One night she says, “They’ve given me a studio on campus. I’ve got to work in a while, but do you want to come see it first?”

“Sure do.”

They walk over dark paths, between concrete buildings lit from below. Sometimes they get wedge views of the great lightshow of southern OC. Nobody else is on campus; it’s like a big video set, the filming completed. One of the concrete blocks holds Hana’s studio, and she lets them in. Lights on, powerful glare, xenon/neon mix.

Piled against the walls are rows of canvases. Jim looks through one stack while Hana goes to work mixing some paints, in a harsh glare of light. The canvases are landscapes, faintly Chinese in style, but done in glossy blues and greens, with an overlay of dull gold for pagoda roofs, streams, pinecones, snowy mountaintops in the distance.

The results are … odd. No, Jim is not immediately bowled over, he does not suffer a mystical experience looking at them. That isn’t the way it works. First he has to get used to their strangeness, try to understand what’s going on in them.… One looks totally abstract, great stuff, then Jim realizes he’s got it upside down. Oops. Real art lover here. Reversed, it’s still interesting, and now he understands to look at them as abstract patterns as well as mountains, forests, streams, fields. “Whoah. They’re wonderful, Hana. But what about—well, what about Orange County?”

She laughs. “I knew you’d ask that. Try the stack in the corner. The short one.” Laughter. “It’s harder, of course.”

Well. Jim finds it extremely interesting. Because she’s used the same technique, but reversed the ratios of the colors. Here the paintings are mostly gold: gold darkened, whitened, bronzed, left itself, but all arranged in overlapping blocks, squares tumbled one on the next in true condomundo style. And then here and there are moldlike blotches of blue or green or blue-green, trees, empty hillside (with gold construction machinery), parks, the dry streambeds, a strip of sea in the distance, holding the gold bar of Catalina. “Whoah.” One has an elevated freeway, a fat gold band across a green sky, bronzed mallsprawl off to the side. Like his place, under the freeway! “Wow, Hana.” Another abstract pattern, Newport harbor, with the complex bay blue-green, boats and peninsula gold blocks. “So how much do you charge for these?”

“More than you can afford, Mr. Teacher.”

“Sandy could afford it. Bet he’d like one of these in his bedroom.”

“Uh-huh.”

Jim watches her mixing a couple of gold paints together in blue bowls, the paint sloshing bright and metallic in the light, Hana’s tangled black hair falling down over her face and almost into the bowl. It’s a picture in itself. Some unidentifiable feeling, stirring in him.…