to sway. Over his shoulder I saw that couples had joined us. Waiters hustled to move tables aside to create an impromptu dance floor, and the orchestra abandoned their classical playlist and played great standards that lent themselves to dancing.

“The Way You Look Tonight” wafted through the white tent. “Tired?” Jake whispered in my ear.

“I keep thinking I should be, but then something happens that gives me another wind.”

“Damn. I was hoping for an excuse for an immediate departure.”

I looked over to see Sarah and Melinda peering dreamily at Jake. “It seems I’ve got some competition for your affections. You were great with those girls.”

“They saved me. I was going to scratch out my own eyes if I had to listen to any more mind-numbing conversation about the status of the arts in North America. Kids are the truest artists. Just think, in a few weeks we’ll have our own daughter around to inspire us all the time.”

I watched Burt as he danced with a young museum curator. Over her shoulder he gave me a look that said,
See, I told you he was something
.

* * *

Back at our cabin, Jake and I sat on the back porch overlooking the lake. I wrapped my shoulders with a soft quilt against the night chill. The cloudless night sky was inky black, bejeweled with brilliant white stars. A single bullfrog made commentary with a bellowing croak. Jake pulled my feet into his lap and rubbed my throbbing arches.

“You’ve been a great sport. Three days of boredom and a night of elbow rubbing. More than any man should ever ask of a pregnant wife.”

“I loved every second of it,” I said, surprising myself. “But you can keep rubbing my feet if you feel guilty.”

Jake stood. “Will you look at that? Oh my God, Kat.”

I stood beside him, peering over the black silhouettes of the trees near the balcony. The lake before us was still, a flawless mirror for the star-filled sky. The water met the sky at the lake’s edges, forming an uninterrupted blanket of stars above and below us, and the water became a bottomless lake of stars.

Jake grabbed my hand and a blanket. “Let’s go.”

“But—”

“No buts. You have to come.”

Jake led me down the steps of our porch to the lake’s shore. At the water’s edge he pulled off his glasses, his shirt, and then his pants. He laid his glasses on top of his clothing on the shore. “Come on.”

I scanned the scene around us. Seeing no sign of anyone, I dropped the quilt.

Jake pressed his lips against my bare shoulder, then unzipped my dress, letting it fall to my feet. “But it’ll get dirty.”

“Shh.” He tossed my dress and undergarments onto the quilt. We waded into the lake. The warmth of Jake’s skin was a cocoon in the cold water around me. I was buoyant, freed from the weight of my body. The swelling of my feet and the heaviness of my breasts had been lifted.

Jake stroked my skin, kissing my lips and face, and I felt my body soften to welcome him. Despite the chill of the water, I felt my own heat rising. His fingertips found the source of my warmth beneath the water’s surface, causing my breath to catch.

“Be still,” he said.

In the stillness, I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears. With each slowing beat I could feel myself release the anger and fear that had nearly consumed me for weeks. The images of Jake, wild and dangerous, or helpless in the hospital restraints, now seemed almost as though I’d dreamed them all and then awakened to this tender sweetness. I was all body, all sensation, freed of the mental noise of worry. Everything in me wanted to writhe with him, to create currents of our own.

“Look. Just look.”

The water on Jake’s skin reflected starlight, and when I looked down at my own body I saw that I, too, wore a silky garment of glittering light. We were swimming among the stars.