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The picture of a workman caught my eye. He was kneeling on a sidewalk, apparently in the process of reaching into a manhole when the back of his pants had come apart. He smiled as he tried to cover the rent. Another picture portrayed a small girl, running as fast as she could against the background of the gold colored glass-facade of an office building. "Can you see the wonderful strength that radiates from this fragile looking girl?" Jennie asked, "and how it contrasts against the hidden fragility of the magnanimous, represented by this glittering front?" Then she added that the picture was taken a week before the corporation that owned the building had gone into receivership.
Jennie's work impressed me also in other ways. It was similar in a way to the work Melanie did as a print-maker and sculptor. They both transformed abstract ideas and feelings into concrete shapes.
Frank's pictures, on the other hand, were quite different, photos of mountains, happy companions, of tiny wild flowers growing in patches of earth between rocks. One photo looked straight down, on a wide alpine valley, partly filled with a layer of fog. The scene was framed on two sides by Frank's climbing boots dangling over the void.
"Which do you treasure most?" I asked him. "The exciting ones?"
He nodded. "Yes, those at first. But one grows up, you know. After one has conquered again and again, and still longs for more, one finds a new way to win. With this comes a new series of pictures."
I looked up at Jennie. How little all this mattered now!
It was several hours past midnight when Frank and Jennie had accompanied me back to my car, two miles below the summit. We walked quietly, arm in arm, in the moonlight.
Naturally, I drove them back to their camper before I set out for home on a long, lonely drive after a most exiting day. The mountains across the valley stood ominous in the dark; huge imposing, monolithic shapes from an alien world, created by a civilization of giants, so it seemed. They stood tall and cold and ominous against the moonlit sky. There was no color in them, no richness of detail, only gray against black. Everything was as gray and dim as the moonlight itself.
In some respects this somber scene was reminiscent of the way my marriage had become. What had happened to the fine texture and colorful detail, the noonday landscape? How much of it had been allowed to fade? I thought of Melanie's devotion, her caring, her smiles, and her achievements. I was ashamed of my response to them, as it had become. Where was the bright intimate glow that should be touching us?
Getting back to Boulder was a two-hour drive. But the drive didn't mark an end to this new friendship that was sparked on the mountain. Rather, it marked a beginning. As I was driving home through the lower parts of the mountains, a series of yellow signs became illumined in the shine of the headlights. They contrasted brightly against the black of the night, like highway markers. However, those weren't highway markers. They bore an inscription that made me shudder as I read it. "Posted, Private Property, Trespassers will be prosecuted."
A week later I remembered the signs again when Frank and Jennie stopped by on their way home. I swore to myself that there would be no such signs posted between us. I made a special effort to assure that the opposite would be the case. I invited them back to us as often as it was practical, and we were consequently invited by them in return. Out of this beginning, that started oddly with a protest, a long series of visits evolved that added a bright new dimension to all our lives. As for Melanie and I, being touched now and then by our friend's gentleness and excitement with living, brought back a certain color into our marriage and some of the fine details that for a period had become lost.
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Stories about
Sex
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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