Songs without Words

by Robbi McCoy

  Remarkably, this inspiration wasn’t a one-way street. Because of Sarah, Harper was recording the soundtrack for her new documentary herself. Roxie had agreed to help, and when Harper returned from the Cape, she planned to put together a small group of musicians to record some additional tracks.

  “You know,” Chelsea pointed out when she heard about this, “you’re only a step away now from writing your own compositions.”

  That idea had seemed far-fetched to Harper, but it was working on her subconscious, occasionally peering out at her enticingly.

  Harper took the coffee back to her bedroom where Chelsea had put on a shirt and was propped up in bed with pillows. Harper sat beside her, handing her a cup.

  “So, what about today?” Harper asked. “What are we doing?”

  “Let’s go down the river. I can borrow a kayak from a friend. It’s going to be blistering hot. A good day to be on the water.”

  “Okay. I’ll make sandwiches.”

  Chelsea sipped her coffee, then said, “I think that Sarah could be a real handful if you got on her wrong side.”

  “I know. I’m just holding my breath, hoping that I don’t set her off. So far, it’s been great. We’re still friends.”

  “Yes, she really looks up to you. I still can’t get over how she ended up at Mary’s house like that. And that Mary let her stay! How bizarre is that?”

  “I think Mary’s lonely. I think she misses you.”

  “Yes, well,” Chelsea said, embarrassed, “she doesn’t have to be alone if she doesn’t want to. She has options.”

  Harper remembered the young woman she had seen with Mary at the symphony. Is that what Chelsea meant by “options”? Chelsea didn’t like talking about it, so Harper knew almost nothing about what had happened between them, about why they had broken up. She assumed it was the same as before—Mary was unfaithful and Chelsea was disillusioned. It was inevitable. There was no way that the awestruck girl from eight years ago could have survived. Nobody could live up to the image she’d had of Mary. Harper knew, though, that Chelsea had no such illusions about her. Chelsea had seen her flaws from the beginning, pointing them out on occasion, gently, as observations, not as demands for change.

  Chelsea had matured so much over the past eight years that Harper often felt she was the younger of them. Chelsea’s rate of maturation had been accelerated, perhaps, by her close association with a mentor so much older and more experienced than herself. Harper liked that about Chelsea, appreciated her sound judgment, her caution, her realistic viewpoint. When it was required, Chelsea was extremely steady and reliable, but she still was also optimistic, trusting and playful. It was as though she had taken the best possible lessons away from her association with Mary. She had not become jaded or pessimistic from the blows she had received. Harper knew that the gifts Mary had given her were considerable. It was hard to imagine that Chelsea wouldn’t feel gratitude for that for the rest of her life. That was a kind of love. It was a bond the two of them would always have. Harper was certain that bond would draw them together again someday. She just hoped it would be under vastly different circumstances, as friends instead of lovers.

  Between the joy of having Chelsea back in her life and the joy of mentoring Sarah, Harper was quite simply overjoyed. This summer, full of unexpected twists, was turning out to be such a happy surprise. She tried not to think about what would come next. In the past, the end of summer had always signaled a huge shift in her life. For that reason she was purposely not thinking too much about the fuzzy cloud beyond August and trying to root herself in the present. If this time with Chelsea was destined to be just another summer romance, she wanted it to be the best that it could possibly be, even if that meant clinging resolutely to the belief in a never-ending summer.

  They ended up on the river by noon, gliding on a mostly gentle current downstream. The occasional stretch of whitewater snatched them, adding a bit of a thrill to their drifting pace.

  “Duck!” yelled Chelsea, tucking her own head down between her knees as the kayak rushed over a small waterfall and into a thicket of tree branches. Harper ducked too, feeling the branches scrape her shoulder and tear a hole in her shirt. She dug her paddle hard down to the streambed and pushed away from the shore. They glided into a gentler section of the river then and relaxed. Chelsea steered with her paddle, straightening the kayak so that it pointed downstream again.

  “Well, that was exciting,” she said. “At least we didn’t capsize.”

  Harper fingered the hole in her shirt and the tiny scrape on her skin underneath it. “Look,” Chelsea called, pointing ahead to the right-hand bank.

  “What?” Harper saw nothing but a dense green bramble under scrawny oak trees.

  “Blackberries!” Chelsea said. “Let’s stop.”

  They steered toward a clearing along the bank and pulled the kayak onto dry grass. The mass of tangled blackberry vines made a solid wall along the shore for about forty feet. They walked around the back of the bushes and found the branches dripping with clusters of black, red and green berries.

  “I’ve never picked wild blackberries before,” Harper said.

  “Be careful.”

  Harper, peering into the dense tangle, saw that the vines were covered with a menacing coat of hard thorns.

  “Take the ones that fall off with just a slight tug,” Chelsea said, demonstrating by pulling a berry loose. She put it to Harper’s lips, and Harper took it in her mouth, tasting the sweet juice.

  “That’s so good,” Harper said.

  Chelsea ate one too. “Reminds me of being a kid,” she said. “We used to pick them in the cow pastures around our house. We’d pick buckets full and eat big bowls of them with milk. Grandma would make pies. Nothing like a wild blackberry.”

  Harper, despite being aware of the danger, got pricked by a thorn more than once and smashed several berries between her fingers while trying to pull them loose, staining her fingers purple.

  They picked an overflowing handful each and then returned to the kayak and poured some water from their water bottle over them to wash off the dust. Then, sitting facing one another on the grass behind the blackberry hedge, shaded by an oak tree, they fed each other berries as floaters and kayakers passed by out of sight.

  “This flavor means summer to me,” Chelsea said, putting a berry between Harper’s lips. “What means summer to you?”

  “You do,” Harper said.

  Chelsea leaned forward and kissed her. A moment later they were lying in the grass, wrapped in one another’s arms, kissing in earnest. Within hearing of the people floating by on the river, Harper and Chelsea lay together in a heated tangle, the smell of ripe berries wafting over them. “I love you,” Chelsea said, running a hand over Harper’s shoulder, sticking her pinkie into the newly torn hole in her shirtsleeve.

  “Why?” Harper asked.

  “Why? Seriously?”

  Harper nodded.

  “Because you’re beautiful.” Chelsea grinned and then became more serious. “Because you don’t struggle against life. You live your life as if it’s a gift. You embrace it and flow with it. Because I can see wonder in your eyes and that makes me happy. Because you’re joyful.” Chelsea kissed her. “And because you’re a terrific kisser.”

  “I love you too,” Harper said.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I can’t put it into words like you do. I just feel it.”

  “Try.”

  “Okay. You’re sincere and articulate. You’re funny. You make me laugh. I just feel good whenever I’m with you. And you’re a terrific kisser.”

  They kissed deeply. Harper closed her eyes, smelling hot grass, listening to the buzz of insects, losing herself in the sensation of Chelsea’s mouth on hers.When she opened her eyes, she saw Chelsea looking intently at something to Harper’s right. She turned to see a reddish brown steer standing only fifteen feet away, watching them placidly with watery brown eyes, steadily chewing.

  Harper jerked
herself to her side, startling the steer, which leapt back a few inches. He then stood calmly watching them again.

  Chelsea started snickering. “You’re not afraid of him, are you?” she asked.

  Harper shook her head. The steer reached his long, thick tongue up over his nose to chase away a fly, then, bored with them, moved off slowly, biting off grass as he went.

  They lay in one another’s arms, unmoving. After awhile, Harper asked, “Are you happy?”

  Chelsea lay her head on Harper’s shoulder and said, “Deliriously.”

  “Me too.”

  This summer felt to Harper nearly identical to that other summer, the first one with Chelsea. The only difference, really, was the knowledge of how that had ended, of how her happiness and sense of awe had abruptly given way to sorrow and confusion. The knowledge that something this good could end was forever on her mind. Perhaps, she thought, that made it even more intense. This must be treasured and savored, she thought, every moment of it. It should be absorbed like sunlight through all the pores of the skin. She turned onto her side and drew Chelsea close, kissing her berry-stained mouth, feeling grateful and pushing away her fears.

  Chapter 27

  JULY 18

  “Professor Plum in the library with the rope,” said Sarah, moving the purple piece across the Clue board to the library.

  It was obvious to Harper that this contest, just like the last one, was between Sarah and Chelsea. For some reason, she had never been good at this game. Chelsea, shielding her cards from Harper, showed something to Sarah, whereupon Sarah nodded knowingly and made a clandestine notation on her score sheet. Although Harper was destined to lose, she was enjoying the camaraderie and the music, provided this afternoon by the classical program on the local NPR radio station. At the moment, Professor Plum’s antics were being accompanied by a Vivaldi bassoon concerto.

  Chelsea, a sly smile on her face, said, “I’ll stay where I am and I’m going to say Mr. Green in the kitchen with the rope.”

  Sarah and Chelsea looked at each other with some secret understanding. They obviously knew something, by which Harper knew that the game was nearing its end.

  “Nothing,” Harper said, after examining her cards.

  “Me neither,” Sarah added.

  Chelsea narrowed her eyes and looked from one to the other of them. “Your turn, Harper,” she said.

  The Vivaldi concerto had ended and a mini news segment was on. Harper’s attention was suddenly drawn to it when she heard a familiar name.

  “Sophie Janssen,” the announcer said, “the celebrated sculptor, died last night at her home in Marin County. She was diagnosed in March with pancreatic cancer.”

  “Your turn, Aunt Harper,” Sarah said.

  “Just a minute,” Harper said, listening more intently to the radio.

  “Since that diagnosis,” the announcer continued, “Janssen has donated all of her major works to local communities and museums. She is best known for her oversized metal art, such as the giant steel butterfly now installed on San Francisco’s Embarcadero near Pier thirty-nine. Janssen also worked with hammered copper and aluminum. Most of her pieces are characterized by curved rather than angular lines. She was the recipient of the two thousand and two Wolf Prize.”

  “That’s your sculptor,” Chelsea said. “The pear in Oak Park.”

  Harper nodded. “Yes. I didn’t even know she was ill. She was such a huge talent. And only in her fifties.”

  “That’s really a shame,” Chelsea said.

  “Aunt Harper,” Sarah asked, “is that one of your documentaries?”

  “Yes. I haven’t shown you that film, but Sophie Janssen was my fourth. She was only just beginning to get the recognition she deserved.”

  “I’d like to see the film,” Sarah said.

  “Me too,” Chelsea added.

  As she went to get the DVD, Harper recalled her two meetings with Sophie Janssen, once at Oak Park where her sculpture was unveiled and once at her home where Harper had filmed the interviews for the documentary. Long divorced from her husband by then and childless, she lived there alone. The house had been large and impressive, yet another aspect of the sculptor’s life that emphasized her small size. Sophie had been what Harper’s mother would have described as “scrawny.” She stood about five-two and weighed around a hundred pounds. She was sinewy and scrappy and moved with sudden, jerky bursts of energy. When Harper had asked her if her small stature had anything to do with the massive scale of her sculptures, she had looked thoughtful and said, simply, “Hmmm,” as though this had never occurred to her before. Standing next to one of them, the pear, for instance, she looked even more diminutive, since the pear was fifteen feet tall even without its stem.

  Harper had been a little intimidated by Sophie’s intensity, but she was otherwise easy to talk to. Her life was interesting, a story that told itself without much interference from Harper. Sophie had been born in Norway. She married an American, then moved to northern California where she got a degree in mathematics. Her particular specialty was geometry, an interest that translated directly to her art. Arcs, spheres and cylinders showed up everywhere in her works.

  Harper recalled how uneasy she’d been during her interviews with Sophie because of her personal math phobia. She remembered almost nothing about geometry, except that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line.

  Her trouble with geometry, actually, had always been her tendency to see every problem as a metaphor for life. She couldn’t approach it as math. She might as well have been in a literature or philosophy class, for her mind would wander into musings like, “Is the shortest distance between two points really a straight line?” The way a human life unfolds nobody really travels in a straight line, and who would want to go from birth to death anyway along the shortest distance? She was surprised she ever managed to pull a “B” out of that class. As the documentary played, Harper and Chelsea sat on the sofa, their legs threaded together, while Sarah sat in the armchair in the lotus position. The three of them watched silently, listening to Mozart play behind scenes of a half dozen outdoor sculptures and their unimposing creator, occasionally pictured with welding equipment and headgear.

  Harper’s voice could occasionally be heard on the film. “How has your background in geometry influenced your art?”

  “Geometry is all about symmetry,” Sophie replied, a subtle accent still detectable in her speech.“This goes all the way back to the beginning, to Euclid. Geometry was invented to describe the symmetry found in nature. Patterns of nature are so often two-sided, mirror images, you know, like the two sides of your face, and the more symmetrical they are, the more perfectly beautiful. At least, that is the classical ideal of beauty. Early sculpture was modeled on that ideal, going so far as to create geometric symmetry where it didn’t actually exist. My approach is the opposite, to destroy that ideal by creating asymmetrical forms by subtle distortion. In nature, asymmetry is often considered inferior, but it adds interest because there’s something just not quite right about it, do you see?”

  “Well, this object here certainly looks like a circle,” Harper’s voice said as the camera lingered on one of three bronze oranges hanging from a bronze tree. The tree was a work in progress and was destined to be located in an orange grove between real orange trees, which was just the sort of thing Sophie Janssen liked to do with her art. It reflected her sense of humor and irony.

  “It looks like a circle, yes,” she said, “but it isn’t. If you measure it, you can determine that. Every orange on this piece is off kilter a bit, and every leaf is bisected just slightly off center.”

  The camera zoomed in to show the veins of a single leaf, offset from one another and off center as Sophie described. “It’s not mathematically coherent,” she continued. “But all of these variables are small, small enough to allow your brain to compensate and render the entire piece perfectly in tune with nature. In that respect, my sculptures are all illusions. Or, if you want,
impressionistic.” Harper noted that Chelsea was nodding appreciatively. The idea of an impressionistic sculpture that was nearly mathematically identical to the original object was a curiosity that had struck Harper as fascinating at the time, and apparently it was having the same impact on Chelsea.

  “If the variation is so slight that we can’t see it,” she heard herself ask on the video, “then why make it at all?”

  “Because on some level, perhaps subconsciously, your brain detects the imperfection. Like everything in nature, your brain also strives toward symmetry. So when it senses a small enough wobble, it can correct it. Nevertheless, it has detected it, and that creates tension. It creates interest, gets the emotions stirred up.”

  “Like in music,” Harper said. “Tension is created by dissonance.”

  “Exactly,” Sophie replied. “It’s the same in all art forms. Writing as well. That uneasy juxtaposition creates tension. Without tension, a work of art is flat. It doesn’t engage you.”

  Harper remembered that during the interview she had been struck with how thoroughly the two disciplines, math and sculpture, had been fused together in Sophie’s work. It reminded her of comments her father had made while talking of quantum mechanics or higher math where comparisons with ballet, for instance, or music would have been entirely appropriate. Listening to Sophie, it was clear that her art was founded on math and that math was founded on nature and that it all tied together in some mysterious relationship that Harper’s father would have called the Theory of Everything. The Theory of Everything, Harper knew, was a physicist’s pie in the sky.

  Another thing Harper had learned from her father was that the laws of physics, as determined by science, were approximations, not the precisions generally assumed by the layperson. The more complex the problem being investigated, the more one had to allow for a wiggle factor. She had always liked the idea that these “laws” and “theories” had problems. They were flawed. Sophie’s sculptures were flawed as well, intentionally, representing the idea that although nature strives toward symmetry, it doesn’t always succeed. Sophie’s work also highlighted the companion idea that the human psyche, when it detects a flaw, if the flaw is not too obvious, converts it to perfection. That was a scary idea. It meant your brain was capable of “seeing” something that wasn’t there or removing something that was there. Visual input, filtered through the mind, was potentially as far removed from reality as something that was simply imagined. This made Harper think of Wilona’s blind grandson and his mind images, about how they might be just as valid as her own images based on sight.