Mendocino Coast

Since I was the aggressor, the light show in my head remained somewhat subdued. It was there, but not like when I was fucking Andre. Just a light array of colors that came and went in a casual and continuous background show in my head. The real emotional component was coming from the sounds of Nadine groaning in ecstasy as I played with her sex. I was in control of another being's sexual arousal. I could ride her emotions up or down.

I could tell she was approaching her orgasm now. She was gasping for air, moaning, crying and whining. "Oh fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, I'm getting close. Don't stop. Don't stop. Ohhhhhh. Don't fucking stop!" it was all in French, but I had learned enough French obscenities from Andre to be able to follow her.

I could imagine the light show I was provoking in her head. I had it in my power to torture her by backing off, but I didn't. Instead I pressed my fingers against her G-spot and then sucked her big swollen clit into my mouth and lashed it with the tip of my tongue. She went off like a fire cracker.

"Oh Fuuuuuuck! Ahhhiiiiii. AHiiiiiiiiii!"

She finished the first wave of her orgasm and began to collapse down on me, but I pulled my hand out of her cunt and held up both of her hips while I continued to lick her clit, driving her through several more waves of orgasm, softer and more subdued than the first but still causing her to cry and groan. Eventually she used her arms to push off the bedstead and break free of my grip on her ass, falling back to one side so she was laying with her face beside my feet as she gasped for breath.

I sat up looking at her and asked, "How was the light show?"

"Mon Dieu. Oh my fucking god. That was . . . Mon Dieu. I've never seen anything like it."

We rested a bit and then she did me. The light show was stunning. She was a talented lesbian. Her long slow licks were like a super sensitive massage of my pussy. Each stroke upward generated a deep purple blast of light and then on her downward strokes, a green with yellow stripes. "Where do these colors come from?" I asked myself. When the tip of her tongue touched my clit there were sparks like a Fourth of July sparkler from my childhood. Her finger fucking was like Andre's cock but not as intense. The colors changed as she changed the angle at which she penetrated me. When she pressed on my G-spot there was an aura of pink with symmetrical streaks of yellow. The color intensified as her pressure increased.

As I approached my climax I could sense on the edge of my synesthetic color palate the hints of the color explosion to come—almost a foreshadowing. And when she finally let me get there the light explosion was spectacular, like the finale of a fireworks display.

Nadine and I spent the night together. In the morning, over room service croissants and coffee, she asked me again, "You really are a synesthete aren't you?"

I smiled. "So you could tell, eh? Yes, I am, and last night was spectacular. The only person who did that better for me was a man. . . whose name I'm not going to tell you."

"No need. I'm an art critic, not a gossip columnist. I'm not going to mention your synesthesia in my review of your art either. You might publish a painting of the lights you saw last night and tell people where they came from. I prefer to keep my sex life private."

"Thank you, but I wouldn't."

"Oh but you must," she said. "for me at least the synesthesia generated by sex is so far beyond any other source as to be beyond comparison."

"I know," I said. "But I'm afraid of it. It's so intense. I'm afraid to try."

"You must," she responded.

I shrugged my shoulders in response.

Nadine and I never established a steady affair, but from time to time when I am in Paris we get together and give each other a light show. Much later, when I had perfected my technique, I did a small painting based on another evening of sex I had with her and named it "Nadine," but I never told anyone, not even Andre or Claudine, what it was about. I didn't sell it either. I gave it to Nadine.

Chapter 7. Fire; A Three-way in Yountville

I could see the fog now beginning to roll into the mouths of the ravines and gulches below where the mountains met the Pacific. The breeze was cooling, my exposed nips swollen and hardened from its effect. It was time to dress and start down the hill. As I began my walk, my mind continued to replay events from my recent past.

A couple of years after my initial show in Paris, about six months before the scheduled date for the next year's FIAC, Gerard asked if I could produce another large painting for the fair. By that time I was experimenting with paintings based on the sounds of locations other than Mendocino. I had done a successful series of smaller paintings based on the sounds of Big Sur. It wasn't a real stretch. Big Sur and Mendocino aren't that different. Perhaps I could do a big canvas based on Big Sur.

Then a traumatic but fortuitous event occurred. I was driving along the Russian River with the intention of going over to highway 101 and then down to Carmel to work on the Big Sur canvas when I was trapped on the highway in a forest fire. It was terrifying. There were fire trucks everywhere, their red lights flashing and sirens screaming with fire fighters in their yellow shirts and green trousers barking orders through megaphones. The wind was howling and I could hear pieces of trees breaking around me. The smoke was thick and whirling about me, giving me brief glimpses of the fire cresting on the ridge line above me, jumping from tree top to tree top. There were cinders from the burning trees carried by the wind falling around us. Some of them were the size of kindling that I burned in my woodstove at the cottage. The tree tops, heated by the fire around them, were literally exploding when ambers from another tree top set them ablaze.

The fire was still a mile away, but the noise was tremendous. It was creating its own wind as it sucked the oxygen needed to feed it through the timber on all sides of it. I sat stuck in the traffic for perhaps 15 minutes until the fire fighters decided the route up the canyon was safe enough for us to go through in escorted convoys. We crawled through the swirling smoke for at least half an hour until we reached Guerneville.

We were out of the intense smoke, but there was more chaos. The authorities were evacuating the town. There were sirens everywhere. Power had failed, so officers were directing traffic at major intersections, and leaving the refugees to take care of themselves at lesser ones. From there I worked my way south, still in heavy, slow moving traffic.

Once I got to the edge of Sebastopol, I pulled over to the side of the road and sat trying to recover from the emotional maelstrom. That was when I realized that much of the emotion I felt had come from my synesthetic response to the noise of the event and the force of the fire. My god, I thought. I have to paint this. Immediately, before it fades. But where? I couldn't go back to the studio in my cottage. There was no way to get back through the mountains that were ablaze. I had supplies with me, including a large rolled canvas which I had previously treated with gesso in preparation for the Big Sur project. I planned to stretch it on a frame I had built in some rented work space near Carmel. But I couldn't take the time it would take to drive to Carmel. I had to get paint on canvas immediately before my memory of the stunning synesthesiastic images faded. Then I remembered an old garage that Charlie Rossini, the gallery owner I worked for in Yountville, had let me use for a studio. That would work. I tried to call him but cellphones weren't working, so I took the risk and headed for Yountville.

I turned left in Sebastopol and took Highway 12 through Santa Rosa, frustrated with the slow traffic. Half-way down to Sonoma, near Glen Ellen, I found the narrow cross road I was looking for that would take me through the mountains to Yountville. I could still smell smoke, but I gambled that it was coming from the Guerneville fire rather than another fire that I didn't know about. I drove like a woman possessed over the Oakville Grade to Rutherford and then down to Yountville, going directly to the old garage. It was locked, but this time my cell phone worked, and Charlie told me where the key was hidden. Fortunately a good deal of the materials I had used in the garage in the past were still there. I worked quickly to stretch the rolled canvas I had brought with me on a rapidly constructed frame.

Once I had a frame built and the canvas was stretched and set up in front of me, I drank some water and sat staring at it letting my memories of the fire pass across the canvas of my mind. The colors were stunning—reds, blacks yellows, oranges, green of trees not yet ablaze and the myriad colors created by my mind from the sounds of the blaze. The colors my eyes had seen were muted by the pervasive smoke, but not so with my memory of the synesthesiastic colors generated by the chaos of the fire. It was the latter group of colors and images I wanted to focus on.

I needed help for this canvas. I rummaged about in some things I had left in the garage and found a partial dose of LSD. It was more than I had been using of late, but it would have to do. I dropped it and sat back to let it take effect.

Once I started, I worked hard until I ran out of light. My frenzied application of paint to the canvas was emmeshed with the emotional experience of the fire and my brain's reaction to its sounds. The painting was literally an extension of the emotional effect of the fire and it's the colors generated by my synesthesia. Were they the same colors I had experienced at the time? I didn't know, but it didn't matter. They were spectacular. They were an extension of the emotions arising during my long minutes in the chaos of the burning Russian River canyon.

Fortunately I had enough connection with reality to make myself stop when I ran out of daylight. I didn't want to be putting paint on the canvas by incandescent light. I cleaned my brushes and other tools, locked up, and walked the three blocks to Charlie's gallery.

When I walked into the gallery, Charlie looked horrified to see me, and if I had had a mirror available I could easily have understood why. I had ash stains on my face and clothing and paint of wild intense colors layered from place to place over and alongside the ash.

"My god, Danielle. You look like one of your canvases. What have you been doing?"

"I pushed my mop of red hair back from my face and grinned at him. "I got caught in the Guerneville fire, but I got out okay. Since I called you I have been painting. The experience was unbelievable. I had to get it down on canvas. But I've run out of light, so now I think l need a drink and some food. Oh yeah, and a place to stay."

Charlie arranged all of my requests in just the right order. Drink came from a bottle of Scotch he kept in the back room of the gallery. Food came in the back room of Bouchon where I ate with the kitchen staff, most of whom I knew. A place to sleep came in a high end B&B that belonged to Charlie's cousin. She had a room that was open for the evening. I showered and fell into bed, only to be awakened by the rising sun.

Breakfast was a bag of croissants and a large coffee I bought as takeout from Bouchon's bakery. Soon I was sitting on a stool before the half finished painting, eating the croissants, and sipping the coffee. I studied the canvas as I waited for the morning's low dose of LSD to take effect. The canvas was far from finished. I had thrown enough paint on it the day before to get the broad outlines of what I was trying to depict in place. But there were still a lot of places where white canvas showed between slashes of vivid color.

I spent the rest of the day filling in the detail, like the burst of color in my brain from the unexpected sound of a large burning ember landing on the hood of my car with a resounding thump. The acid I had dropped was nice and mellow. No interfering hallucinations (although anyone looking at the canvas would have thought it was just one big hallucination), no pesky paranoia, just a long smooth ride that enabled me to draw out the details of my synesthetic reaction to the fire and record them with paint on the canvas. At the end of the day, the acid was done, I was tired, and the canvas was done. How did I know it was done? I never know how I know an abstract canvas is done in any mechanical, rational sense. It just tells me, "I'm done," and I believe it.

I cleaned up my brushes and other tools, put my paints away, what was left of them, changed into a clean T-shirt, and then called Charlie. "It's done," I said. "Bring the whiskey bottle and come over here."

I spent most of the next 48 hours sleeping and dining on leftovers from Bouchon (apparently, I had more friends in this town than I realized). Once I came back to life I went over to the garage (again with croissants and coffee from Bouchon's Bakery). As I walked in the first thing that struck me was how large the canvas was. I hadn't really intended to paint anything quite this large. But I was so wound up when I arrived in Yountville after the fire that I just mounted the whole role of canvas I had with me instead of using perhaps 2/3 of it as I had originally intended. It was probably 50 percent bigger than any of the Mendocino 18 paintings. I sat and stared at the painting for a long time. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. I was sober and straight; no drugs; no sleep deprivation; enough calories and water in the system to be in a good balance. And yes, I really liked it. This was better than any of the Mendocino 18. It truly captured the emotional impact of the synesthesiastic reaction my brain had to the chaos of being in the path of a raging forest fire.

The next step was to see if anyone else liked it. There was a kid ambling by with his head down and a cellphone in his hands pointed at his face, obviously playing a computer game as he walked up the street. I yelled, "Hey kid."

He looked up.

"I need a favor. Won't take a minute. You know how to take a picture with a cell phone?" That was a world class dumb question to ask a teenager.

"Yeah sure."

"Can you take a picture with my camera for me?"

"Me?"

Okay this kid might be in the slow learner group, but who ever heard of a teenager who couldn't run a cell phone well enough to take a picture.

"Yes, you. Come over here. Please." I added the please on the outside chance the kid might have been raise to value "please and thank you."

I held out my camera to him and told him I wanted him to take a picture of me standing next to the painting. "It's important that you get me and all of the painting in the frame," I said.

I stood next to the painting smiling and he walked to the back of the garage so he could get everything in the frame. I wanted to be in the picture so someone seeing it could tell how big it was. "Take four or five shots," I told the kid

He stood pointing the cell phone and I heard it trigger a few times. He walked over to me and handed me the camera. "Cool camera. I like the way these optimize the exposure so everything is in the best light. The light was a little shaky in this old garage but the camera makes up for it. I used the HDR mode for you." He didn't say a thing about the painting.

I said, "Thank you," as he walked away. I felt old. He knew more about the camera in my I-phone than I did and I had six years of formal training in art and graphics. Whatever. The cell phone picture was just fine for my purposes. I attached it to a brief message to Gerard, with copies to Andre and Claudine. The text said, "You wanted something bigger. How's this?"

Forty-eight hours later all three of them were standing in the garage staring at the painting with their mouths open. They had gone to the gallery first and Charlie had brought them over.

"How did you do this?" Gerard asked.

"With brushes and a palette knife."

"But what is it?"

I was trapped in a forest fire and this is my effort to capture the synesthesiastic experience. I can't put it in words, but this, or something like it, was going on in my head while the world exploded around me.

"Mon Dieu," exclaimed Andre and Gerard almost in unison.

"Were you injured?" asked Claudine.

"Scared, but not injured."

"I must have this for FICA."

"It won't dry in time to ship it."

"Oh, oui, oui. I understand that. I meant for next year. If you can do some more smaller ones I will build our whole exhibit around them, as I did last year. I will do a mix of artists for this year, a few of yours and some of several other artists I represent. I've got some of your new series on Big Sur that will do for this year."

"I think I can paint some smaller ones by next month. The experience was only a few days ago."

"Good, good. We are going to make so much money off this painting. It is Delacroix again. If we do this right it will be worth millions."

We all laughed at that notion. I liked it, but it was not Delacroix.

"No, no, no." He said. "I mean that. Now, we need to celebrate tonight." He turned to Charlie, "Is there a decent Bistro in this little town or do we have to drive back to San Francisco?"

Charlie, Andre, and I laughed. "Do you want three Michelin stars or will one do."

"Really?"

"I recommend the one star bistro. It's where I met Andre." I said.

Charlie spoke up, "So we will be five tonight? I need to make a call. The Bouchon Maître' de

is my son-in-law." Yountville is a small town.

"But Gerard," Andre said. "You are buying tonight."

Guibert looked offended that Andre had even mentioned it. "Oh, of course, of course. How could I not."

"And I don't want to see it show up on an expense sheet when you pay me the vast sums you are going to get for the painting," I said. That got a laugh from everyone but Gerard, who looked pained.

Dinner was grand that night. First it was Bouchon and dinner is always grand there. But more importantly the company was all in a grand mood. Everyone was excited about my Guerneville fire painting. We had a lengthy debate about what to name it. I think the consensus was "Sounds of Guerneville Fire." Some wanted "1" after the name to leave room for painting more. Others favored less specific names such as "In the Fire." As the wine flowed the suggestions got more exotic, such as "Sounds of the Apocalypse," or "Sounds of Climate Change" (way too political for me). Ultimately, I asserted my right to name my own painting and declined to make a decision before the paint dried.

Andre ordered a dozen raw oysters on the half shell for his appetizer and was immediately given no end of teasing about how he was going to need more oysters than that to keep up with Claudine and me tonight. Claudine snickered, "He'll do okay tonight. After all I have Danielle here to distract me, but if . . . and here she wagged a finger at Andre . . . if she goes back to her painting in the garage tomorrow to create another canvas while her memory is fresh, then Andre you need to watch out because you are going to be left with me alone and I can be very demanding . . . as you know."

The group erupted in hoots and cheers. Gerard with a loud, "Ooh La La. Andre, I told you trying to keep up with these two women would be the death of you."

Andre actually blushed and said something in French that I didn't understand but got a laugh from everyone else.

By the time we reached the dessert, Gerard was fading from jet lag and excused himself. Charlie discreetly followed suit, leaving Andre, Claudine and me at the table. As it turned out Andre had not just flown in from Europe. He had been in New York calling on customers and Claudine of course was living in Berkeley where she was working on her MFA at CCA in Oakland.