[shige/yamapi] in painting
in painting by catskilt
kato/yamashita
pg-13; au; 3605 words
yamashita knows jeopardy when he sees it.
inspired by the NEWS calendar 2010-11 wherein shige is an artist and yamapi is a high-flier.
in painting
when he meets kato, it's in an art gallery with muted noise and a vague clinking of champagne glasses and semi-important people with impressive-sounding job titles welcoming him, smiling, saying "welcome, yamashita-san, will you have a glass of champagne, here's the brochure, go ahead, enjoy yourself, great pieces of photography to be found in here."
he's not that interested, really, he's here only because his friend is an enthusiast of japanese photography and insisted on dropping by for a look during their late afternoon break. he thinks photography is deceptive, manipulative. reality coloured over, placed at angles, made to seem brighter or darker or more vibrant at the photographer's whim. he encounters posturing often enough in daily business to care overly much about seeking out posturing in art galleries.
when he meets kato, it's because a mutual friend of theirs, a respected columnist in the arts and culture section of the asahi shimbun, recognizes both of them and decides to do the world a good deed by introducing them. he's not very sure why his friend thinks he would want to meet kato, young fledging photographer making his name in the arts circles for his unique and inspiring use of landscapes, still life, shadows and colours; he thinks he hears something, too, of kato's technical knowledge of lens and fields and aperture; he doesn't quite get it; he isn't interested; he would not have imagined that any friend of his would think of introducing him to a photographer barely out of university. this isn't the kind of contact he wants or needs. but he allows himself to be led up to the artist, the sensitive photographer, purely out of politeness and a sense of acknowledgement that after all, young and insignificant though he might be, this is his show and you've got to have some respect for a man running his own show.
"kato-san," their mutual friend says, white teeth flashing back and forth; too white, too perfect, crowns definitely; for beauty? for health?, "i congratulate you on your successful exhibition."
kato looks at their mutual friend and then at yamashita, and he isn't fooled; he knows this meeting wasn't asked for. "thank you," he says politely.
"may i introduce my friend of many years, yamashita-san," their mutual friend smiles, edging yamashita forward. "he took the time out of his busy schedule to visit your exhibition, so i'm sure he's equally delighted to make your acquaintance."
they bow perfunctorily and exchange name cards. yamashita's is professional, business-like; kato's is of the modern, artistic type with minimalist fonts and starkly coloured backgrounds.
"this is a truly impressive exhibition," yamashita says, sincerity in his voice; it's easy to sound sincere when you've practiced at it for so many years, mastered the art. he wants to smile when he perceives that kato isn't buying it.
"i'm sure you've seen many far more impressive ones," kato replies, self-deprecatingly charming, evidently aware that yamashita has never stepped foot into any photography exhibition before.
something flickers between them, despite their determination not to be attracted to each other. a small something. yamashita feels it, tastes the foreignness of it within himself. he hasn't felt like that since…he doesn't remember. there are some things he has chosen to forget. other things he realises he thinks he has forgotten, but hasn't.
… …
his office is dark wood, mahogany, beautifully furnished. table lamp with a green glass shade, 23-inch monitor, leather chair, comfortable couch. his father believed in western standards. no slogging it out at a cookie cutter grey worktable before twenty harassed-looking employees for him. yamashita hasn't yet perceived the difference; either way, you receive the same amount of stress, the same amount of work, the same process of jadedness.
his secretary is briefing him on his schedule for the day, meetings with shareholders, important clients, latest crises in that damn hospital job (wasn't it supposed to have been completed and handed over last month? incompetent project managers, as usual, the stink of inexperience, of the pampered youth of today who can't stand 12-hour working days), the obligatory visit to his bedridden, half-paralysed father who should be occupying this leather seat instead, more meetings with clients. he takes it all in, but he's not listening, not really; after five years, he has taught himself to remember without paying full attention.
he thinks, instead, of hues and angles and vibrant colours, of buds and petals in focus, of huge expanses of sky, of cracks in sidewalks. of trees and sunlight and reality, a photographer's reality, kato shigeaki. he doesn't like angles of the earth, manipulated images, but they stick in his mind somehow. or maybe it's just kato, who obviously knew that he knew nothing about photography.
he thinks of the determination not to like him, of his smile and quiet assurance, of the futility of determining not to like him. he remembers that he has kato's name card.
his secretary withdraws, and yamashita contemplates making a call (what reasons can he give? how does one approach these things? is this what it's like not being in control?).
he'd forgotten.
… …
kato's studio is a small space on the 18th floor rented from his mother's friend which he has scattered, in organized chaos, canvas boards, paint brushes, cameras, and various failed art and photography pieces that are deemed too ordinary to be shown to the public but too meaningful to be discarded. there is one window from which you can look down to the street below and see people passing by, red and blue and black and transparent umbrellas in the rain, brown and black and balding heads in the sun.
yamashita steps gingerly around a stool to examine an unfinished painting sitting on a stand. he makes out sea in the background, glimpses of blue-that-is-not-blue ("seas are not really blue," kato says, "it's an illusion of blue") and he thinks of sunlit days by the sea with his mother reading her book under a beach umbrella behind him. he tastes the happiness, the felicity, of freedom and sand and sea and sky.
"i didn't know you painted," he says quickly, before nostalgia shows on his face.
"it's just a hobby," kato says. "i don't show my paintings to the public."
"it must be nice having somewhere to escape to," yamashita says. even if it's a small studio on the 18th floor of a building that has seen better days. even if there's spilled yellow paint on the floor, so dried that scrubbing with a normal wet cloth would be completely futile. he hears the hunger in his voice, a sudden and inexplicable longing for this to be his hideout, his own escape. high and above, far and away, what was that book his mother had used to love? something about far away and madding crowds.
kato gives him a keen look. "well, what was it about the exhibition that you wanted to tell me?"
yamashita opens his mouth, ready to begin his fabrication of how a few of his friends would like to meet the aspiring young photographer, learn a little from him about his work, offer him some gallery space in museums across japan (it is not a fabrication, not exactly, he just hasn't put it into motion yet); but something makes him abandon the words. he fingers the corner of kato's worktable, suddenly awkward.
kato turns away from him and sets up his unfinished painting, his paints and brushes. "do you want to hang around here for a while longer?" he asks over his shoulder. "you might as well, since you've come all the way down here."
"i might as well," yamashita says, wanting to apologise.
he sits on a plastic chair and watches, instead, as kato starts filling in more of the blue-that-is-not-blue.
… …
kato smiles against his lips when they kiss for the first time; yamashita doesn't bother to interpret it. he knows the bitter amusement and arousal and satisfaction because he's feeling it himself, he's smiling too. kato tastes of mint, his skin is soft under his shirt, and yamashita is pulled into him, into all the non-conventions and half-hidden society contours and beautiful, beautiful feeling, the feeling of holding a man against himself.
"what do you see in me?" he asks kato, because it is so blatantly obvious what he sees in kato, but not the other way around; who is he, after all? he has no talent with lens or brushes or words.
kato only takes a moment to think. "the fact that you can't lie."
"that hints of being sad," yamashita says.
kato smiles again, mouth and eyes. yamashita finds himself edging forward, wanting to taste those lips again, touch again. he's mildly surprised when he does.
… …
"you didn't like me the first time we met." it's a statement, a conclusion, not a tentative call for denial.
"i thought i'd perfected my social graces, but now it seems i was as transparent as you."
"few people ever succeed in deceiving others into thinking they like them when they don't. you should be glad that you aren't so deceptive." kato smiles, and yamashita has to hold back from reaching out and lacing his fingers through his hair down his cheek to his neck, touching him, that smooth expanse of skin that he'd touched only an hour ago. but they're out in the open now and one has to be decorous, observe societal rules. he withholds.
"why didn't you like me?" kato asks, running a finger around the rim of his glass. he feels yamashita's desire. he acknowledges it with a tiny curl of the lips.
"i don't like free spirits, i suppose." yamashita rubs his calf against kato's under the table, thanking god and restaurant managers for tablecloths. "i've been surrounded by regulations all my life. i don't like people who throw caution to the winds to pursue uncertain artistic careers. especially when their family paid for them to get perfectly good university degrees."
"the typical asian." kato nudges him with his knee. "respectable career over imminent artistic washout."
"well," yamashita says, "that's what everyone wants, isn't it? stability."
"not everyone," kato says. "some like to be free spirits."
"eventually," yamashita amends. "people can't be free spirits all their lives. eventually they'll want something solid to come back to."
"people like you?"
yamashita won't answer that. he shrugs and they opt for sipping their coffee instead, watching a tableful of office ladies gossiping with exclamations and little shrieks of glee. yamashita feels kato's unsaid words hanging in the air between them; he's one of japan's most successful businessmen, twenty-nine years old sitting in the managing director's chair in a multi-national corporation, the world at his feet, the red carpet wherever he goes, all that, yet having lunch hour sex with a young photographer barely out of university. stability. that's what everyone eventually wants. that's what yamashita wants. but surely he knows the meaning of jeopardy, sees it as clearly when it happens. doesn't he?
… …
at times he feels he's drowning in kato, sinking into him, drawing so much out of him that he tells himself it's enough, it's more than enough, but it isn't. he hasn't felt such passion in his life before, so much desire for another human being, such intense hunger to hold him and have him without needing to know everything about him. he wonders how long such feelings can last, or rather how long before they die out and he can't imagine it again, can't summon up the sensation, but the present is too intoxicating for him to spend too much time thinking about the end.
he can't meet kato every day, or even every other day, but their hours together colour all the rest of the time when they're apart. the complete satisfaction in each other, physically and mentally, the impossibility of their affair, the glaring opposites of their lives, the contradictions; yamashita doesn't think about them all the time but they remain lying at the back of his mind, always there to be thought about, to be longed for.
he doesn't know where this is going. he doesn't, in fact, know much of kato's life outside his studio; whether he has another lover, or many; what his family calls him (shige, possibly?); whether any of his friends know that he's sleeping with the legendary yamashita tomohisa, who was featured in this month's time asia magazine. he knows only the kato shigeaki whom he meets in the studio or at kato's apartment (never the yamashita residence; servants and bodyguards cannot be trusted in today's generation of crazy biography publishing). he knows the smiles, the sex, the soul-baring, the caresses, the need to be secret, the long quiet hours spent watching kato at his work.
"this is an escape for you, isn't it?" kato says once. "a hideout that nobody else knows about. you like having something all to yourself."
"not entirely…"
"it's okay. i won't take offense."
"i like seeing you work," yamashita says. "i like being with you. i know you can say the same thing about me."
"i can," kato acknowledges.
"let's keep it that way then," yamashita says. "for now."
… …
"why don't you ever show your paintings to the public?" he asks kato one night, it might be three a.m., or later, he doesn't know. they're in the studio with its one window, purple clouds smudging the dark sky foretelling rain, moonless, silent. he wonders if anyone outside sees the lit window, if the light throws itself out of the glass, reflects on the ground, hints of the intimacy up in the studio.
kato's mixing his colours in his palette, brush marks along his wrists up to his elbows. he shrugs. "the public wouldn't want to see them."
"why wouldn't they? you're the artist. they'd want to see anything you did."
"i'm a photographer. that's what they know me by; that's what they expect me to be."
"isn't it all the same thing?"
"no." kato glances briefly in yamashita's direction. "did you ever notice," he says after a pause, "that photography cancelled out painting?"
"don't recall ever giving it much thought."
"in the past, before the notion of lens and the light spectrum was conceived, what people had was paint. paint was merely reality as the artist saw it. in some instances, it wasn't reality at all; was da vinci present at the last supper to see all the disciples at the moment of jesus' revelation?"
"some people certainly think he was," yamashita says, smiling. he leans back on his chair, feels the hardness of the plastic seat against his thighs.
"people with time on their hands." kato adds another colour into his palette. "art was art. people were satisfied with analyzing brushstrokes, tints of light. then photography came along and people started wanting reality, though god knows photography isn't exactly reality either, it's just another manifestation of art, another view through the artist's eyes. vibrant green glass, garishly dressed women, cards in the air, illustrations, empty train stations. but that's what people got, and when they had pseudo-reality that looked like reality, they stopped wanting paint. they wanted real people, not enigmatic models with ambiguous expressions and folded hands."
"i'll have you know that the mona lisa is highly respected," yamashita says.
"because she was painted four hundred years ago. do you think, if she debuted in our art galleries this year, that the masses would care about her?"
yamashita shrugs.
"that's why i keep them divided," kato says. "work and hobby. photography and art."
"photography is what brings in the money, huh?"
"not that much money." kato grins wryly.
"i like it." yamashita traces his finger down the canvas of kato's unfinished painting. reality through kato's hand. colours mixing, brush tips, blood red, hues of green and blue and purple and grey to make an afternoon sky. kept in this studio, shuttered from outside eyes that have no desire for this version of reality. he likes being able to see what others can't. touch what others have no access to. he likes the thought, the idea, the nuance, of romance.
… …
"do you ever think of wanting to paint me?"
kato chortles over their late night coffee, and yamashita tries to look affronted. "what's so funny?"
"you live in a movie."
"i don't," yamashita says, suddenly serious. "i live in everyday life of development projects and nasty clients and delayed work and jobs not getting done. i come to you from the everyday."
"fair enough." kato stretches out his legs on the couch and yamashita hooks them in his, entangles their legs together. he almost spills his coffee onto the red fabric.
"no," kato says, and yamashita looks up, distracted from the near spillage of coffee. "i don't want to paint you. i'm not good enough to."
"i never knew you had such a good opinion of my looks, kato-san."
"flatter yourself," kato says. "the real reason is that i can't paint all this. if i paint you, i'll want to paint what we have, every single detail, every moment. and i won't be able to do that."
"couldn't you simplify yourself?"
"if you just want a portrait," kato frowns, "i'm not the painter you want, because i have no talent whatsoever in reproducing faces."
yamashita laughs. outside, falling snow is making the sidewalks slippery, breaths are coming out as mists, a little girl slips and picks herself up and is scolded by her mother for not walking carefully. inside, kato's thighs are soft and warm, yielding under his touch. he puts their coffee aside and leans over kato, pressing them together, body on body. "since you put it that way," he says, "i suggest we'll just concentrate on feeling."
… …
he's under no illusions. there are days when yamashita admits knowledge that this thing they have between them won't last forever. it'll peter out, because a relationship based so much on the delight of its clandestinity will not survive the bread and butter of the necessary daily life (who will do the grocery shopping? who will clean the toilet? who will hang out the laundry? who will be his escort at social events?).
one cannot keep escaping to amour forever. one cannot remain beautiful and passionate forever. the veins will make their way to the surface, the skin will bunch together, the hair will fall out, the muscles will slacken, the belly will extend. the mind slows down, the desire for intellectual conversation, amusing wit, cutting sarcasm, wanes. aging happens, inevitably, and with it comes the diminishing of passion, the burning out of beauty. when that is gone, what then? where does the clandestinity come in? where do the art, the photography, the deep talks, the light in the studio, the mixing of colours in the palette, the inaccessible paintings go? what blows are dealt them with age?
kato is still next to him, tips of fingers on yamashita's chest, tracing (words?), intimate. he says, "they become reminders. memories. maybe they become surreal. old, fat, balding artists aren't romantic. don't get themselves involved in love affairs like poor young struggling artists do. don't touch people's imaginations like mad geniuses do. everyone likes a mad genius. just not normal, everyday, un-dramatic, mercilessly aging men. they're the worst possible subjects for a love story."
"you've got it all figured out," yamashita says. "sometimes it makes me discouraged that whenever i hit a revelation, i discover that you've already reached it."
kato laughs shortly, flips over on his back so his hand isn't on yamashita's chest anymore, isn't tracing circles and lines on his skin. "i knew you were practical from the moment i saw you. despite your weakness for romantic notions."
… …
"maybe this is all we can ask for."
"what is this?"
"a few caught months together, a few moments, a fleeting sort of happiness. maybe this is all that anyone can ask for."
"some people have it for a lifetime."
"some people don't."
"are we to belong to the unfortunate second category?"
"we've always belonged the second category, yamashita-san."
inevitability pushes them apart from each other, still perspiring, still breathing hard. they don't look at each other for a long time. yamashita longs for a cigarette. just one, though he doesn't smoke. he's heard rumours of the relief. he thinks of clinking champagne glasses, falling snow, different name cards, unfinished paintings, coffee and bed sheets. his head aches, and then he doesn't want a cigarette anymore (it seems futile, doesn't it, simplistic, to think that a piece of rolled tobacco could nullify this feeling?)
"this hints of being sad, kato-san," he says.
"it does, doesn't it?" kato says. "isn't it lucky that sadness passes away?"
… …
yamashita leaves one evening and doesn't come back. he doesn’t offer any explanations; there isn't a need. kato knows the difference between painting and photography, work and hobby. he knows (they know), too, which one yamashita will always gravitate towards.
trees turn from green to orange and brown. a few exhibitions are held, a few projects are completed successfully with considerable profit margins. someone goes overseas to study art. a day after his departure, yamashita receives a (still unfinished?) painting addressed to his office.
he hangs it up on his office wall. it's the closest they'll ever get to being public.
at private moments, he still remembers the smell of paint and canvas in that little 18th floor studio. (is it still there? of course it is. physical things remain. but intangible things are taken away.)
end
it has been forever and many days since i wrote shigepi. i don't even remember the last time i wrote shigepi, or whether i started this fic with any plot in mind aside from hot!businessman!yamapi and hotter!artist!shige but ;alsdkj i hope this sort of made sense anyway. thanks for reading! <3
kato/yamashita
pg-13; au; 3605 words
yamashita knows jeopardy when he sees it.
inspired by the NEWS calendar 2010-11 wherein shige is an artist and yamapi is a high-flier.
in painting
when he meets kato, it's in an art gallery with muted noise and a vague clinking of champagne glasses and semi-important people with impressive-sounding job titles welcoming him, smiling, saying "welcome, yamashita-san, will you have a glass of champagne, here's the brochure, go ahead, enjoy yourself, great pieces of photography to be found in here."
he's not that interested, really, he's here only because his friend is an enthusiast of japanese photography and insisted on dropping by for a look during their late afternoon break. he thinks photography is deceptive, manipulative. reality coloured over, placed at angles, made to seem brighter or darker or more vibrant at the photographer's whim. he encounters posturing often enough in daily business to care overly much about seeking out posturing in art galleries.
when he meets kato, it's because a mutual friend of theirs, a respected columnist in the arts and culture section of the asahi shimbun, recognizes both of them and decides to do the world a good deed by introducing them. he's not very sure why his friend thinks he would want to meet kato, young fledging photographer making his name in the arts circles for his unique and inspiring use of landscapes, still life, shadows and colours; he thinks he hears something, too, of kato's technical knowledge of lens and fields and aperture; he doesn't quite get it; he isn't interested; he would not have imagined that any friend of his would think of introducing him to a photographer barely out of university. this isn't the kind of contact he wants or needs. but he allows himself to be led up to the artist, the sensitive photographer, purely out of politeness and a sense of acknowledgement that after all, young and insignificant though he might be, this is his show and you've got to have some respect for a man running his own show.
"kato-san," their mutual friend says, white teeth flashing back and forth; too white, too perfect, crowns definitely; for beauty? for health?, "i congratulate you on your successful exhibition."
kato looks at their mutual friend and then at yamashita, and he isn't fooled; he knows this meeting wasn't asked for. "thank you," he says politely.
"may i introduce my friend of many years, yamashita-san," their mutual friend smiles, edging yamashita forward. "he took the time out of his busy schedule to visit your exhibition, so i'm sure he's equally delighted to make your acquaintance."
they bow perfunctorily and exchange name cards. yamashita's is professional, business-like; kato's is of the modern, artistic type with minimalist fonts and starkly coloured backgrounds.
"this is a truly impressive exhibition," yamashita says, sincerity in his voice; it's easy to sound sincere when you've practiced at it for so many years, mastered the art. he wants to smile when he perceives that kato isn't buying it.
"i'm sure you've seen many far more impressive ones," kato replies, self-deprecatingly charming, evidently aware that yamashita has never stepped foot into any photography exhibition before.
something flickers between them, despite their determination not to be attracted to each other. a small something. yamashita feels it, tastes the foreignness of it within himself. he hasn't felt like that since…he doesn't remember. there are some things he has chosen to forget. other things he realises he thinks he has forgotten, but hasn't.
… …
his office is dark wood, mahogany, beautifully furnished. table lamp with a green glass shade, 23-inch monitor, leather chair, comfortable couch. his father believed in western standards. no slogging it out at a cookie cutter grey worktable before twenty harassed-looking employees for him. yamashita hasn't yet perceived the difference; either way, you receive the same amount of stress, the same amount of work, the same process of jadedness.
his secretary is briefing him on his schedule for the day, meetings with shareholders, important clients, latest crises in that damn hospital job (wasn't it supposed to have been completed and handed over last month? incompetent project managers, as usual, the stink of inexperience, of the pampered youth of today who can't stand 12-hour working days), the obligatory visit to his bedridden, half-paralysed father who should be occupying this leather seat instead, more meetings with clients. he takes it all in, but he's not listening, not really; after five years, he has taught himself to remember without paying full attention.
he thinks, instead, of hues and angles and vibrant colours, of buds and petals in focus, of huge expanses of sky, of cracks in sidewalks. of trees and sunlight and reality, a photographer's reality, kato shigeaki. he doesn't like angles of the earth, manipulated images, but they stick in his mind somehow. or maybe it's just kato, who obviously knew that he knew nothing about photography.
he thinks of the determination not to like him, of his smile and quiet assurance, of the futility of determining not to like him. he remembers that he has kato's name card.
his secretary withdraws, and yamashita contemplates making a call (what reasons can he give? how does one approach these things? is this what it's like not being in control?).
he'd forgotten.
… …
kato's studio is a small space on the 18th floor rented from his mother's friend which he has scattered, in organized chaos, canvas boards, paint brushes, cameras, and various failed art and photography pieces that are deemed too ordinary to be shown to the public but too meaningful to be discarded. there is one window from which you can look down to the street below and see people passing by, red and blue and black and transparent umbrellas in the rain, brown and black and balding heads in the sun.
yamashita steps gingerly around a stool to examine an unfinished painting sitting on a stand. he makes out sea in the background, glimpses of blue-that-is-not-blue ("seas are not really blue," kato says, "it's an illusion of blue") and he thinks of sunlit days by the sea with his mother reading her book under a beach umbrella behind him. he tastes the happiness, the felicity, of freedom and sand and sea and sky.
"i didn't know you painted," he says quickly, before nostalgia shows on his face.
"it's just a hobby," kato says. "i don't show my paintings to the public."
"it must be nice having somewhere to escape to," yamashita says. even if it's a small studio on the 18th floor of a building that has seen better days. even if there's spilled yellow paint on the floor, so dried that scrubbing with a normal wet cloth would be completely futile. he hears the hunger in his voice, a sudden and inexplicable longing for this to be his hideout, his own escape. high and above, far and away, what was that book his mother had used to love? something about far away and madding crowds.
kato gives him a keen look. "well, what was it about the exhibition that you wanted to tell me?"
yamashita opens his mouth, ready to begin his fabrication of how a few of his friends would like to meet the aspiring young photographer, learn a little from him about his work, offer him some gallery space in museums across japan (it is not a fabrication, not exactly, he just hasn't put it into motion yet); but something makes him abandon the words. he fingers the corner of kato's worktable, suddenly awkward.
kato turns away from him and sets up his unfinished painting, his paints and brushes. "do you want to hang around here for a while longer?" he asks over his shoulder. "you might as well, since you've come all the way down here."
"i might as well," yamashita says, wanting to apologise.
he sits on a plastic chair and watches, instead, as kato starts filling in more of the blue-that-is-not-blue.
… …
kato smiles against his lips when they kiss for the first time; yamashita doesn't bother to interpret it. he knows the bitter amusement and arousal and satisfaction because he's feeling it himself, he's smiling too. kato tastes of mint, his skin is soft under his shirt, and yamashita is pulled into him, into all the non-conventions and half-hidden society contours and beautiful, beautiful feeling, the feeling of holding a man against himself.
"what do you see in me?" he asks kato, because it is so blatantly obvious what he sees in kato, but not the other way around; who is he, after all? he has no talent with lens or brushes or words.
kato only takes a moment to think. "the fact that you can't lie."
"that hints of being sad," yamashita says.
kato smiles again, mouth and eyes. yamashita finds himself edging forward, wanting to taste those lips again, touch again. he's mildly surprised when he does.
… …
"you didn't like me the first time we met." it's a statement, a conclusion, not a tentative call for denial.
"i thought i'd perfected my social graces, but now it seems i was as transparent as you."
"few people ever succeed in deceiving others into thinking they like them when they don't. you should be glad that you aren't so deceptive." kato smiles, and yamashita has to hold back from reaching out and lacing his fingers through his hair down his cheek to his neck, touching him, that smooth expanse of skin that he'd touched only an hour ago. but they're out in the open now and one has to be decorous, observe societal rules. he withholds.
"why didn't you like me?" kato asks, running a finger around the rim of his glass. he feels yamashita's desire. he acknowledges it with a tiny curl of the lips.
"i don't like free spirits, i suppose." yamashita rubs his calf against kato's under the table, thanking god and restaurant managers for tablecloths. "i've been surrounded by regulations all my life. i don't like people who throw caution to the winds to pursue uncertain artistic careers. especially when their family paid for them to get perfectly good university degrees."
"the typical asian." kato nudges him with his knee. "respectable career over imminent artistic washout."
"well," yamashita says, "that's what everyone wants, isn't it? stability."
"not everyone," kato says. "some like to be free spirits."
"eventually," yamashita amends. "people can't be free spirits all their lives. eventually they'll want something solid to come back to."
"people like you?"
yamashita won't answer that. he shrugs and they opt for sipping their coffee instead, watching a tableful of office ladies gossiping with exclamations and little shrieks of glee. yamashita feels kato's unsaid words hanging in the air between them; he's one of japan's most successful businessmen, twenty-nine years old sitting in the managing director's chair in a multi-national corporation, the world at his feet, the red carpet wherever he goes, all that, yet having lunch hour sex with a young photographer barely out of university. stability. that's what everyone eventually wants. that's what yamashita wants. but surely he knows the meaning of jeopardy, sees it as clearly when it happens. doesn't he?
… …
at times he feels he's drowning in kato, sinking into him, drawing so much out of him that he tells himself it's enough, it's more than enough, but it isn't. he hasn't felt such passion in his life before, so much desire for another human being, such intense hunger to hold him and have him without needing to know everything about him. he wonders how long such feelings can last, or rather how long before they die out and he can't imagine it again, can't summon up the sensation, but the present is too intoxicating for him to spend too much time thinking about the end.
he can't meet kato every day, or even every other day, but their hours together colour all the rest of the time when they're apart. the complete satisfaction in each other, physically and mentally, the impossibility of their affair, the glaring opposites of their lives, the contradictions; yamashita doesn't think about them all the time but they remain lying at the back of his mind, always there to be thought about, to be longed for.
he doesn't know where this is going. he doesn't, in fact, know much of kato's life outside his studio; whether he has another lover, or many; what his family calls him (shige, possibly?); whether any of his friends know that he's sleeping with the legendary yamashita tomohisa, who was featured in this month's time asia magazine. he knows only the kato shigeaki whom he meets in the studio or at kato's apartment (never the yamashita residence; servants and bodyguards cannot be trusted in today's generation of crazy biography publishing). he knows the smiles, the sex, the soul-baring, the caresses, the need to be secret, the long quiet hours spent watching kato at his work.
"this is an escape for you, isn't it?" kato says once. "a hideout that nobody else knows about. you like having something all to yourself."
"not entirely…"
"it's okay. i won't take offense."
"i like seeing you work," yamashita says. "i like being with you. i know you can say the same thing about me."
"i can," kato acknowledges.
"let's keep it that way then," yamashita says. "for now."
… …
"why don't you ever show your paintings to the public?" he asks kato one night, it might be three a.m., or later, he doesn't know. they're in the studio with its one window, purple clouds smudging the dark sky foretelling rain, moonless, silent. he wonders if anyone outside sees the lit window, if the light throws itself out of the glass, reflects on the ground, hints of the intimacy up in the studio.
kato's mixing his colours in his palette, brush marks along his wrists up to his elbows. he shrugs. "the public wouldn't want to see them."
"why wouldn't they? you're the artist. they'd want to see anything you did."
"i'm a photographer. that's what they know me by; that's what they expect me to be."
"isn't it all the same thing?"
"no." kato glances briefly in yamashita's direction. "did you ever notice," he says after a pause, "that photography cancelled out painting?"
"don't recall ever giving it much thought."
"in the past, before the notion of lens and the light spectrum was conceived, what people had was paint. paint was merely reality as the artist saw it. in some instances, it wasn't reality at all; was da vinci present at the last supper to see all the disciples at the moment of jesus' revelation?"
"some people certainly think he was," yamashita says, smiling. he leans back on his chair, feels the hardness of the plastic seat against his thighs.
"people with time on their hands." kato adds another colour into his palette. "art was art. people were satisfied with analyzing brushstrokes, tints of light. then photography came along and people started wanting reality, though god knows photography isn't exactly reality either, it's just another manifestation of art, another view through the artist's eyes. vibrant green glass, garishly dressed women, cards in the air, illustrations, empty train stations. but that's what people got, and when they had pseudo-reality that looked like reality, they stopped wanting paint. they wanted real people, not enigmatic models with ambiguous expressions and folded hands."
"i'll have you know that the mona lisa is highly respected," yamashita says.
"because she was painted four hundred years ago. do you think, if she debuted in our art galleries this year, that the masses would care about her?"
yamashita shrugs.
"that's why i keep them divided," kato says. "work and hobby. photography and art."
"photography is what brings in the money, huh?"
"not that much money." kato grins wryly.
"i like it." yamashita traces his finger down the canvas of kato's unfinished painting. reality through kato's hand. colours mixing, brush tips, blood red, hues of green and blue and purple and grey to make an afternoon sky. kept in this studio, shuttered from outside eyes that have no desire for this version of reality. he likes being able to see what others can't. touch what others have no access to. he likes the thought, the idea, the nuance, of romance.
… …
"do you ever think of wanting to paint me?"
kato chortles over their late night coffee, and yamashita tries to look affronted. "what's so funny?"
"you live in a movie."
"i don't," yamashita says, suddenly serious. "i live in everyday life of development projects and nasty clients and delayed work and jobs not getting done. i come to you from the everyday."
"fair enough." kato stretches out his legs on the couch and yamashita hooks them in his, entangles their legs together. he almost spills his coffee onto the red fabric.
"no," kato says, and yamashita looks up, distracted from the near spillage of coffee. "i don't want to paint you. i'm not good enough to."
"i never knew you had such a good opinion of my looks, kato-san."
"flatter yourself," kato says. "the real reason is that i can't paint all this. if i paint you, i'll want to paint what we have, every single detail, every moment. and i won't be able to do that."
"couldn't you simplify yourself?"
"if you just want a portrait," kato frowns, "i'm not the painter you want, because i have no talent whatsoever in reproducing faces."
yamashita laughs. outside, falling snow is making the sidewalks slippery, breaths are coming out as mists, a little girl slips and picks herself up and is scolded by her mother for not walking carefully. inside, kato's thighs are soft and warm, yielding under his touch. he puts their coffee aside and leans over kato, pressing them together, body on body. "since you put it that way," he says, "i suggest we'll just concentrate on feeling."
… …
he's under no illusions. there are days when yamashita admits knowledge that this thing they have between them won't last forever. it'll peter out, because a relationship based so much on the delight of its clandestinity will not survive the bread and butter of the necessary daily life (who will do the grocery shopping? who will clean the toilet? who will hang out the laundry? who will be his escort at social events?).
one cannot keep escaping to amour forever. one cannot remain beautiful and passionate forever. the veins will make their way to the surface, the skin will bunch together, the hair will fall out, the muscles will slacken, the belly will extend. the mind slows down, the desire for intellectual conversation, amusing wit, cutting sarcasm, wanes. aging happens, inevitably, and with it comes the diminishing of passion, the burning out of beauty. when that is gone, what then? where does the clandestinity come in? where do the art, the photography, the deep talks, the light in the studio, the mixing of colours in the palette, the inaccessible paintings go? what blows are dealt them with age?
kato is still next to him, tips of fingers on yamashita's chest, tracing (words?), intimate. he says, "they become reminders. memories. maybe they become surreal. old, fat, balding artists aren't romantic. don't get themselves involved in love affairs like poor young struggling artists do. don't touch people's imaginations like mad geniuses do. everyone likes a mad genius. just not normal, everyday, un-dramatic, mercilessly aging men. they're the worst possible subjects for a love story."
"you've got it all figured out," yamashita says. "sometimes it makes me discouraged that whenever i hit a revelation, i discover that you've already reached it."
kato laughs shortly, flips over on his back so his hand isn't on yamashita's chest anymore, isn't tracing circles and lines on his skin. "i knew you were practical from the moment i saw you. despite your weakness for romantic notions."
… …
"maybe this is all we can ask for."
"what is this?"
"a few caught months together, a few moments, a fleeting sort of happiness. maybe this is all that anyone can ask for."
"some people have it for a lifetime."
"some people don't."
"are we to belong to the unfortunate second category?"
"we've always belonged the second category, yamashita-san."
inevitability pushes them apart from each other, still perspiring, still breathing hard. they don't look at each other for a long time. yamashita longs for a cigarette. just one, though he doesn't smoke. he's heard rumours of the relief. he thinks of clinking champagne glasses, falling snow, different name cards, unfinished paintings, coffee and bed sheets. his head aches, and then he doesn't want a cigarette anymore (it seems futile, doesn't it, simplistic, to think that a piece of rolled tobacco could nullify this feeling?)
"this hints of being sad, kato-san," he says.
"it does, doesn't it?" kato says. "isn't it lucky that sadness passes away?"
… …
yamashita leaves one evening and doesn't come back. he doesn’t offer any explanations; there isn't a need. kato knows the difference between painting and photography, work and hobby. he knows (they know), too, which one yamashita will always gravitate towards.
trees turn from green to orange and brown. a few exhibitions are held, a few projects are completed successfully with considerable profit margins. someone goes overseas to study art. a day after his departure, yamashita receives a (still unfinished?) painting addressed to his office.
he hangs it up on his office wall. it's the closest they'll ever get to being public.
at private moments, he still remembers the smell of paint and canvas in that little 18th floor studio. (is it still there? of course it is. physical things remain. but intangible things are taken away.)
end
it has been forever and many days since i wrote shigepi. i don't even remember the last time i wrote shigepi, or whether i started this fic with any plot in mind aside from hot!businessman!yamapi and hotter!artist!shige but ;alsdkj i hope this sort of made sense anyway. thanks for reading! <3