Galatea(3/8)

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Spoilers: None. You can imagine this sometime during the second or third season. Your choice.

Disclaimers: The characters and situations of the television program "Charlie's Angels" are the creations and property of Spelling-Goldberg Productions and Columbia Pictures Television, and have been used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended. However, I retain the rights to the plot. You may download and distribute this story as long as my name stays on the by-line.

Rating: R

Summary: Part 3 of the Significant Other fanfic. Alan plays a game of 8-ball with Doug and prowls around LACMA, all the while mulling over his relationship with Kelly. At the museum he runs into an old friend.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Mike Villanueva, who taught me to wield a cue with shark-like ferocity (if not accuracy) and illuminated the differences between pool, snooker, and billiards. It's nice to have my ideas carom off yours every now and then.

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Doug Lansing was part-owner of Benny's, one of the buzzy, unpretentious bars in Beverly Hills. By day it was typical California restaurant: sharp, white, clean, flashes of primary color, pale wood floors, lots of light, and long rather than high. Preppie college students, the occasional has-been, and one or two nihilistic TV luminaries deigned to grace Benny's at lunch, eating off three-toned beige stoneware plates.

By night, Benny's was filled with undying, sun-kissed silver-screen denizens. Benny and Doug kept the transition between light and darkness smooth, and no matter what time it was, they made sure that there was always enough alcohol to wash an elephant.

In the back room they had a pool table. Many an actor's career had been made or broken in the course of discussions over that green felt. Benny generally stuck to keeping things going in the kitchen and the bar. Doug's easy charm, his talent for mixing drinks, and utter disinterest with everything in Hollywoodland, made him the ideal host at the back room. His skills as a pool shark didn't hurt either.

I took a swig from the bottle of beer Doug had given me, and watched as he sent the cue ball racing into the perfect triangle of colored balls, scattering them on the table and sinking the 12-ball.

"This is your idea of comfort, beating the crap out of me?" I asked, a little tipsy from the two other beers I had.

"I've only won three games." he said sarcastically, taking aim at the 15-ball that was positioned near a side pocket. "You saying I have to let you win now?"

"It would be nice to start winning at something." I replied. "Hey Doug, does Kris ever tell you about their cases?"

"Nope." he said, striking the cue ball a little too far to the left. Doug stood back and let me pick out a solid ball. "Kris and I don't talk shop. It's easier that way. She never asks about the gossip at the bar, and I don't ask about any sordid crimes. If work does crop up, we just discuss it in general: where they have to go, what it was about, if she has to testify… that sort of thing."

"So what do you talk about?"

"Food." Doug laughed. "Music, old movies, family, basketball, each other… I don't know, we never seem to run out of things to say to each other. "

"Good for you."

"Aw, come off it. You can't seriously believe that Kelly is only interested in fucking you."

I paused, taking careful aim so that the cue ball would hit the rail and nudge the 5-ball into the corner pocket.

"Well," Doug asked, "isn't that what you're saying?"

I sank the 5 and surveyed the table. "I don't know what I'm saying. Sometimes I look at her, and my chest feels tight. I know this sounds crazy, but I watch her sprawled on my bed stuffing handfuls of this popcorn-potato-chip mixture she likes to eat out of a plastic bag… and then she notices I'm staring at her and she smiles…"

"And you have to get out more often…" Doug said, rolling his eyes.

I smirked. "Oh right, this from the man who says that he wakes up everyday loving Kris Munroe."

He rubbed the bridge of his nose in embarrassment. "Cheesy, I know, but hey, at least I said it. Have you told her?"

"Naturally."

"In detail?"

"In great detail." I repeated.

"In too much detail? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

I gave him a withering look. "It's so goddamned obvious. I mean, what do I have to do? Rip my clothes off every time I see her?"

"Not pillow-talk you moron," Doug said, "I meant have you told her or made her feel that you love her when you're not in bed?"

I gave him a look like razor across lip. "Exactly how big of an asshole do you think I am? Of course, I tell her I love her. She just never says anything back."

"Well, maybe Kelly's not as wordy as you are. That doesn't mean she's toying with you."

I closed my eyes in frustration. "It's not that. I could take it if she were just naturally quiet. She claims I don't understand her and that I should get to know her better, and then she clams up every time I ask her about something important."

Doug looked thoughtful as he sank two more striped balls.

I leaned against the cue and continued to rant. "I know you think I'm paranoid and sentimental… but it's like she can get out of bed, go out into the world, and not look back."

"Other people would call that discipline." Doug observed.

"But to act as if nothing happened?"

Doug missed his shot and I leaned over the table to reach the cue ball and tap it toward the 1-ball. He took out another bottle of beer and opened it with a satisfying pop. Pulling up a bar stool, he watched as I pocketed the ball and prepared for another shot.

Doug grabbed a stool and lit a cigarette. He exhaled slowly and turned to face me. "You don't have a patent on loneliness, Alan. You're not the only one who's paranoid. Maybe this is all the intimacy she can handle right now."

I sighed and flubbed the shot. "On an intellectual level, I know that. I just wished I knew, really knew for sure, that I just wasn't just another guy."

He shook his head.

"If you were just another fling, why would she have to protect herself?"

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I had decided to take my students to the LA County Museum of Art on Miracle Mile, where several Vermeers were on exhibit. The paintings were on loan from the Louvre, a gift from the French for the duration of the fourth of July festivities.

Perhaps it was the coming three-day weekend that made my class of fine arts undergrads more rowdy and asinine than usual. Even the brighter students seemed to be bouncing off the walls, and my head was beginning to ache.

After discussing Vermeer's technique half-heartedly, I told them to spend the next hour looking for two paintings with similar subjects but differing styles. A three page paper would be due after the weekend comparing the two paintings. There were groans all around.

"What's more, ladies and gentlemen," I added, "One of those paintings must be a Vermeer."

The class broke up into groups of twos and threes, leaving the gallery no doubt to look for more "exciting" works. The spacious room was suddenly filled with a blissful silence. The building's air-conditioning was working full time, the corridors and other galleries brought only diffused echoes of the outside world, and the lighting was perfect.

I sighed as I sank to the bench in the center of the gallery. I found myself in front of Vermeer's painting of a girl at her music lesson. It had been executed at the height of the artist's prowess.

The Dutch artist was one of the few masters who had truly harnessed the power of light. Every color, everything that could be seen, all that we labeled "reality" was nothing but what the poet Goethe called "the deeds of light." Light was nature's paintbrush and Vermeer had been obsessed with capturing the same effect.

The light gave shape to the furniture, dimension to the floor, texture to the cloth on the divan… and at the same time the light dissolved them in reflections of themselves. Vermeer handled the light so subtly that he seemed to capture split-seconds of eternity.

There was such a clarity to his paintings. A tranquility and a concentration that was hard to verbalize. The light was an unerring record, compelling in its intensity and stillness. Everything seemed tangible, reachable, quantifiable. The ordinary moments of life forever immortalized in a painting that approximated the quality of a modern movie still.

But this painting, the Music Lesson, was even more intriguing than his other work. Vermeer's canvasses had such a lens-like precision, such photographic intensity, that it made you feel like a voyeur. As if you were intruding, a part of their lives, but still separate… a visitor, perhaps… or an outsider.

The striking sense of intimacy, its beautiful simplicity, its peace… these had drawn many people into the painting. But it was the ambiguity between the man and woman that mesmerized me now. The simple brush strokes and soothing colors illuminating an intricate web of feelings and fears, of unseen deceits and uncommunicated desires.

The perfectly rendered window and the horizontal beams of the roof provided an assuring symmetry. The diagonal pattern of the marble tiles on the floor drew my eyes deeper into the picture. The woman playing the clavecin had her back to me. At first it seemed as if the only way to gauge the relationship between the man and woman was through her body language and the distance between them.

Yet her face was reflected in the mirror above her. The real and reflected heads were not consistent. The mirror shows her turning to the man, as if to indicate assent or approval. The real head seemed to be looking down at the clavecin's keys, as if to indicate preoccupation or rejection.

Some scholars theorized that the man with the stick was not actually a teacher marking time, but the woman's lover who had just come from the street. The couple stood in front of me, in an almost perverse frozen perfection. Vermeer had meant to capture the viewer in perpetual suspense, thinking that at any moment the woman would laugh, or play, or move towards the man, or leave him.

"That's always frightened me," a familiar female voice said from behind me, "the way he froze people like that. Like something out of the Twilight Zone."

"That's an interesting idea." I replied coolly. "But what's a Twilight Zone but another person's reality? A different reality. After all, reality is the name we give to the way we interpret the world."

She moved to sit beside me, her white linen suit seemed out of place, too elegant for the museum. Too good for just me. She nodded towards the Music Lesson. "Really, professor. This is his reality? All this detail and… exactness?"

"This was the Renaissance, everyone believed in a tangible world, a world that could be explained."

"No wonder you like his work so much." she said, flashing her perfect white teeth like scintillating knives. "He thinks like you."

I shook my head. "I enjoy his work because it's real to me. I think that's what's important about art. That it's real to someone, that it matters…that it speaks to someone. It isn't… an imitation of life."

"Like our marriage was?" she said, seasoning her smile with a dry laugh. Each "ha" seemed punctuated, cut short. I always hated the way she laughed.

"Exactly like our marriage." I said quietly.