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IN THE DINING ROOM of John’s old Victorian house on the crest of Capitol Hill, the afternoon light was drenched in gold, shimmering like something from a poem. Ringed in leaded glass windows, the room sparkled with warmth different from the sun that lit Ryan’s home studio, which got great, bright southwesterly light on a clear day, and fine enough on any normal overcast day.
At home, Ryan painted in oil standing at an easel, and in ink sitting on a stool at his drafting table, tipped down to make a level surface. At John and Steven’s empty house, making do with what he found, Ryan built a low, Japanese-style table using a board scavenged from the garage, laid over two cardboard boxes. He flattened another box to kneel on the hardwood floor. Not the tatami mat and shoji screen setup of his youthful dreams, with a view of a Kyoto garden, but traditional enough. When Ryan knelt to begin work, grinding an ink stick to powder in his compartmented ceramic tray took on an element of ritual. Perhaps this was the missing component; this would kick start his art.
Ryan mixed a deep black and a mid-grey on a re-purposed watercolor tray, leaving a few drops of water in the last two compartments, in case he needed to water the grey down further. Fude and hake brushes were lined up, a stack of paper at the ready.
On his left was a black-and-white photo looking down Jackson Street, angled toward the Higo Variety Store in the International District. His grandmother said it went back to before the war, when there was still a Japantown. A street he’d walked down with his grandmother a thousand times, accompanying her on social rounds in the neighborhood, or stopping on the way to Waji’s to get treats while she bought groceries. A place that belonged to them. Not a great photographer, Ryan managed to capture the sense of what he needed to translate the lines and shadows into ink.
A sheet of blank paper lay in front of him on the bare pine board, the special hemp paper he saved for final pictures, after he’d done wet sketches on cheaper watercolor paper. No test run for this picture. Ryan trusted his vision, his honed skill, his deep love of his grandmother and their times together, to get this right on the first try in this new setting. He had only to capture the spirit of the place, and wasn’t that always in him?
Outside, the day was far too fine for September. In the silent house, Ryan imagined he heard the bumblebees humming in the over-grown borage and Russian sage of John’s abandoned garden. He closed his eyes, searching his memory for the sounds of Seattle streets, for the varying voices and languages he heard in the International District. The damp chill of walking under misty grey skies the day he took this source picture.
A few deep, centering breaths before Ryan laid ink to paper, two long, thin lines, defining the sides of the street. He built off those, constructing the storefronts of calligraphy, words coming to life. Slowly the light ink washes blended together to make shadows and puddles, shape people, and define signs from windows.
After about forty minutes, there wasn’t much more to include without destroying the necessary simplicity of the picture. Back stiff and knees screaming in protest that cardboard wasn’t enough padding against oak, he got up and stretched. In the kitchen, nothing had been left behind, so he drank from the faucet using his cupped hands, drying them on his jeans. Outside the kitchen window, the yard was as tidy as ever, grass perhaps unusually high.
Desiccated rhododendron blossoms stuck to dark green leaves of the bush nearest the kitchen window. He mentally painted them in full bloom, the lines and shades of the flowers against the darker leaves, rendered against the Craftsman façade of John’s house. He should try to capture it for Steven and John, to hang in their new house.
In the dining room, he avoided looking at the new ink painting, giving it room to breathe before he critiqued it. His incomplete canvas of Ben from the other morning was on the easel. Shadows painted on the sheets and blankets pooling around his hips, but his torso undefined, an idea rendered in umber wash, his hair matched, but the facial expression was crisp, detailed: brow uncreased, untroubled; mouth soft and turned up slightly as if his dreams made him happy. The ease Ryan sensed at the core of Ben’s being was readily visible on his sleeping face.
It was shaping into a fine painting, one of the best in a while. Maybe even worthy of showing with Terrence Chao.
But literally exposing Ben to the world like this? Not without Ben’s permission, which Ben made clear wasn’t forthcoming based on his feelings about other artists showing their lovers or family.
From the doorway, Ryan checked the dark and light of today’s ink-washed cityscape on the makeshift table. It was perfectly executed, from the way the ink shades varied and how stark the lines were. He circled the table, looking at it upside down first, before finally coming around to stare at it properly.
As with all his recent sumi-e work, there was no question of its technical perfection. He’d learned a certain looseness of wrist and hand, smoothing the ink like it never stopped flowing, even when dry. He balanced width, narrow to full, in a single stroke.
The rendering gave a specific Seattle-ness, shading that captured cloud-filtered light and damp concrete, stark and spare. Any viewer who’d walked that street would the location right away, even without “Higo Variety” on the sign.
But it lacked the life the recent painting of Ben displayed, the depth, that indescribable spark. A roiling well of emotions burbled in Ryan, untapped. A key to translation of pathos to ink and paper was lost. His primary job as an ink artist was to capture the spirit. And he’d failed.
Ryan sank to the floor, but then straightened his spine, tucked his feet under him. Setting the drawing aside, he pulled out a new blank page. A different photograph. A more natural image, worthy of this honey-thick light.
He chose a view from Volunteer Park of the Space Needle through the open center of the 1969 Isamu Noguchi sculpture, Black Sun, that gigantic donut popularized in the Soundgarden song. Sun reflected off the glossy black stone, heavy trees rising on both sides to frame the whole view. Puffy, fake-looking clouds in the sky, not a person in sight. A place he and Ben often walked together, stopping as they passed. Not in the picture, but evoked from it: the velvet brush of Ben’s lips, a quick kiss before they abandoned the view to keep walking.
As he cut in the lines in the deepest black ink, Ryan let his mind wander to walks in that park with Ben. Jokes about cruising the bushes. Summer afternoons crowded with all the other homos catching a few rays. Rainy day visits to the Asian Art museum for an old Japanese scroll Ryan wanted to study, Ben always game to go on those focused museum trips. Listening intently to Ryan’s explanations, asking what Ryan saw in the pictures that Ben’s untrained eye might miss.
Ryan sat back on his heels, brush hovering over the ink tray. The picture unfolded entirely without spirit. No great ardor flowed from his hand onto the page.
“Hello?”
Marcus’s baritone echoed through the house. A welcome reprieve.
“Dining room!”
Ryan heard the door latch behind Marcus, the creak of old floorboards, and then Marcus filled the doorway, in crisp forest-green chinos and heather-grey sweater over a pink oxford shirt. Always dressed to the nines even at his most casual, contrasting Ryan’s ratty paint-stained jeans and worn Franklin high school sweatshirt.
“Am I interrupting? I called your house, and Ben said you were up here. Figured the quick walk would do me good, even if you’re too busy to talk.”
“No, I’m glad you’re here. Just in time to save me from myself. I can’t work today.”
Marcus examined the two pictures on Ryan’s low makeshift table. “Did you do these today? Looks to me like you’re working. These are amazing. I know that street. Picture makes me feel like I’m right there again. I can feel the temperature and tell the time of day from the light and everything.”
Ryan laughed. “Liar. You can never tell the time of day from the light in Seattle. It’s only lighter grey or darker grey.”
“Then you’ve captured Seattle perfectly there. A lighter grey day for sure, a little mist. I can almost feel it. I can’t believe you can do that with only ink. It’s incredible.”
Ryan stood next to Marcus, attempting to see what his friend saw, but both images still lacked for him. He shook his head. “They aren’t doing what I need them to.”
Rather than argue, Marcus nodded. “That must be frustrating for you. What about this one?” He pointed to the canvas on the easel.
“That one is doing what I need it to, but I can’t use it for Eli’s show.”
“What does Ben think of being portrayed like this?” Marcus crossed the room to the canvas. “He looks so peaceful and beautiful. This makes me see him the way you see him.”
Ryan wrapped his arms around himself, equally warmed by Marcus’s understanding of the painting, and chilled by the intense emotional exposure.
“Ben hasn’t seen it. It’s—well, I’ve been doing this series of him in secret. He hates the idea of being a muse, of being used for an artist’s purposes. But I can’t help myself. When I see him like this, I want to capture it forever. You’re the first person to see any of it. There’s a few more in my studio at home.”
Marcus studied Ryan the same way he’d looked at the painting. “Do you want to talk about what’s going on with you guys? Finish our conversation from the other night?”
“Is that what you came here for? You think I need counseling?”
Marcus wore an insecurity so foreign it took a second for Ryan to read it for what it was. “No, I came for your advice.”
◊
Outside they turned on Republican Street, up to Fifteenth Avenue to get coffee. They walked along leafy streets, fallen horse chestnuts making the cracked, aging sidewalks dangerous. Ryan loved this neighborhood, with its huge old mansions popping up between large gingerbread-decorated family homes. Streets that resembled a child’s storybook compared to where Ryan grew up, only a few miles away.
Marcus ruminated on the quiet walk, Ryan shook loose his artistic despair. Walking outside in a brief spot of sunshine made hope possible again. Inside Caffe Ladro, the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” smoothed over the cacophonous coffee shop sounds. They got their steaming cups and found seats.
“What’s up?”
Marcus blew out a deep breath, shaking off that peculiar apprehension. “I think I’m going to sell the store. Or at least turn it over to someone else to manage.”
“You feel okay about that?” Ryan forced back his own response to the announcement. It wasn’t news after their conversation the other night. But still: the end of an era. When they’d first met, Steven worked in Marcus’s clothing store while going to school. It was central to all their lives together, as a physical meeting point, if nothing else.
“I do. Mitchell would want me to move forward, and I haven’t been. Just stationary for a decade now.” Marcus’s usual calm returned, as if saying this all out loud solidified it for him, restored his usual confidence.
Ryan instinctively refrained from exclaiming over the enormity of Marcus’s decision. “So, what will you do?”
“Jamie offered me a job. That’s why I was looking for him the other night when I found you two necking.”
“We weren’t necking.” Ryan’s indignation over the accusation mixed with his dissatisfaction over art and pushed his own troubles to the forefront, watering down his dismay that a new job was in Marcus’s future and not romance, which Ryan had guessed on Sunday night.
“So,” Ryan pressed, “what does that mean? Besides selling the store. Or handing it over to someone else to manage.”
“Are you interested?”
“In running the store? Are you avoiding my question?”
Marcus sipped his espresso, watching people walk down the street outside the window. “No,” he sighed finally. “I feel I know what John, or Shane, or Bash would tell me to do. I tried to talk to Lisa, but she had an easy, pat answer. You, I can’t guess what you’ll tell me, so you must be the right person to talk to.”
“So tell me.”
“You know what Jamie is doing at QYRA?” Marcus pronounced the acronym the same as Jamie. It rolled smoothly off his tongue, like he’d been saying it a lot lately.
“Of course. It’s been Jamie’s dream for a long time to help kids get off the street. Even when we were together, he was doing that work. He always wanted to build a place for GLBT kids.”
“It’s more than merely a place. The building can be used to literally get kids off the street, get them warm, get them food, coats if they need. Jamie’s put a lot of thought into it. He wants all gay kids to have a place to go, even those with homes, if their families aren’t supportive. And he has volunteers and employees to hand out clothes and sign kids in and track beds. People to do the accounting and help with the business.”
“And? What does he want you to do?”
Marcus sat up straighter. “Those kids need more than that. They need to talk to someone they trust. Who can help them get to where they need. Find other services, financial or maybe foster care, or jobs if they’re sixteen. Jamie wants me to counsel those kids.”
“Are you—do you feel like you know how to do that?” Ryan asked the question carefully. Obviously the reason Jamie offered this to Marcus, it was exactly what Marcus did for all of them for as long as they’d known him. But was Marcus aware of the power in his counsel?
“What the fuck do I know about helping kids with real problems?”
Unsettled by Marcus appearing insecure or unsure, in a deep and genuine way, Ryan attempted to answer.
“What do you know?”
“I know people go to school for years, get degrees to counsel troubled kids. I sell clothes to bitchy queens who need to be advised on which shirt and slacks go together. It’s not the same skill set.”
Though larger than life, Marcus was always approachable and ready to dispense advice. Marcus passed down their history, stories older gay men had told him. He shared books that none of them would have discovered on their own. Marcus was, from the moment Ryan met him, a champion and protector, to Ryan or Steven or any of their friends when they needed it most. Of course Marcus was qualified to help gay kids.
“Do those people, with their degrees, know what you know about being gay? Can they answer with the knowledge you have from watching all of us fumble through our lives? Steven, Adrian, and I weren’t much more than kids when you met us. Adrian was a kid, and you got him to adulthood relatively unscathed. And he’s successful now. You think you couldn’t do that for these kids? If you did for even one kid, you’d improve the world so much. And I bet you’d help so many more.”
Marcus blinked slowly like he was just waking up. “They teach you inspirational speaking in art school?”
Ryan only said what he thought Marcus most needed to hear, like Marcus did for him. “You have so much to give, Marcus, whatever you do. Even if you kept the store open forever, it would have meaning. But I think this would give back to you something you’ve been missing.”
“Mitchell was the one who decided to help Adrian, saw that he needed adults to guide him when no one else cared.”
The rest of the story sat between them, but Ryan didn’t want to leave it unsaid, it was what would convince Marcus.
“But Mitchell died, and you did the work that saved Adrian. And if you can do it again, for others, you should.”
The room hummed around them, the whoosh of the steam on the espresso machine, the murmured conversations, music not quite loud enough to hear, cars outside. But not Marcus saying he’d do it.
Ryan pushed aside his cold latte. “You know, I have a lot of residual thoughts and feelings about Jamie, things I’ll never tell anyone, and most of them aren’t nice. But he knows people. Whatever he went through when he was on the street taught him how to read people. He wouldn’t have asked you to do this work if he didn’t think you were up to it. He was one of those kids once. He knows what they need, and he’s right when he says it’s you.”
It wasn’t a laugh so much as an auditory of exhalation of tension, Marcus releasing it and sending it back into the world.
A hand settled on Ryan’s shoulder. He twisted around to face the frizzy, tweedy, and entirely unexpected Robert Langdon.
“Mr. Ikeda, twice in less than a month. How did I get so lucky? Would that I saw your work showing around town as often.”
Ryan made introductions between two parts of his life that hadn’t touched before.
Marcus shook Langdon’s hand. “If you’re in any way responsible for what Ryan does with a brush, you deserve some credit. I just saw some ink paintings he did this afternoon. He really has the most remarkable and unbelievable talent.”
Langdon nodded. “Makes me wonder why he hasn’t been out and showing. Ryan, my boy, I’ve been waiting for years for you to blow up as the next big thing in Seattle. Everyone expected it from you right out of art school. It seems that you lost your momentum and never quite got out there. What happened? Life interfered? Money?”
“No, sir. I’ve been working continuously, bringing myself up to master level so I’m truly ready to show.”
Langdon said, “Son, you’ve been at master level since you were in my classes. You could have been selling easily before you graduated. I don’t know why you’ve waited all this time. Can’t sleep on things like gallery shows. Get out there and hustle. You know how to do it. Hopefully I taught you that much.”
Marcus glanced between them and moved protectively towards Ryan. What did Ryan’s face reveal? Had he misunderstood what Langdon said all those years ago? Or was Langdon’s push back no different than the undermining things he’d said to Eli and Veronica, keeping his students down against his own lack of talent? Whether Ryan operated all these years under his own mistaken assumption or an actual lie from Langdon didn’t matter. Either way it kept him from getting to where he wanted to be, holding back for no reason at all. Coffee rose sourly in Ryan’s throat. He swallowed back his confusion and smiled at Langdon.
“Better late than never, right? I’m out there now.”
“Out with Terrence Chao,” Langdon said. “What a way to begin. Though I suspect you could have surpassed his level of success by now if you’d been out there hustling.”
His forehead creased with worry, Marcus watched Ryan intently.
Langdon stuck out his hand. “I don’t want to keep you. Sorry to have interrupted. Looks like my wife has her coffee and needs my attention. Looking forward to seeing what you have at Prima Zero this winter. Take care. Nice to meet you, Marcus.”
Langdon’s wife waited patiently. The length and glossiness of her black hair looked ethereal, a creature who’d crossed through a fairy-ring.
With Langdon out of earshot, Marcus put his hand over Ryan’s. “You look positively ill.”
“I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Confusion warred with worry and Marcus’s face. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.
“I don’t either.”
Ryan shook off a decade of anxiety; misery poured in to fill its space. How to explain, even to Marcus, who wouldn’t judge? Admit out loud that he’d made a gross mistake? He’d trusted someone who proved untrustworthy. He’d placed importance on a statement that meant nothing. Two minutes wasn’t enough time to process a few sentences that changed an entire decade of belief.
“Just something he said long ago. It’s an art thing.” Ryan waved it off, attempting to project the calm ease he’d painted into Ben’s face, back on the easel at John’s house. “Aren’t we here to talk about you?”
“You’re sure?”
Ryan nodded and plastered on a smile. “What were we saying before we were interrupted?”
“You were saying all the right things. Everyone else would tell me it was a good opportunity that I shouldn’t pass up. Thank you for reminding me of what’s in my heart.”
“I know because you’ve shown it to us all these years.”
“You’ve given me the boost I needed, the thing I had to hear to change my life. You need something back?”
“Let’s keep this positive.” Ryan bent his face into a joking grin, covering his desperation to escape, to sort the meaning of Langdon’s hundred-and-eighty-degree turn on Ryan’s readiness. “I need to get back and use up the rest of this daylight painting.”
But he’d only go to clean up. Painting would be impossible after the day’s revelations. He’d spare Marcus one counseling session and get the love he needed from Gramma when he walked her to church the next morning.