If I Lose Her (2 page)

 I had never
been to an art exhibition before so I didn’t know how to dress or what to wear
except what I had seen in movies, so I decided to wear a simple black suit and
white collared shirt with no tie and the two top buttons undone. I had also
wanted to bring something. Not just flowers or chocolates; something more
personal.

 I parked
around the corner from where Jo said the gallery was, took out my wrapped gift
and my small Holga camera and made my way.
Dummo. I probably wouldn’t pick a
name like Dummo myself, but whatever.

 It was a
fall evening, and Santa Fe Blvd, where all the small galleries are in Denver,
was strung with little white lights. It wasn’t cold, just fresh, and the winter
snow taste of the mint in my mouth melted as I walked down the street. I stopped
and looked at myself in a darkened window full of wedding dresses. I adjusted
my collar, ran a hand through my hair and smiled. I was ready.

 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.

 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 almost 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 goodnight.