Mushrooms

Brian Holliday

 

“I know,” I said, “but… mushrooms?”

“Just one mushroom, at the moment,” Paul said, lugging his largest camera and smallest tripod out the back door. “Haven’t you seen it, down by the wall? It’s perfect.”

There was always a damp spot out there, under the pines. I followed Paul, even volunteering to carry his equipment case and an old tarp he wanted. Sure enough, there was a little hollow where several volunteer fungi had grown. They were classics, nice thin stems with rounded caps in shades of brown and tan. The largest, the one with the fully opened cap, was about three inches high.

“What kind are they?” I asked, just for something to say.

“No idea,” Paul said distractedly.

“But what if they’re poisonous?”

He looked over and shook his head, giving me one of his patented You’re an idiot, but I love you anyway smiles. “I don’t plan to eat the thing, just photograph it.”

Paul spread the tarp as close as possible to the mushrooms, without encroaching on the space he’d need for background and foreground in the image. Then he knelt, spread the tripod’s legs, and found a fairly level spot for it before attaching the camera.

I looked up. The sun was still overhead but cast few hard shadows, the light filtered by branches and shrubs. “Need anything else?” I asked, not particularly anxious to go back to my own project.

Paul hummed to himself, bending to peer into the viewfinder. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, “I’ll leave you to it.”

But instead, I dragged over one of our lawn chairs and made myself comfortable. I loved watching Paul at any time, but he was particularly intriguing hunkered down on all fours, buns in the air as he checked the view through the lens of the camera. Oblivious to my presence, he turned and sat tailor fashion while he changed lenses, then reset the camera and tripod, and at last snapped a few frames.

These days, Paul wasn’t a professional photographer, but like everything else he’d done in his many and varied careers, he gave every project his best. When I saw him reach for the reflective umbrellas he used to improve the lighting, I knew we were in for a long session. I hoped the mushrooms were up to it.

After a while, the sun was more than I needed without a hat, which would entail a trip into the house, so when I went in, I stayed. With Paul busy in the backyard, the least I could do was put in a little work myself.

It was probably an hour later when Paul came in for water and a bathroom break. “How’s it going?” he said brightly.

“I’m going to sue,” I said, irritation leaking into my voice.

“Yeah? What did I do now?” He grinned.

“Not you,” I said, throwing my well-used eraser in his direction. “It’s the maker of this dinnerware.” I held up the saucer I’d been tracing around. It was just the right size for the circle I needed.

Paul raised his eyebrows.

“Look.” I held up a half-dozen crumpled sheets of paper. When Paul just looked at me, I did my best to flatten one out and pointed. “You see, it’s not a perfect circle. I’ve tried three different saucers, and none of them is perfectly round. Saucers should be perfectly round; everyone knows that. It’s false advertising, I tell you!”

Paul put one hand over his mouth, but his eyes were dancing. I’ll never know why my crises are always so funny to him.

“Why don’t you generate a circle on the computer?” he asked, after I’d re-crumpled the offending sheet and gone to fetch yet another saucer and sharpen my pencil.

“Because I want it right here.” I pointed to the logo already complete on the page, a lovely drawing of a tiger, if I do say so myself, which only needed the perfect circle to leap out of, one paw and both ears outside it, to be ready for color.

Paul placed an arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Nice! Why don’t you just scan the whole thing into the computer, and then you can easily add the circle? Problem solved.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. That was easy for him to say. Paul had always been much more tech savvy than I was. Truth was, I just didn’t trust computers. “It’s not the same,” I grumped.

“Well, go on then,” he said, philosophically. He held up the last saucer I’d brought back, studying it against the light. “I’m sure this one is perfectly round.”

Well, it wasn’t, of course. But it did seem to be good enough…barely. Stretching, I went to the door and looked out toward the pines, but Paul had obviously slipped by me while I labored, and I found him in the office, one of his fungus photos on the computer screen.

“What do you think?”

It was a great pic, and I told him so. There was nothing center stage but the little mushroom, well displayed down to its last pore, or gill, or whatever, and cozily surrounded by artful bits of fern and flower. “Now what?” I asked.

“Now I get Eric over here to model for the elf who’s going to be sitting on it,” he said, continuing to compulsively tweak the photo here and there.

“Leave it,” I said. “It’s already perfect.”

He turned to look at me over one shoulder. “Nothing is ever absolutely perfect,” he said, seriously. Thinking of my struggle with the tiger drawing, I had to agree.

“Hey, why wait for Eric?” I said, trying to lighten the mood. Paul’s nephew was in college, a couple hundred miles away, and wouldn’t be in town until spring break, which was more than a week away. “I’d be glad to model for you.” I struck my very best elf-sitting-on-mushroom pose—or was it just a fairy?

Paul laughed and pulled me into his lap, causing the chair to creak alarmingly. “This photo is meant to show early spring,” he said, nibbling on my ear, “not late fall.”

I did my best to smack him, but that worked about as well as it usually did, and before I knew it, he had me laughing along with him. All the kissing and the fact that he had one hand down the back of my pants may have had something to do with it. “I’ll show you who’s late to fall,” I growled.

“Hey,” he said, “I thought it was your turn to make dinner. A man needs food to keep up his strength!”

“Well,” I said, standing and pulling him up next to me, “maybe I can arrange a high-protein appetizer to tide you over.”

Needless to say, dinner was late that night.

Afterwards, we chose to sit on the porch swing, listening to the chirp of crickets and the sleepy night songs of birds, occasionally waving away an early mosquito. I was still feeling a bit of frustration over my drawing, but Paul’s earlier comments had inspired in me a more philosophical turn of mind as well.

“Why do you suppose we can imagine perfection, but not achieve it?”

He smiled at me, then looked up over the trees where the first quarter moon was rising. “Because it exists, somewhere, and down inside ourselves, we know it. Perhaps not in this world, but somewhere…”

“Why not here?” I asked, caught by the pleasant vision of a perfect world.

“I don’t know. Maybe if we did achieve the perfection we see in our minds, we’d become lazy, complacent…stop trying. And I think this world is all about trying.”

I nodded, reminded, as I often was, of the physical imperfections that had been a part of my life from early adolescence. I wanted so much to be like everyone else, had spent so many years crying in secret, cursing the god my parents said loved his children and only punished those who were bad. What sins, I had asked myself, could I have committed to deserve this punishment—and, worse yet, the pitying looks I often received from friends and perfect strangers alike?

As though reading my mind, Paul reached under my shirt and stroked a hand over the scars on my back. A cascade of pleasant shivers followed his gentle touch.

Paul saw everything with the eye of an artist, but he never saw my body as anything but perfect. Or perhaps he turned on me that inner vision of perfection he spoke of, and saw me not as I was on the outside, but as the person I wished to be. Maybe, one day, if I kept listening to Paul, I’d learn not to turn away from the reflection I saw in the mirror.

Suddenly, he laughed. “Maybe, when people talk about heaven, they’re remembering another life, one where that elusive perfection was not only imaginable, but achievable.”

“Another life?” I asked, intrigued. “Do you really believe in such things?”

“Maybe. Why shouldn’t heaven be where we came from as well as where we might go?”

“As little cherubs with wings?” I fluttered a hand in my fairy imitation.

Paul poked me in my ticklish spot. “No, idiot. Maybe there we’d be perfect too, not needing a physical body, able to create with nothing but thought, swimming in rivers of light and energy.”

I sighed. I could almost share that lovely vision. “Then why would we ever leave it? Why come to Earth?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because here, there are challenges.” He sat quietly for a while and then asked: “Ever play tic-tac-toe?”

“Sure, when I was a kid. Didn’t everybody?” I was puzzled by the non sequitur.

“Want to play it now? Would it be a fun way to spend a few hours?”

“God, no.” I said. “Tic-tac-toe is boring.”

“Oh? Why is that?” Paul sat up, smiling into my face.

I rolled my eyes. “Because once you figure it out, it’s the same outcome every time. You know that as well as I do.”

“Exactly!” He was delighted.

I wasn’t. “So?”

“So, instead of the perfectly boring game of tic-tac-toe, we play a more complex game, one with enough possibilities that it’s impossible to figure everything out ahead of time—such a complex and involved game that sometimes, you might forget it’s a game at all.”

“The game of life,” I said slowly.

“Maybe. Yes, I think so.”

“And after we finish this particular game, win or lose, we go back to the perfect place?”

“Could be.”

I moved a little, easing the strain on my back. Right now, a perfect world sounded pretty good. “I still don’t see why we would ever come back here.”

“Maybe we come here to grow. No one grows in their comfort zone. Only when things get tough do we make an effort to learn something, to change ourselves. I don’t suppose we have to come back.”

I stroked a hand over Paul’s cheek. “I guess I’ve learned there are a few good things in this world.”

He turned his head to kiss my palm. “Indeed there are.”

“If you’re right, and we do go somewhere after this, maybe to that ‘perfect’ place, do you think you’d ever choose to come back here again?”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Are you planning to be here?”

I grinned. “I will if you will.”

He grasped my hand, his smile traveling up until it lit his eyes from the inside. “It’s a pact, then.”

After a while, we went inside, still holding hands like children, undressed, and climbed into our bed. As often happened, Paul fell asleep first, his head on my shoulder, one arm across my chest. I lay quietly, listening to the soft sound of his breathing, and thought about perfection, and how precious it is when you find it.

Wherever Paul was, that was and always would be my perfect world.