(Sorry--no sex in this chapter--just character development.)
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all of ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lives on the other side of silence."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
JILL
Steve had driven us out to the Brandywine Museum, but before we went to look at all the Wyeths, he surprised me by steering us toward the gift shop first. From one of the bins he drew a print of one of Andrew Wyeth's Chester County farmland paintings.
"So--what colors do you see?" he asked. It sounded like an easy question to answer, but it wasn't.
"Well...I see brown, and gray, and dull green, and black, and off-white...I think that's about it." With a flourish he turned the print upside-down.
"Wow!" I marveled; orange and violet and red and indigo and yellow were all over the picture, hiding in plain sight.
"The eye gets seduced by the representational form of the picture," he began;
"So you ignore the colors you don't expect to see!" I finished.
"Exactly! But all those colors add to the total effect whether you're aware of them or not." He replaced the print in the bin and we began walking down a long, glassed-in corridor that gave a beautiful view of the Brandywine River. I watched some damselflies flit in and out among the cattails, then said.
"I can do that to people, sometimes," I said.
"What, turn them upside-down?"
"See their true colors--what's really there under the surface representation."
"Tell me more," he said.
"Actually," I hedged, "I shouldn't say this is something I can do; it's more like something that happens to me. There's no pattern or triggering event; it just seems to come upon me when it wants to."
"Are these people you know?"
"Never," I said. "They've all been total strangers so far."
"What sorts of things do you see?" he pursued.
"Well, just yesterday, I was standing in the drugstore checkout line, looking sort of absently at the magazine rack, and when I looked up, everyone in the store--customers, cashiers, everybody--had a beam of bright light passing through their bodies; it went up forever out of the crowns of their heads, and down forever through the soles of their feet. It moved with them, bent when they bent, turned when they turned; but it never left them."
"How long did it last?"
"I can't be sure; not more than five minutes or so."
"How often does it happen?"
