The Vibrant Years(57)
“So you’ll do it?” both men said together in entirely different tones, one all excitement, the other all challenge.
Aly snatched the bag from George and stormed off to the public restrooms.
“Cullie is waiting for you in the car,” she threw over her shoulder as she left, hoping he’d be gone by the time she returned.
He was. But George was right there. Hair and beard and all of him alarmingly bronze. And . . . well . . . he seemed to be stark naked. Well, fake stark naked. Seeing her expression, he grinned, flashing bronze-painted teeth behind bronze lips. The whites of his eyes were the only part of him that was not bronze.
But coming back to the nakedness . . . was that a prosthetic, um, organ hanging from him?
Aly shoved the bag filled with her clothes at his fake junk.
“This is an adults-only installation. Don’t worry,” he said, pointing to the seven other couples also dressed in metallic leotards. It wasn’t until she saw the other statue couples that Aly looked down at herself. Yup. Her bronze leotard had embossed, and quilted, nipples.
She squealed in shock and then let her gaze drop lower, to the pretty lifelike wiry bronze fuzz between her legs. The restroom had no full-length mirror, and Aly had been in such a rage, she hadn’t noticed.
She yanked the bag back and covered her own fake junk this time. “Are you out of your mind?” she said.
“Art is about normalizing the natural world.”
What did that even mean?
“How can we love and accept each other if we can’t even accept our own bodies?”
“But this isn’t my body. It’s quilting and . . . steel wool?”
“I thought you said you loved art,” he said, a whine showing up in his voice. “Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Before she could respond, or run for her life, a woman—painted entirely silver and also bedecked with fake genitals—brought him a jar of bronze paint. “So real,” she declared, voice choked with emotion, studying Aly from head to toe.
“Truth,” George said, and they slid into a joint trance of examination.
Aly threw a glance around the garden to make sure Ashish was gone. Because if he wasn’t, she was going to have to run away to Antarctica and never show her face again.
“Your friend is gone,” George said, beckoning her with the brush dipped in bronze paint. “I sensed a lot of negativity in him. You shouldn’t let his energy bind you. If you let it keep you from reaching for this gift of experience, from living your life, doesn’t his negativity win?”
Aly squeezed her eyes shut. And shoved her face at him. “Let’s do it,” she said as paint brushed down her nose, knowing full well that she was going to regret those words.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BINDU
When I wrote Poornima, I hadn’t planned on playing that scene out on film. But then I hadn’t planned on Bhanu turning into Poornima. With her whole soul. And there was no way to keep that final surrender, that ultimate claiming, from the audience.
From the journal of Oscar Seth
The chef, with his pure-white ponytail and almost glacially blue eyes, slipped his hand into Bindu’s. It was a good hand, warm and capable. They walked along Marco Island’s main beach, the art deco high-rises lining the ocean dwarfing them. A salty gust of wind hit her, and she pushed her hand against her sun hat to hold it in place. Nostalgia for Goa slid down her skin like a monsoon shower.
“You’re a vision,” Ray the Chef said. Yes, he’d introduced himself that way: I’m Ray, the chef. Now Bindu could only ever think of him as Ray the Chef.
“I’m Bindu,” she’d answered, followed by a pause that had nothing substantial to fill it. Bindu, the grandma, the mother, the widow? The actress who could’ve been the defining moment in the career of one of the world’s most celebrated filmmakers, had the world been a different place? The latest addition to a community for your vibrant years?
If she had to choose one, she’d choose that last one, because she did feel vibrant. And honestly, that was the one thing still within her control: who she was now.
“You look like you were born to walk by an ocean.” Ray the Chef was still talking. His voice was gravelly with sharp edges, like someone used to issuing commands in a kitchen. A distinctly male tone in her day. Now she smiled every time she thought about her Cullie having it too. This unapologetic authority.
“Funny you say that,” she said, slipping her hand out of his to adjust her hat and retie the strings at her chin. “I was born a few feet from the ocean.”
This seemed to delight him. Ice-chip eyes glittered in a way that made Bindu think of him tasting a new dish and then throwing a chef’s kiss at it.
“In Goa, India,” she added, loving the taste of her hometown’s name on her tongue.
“Goa!” he said, also savoring the word. “It’s been years since I visited. Some of the best food I’ve ever eaten.”
She wasn’t surprised. Almost every American she’d ever met who’d been to India had visited Goa. Agra, Jaipur, and Goa were the trifecta of India’s tourist meccas.
“Vindaloo, now there’s a dish a chef can become obsessed with,” Ray the Chef said, pulling her out of her memories. Memories she wished she could shove back inside the vault. “And xacuti, and sorpotel. I love that the names have Portuguese roots.”