The Gold Coast

38

Now Jim looks forward to seeing Hana Steentoft, but he certainly can’t count on it happening; she doesn’t seem quite as interested in getting together. Some nights she’s gone before Jim dismisses his class. Other nights she has work to do; “Sorry,” she says diffidently, looking at the ground. “Got to be done.” Then again there are the nights when she nods and looks up briefly to smile, and they’re off to the pathetic Coffee Hut, to talk and talk and talk.

One night she says, “They’ve given me a studio on campus. I’ve got to work in a while, but do you want to come see it first?”

“Sure do.”

They walk over dark paths, between concrete buildings lit from below. Sometimes they get wedge views of the great lightshow of southern OC. Nobody else is on campus; it’s like a big video set, the filming completed. One of the concrete blocks holds Hana’s studio, and she lets them in. Lights on, powerful glare, xenon/neon mix.

Piled against the walls are rows of canvases. Jim looks through one stack while Hana goes to work mixing some paints, in a harsh glare of light. The canvases are landscapes, faintly Chinese in style, but done in glossy blues and greens, with an overlay of dull gold for pagoda roofs, streams, pinecones, snowy mountaintops in the distance.

The results are… odd. No, Jim is not immediately bowled over, he does not suffer a mystical experience looking at them. That isn’t the way it works. First he has to get used to their strangeness, try to understand what’s going on in them.… One looks totally abstract, great stuff, then Jim realizes he’s got it upside down. Oops. Real art lover here. Reversed, it’s still interesting, and now he understands to look at them as abstract patterns as well as mountains, forests, streams, fields. “Whoah. They’re wonderful, Hana. But what about—well, what about Orange County?”

She laughs. “I knew you’d ask that. Try the stack in the corner. The short one.” Laughter. “It’s harder, of course.”

Well. Jim finds it extremely interesting. Because she’s used the same technique, but reversed the ratios of the colors. Here the paintings are mostly gold: gold darkened, whitened, bronzed, left itself, but all arranged in overlapping blocks, squares tumbled one on the next in true condomundo style. And then here and there are moldlike blotches of blue or green or blue-green, trees, empty hillside (with gold construction machinery), parks, the dry streambeds, a strip of sea in the distance, holding the gold bar of Catalina. “Whoah.” One has an elevated freeway, a fat gold band across a green sky, bronzed mallsprawl off to the side. Like his place, under the freeway! “Wow, Hana.” Another abstract pattern, Newport harbor, with the complex bay blue-green, boats and peninsula gold blocks. “So how much do you charge for these?”

“More than you can afford, Mr. Teacher.”

“Sandy could afford it. Bet he’d like one of these in his bedroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jim watches her mixing a couple of gold paints together in blue bowls, the paint sloshing bright and metallic in the light, Hana’s tangled black hair falling down over her face and almost into the bowl. It’s a picture in itself. Some unidentifiable feeling, stirring in him.…

As she mixes paints he talks about his friends. Here’s Tashi writing tales of his surfing with a clarity and vividness that put Jim’s work to shame. “Because he isn’t trying for art,” Hana says, and smiles at a bowl. “It’s a valuable state of mind.”

Jim nods. And he goes on to talk about Tashi’s great refusal, his secret generosity; about Sandy’s galvanic, enormous energy, his complex dealing exploits, his legendary lateness. And about Abe. Jim describes Abe’s haggard face as he comes into the party after a night’s work, transformed by an act of will into the funtime mask, full of harsh laughter. And the way he holds himself at a distance from Jim now, mocking Jim’s lack of any useful skills, teaming with Tash or Sandy in a sort of exclusion of Jim; this combined with flashes of the old sympathy and closeness that existed between them. “Sometimes I’ll be talking and Abe will give me a look like an arrow and throw back his head and laugh, and all of a sudden I realize how little any of us know what our friends are, what they’re thinking of us.”

Hana nods, looking straight at him for once. She smiles. “You love your friends.”

“Yeah? Well, sure.” Jim laughs.

“Here, I’m ready to work. Get out of that light, okay? Sit down, or feel free to track or whatever.”

“I’ll look at the other ones here.” He studies painting after painting, watching her as well. She has the canvas flat on a low table, and is seated next to it, bent over and dabbing at it with a tiny brush. Face lost in black hair. Still bulky body, hand moving deftly, tiny motions… it must take her hours to do one painting, and here there are, what, sixty of them? “Whoah.”

After a while he just sits by one stack and watches her. She doesn’t notice. Every once in a while she heaves a big breath, like a sigh. Then she’s almost holding it. Cheynes-Stokes breathing, Jim thinks. She’s at altitude. Once he comes to and realizes he’s been watching her still form without thought, for—he doesn’t know how long. Like the meditation he can never do! Except he’s about to fall asleep. “Hey, I’m going to track.” “All right. See you later?” “You bet.”

On the drive home he can hear a poem rolling around in his mind, a great long thing filled with gold freeways and green skies, a bulky figure perched over a low table. But at home, staring at the computer screen, he only hears fragments, jumbled together; the images won’t be fixed by words, and he only stares until finally he goes to bed and falls into an uneasy insomniac’s slumber. He dreams again that he is walking around a hilltop in ruins, the low walls broken and tumbled down, the land empty out to the horizon… and the thing rises up out of the hill to tell him whatever it is it has to say, he can’t understand it. And he looks up and sees a gold freeway in a green sky.