Opportunity
by Mab
Sometimes Jim wondered how he ended up in the some of the situations he found himself in. How he ended up in an art gallery, however, was no mystery. Why, yes, it was Sandburg's fault. “It'll be fun, Jim.” “A little culture will do you good, man.” “Struggling through one beat novel does not make you an intellectual, Jim.”
Struggling against one urge to strangle a pushy anthropologist didn't make Jim a potential murderer, either, although it had been a close run thing. He didn't feel particularly murderous right now; just increasingly confused and irritated. All around him was the sound of what would have been 'ooh' and 'ahh', except that this crowd was too sophisticated for that level of enthusiasm. Maybe that was unfair. Jim knew the look and smell of intellectual passion on Blair, and it was rising from him now like perfume, along with occasional rapturous noises which gained him a mix of indulgent looks and disapproving glares. There was mild entertainment in using Blair as a baseline to pick out the poseurs from those who were genuinely enjoying the exhibition.
Jim was trying. He saw things that he liked well enough, combinations of colour and shape, but in the end the paintings fell flat for him. He was not going to tell Blair that. 'Paintings. Flat. That's funny, Jim' was the best response Jim expected. At worst, there'd be annoying questions and analysis, and theories on the deep meaning of a simple personal preference. But watch Blair shy away if Jim questioned a few of his preferences – like the brunette wearing the red top with the plunging neckline, who'd been staring at the paintings through some of the ugliest glasses Jim had seen for a while.
Jim wandered away from the paintings and into another section of the gallery. There was a display of ceramics there, including a large plate, or shallow bowl. Painted vines radiated out from the centre. They twined in a complex pattern, maroon like earth and blood, to be enclosed about two-thirds of the way from the rim by a scalloped design of stylised flowers, blue, raised from the pattern of the clay, as well as painted on. Past that the plate was rimmed in green, streaked in subtle differences of hue because of the glaze, Jim presumed. The underside was the same green.
He liked it better than the paintings, and he paced in an arc, left to right, observing the way that the blue glaze of the scalloped ring of flowers had occasionally smudged into the design below. Conscious choice? Accident of firing? He didn't know. He itched to touch it; but it was encased behind glass. Jim pressed his fingers against the smoothness of glass, while his eyes tracked the minute bumps in the fired clay, the gloss of the glaze, the way that colours gradated and changed. He could almost feel the bowl instead of the sterile glass. Almost....
“Having fun?” It was Blair.
Jim had been zoned. Embarrassed, he shrugged.
“The attraction would be what? The colours? Or the fact that if all else fails, you can stick some fruit in it?”
So – what? Blair was pissed because Jim didn't see the 'concept' of a bunch of daubs? “Yeah, sure I'm a Philistine. Dump some Wonderburger on that plate and I'm good to go. What about you, Chief? Time we were out of here?”
Blair's face screwed up in some complicated, chagrined expression. “Might as well.” He turned away. Jim took one last look at the bowl, platter, whatever it was, but the moment was gone. It was a nice looking piece of pottery.
“Want some sushi?” Blair asked once they were in the truck. Jim grunted some assent. Sushi obtained, the ritual exchange of all of Jim's wasabi to Blair and all of Blair's pickled ginger to Jim took place. They didn't bother to take the food home, simply ate in the truck, which was warm enough, sheltering them from evening's brisk wind.
“It was a lovely piece of ceramic work,” Blair said eventually, his breath wafting seaweed and rice and wasabi in Jim's direction.
“Yeah.”
“It's a shame the pictures didn't grab you.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that, Chief.”
“De nada, man. No cone of silence, then?”
“What?” Then Jim got smart, as it were. “That's bad, Sandburg.”
Blair settled in his seat, tension eased. “Just don't ask me to make THRUSH jokes. Some things about women and commune life were way TMI.”
Jim shook his head. Blair's weird segues were best passed over in silence. Besides, wasn't that the wrong show anyway?
Sentinel vision was good for spotting trash bins in the dark, and he crumpled the empty containers in his hands and marched out through the cool of the evening to dump them.
When he returned, Blair looked thoughtful. “I should have known that you'd like the ceramics display better. You have all that pottery stuff on the tops of the kitchen shelves.”
“About three items doesn't count as 'all that stuff',” Jim amiably replied. He flicked on his indicators and prepared to drive out onto the street. It was quiet enough here.
“I know, but I also know that you did a clean sweep of anything you didn't want after Carolyn took her things, so ipso facto, you must like what's left. Which leaves me wondering about how the senses might play into that.”
“Because you always wonder how the senses might play into everything.”
“Absolutely; and since you keep reminding me that your sex life is out of bounds, I'm going for door number two.” Blair held out an imaginary microphone; at least, Jim presumed that was what he was doing. “Detective Ellison, would you like to say a few words about your...” Blair's voice drawled in innuendo, “aesthetic life?”
“No.”
“Ah, come on, Jim.”
“There isn't anything to say. I liked the bowl better than the paintings. I don't claim to be an art critic.”
Blair had a stubborn look on his face. “You're not a dumb macho type. You must have some opinion.”
“My opinion is that I liked the bowl better.” Jim exercised some pity, as Blair huffed exasperatedly. “I don't know, Sandburg. I liked the colours. I like the fact that you can touch ceramics – or that it's possible to touch them when they're not locked up behind glass." He struggled for words. "I don't know. I just like the way that things like that sit in space." It sounded both pitifully inadequate and perilously close to something that Aunt Faye would have said. Now there was a woman with pretensions. When Jim's mother had left, Faye's absence had been the only good to come out of that mess. He shrugged. "That's all you're getting."
Blair sighed. "No problem. It's not like I have much more than a naive approach to ye olde art appreciation anyway."
"That girl in the red top smack you down, huh? Looking for a better class of pick-up in the art galleries?"
"No!" Blair reconsidered. "Not directly anyway. She was an opportunity, know what I mean?"
"And you believe in grabbing those opportunities."
"Yeah." Blair's voice sounded wistful. "I wondered what you'd see in the paintings. If you'd see things that other people missed. Instead of not really seeing anything worthwhile at all."
"Nothing wrong with people liking different things," Jim said, hauling on the wheel around the one particular corner that was always a bitch if you didn't slow down. It was easier driving if you went off at Third, but this route tended to be quieter.
"And it doesn't get much different than you and me," Blair said. There was a smile in his voice.
"We both like sushi," Jim said dryly.
"Yeah. Whatever, man." Blair was silent, but that was always a temporary thing. "So what was it that sold you on the loft? Not that it's not a very cool space, but was it the view? The platform area?
"Can I refuse to answer on the basis that I might incriminate myself?"
"Oh, that's funny."
They had nearly reached Prospect by now. Jim sucked in a purposely noisy breath between his teeth, and said, in his very best fancy accent, "I think that the aesthetic flow of the space was the first thing that struck me. The minimalist brick makes a statement too, an important merge between the building's former industrial use and its new domestic purpose."
"Come on, I'm trying to be serious here." Blair's voice was suspicious. "Did that come out of your own head, or was your realtor seriously misjudging the client?"
"Sandburg, I'm wounded. I guess I'm not as much of a loss to the arts pages as I might have thought."
"Just don't give up your day job. So why can you spout about the loft but not the platter?"
"Because that was just bullshitting." Jim didn't feel like he was giving away anything. If Blair hadn't figured out a few things about Jim by now, then he'd been wasting his time.
"Strong and silent type where it matters, huh?"
They were home and Jim had nothing to say about that either.
Blair said, "That was a bust as a guys' night out. Guess we should stick to Jags' games."
"And you can ogle the cheerleaders."
That got Jim a flashing smile. "Who knows? Opportunity!"
Jim tugged on Blair's hair - a purely symbolic and futile gesture, because Jim hadn't seen much that could rein Blair back.
"Yeah, sure, Chief. Opportunity." There seemed to be a lot of it about since Blair had moved in.
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