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FluffandCrunch

Feng Shui (Rin)

Mar 13th, 2013
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  1. “It's wrong.”
  2.  
  3. That's all she's said the past few days, staring at the white canvas I set in front of her at the beginning of the current dry spell. The plain white sheet is blank, clean, undisturbed just like her eyes, unfocused but oddly intense. An impenetrable mask of perturbation, that feeling that something is wrong while being totally incapable of explaining how or why or how to bring an end to the mental stalemate inside her head.
  4.  
  5. Rin Tezuka is one of the most intriguing women I have ever met, a wonderful complexity to her mixed with the pure innocence of joy that bubbles beneath the surface. You don't get to see it very often, but when you do, she can be fairly witty at times and has a funny glint of sarcasm to her. Now it's all muted by her confusion and distress and the only thing I want to do is to help her be the person she feels she needs to be or wants to be.
  6. I guess that's why I fell in love with her. “What do you want me to do?”
  7.  
  8. I know better than to try and have her explain things to me. It never comes out right. If Rin wanted to explain something to someone, she would paint her feelings, but as the source of the problem is her inability to paint, there remains an impassable blockade for her own self resolution.
  9.  
  10. She looks up at me, her eyes glassy. I've been making sure she eats the last few days, leaving her food outside the door than vanishes the next day, but it's like everything I give her just passes right through her soul, leaving behind no nourishment. I can't leave her alone for too long or she'll start neglecting herself. Sometimes I wonder if it's a sense of bad hygiene or laziness, but I think it's because with her disability, simple things people take for granted become a chore, so she just does away with them and files them under 'troublesome' and pays them no mind.
  11.  
  12. “Everything,” she says.
  13.  
  14. I sigh. 'Everything' is a tall order. With Rin it may just be the easel in front of her. Maybe she has a bad feel for this particular canvas and needs it to be changed. Then again, she could be talking about the whole world and I may need to solve world hunger, war or poverty before I find what she's talking about.
  15.  
  16. “All right,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Let's change everything.”
  17.  
  18. I take the canvas away, it won't be necessary for what we're doing.
  19. I drag Rin's chair, with her on it, to the exact center of the room, in the middle of all the half finished canvases, the shelves of paint and the sparse furniture scattered about the corners of the workspace.
  20.  
  21. From the front pocket of her overalls I take out an expensive looking case filled with cigarettes I rolled myself and a matching lighter. I put one in her mouth and light it with the latter, holding it for her to puff at a few times before she gets a good burn and takes it herself, deftly manipulating the stick of tobacco with her lips.
  22.  
  23. I step away and take a look around the room. “What's first?” I ask her.
  24.  
  25. She looks around, a lazy tilt to her head, smoke curling up around her auburn hair. She surveys the room the same way she looks at people and painting, looking at the things below and between, wondering what they really are rather than what she sees.
  26.  
  27. She nods towards a pile of old paint cans. “Those.”
  28.  
  29. I take a trash bag and start throwing them in, a raucous sound of clanks and empty tin gongs.
  30. “Don't throw them away,” she says, her voice muffled.
  31. “Where do you want them?”
  32.  
  33. She looks around and nods to the opposite corner of the room. “Over there. Dark colors on bottom. Start with blues and work your way around.“
  34.  
  35. I smile and does as she says, several times rearranging them in the proper color wheel at her insistence. Sometimes she's wrong and gets the shades technically incorrect, but what matters if that they feel right to her, not that she's accurate to an arbitrary scale that doesn't matter to her in the least.
  36.  
  37. Next she has me move a small couch that doesn't have a place in the front room to the next corner in a clockwise direction. It has stacks of newspaper on it covered in dried paint, but she says to leave them alone, that they're perfect the way they are, calling them a 'nice pile of words.'
  38.  
  39. She uses her bare foot, a splash of red and yellow on her toes, pointing at a group of completed paintings. “Move the last three towards the window.”
  40. I take the last three paintings in the row and put them under the window as directed.
  41. “No, they need to overlap a little.”
  42. I make the proper adjustments.
  43. “Put the back one in front.”
  44. I do as commanded.
  45. “Good. That's good.”
  46.  
  47. She looks up at the ceiling and the mannequins hanging from nearly invisible wire, an odd decoration, but one she seemed delighted with when I put them up there.
  48. “You're not going to make me cut them down, are you?“ I ask. The last time I went up there, I nearly broke my neck.
  49. Rin shakes her head. “No, they're fine.” She cocks her head. “Put a hat on that one.”
  50.  
  51. I grimace at the absurdity of the suggestion. It takes me some time to find the right hat, an old, ratty top hat from a costume when I worked at the theatre and lower the model down to the floor, securing the top tightly to it's dome-shaped cranium.
  52. The model goes back up, hanging in mid air, in the motions of flight.
  53. “That's good,” Rin says with a smile.
  54.  
  55. “What else?” I ask.
  56.  
  57. She looks down at a can of paint by her chair. “Throw it.”
  58. “Where?”
  59. “I don't care. Where you want to.”
  60.  
  61. Not everything she wants to change is her own choice. Sometimes she leaves it up to me to decide, a little bit of trust in my own ability to choose that I appreciate from her. She doesn't like unfamiliar things, and the fact that she is all right with my own changes to her environment is something that took a long time for her to accept.
  62. I pick up the can, find a blank space of white wall and hurl it's contents, creating a blast of green in a long, messy stripe.
  63.  
  64. Rin tilts her head. “Throw some sun yellow over it.”
  65. I find a can of yellow and hurl it at the wall laterally to the previous stripe of color.
  66. “Use one of the brushes and flick some gold on it. Just a smattering.”
  67.  
  68. I'm not sure how much a 'smattering' is, but I find a thick brush and dip it into the last bit of gold paint I can find, creating tiny sparkling dots all over the wall and it's disarray of colors.
  69. More paint and colors join it, creating stripes and whorls, loops and shapes in no clear order. Sometimes they're right, other times she's displeased and I have to try again. Sometimes she gets frustrated and does it herself, lying on her back, using the bottom of her feet to smear and stretch the colors out in patterns I could never match with my own clumsy hands.
  70.  
  71. By the time we're finished, you could never tell the wall was white, covered with an explosion of paint as it is. Tiny droplets of oil base drip from her hair and a tiny smudge of pink sots on the tip of her tiny nose.
  72.  
  73. “I like it,” she declares.
  74.  
  75. God himself may have spoken, 'It Is Good,' into the depths of the waters for all the solemnity the words hold for her.
  76.  
  77. It's too bad it's on the wall and not a canvas. We could have sold it otherwise. I guess it'll just be there for our own amusement. “Anything else?”
  78. Rin looks down at herself then at me. “We're a mess.”
  79. I nod, retrieving a fresh pair of clothes for her from a bin kept on the bottom shelf of supplies.
  80. Rin stands and shrugs the loops of her overhauls from over her shoulders. The denim clothes fall to the ground and she steps out of them, leaving her in panties in front of me. I smile at her and she looks at me with a confused expression.
  81.  
  82. Then she looks down and sees herself and a tiny, almost invisible blush sprouts onto her cheeks. She smiles too and dips her head a little, catching my eyes, pleased by my reaction.
  83.  
  84. I take my time unbuttoning her paint splattered shirt. For a while after I became her attendant, there was an awkwardness in the action, a very clear line that must not be crossed. Soon it began to blur for both of us and by the time we moved our relationship from merely attendant and attendee to business, I think she was interested in more than just being 'friends'.
  85.  
  86. She was the one who asked, though it took me some time to understand exactly what she was asking me. 'I don't want to be friends anymore.' That's a hard thing to hear from someone you're fond of. The initial reaction is to assume they want to cut the relationship off, not move it to the next level. In all things, though, Rin Tezuka approaches them in her own way and by her own perception. I'll admit, I wondered at the propriety of not being 'friends' anymore. I had only meant to assist her while we attended university, nothing more. I had a history of nursing and assisted living before I got into art sales, so I was used to it. As time passed, it became more, though. It had to, you can't be this close, this attached to someone without it leaning dangerously close to the realm of affection. Still, there is a time and place for it and Rin has her own way of seeking intimacy between us.
  87.  
  88. I remove her shirt from her skinny shoulders and frown at her ribs peaking from under her too pale skin. “You have been eating the food I've left you, haven't you?”
  89. She turns away. “Chewing takes too much concentration. I can't spare the time to digest. I need to paint.“
  90. “Where did the food go?“
  91. She frowns. “I threw it away. It's fine.“
  92. “Not when it comes to your health. I've told you this before, if you don't eat for yourself, I'll have to make you.“
  93.  
  94. She shrugs.
  95.  
  96. (Yes, I know you're right. I guess I was wrong, I'm just worried about stuff and I keep forgetting and when I forget I only remember things when it's too late and by that time I have even more things to worry about and by then it doesn't seem like a big deal and I only eat when I really have to but if I don't think about it I don't have to eat because I'm not hungry, so I don't see why I can't skip a meal while I work even if it becomes two or three meals that I skip and I know I shouldn't but your right and I'll try to remember.)
  97.  
  98. That's what the shrug says.
  99. I think.
  100.  
  101. I redress her, helping her into a pair of comfortable sweat pants and a comfy sweater, tying the sleeves at the right length for her arms. I have to take the cigarette out of her mouth to pull the shirt over her head, but I replace it between her lips. My fingers linger for just a little, while her lips touch the very tips, soft and delicate. He green eyes flash at me with a long glance and I smile back at her, the two of us silently sharing a moment of connection that doesn't require, or would even be able to survive, any words between us.
  102.  
  103. She sits back in her chair and I take a position behind her, my hands on her shoulder. “Better?
  104.  
  105. She takes a long time to answer, the silent judge and appraiser overseeing her work.
  106.  
  107. Eventually, and with immense solemnity, she nods and declares it good.
  108.  
  109. I reposition the empty canvas in front of her. “Do you want to try again?”
  110.  
  111. She nods and picks up a brush from the floor with her toes, dipping it into a can of paint I provide her with.
  112.  
  113. Settling onto the floor, I watch Rin Tezuka paint in front of me in the back room of the tiny gallery I own in Tokyo. She moves with such precision and grace, I find myself awed by her, yet humbled by her delicacy. I consider myself to be a very lucky man to have had her wander in my life. It's a comfortable arrangement; she paints, I sell them and no one bothers her with questions about 'what does it mean?' and ' what was your inspiration?' Thise are things I can take care of for her.
  114.  
  115. I consider myself an expert on the matter of art, but I've always found those questions both pointless and silly; why ask? What are you expecting out of it? She doesn't have a reason or need one. She just is what she is. The reclusive master of the surreal that everyone knows about and few have ever met and no one can understand. Rin can go days without seeing another person except me and she seems to like it that way; no one to pester her, no one to harass her for the next painting or try to dissect her or the work. Unlike most gallery owners, I have patience. She paints when she wants to and if she doesn't, she doesn't. I've never once asked her about her method or reasons, what her inspirations were. Those are questions that shouldn't be asked. In a way, they would expose too much, shatter the facade and force too much into the open, killing the mystery of her. Trying to analyze the paintings would be like dissecting her, tearing her into tiny parts that can be examined, cataloged and stored for later research, a vulgar experiment.
  116.  
  117. I lean back on my arms and watch her work, smiling to myself with the simple enjoyment.
  118.  
  119. She stops suddenly, her cigarette going out. “Can I have another one?”
  120.  
  121. I take an ashtray on the table, a large pile of butts and ash in it and she drops the dead light into it. Afterwards I supply her another, but she doesn't go back to painting right away. She stares up at me with large green eyes and cocks her head like a cat at a strange and unfamiliar sound. “Is something else wrong?” I ask.
  122.  
  123. She shakes her head slowly, then rests her forehead on my chest, taking a deep sigh between puffs. “No,” she smiles. “Everything is all right.”
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