The woman in this story associates colors with sounds and with forces of nature, even sex. This is a story of her quest to capture those colors in her abstract paintings, and of her love life with a French wine merchant and art collector, Andre, and a French-American fashion model and artist, Claudine.
Chapter 1. Synesthesia; Andre
The sound of the fog outside the cottage was beautiful. It was lulling me to sleep.
I lay next to Andre, smothered under a blanket, our bodies still warm from our lovemaking, in touch from head to toe. We were past the panting and desperate recovery, but not yet passed into that deep post-coital sleep that sometimes followed our most passionate sex. He moved his body. Just a bit. Just enough so that I felt the hair on his chest drag tantalizingly across my still swollen nips. It was such a little sensation, but it brought about a complete change from fading into sleep to arousal.
"Listen to the fog," I said.
"Danielle, fog doesn't make a sound," he whispered. "It's the wind you are hearing. I'm sure of it." I loved his French accent, but at moments like this, and always in moments of passion, he would slip completely into French which I struggled to follow.
"No. The wind is a different sound. I hear it too, but fog makes its own sound, and it has a color just as the wind does. But they are different colors. Sometimes quite different." I moved my chest against his. Not much. Just enough to recreate the sensation of his chest hair tantalizing my nips. Why was I doing this? I had already lost track of the number of times I had climaxed since we arrived last night. I wanted more. I always wanted more of Andre.
"Let me guess. The fog is grey?"
"No, no. I've explained this before. Fog is grey, but only when all you do is look at it. You have to listen to it and hear its own sound, separate from the wind that carries it, and like all sounds, the sound of fog has a color. Fog is a force, it has a sound, and the sound has a color."
"But not grey?" He moved against me again, responding to my movement. He knew what I wanted, and this was his slow subtle way of saying yes without terminating our conversation.
"Sometimes, but usually not," I said.
I listened carefully. There were a lot of sounds seeping through the windows—the muted tones of the surf pounding on the rocks a hundred feet below (a swirling combination of pastel blues and grey), the gusting tones of the Pacific wind hitting the first solid object it had met since leaving Japan (a sharp, brittle, pale green that would break into an intense dark green when a gust smacked the side of the cottage), the occasional discordant screech of a gull (a glowing, intense, but brief, yellow, a streak across the canvas of my mind), the rustle of the tall grass that covered the highland between the thrusting mountains and the break of the cliffs down to the ocean (the softest pale brown you can imagine), the smoke drifting rapidly east from fire in the wood stove (yes, even wood smoke has its own sound to me, and today the sound had a pale ochre associated with it), and always, above all, the sound of the fog.
For me all sounds have colors associated with them. I'm a synesthesiate. That's a person who associates colors with sounds. I don't exactly see the color that goes with a sound. It's not a part of the visual context. It's just an awareness of color, sometimes quite intense, that occurs in my head and may be remembered, or forgotten, just as the sound is. When I was young my parents were afraid I was psychotic or had a brain tumor, so they took me to a series of doctors. But after pestering me with a lot of questions and tests, they all concluded I was just a synesthesiate, which is a condition that, although not common, is harmless. The business about forces having sounds and in turn colors associated with them—I just didn't bother the shrinks with that issue. They probably would have just wanted to dissect me like an unusual frog someone brings into a biologist's lab. Bottom line is my brain is not quite wired up like most peoples, but it's not a real problem for me.
"But it's not grey," I told him. "Not this morning. The fog's a soft orange. Perhaps with brown streaks following the twisting line of the wind."
He laughed. "I love you, but I will never understand you. How does your head do that?" He moved his body again and this time I felt his swelling prick dragged softly along my thigh.
"It's the way I paint," I told him. "I don't paint objects. Everyone can see objects, and there is no way I could paint a bowl of apples and make it more beautiful than it is to virtually everyone who sees it. But sounds. Sounds are different. Not everyone can sense the beauty of sounds and every sound comes with its own color and that's what I paint. My paintings are a re-creation of the sounds I hear and that includes the sounds that forces like the fog make for me." I moved my thigh, the one pressed against his prick. Not much. Just a little motion, but enough to rub his swelling cock.
"Does the sports car we drove up here in have a color?" he responded, moving to drag his prick along my leg again.
"Yes, of course. It's bright red. You and everyone else can see it. It's bright red, always. It's not a force. Just an object. The only color it has is the one it came from the factory with, and a few rust patches the sea has given it. Now sometimes it goes vroom vroom or there is a screech from the tires if I go around corners too fast, but those are sounds I cause that have their own colors, separate and apart from the red of the car. I moved my thigh again stroking his rapidly swelling prick.
"And the vroom vroom?" I felt his prick twitch.
"It's kind of a pale grey, usually." More motion from my thigh.
"And the screech?" He flexed his glutes, just the slightest amount, pushing his hardening cock along my thigh.
"Oh such harsh colors—screaming red with black streaks and bright sparks." I responded by dragging my nips through his chest hairs again, just the lightest bit. It sent sparks coursing through me.
"You need to understand," I continued, "The colors I'm talking about, the ones I paint, are the colors associated with the sounds made by forces—wind, water, screeching tires, and some that you probably can't hear, like the fog. The colors of the objects you and everyone else see are irrelevant to my art. The colors I am painting are not a part of the visual context my eyes are reporting in on." I put a hand on his ass. I didn't do anything with it. Just placed it there.
