Not anymore. Now I had him in front of me and, in a strange way, only now was he flesh and blood to me. Real. So real. With his defects, his shadows, all his magnitude, a thousand times better and a thousand times more interesting than the perfect Axel who had lived in my head.
And loving him added a new dimension.
More shades. More colors. More everything.
86
_________
Axel
Maybe if the feelings leah stirred in me had been lukewarm, I could have avoided them, stopping it before it happened, keeping up a barrier. But no, they were like a hurricane that sweeps through and upturns everything. Like something long dormant that suddenly awakens. Like the apple they say you shouldn’t taste, but it’s so shiny and tempting and perfect. Like the unexpected.
I could say it was chance. That Leah wound up in my house. That I struggled to strip her bare layer by layer. That I fell in love with her after finding what I found, when all that was left was her skin against my fingers…
I could say that…
But I’d be lying.
87
_________
Leah
I had gotten two bs and an A on my last three exams, and I was excited when I got home. Axel hugged me and said we had to celebrate. It was a warm spring Friday. I put on a loose dress and sandals. We went to Nimbin, a suburb to the west of Byron Bay, an artists’ and ecologists’ refuge, the most alternative town in Australia, where all the hippies gathered.
We walked down the streets and looked at the colorful facades covered in drawings. We’d been walking a few minutes when Axel’s fingers started rubbing mine, and soon we were holding hands. Seeing his expression, I understood. He had decided to take me to eat somewhere where we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. And I liked that feeling of being able to walk hand in hand with him like a regular couple, which was just what I wanted us to be. I opened my mouth to tell him, but he guessed it.
“Not yet, Leah.”
“Okay.”
The midday sun accompanied us when we sat on a patio to have lunch. We were relaxed, and we spent the trip back in the car talking nonsense. Axel told me it was impossible to touch your nose with the tip of the tongue. I struggled to do it.
“Let it go.” He rolled his eyes.
“This from the guy who always tries to find the logic in everything, or some proof to the contrary. I was just checking,” I joked.
“I don’t do that,” he said, defending himself.
“Of course you do. You can’t stand not understanding something.”
“Like what?”
“Dad’s beetles, for example.”
“Do they somehow make sense?”
I wasn’t used to talking about him, about them, without someone forcing me into it. Without Axel doing so specifically. It saddened me to realize I missed my parents and wasn’t even allowing myself to remember them, to keep them close and carry them around with me.
“They do make sense,” I said. “He did them for Mom. She loved beetles because she had an amulet of one that my grandfather gave her when she was little. In ancient Egypt they were considered a symbol of protection, wisdom, and resurrection. When she fell in love with my father, before they started going out, she said she used to spend the days picking daisies in the garden of her house and pulling off the petals, saying, ‘He loves me, he loves me…’”
“Isn’t it supposed to be, he loves me, he loves me not?”
“Exactly, but she didn’t want to imagine any other possibility, so she changed the rules and that’s that.” I couldn’t help smiling as I thought about Mom. “She told him on their third date. So for him, the beetle was her, good luck, full of those I love yous.”
Axel started laughing. “Jesus, fucking Douglas, I still remember the day I asked him and he told me I should keep thinking about it. I could have spent my whole life trying to figure it out and I would never have gotten anywhere. You know what? He loved that, having a laugh at my expense.”
We were silent for a few minutes.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Him portraying things only they could understand. The rest of the world could see those beetles sliced open down the middle and think it was just weirdness. And for him it was love, one of the many ways he had of looking at it.”
Axel sighed and his expression darkened, but I didn’t ask him what he was thinking, because I knew he wouldn’t tell me. Back in Byron Bay, he took a detour.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.”
He stopped in front of a contemporary art gallery. There were several in town, but this one was the smallest, and it was special, maybe because of its rustic facade or its charm. He seemed nervous.
“I never told you this before, because…I didn’t want you to get scared or take a step back, but I promised Douglas something once. I told your father that I didn’t know how, but I would…get you to show your work in a gallery.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because I failed to keep another promise.”
“Which one? You don’t have to lie to me.”
“That I would. Show my work here. Because that was my dream, but so long ago that I don’t even remember the feeling of wanting such a thing. When I told you I needed to talk to someone about them, with you, I was being serious. Not just because I miss them, Leah, but because your dad…if I take him out of my life story, you’ll never know me entirely, understand? I owe a lot of what I am to him.”
I held back to keep from crying, and his fingers glided softly down my cheek, but he pulled away when he noticed something outside the car. I turned. All I saw was a short-haired girl whose head turned when she met my eyes.
“What is it, Axel?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“You know her?”
“She’s a friend.”
He started the car, and we went home. I looked at the door of the art gallery we were leaving behind in the rearview mirror, and we didn’t talk about it again for the rest of the day. We made dinner together. We put on a record. We made love in his bed and embraced afterward in the silence of the night.
I couldn’t fall asleep. The tips of my toes were burning, and I knew that sensation very, very well, but it was three in the morning, I didn’t want to wake him. I got up when I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked barefoot on tiptoe through the living room, leaving the door to the bedroom cracked. I turned on a lamp on the table, which gave off a faint orange light, and went for my art materials. I unrolled a sheet of paper on the floor and knelt on the warm wood. I took a deep breath, feeling the solitude of the moment, holding on to it before opening the paint box and sliding my fingers over the tubes, caressing them, remembering them…
I grabbed a yellow. Then a carmine red.
Then a petroleum blue, a mauve, a purple, a salmon pink, a chocolate brown, turquoise, dark amber, apricot, mint green…
I mixed them all. Felt them all. Found myself in all of them.
88