reading the newspaper when she stumbled across the room.
“Did you do all this for me?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “The fun’s over. Where’s my real brother? Where have you taken him?”
“Contrary to previously observed and incriminating evidence,” said Ray, “I’m not actually a complete and total slob. I only have occasional lapses. Coffee?”
“Yes. Absolutely. But let me take a shower first. I feel like I’ve been on a plane for twenty hours. Come to think of it, I have been on a plane for twenty hours. And why did I dream about bears all night?”
Ray got up to plug in the kettle. “The blue towel is clean,” he said.
“And sanitized?”
Ray sighed. “Gee, you’re even funnier than I remember. When are you leaving?”
She stuck out her tongue. “How about the day you get married?”
“How about the day you get married?” he retaliated.
“Touché,” she said. “You’re funnier than I remember.” She closed the bathroom door. “Oh, wait,” she shouted through the door. “I forgot. You’re not my real brother. He’s been kidnapped by aliens.”
Ray smiled as he measured coffee into the French press. He really had missed her.
Maris devoured the croissants and Danishes and savoured the coffee. “Mmmmm,” she kept murmuring, until Ray told her to stop.
“You’re a hummer,” he said. “It’s annoying.”
“I’m a what?”
“A hummer. You hum, you know, ‘mmmmm,’ while you eat.”
She laughed. “You’re kidding. I don’t. Do I?”
“You do. And it’s not an endearing trait. It’s probably why you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “We won’t go there.”
“You’re right. We won’t go there. Not unless you want to talk about your non-existent ‘girlfriend.’”
“I only have two words on the subject,” he said. “Biological clock.” He put up his hands to stop her from responding. “That’s all I’m going to say. End of discussion.”
She grabbed a section of the newspaper and glared at him. She was definitely not in the mood for this conversation.
After a few minutes of silence he said, “Do you hear something ticking?”
“That’s it!” She jumped up and started swatting him with the rolled-up newspaper. “You are such a pig!”
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” he laughed. “I’m just softening you up for Spirit. You know she’s gonna want to talk about it. She’s on my case all the time. ‘You need to have kids, Ra. They’ll centre you.’ Yeah, I wanna say. Centre me in a deep hole that I can’t climb out of.”
Maris sat back down. “I know,” she sighed. “It’s not that I don’t want to have kids, it’s just that … well, I’m not sure I want to raise them alone, the way Spirit did. It was rough for her, despite what she says. And I wonder what she might have done with her life if she hadn’t been shackled with us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, as an artist. She’s very creative, you know. Where do you think we get our artistic sense from? Do you think you would have been such a good photographer or I would have been an artist without her encouragement?”
“I notice you didn’t say ‘good’ artist,” Ray said. “How’s your work going, anyway?”
“Not so good,” she said. “Ever since Peter died, I haven’t been able to see things in colour, if you know what I mean.”
Ray pointed to a wall of framed photographs behind him. They were all black and white. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But is that a bad thing?”
“It is for me. My art is all about colour. I ‘feel’ colour; it’s a mode of expression for intense emotion, which is what I try and paint.”
“But your paintings are so … so … almost sterile,” said Ray. “And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s just that they’re so clean, so precise.”
“But that’s the point,” she said. “I don’t want you to be distracted by technique when you look at my paintings. I want you to respond to the purity … no, that’s not the right word … to the …”
“Essentials?”
“Yes,” she said. “To the essentials. What all of us share as human beings, beyond all the encumbrances of culture and personality, what we wear and what we eat, what we look like, or what we want to look like. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do. Maybe that’s why I shoot so much in black and white. With photography, you can’t control the ‘message’ in the same way as you can with painting or something you create from scratch. You have to deal with the reality that exists in the frame. I can control the composition and the colour, or lack of it, the shadows, the depth of the perspective, but even that I can control only in a limited way because it’s a two-dimensional image. Colour, for me, is distracting. Like you say, a technique. In photography, colour is a technical component. How do I know that the red I’m seeing is the same red you’re seeing? The only way I can control that, to show you what I want you to see, is to strip out the colour. That way, maybe we’re all looking at the same image. At least to some extent.”
“Control,” Maris said. “You think art is about controlling the image? Controlling the perception?”
“Yeah, I guess I do. I mean, a writer gets to pick and choose his words. He controls what you’re reading. Why can’t a visual artist control the elements in his creation?”
“I didn’t mean you shouldn’t control the elements in a painting or a photograph, as much as you can. That’s the art, the craft of it. But you can’t control the viewer’s perception or their interpretation. That’s totally subjective. I mean, maybe it’s none of my business how you interpret what you see. Once I hand it off, it’s not mine anymore. It belongs to you, and you can see it any way you want to. Hell, you can cut it into little pieces and eat it, for all I should care.”
“Ah, but you do care,” said Ray.
“Yes, I do. I’m not sure how to get to that place yet.”
“Is that the place you want to get to? Not caring?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you want to talk about Peter?”
She thought for a minute, took another sip of her coffee. “Not
