Buffalo Jump (Jonah Geller Book 1) by Howard Shrier

Author:Howard Shrier [Shrier, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-06-09T12:00:00+00:00

***

Listening to Rich and Barry giggling in the front room now, Amy wondered, not for the first time, whether Barry’s lifestyle was finally catching up with him. All the dope he had smoked, the acid and mushrooms he had tripped on. Was he finally coming unhinged? Taking a chance like this: was it a sign that his moorings were slipping, easing him out from shore into water whose color warned of hidden depths?

Amy had fallen hard for Barry the first time she saw him on campus. He was studying fine arts; she was majoring in piano, unaware that her own immune system would one day turn on her so badly she’d barely be able to play Chopsticks, let alone Chopin. Barry had black hair straight down his back like a Native American in those days. He was lean; he could wear those skinny black stovepipe jeans without looking ridiculous, unlike Rich, whose pear-shaped body demanded something more forgiving even in his youth. Barry had enjoyed considerable acclaim as a student, winning a faculty award for works inspired by Frank Stella’s minimalism, discrete blocks of bold colors separated by thin lines Barry scraped across the canvas with his thumbnail. Then he’d gone post-modernist, influenced by Andy Warhol and his celebrity portraits, only Barry didn’t know any real celebrities, so his work lacked the connection between subject and style that Warhol exploited. Then it was on to Robert Rauschenberg’s emerging pop-art sensibility, Barry screening archival images onto canvas in jarring contexts, trying to confront society, as he then explained it, with society’s own face. And that was Barry, Amy eventually realized. Talented enough to soak up influences and talk the talk, but always riffing on someone else’s style rather than developing one of his own. He went only as far as his modest talent and even more modest work ethic could take him, and that had not been very far at all.

Amy, on the other hand, had made the most of her musical gifts, always working as hard as, if not harder than, other musicians she met in schools or competitions. It wasn’t until her last year that she could see other students pulling away from the pack and realized a concert career was not to be.

Neither Barry nor Amy wound up at the forefront of an artistic revolution, as they’d once hoped, Buffalo being several hundred miles northwest of said forefront in New York. But both found work that made good use of their skills, Barry in graphic design, Amy as a piano teacher and rehearsal accompanist for musical theatre, ballet and dance companies. They liked their jobs and lived well. They had great friends, most of whom they’d known since college. But what had it all amounted to, Amy sometimes wondered. What impression had they made on the world? They had never had children: supposedly a mutual decision but it was Barry who had never been ready, Barry who always ended the discussion, Barry who wouldn’t have unprotected sex with her unless the time was safe.

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