"...she doesn't have such a great smile. I bet she's never made any delivery boys drop their packages with that smile. I did that once. And he walked into a pole afterwards.
That's what she'd said at the sight of the legendary La Joconde. She hadn't been the least bit impressed with it. A centuries old painting less than ten feet away from her, and all she had been able to do was shrug and glance around to see if there was a painting with the proper amount of nudity hanging around. It hadn't interested her in the slightest.
Normally, Alan would have been furious with her for it. He'd wanted to at first. He knew he'd certainly sounded annoyed over the next few seconds. But when she turned to him with those wide blue eyes, clear enough to see the deception in her smile, he had relented. Any real anger he had towards her dissipated - vanished like a stain of breath upon a mirror.
She'd always been able to do that. But when she'd been younger, it had been her innocence that stayed him. Now it was something else entirely - something he couldn't quite name. Experience? Wisdom? Sorrow? A mix of all three and more? He couldn't be sure. He had never had the talent for dissecting human emotion in the moment.
He could study it when captured in a painting or a photograph or recorded in prose or poetry. He had time enough to do it then. And even the most moving work of art was always slightly removed from reality. It could move men to madness or to tears or to rapture, but no matter what, it was always a step away from actual emotion. It was a copy, and therefore not genuine. It was filtered and removed from the other variables that could mask it or alter it. It was easy to tell from a poem what someone was feeling. But from human interaction? There Alan was usually stumped.
He wished he could write a poem or draw a picture about what he felt when he looked into Minako’s eyes. But God had not given him any talent for creating art. All he could do was recognize brilliance when he saw it. It was nothing to be scoffed at of course. It’s what made him an excellent critic and a damn good editor. But it didn’t make him an artist, and he’d always been a bit bitter about that.
He thought maybe if he could capture the different feelings zooming through his mind when he looked at her, he could actually understand what they meant. He could understand the way his heart twisted in anguish; the way his back straightened in determination; the way his fingers curled in frustration; the way his stomach turned with anxiety.
The way he had to physically restrain himself from throwing his arms around her, crushing her to him. He wanted to swallow her breath, to bruise her lips, sometimes even make her bleed. He wanted to hold on to her for as long as it took until he could take in some of that strength of will or whatever else it was she had that made her survive. He wanted to take all of her in if he had to. Anything to make her stay. Anything to make him understand her. Anything to make his life make sense again.
The impulse scared him. Of that much he could be sure.
The suddenness of it all was what was driving him quickly to the edge. It had attacked him out of nowhere, giving him no opportunity to prepare for the assault. It had been an ambush. Guerrilla tactics. Just her style.
She’d just shown up the day before, standing on his doorstep after he hadn’t seen her for five years. At first, he thought he was seeing a ghost, and he’d been terrified. But then he saw that she’d changed too much from thirteen to be a ghost. Then he’d gotten scared of something else, maybe that she was moving too fast and far away from him when he already felt so alone. So he’d hugged her like a drowning man to a life raft, hoping she would sense his desperation and tell him it was all right if he never let go.
But of course she didn’t. She probably didn’t think anything was wrong. Not with his marriage, not with his mind… How could she know that he’d been sleeping on the couch for the better part of a year? How could she know that he hadn’t smiled for quite some time until she’d shown up at his door?
He wondered about the Mona Lisa smile. Maybe she had been just as miserable as he was. Maybe she was searching for something to make life better again when she sat down for Da Vinci some four hundred years previously. Maybe her solution was a kind of eternal youth – captured on canvas at the height of her beauty, bewitching men through the ages. Maybe that had given her peace.
And could he find that same peace, Alan wondered? The vessel was standing beside him, rocking back and forth on her heels, tucking a lock of golden hair behind her ear. If she knew what he was going through, would she help him? Of course she would want to. But how far could she go to save him at this point? Would she go that far? Or would she hate him for asking her of it?
He thought of asking her then. He thought of laying hands to her bare shoulders, pulling her forward, maybe even kissing her. He thought of whispering his plea against her neck, turned away so that he would not see her scorn if she had it for him. He even thought of weeping like a child at her feet no matter how demeaning it was. It would hardly be the first time he cried since he came to Paris.
But Minako had wanted the painting to keep her secrets. And so Alan would too for as long as he could manage.
He smiled at her, hoping that maybe one day she’d be able to discern it for herself.
