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“No fucking way.” I started laughing when he took out a bag and shook it before my eyes. “Looks good. Give me that.”
He laughed uproariously there in the nighttime as I took the weed from him and went for a rolling paper. A half hour later, we were both high and sitting on the porch steps with an open bottle of rum, our feet in the grass growing in the sand.
He took a hit and coughed. “I’m too old for this.”
“You’ll never be too old for anything, Douglas. Can a thought get old? I don’t think so. You can always be what you want to be.”
“Don’t get all philosophical on me at this hour, boy.”
I took the joint from his hands. He looked at me askance as I blew out the smoke and observed the smoke rings disappearing in the darkness.
“So fuck painting.”
“Fuck painting!” I repeated, euphoric.
“I always liked that about you, the way you just grab on to life and bend it to your will. You remind me of myself. You know, sometimes there are just two options: go up or go down, move forward or move back, grab on or let go, close or open… Shades of gray are fine, but they’re not everything. Sometimes you’ve got to go big, take risks. Like in love.”
“Screw love,” I mumbled.
“I don’t buy that from you. You’re an easy target, you know. Tell me you know that, Axel. You need to be on guard.”
I looked at him from the corner of my eye and raised a brow. “You’ve smoked too much.”
“No. I’m talking about you, how you are. Trust me, I know what I’m saying.” He brought a hand to his chest, looking happy. “Axel, you paint or don’t, and one day you’ll love or you won’t, because you won’t know how to do things any other way.”
I lay back and looked up at the stars. “Well, love doesn’t seem to be in a rush…”
“There are things it’s worth waiting for.”
“How did you know Rose was the one?”
“How could I not?” He wrinkled his forehead, disconcerted. “Hell, one look at her and the world stopped right as I heard the notes to ‘I Will’ in my head. I never had a doubt.”
“You’re lucky,” I whispered, and then two ideas came together all at once. Maybe it was a coincidence that she popped into my head while we were talking about love. Or maybe not. I would never know. “As far as that promise I made you, since I’ve just been screaming, ‘Fuck painting…’”
“You don’t owe me explanations, Axel.”
“It’s not an explanation, it’s a revelation.” I sat down quickly, a little dizzy. “She’ll do it. Leah. Your daughter. It makes sense, no? Now I understand; it was clear from the beginning. Have you seen what she does? She’ll fill galleries. And I think…I think that’s her destiny, not mine. That’s fucking it.”
“She’s really good, yeah. She’s special.”
“You know what, I think I will keep my promise. I’ll have an exhibition one day; the only thing is, I’ll do it with her. I’ll be the organizer. Same thing, right?”
Douglas laughed, and I did too.
It was almost dawn when I decided to go inside and look for my cell phone in my desk, because, unless I was wrong, I had left it there a day or two back. I found it and called Rose. I told her not to worry, that her husband was going to sleep at my house. But twenty minutes later, she showed up.
“I can’t believe it,” she said when I opened the door and she saw Douglas on the couch.
“It’s my fault, I swear.” I let her in. “Coffee?”
“Yeah, because it’s that or drag him out by his ear.”
“I’ve told you before, he loses track of time; he doesn’t realize it.”
“Axel, we know each other. Make me that coffee.”
I suppressed a smile and poured her a cup. She was wearing baggy jeans and a few blond hairs were hanging out of her wild ponytail.
