Yearn: Tales of Lust and Longing

“Who listens to Leonard Cohen these days?”

“I do.” Again, Seth tried not to sound defensive. Tigger stopped herself from telling him that Leonard Cohen was one of her mother’s favorite singers, figuring mothers, family, or anything that enabled him to pin down her age might be unwise. Desperate to change the subject, she walked over to the miniature Lego film set.

“You play with Legos?” She failed to keep amazement out of her voice.

Insulted, Seth now stood with a teapot in hand. “It’s not just any old Legos; it’s a model of a Spielberg set. You can point the camera around the interiors and play the image back on the computer.”

To Tigger it seemed like an adult manifestation of a childlike interest; she could feel Seth watching her. Acutely aware of her own body language and his proximity, she sat down awkwardly, sinking into the old vinyl couch. She glanced back at the model, trying to work out which Spielberg film the set was from—suddenly she recognized the strange mold in the front room of the miniature bungalow.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind, right? Richard Dreyfuss’s house?”

“You got it!”

“It was that scene where he’s obsessively trying to re-create the mountain the aliens are going to land on—I’ll never forget it.”

“Yeah, it’s my favorite scene too.”

“I loved the way he used dream, creative expression, and coincidence to drive those people to tell their experience of the UFOs. . . .”

“But that’s how it is, isn’t it? In real life. We glean intelligence from all different kinds of sources. Experience isn’t linear; it’s a collage.”

Christ, I can remember the kid’s passion, his blind conviction, like it was yesterday. Now Seth watched Tigger, wary that he’d given too much of himself away. To his delight she smiled.

“Are you sure you’re only interested in being a curator? You talk like an artist.”

He took a deep breath, wondering if he could trust her, really trust her.

“I do draw, small sketches. But I’ve never shown anyone. I don’t think they’re good enough.”

“Show me.”

The sudden whistle of the kettle boiling interrupted them.

Seth put the teacups and teapot down on the coffee table in front of Tigger, then walked over to an old chest of drawers in one corner. He reached into the bottom drawer and pulled out two small thick sketch pads.

He sat down beside her, noting the closeness of her body. The warmth of his leg running alongside her own, the elegance of her slender thighs. He placed the sketch pads on the coffee table, his hands hovering over them for a moment, almost reverently.

He dared not look at her, not wanting to betray his nervousness at such exposure; but then, I remember, he reasoned to himself: “This is a woman who doesn’t know me—her opinion will be entirely objective; what have I got to lose?”

“You sure you want to look at them?”

“Of course I do. And trust me, I’m known for my brutal honesty and I know good art when I see it.”

“These are from my travels. The first sketch pad is Europe, the second is Asia.”

He pushed the sketch pads toward her. She picked the first one up and opened it. The image was startling: a mass of thick black pencil lines and smudged charcoal, a bull charging a bullfighter. The energy of the collision between the two was palpable, dynamic, and undeniably sensual. She flicked the page—the next was of a young girl emerging from the sea. Her thin pubescent body, just about to break into adulthood, seemed like a metaphor for her emergence from the ocean itself. Again, the drawing was frenetic, both sparse and dense, the rhythm of the image itself suggesting a maturity far beyond the years of the youth sitting in front of her.

“These are extraordinary,” she murmured, unable to keep the awe from her voice.

“You’re kidding me.”

“No really, Seth, this has to be your career; promise me.”

He gazed at her. No one had ever really believed him capable of anything extraordinary before, not his parents, not his teachers, not any of his other lovers—which frankly for his age had been rather a lot. A great energy suddenly roared through him as her belief crystallized something that up until then had been vague, nebulous. Together they pored over the open book, their heads almost touching. Seth flicked through the pages excitedly.

“This was Spain, this was Morocco, after that I went over to Algeria. . . .”

His fingers, both animalistic and elegant, distracted her momentarily from the drawings. Tigger found herself wondering about the shape and size of his penis, as often she had noticed a correlation between the two.