Memory and Dream Page 5

  He fell silent then. Studying her reflection for a few moments, he began to build up a figure on the canvas with quick deft strokes. Three, four – no more than a dozen – and Izzy could see herself, already recognizable, her own image looking back at her from the canvas. She looked as though she was standing in a cloud of mist.

  “Now what do we have on the canvas?” Rushkin asked.

  “Me?”

  The brush moved again in his hand, adding darker values to the hair and skin tones, highlighting the idea of a cheekbone, exaggerating the shadow that held an eye.

  “And now?”

  The familiarity was gone. With two strokes he’d changed the image of her into that of a stranger.

  But oddly enough, the final effect made the image on the canvas seem more like her than it had been only moments before.

  “This is what you want to find,” he told her. “Use what you see as a template, an idea, but draw the final image from here –” He tapped his head. “– and here –” Now he laid a hand against his belly. “– or what you do is meaningless. You want to paint so that the subject on your canvas is something the viewer has never seen before, yet remains tantalizingly familiar. If you want to paint exactly what you see, you might as well become a photographer. Paint what you feel.”

  “But your work’s realistic. Why should I have to –”

  She never saw the blow coming. He struck her with his open hand, but it was still enough to send her staggering. Her cheek burned and her head rang. Slowly she lifted a hand to her stinging cheek and stared at him through a blur of tears.

  “What did I tell you about questioning me?” he shouted.

  Izzy backed away. She was numb with shock, and scared.

  Rushkin’s rage held for a moment longer; then the anger that had twisted his features into an even more grotesque appearance than usual fled. A look of contrition came over them and he seemed as shocked as she was at what he had just done.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I … I had no right to do that.”

  Izzy didn’t know how to respond. Her adrenaline level was still high, but her fright had now turned to anger. The last person to hit her had been a boyfriend she’d had during her last year of high school. After she finally managed to break up with him, she’d vowed never to let anyone hit her again.

  Rushkin dropped her paintbrush into a jar of turpentine and shuffled over to the recamier. When he sat down, head bowed, gaze on the floor, he looked more than ever like a stone gargoyle, a small figure, lost and tragic, looking down at a world to which it could never belong.

  “I’ll understand if you feel you have to go,” he said.

  For a long moment, all Izzy could do was stand there and look at him. Her cheek still stung, her pulse still drummed far too fast. Slowly her gaze lifted from the dejected figure he presented to look about the studio. Rushkin’s masterpieces looked back at her from every wall and corner, stunning representations of an artist still at the peak of his career. She heard Kathy’s voice in her head, repeating something she’d said that afternoon Izzy had told her about her odd meeting with Rushkin.

  I think you’re all mad. But that’s part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn’t it?

  Izzy didn’t know if it was madness, exactly. It was more like living on a tightrope of emotional intensity. Many of the great artists, if they didn’t have volatile temperaments, were at the least eccentric to some degree or another. It came, as Kathy had put it, with the territory. No one forced a person to associate with the more cantankerous representatives. People befriended artists such as Rushkin for any number of reasons, understanding that they would have to make compromises. The gallery owner stood to make money. The student hoped to learn.

  So Izzy had taken Rushkin’s verbal abuse, because the trade-off had seemed worth it. He might be overbearing and self-centered, but God, could he paint. And even if she was no closer to winning his approval than she’d ever been to winning the approval of her parents, she was at least learning something here, which was more than had ever happened at home.

  She would never forget the day that she was taking a break from weeding the vegetable garden, sitting under one of the old elms by the farmhouse, sketchbook on her knee. Her father had come upon her and flown into one of his typical rages. He hadn’t hit her, but he had torn up the sketchbook, destroying a month’s worth of work. For that, and for all the other ways that he tried to close up her spirit in the same kind of little box that held his own, Izzy would never forgive him.

  Her attention turned from the offhand gallery of Rushkin’s work that surrounded her, back to Rushkin himself. Her cheek didn’t sting so much anymore and her shock was mostly gone. The anger was still present, but it had been oddly transferred to her father now. Her father, who, after he’d torn up her sketches that afternoon, had told her that “all art is crap and all artists are fags and dykes. Is that what you want to grow up to be, Isabelle? A man-hating dyke?”

  In that sense, even with the red imprint of Rushkin’s hand on her cheek, she still felt as though they were compatriots in some great and worthy struggle, allies standing together against all those small-minded people such as her father who couldn’t conceive of art as being “real work.” Her father’s anger originated in his disdain for her and what she’d chosen to do with her life; Rushkin’s was simply borne out of his frustration that she wasn’t doing it well enough. Not that she shouldn’t be doing it, but that she should be doing it better.

  “It … it’s okay,” she said.

  Rushkin lifted his head, a hopeful look in those pale discerning eyes of his.

  “I mean, it’s not okay that you hit me,” she said. “It’s just … let’s try to carry on.”

  “I’m so very sorry,” he told her. “I don’t know what came over me. I just … it’s that I feel time is running out and I have so much I want to pass on.”

  “What do you mean, ‘time is running out’?” Izzy asked.

  “Look at me. I’m old. Worn out. I have no family. No coterie of students to carry on my work. There’s just you and me, and I can’t seem to teach you fast enough. I get frustrated, knowing that I’m trying to force a lifetime of learning into whatever time we might have left.”

  “Are you … are you dying?”

  Rushkin shook his head. “No more than we all are. Life is a terminal illness, after all. We have our allotment of years, and no more. I’ve lived long enough that my course is almost run now.”

  Izzy gave him a worried look. How old was he, anyway? He didn’t look to be more than in his mid-fifties, but then, when she considered the dates on some of the canvases that hung in the Newford Museum of Fine Arts, she realized he probably had to be in his late seventies. Perhaps even his early eighties.

  As though to emphasize that point, Rushkin, moving with obvious difficulty, rose stiffly to his feet.

  “Let’s have our lunch early,” he said, leading the way downstairs.

  Izzy trailed along behind him, her emotions in a turmoil, worry overriding them all. When they got to his ground floor apartment, he insisted on making them soup. While they had lunch, he opened up for the first time in all the weeks Izzy had known him, telling her about living in Paris in the early part of the century, being in London during the Blitz, the well-known artists he had known and worked with, how he’d paid the bills while he was still making a name for himself by working on ocean steamers, in dockyards, construction sites and the like. Having no education, he’d only done physical labor, and because of his size, he’d had to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove himself capable of holding his own.

  “I don’t know when it was that I learned the secret,” he said.

  “What secret is th–?” Izzy began, then caught herself.

  Rushkin gave her one of those smiles that were supposed to show his humor, but only distorted his features into more of a grimace.

  “We’ll make a new rule,” he said. “Upstairs, when we’re working, no quest
ions. You’ll do as you’re told and we won’t ever hear the word ‘why,’ or I won’t be able to maintain the teacher-student relationship the work requires. We’ll never get anywhere if I have to stop and explain myself every two minutes. But when we leave the studio, we should recognize each other as equals, and equals have no rules between them except for those of common sense and good taste. Agreed?”

  Izzy nodded. “My name’s Izzy,” she said.

  “Izzy?”

  “You’ve never asked me my name.”

  “But I thought I knew your name: Isabelle Copley.”

  “That is my name. Izzy’s just a nickname that my friend Kathy gave me and it kind of stuck.” Izzy paused, then asked, “How did you know my name?”

  Rushkin shrugged. “I can’t remember. If you didn’t tell me, someone else must have. But ‘Izzy.’” He shook his head. “I think I will refer to you as Isabelle. It has more … dignity.”

  “Let me guess,” Izzy said, smiling. “Nobody calls you Vince. It’s always Vincent, right?”

  Rushkin smiled with her, but his eyes seemed sad to her. “No one calls me anything,” he said, “unless they want something, and then it’s Mr. Rushkin this and Mr. Rushkin that. It makes for dismal conversation.” He paused for a moment, then added, “But I can’t find fault with my fame. When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself: to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay. Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim.” He gave her a sharp look. “At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I must express. People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap – particularly when you’re young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of: that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression.”

  When he paused this time, the silence drew out between them. Looking at him, Izzy got the feeling that he was traveling back through his memories. He might have even forgotten she was there and what they were discussing.

  “You were saying something about a secret,” she said finally.

  Rushkin took a moment to rouse himself; then he nodded. “What do you know about alchemy?”

  “It’s something they did in the Middle Ages, I think. Trying to turn lead into gold, wasn’t it?”

  “In part. I consider the search for the philosopher’s stone, which would turn all base metals into gold, to be more of a metaphorical quest than a physical one, especially since alchemists also searched for a universal solvent, the elixir of life and the panacea – a universal remedy. There are so many connections between these elements, they are all so entwined with one another, that they would seem to my mind to all be part and parcel of the same secret.”

  Izzy gave him an odd look. “Is this the same secret you started out talking to me about?”

  “Yes and no.” Rushkin sighed. “The trouble is, we don’t yet share enough of a common language for me to clearly explain what I mean.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “But –”

  “What I am trying to teach you in the studio are not just artistic techniques and the ability to see. It’s also another language. And until you gain more expertise in it, whatever I tell you at this time will only confuse you more.” He smiled. “Perhaps now you can understand why I get so frustrated at our slow speed of progress.”

  “I’m trying as hard as I can.”

  “I know you are,” Rushkin told her. “But it’s a long process all the same. And while you’re still young, I grow older every day. More tea?” he added, lifting the teapot and offering it in her direction.

  Izzy blinked at the sudden switch in topics. “Yes, please,” she said when she registered what he’d asked.

  “Look at that sky,” Rushkin said, pointing out the window to where an expanse of perfect blue rose up above the city’s skyline. “It reminds me of when I lived in Nepal for a time …”

  By the time Izzy left Rushkin that day, she felt that she’d gained a real insight into him, both as a person and as an artist. She’d managed to get a glimpse of what lay hidden underneath the face of the angry artist he presented to the world, and found there a much more human and kinder man. She was in such good spirits as she took the bus back to the university for an afternoon class that she completely forgot about what had happened in the studio earlier that day.

  Until the next time he hit her.

  The Wild Girl

  The wild girl peers out through a gap in the tangled skein of branches that make up the wild rosebush thicket in which she sits. She has an elbow on one knee, her chin cupped in her hand, her head cocked. Her red hair is a bird’s nest of uncombed snarls, falling around her features and spilling over her thin shoulders like a tumble of catted wool. Her features have a pinched, hungry look about them. Her eyes dominate her face and hold in their irises both the faded grey of the late-afternoon sky above the thicket, and the pale alizarin madder of the rose petals that make up the tiny blossoms surrounding her. She is wearing an oversized white dress shirt as a smock, the sleeves rolled up, the collar unbuttoned.

  The shirt draws the eye first, its stark whiteness only slightly softened by the echoes of shadow and local color that are reflected across its weave. Then the eye is drawn up, through the tangle of branches and rose blossoms, to the wild girl’s face. She is at once innocent and feral, foolish and wise, preternaturally calm, yet on the verge of some great mad escapade, and it is the consideration of these apparent dichotomies that so entertains the imagination.

  It is only afterward, when one’s eye gives a cursory glance to the more abstractly rendered background into which the rosebushes have been worked, that a second figure can be seen. It is no more than a vague shape and is so loosely detailed that it might represent anything. Friend or foe. Ghost or shadow.

  Or perhaps the eye has simply created the image, imposing its own expectations upon what is actually nothing more than an abstract background.

  The Wild Girl, 1977, oil on canvas, 23 X 30 inches. Collection The Newford Children’s Foundation.

  Adjani Farm

  Where the wild things are is where I am most at home.

  – Kim Antieau

  Wren Island, September 1992

  Alan had been surprised at Isabelle’s reaction to his call earlier that morning. She’d seemed somewhat distracted, it was true, but genuinely friendly, as though the funeral and the five years since she’d stopped speaking to him had never occurred, as though she were still living on Waterhouse Street and he was simply phoning her at her old apartment, across the street from his own. When he told her that he had a proposition for her, one that he preferred to make in person rather than over the phone, she’d agreed to see him and then given him the somewhat complicated instructions he needed to get out to her place.

  Wren Island was a two-hour drive east of the city. After leaving the highway, he had to navigate a twist of narrow roads that eventually became little more than cart paths, weeds growing thigh-high except for the two ribbons of dirt wheel tracks that finally deposited him on the shore of the lake. A bright red Jeep was parked under a pine tree that towered skyscraper-high, its immense limbs overhanging the shore. The only other man-made artifacts were the island’s power and phone lines, and the rickety wooden dock that pointed out into the lake toward the island. When he pulled up between the dock and the Jeep, he leaned on his car horn as he’d been instructed and then got out of the car to wait.

  If it hadn’t been for the vehicles and power lines, he might have felt transported to an earlier century.

  There was a sense of timelessness about the narrow roads, the old dock and its surrounding woods.

  Shading his eyes, he looked toward the island, but could see no sign of habitation except for another decrepit wharf pointing back to where he was standing. A small rowboat was moored al
ongside it.

  Just when he considered giving the car horn another try, he spied a figure come out of the island’s woods and step onto the dock. His pulse quickened as he watched Isabelle untie the rowboat and get into it, knowing that within minutes they would finally be seeing each other again. Five years was a long time, though sometimes it still seemed as though it was only yesterday that the three of them were sitting around a table in one of the small Crowsea cafés, deep in conversation, or sprawled out together for a picnic lunch in Fitzhenry Park, Isabelle in her bohemian blacks, Kathy her exact opposite with a rainbow array of Indian-print patches on her jeans and her tie-dyed tops. He still wore the same commonsensical jeans and cotton shirts that he had back then, the jeans always in one piece and a touch too rich an indigo to make much of a fashion statement, the shirts varying only in terms of the length of their collars, which was due to availability rather than any particular choice of his own.

  He felt nervous as he saw Isabelle push off from the dock and head his way. Too late to back out now, he told himself.

  “Whatever you do,” Marisa had warned him when he called her that morning, “don’t get into whatever it was that set the two of you at odds with each other in the first place. Don’t talk about it, don’t apologize, and don’t expect her to. And don’t go dragging all sorts of old baggage along with you. Just take it one moment at a time.”

  “But I can’t just tuck all the memories away,” Alan had countered. “My mind doesn’t work that way and Isabelle’s probably doesn’t either.”

  “Just try, Alan. Deal with the Isabelle of now, not the one you remember, because I doubt that one even exists anymore.”

  “I’ll try,” Alan had promised her, but he knew it would be hard. Marisa was basically telling him to treat Isabelle as a stranger, and he had never been comfortable with strangers.