Drawing Lessons

by Julia Gabriel

  “Dad,” Marie said. She nodded toward his empty hand. “Can I go get you a drink?”

  “Maybe later. Your mother was worried you weren’t coming.” His eyes toggled between her face and the room behind. When she was a teenager, this had bothered her to no end, her father’s inability to focus solely on her for even a minute or two. Now, she merely accepted that this was who he was.

  She sighed. “What’s eating Richard tonight?”

  “Oh, some businessman in Pennsylvania is putting together an exploratory committee. He’s thinking of challenging Richard in the primary next year.”

  “That’s less than a year away. Kinda’ late to get in the game now,” she said.

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were him. Who was that you were talking to over by the auction tables?”

  Marie looked toward the auction tables but Luc Marchand and his date had disappeared. “Some artist. I happened to be looking at his auction.”

  “Some nice donations your mother secured for the auction this year. Speaking of your mother, she just motioned to us. I believe she wants to speak to you.”

  Marie squinted to spot her mother in the crowd. She fought the urge to roll her eyes. Her mother was engrossed in conversation with another woman. Her father was just trying to get rid of her, and not even attempting to be smooth about it. Well fine, Marie didn’t want to hang out at the donation table anyway. Sooner or later, Richard would claim it as his turf.

  She was twenty feet away from her mother when a flash of silver passed through her peripheral vision. She turned to look, only to see Maya Redfearn staring directly at her, a look of barely-disguised glee on her face. Marie raked her eyes up and down the other woman’s body. Typical Maya. Always dressed for attention. Tonight, a slinky silver dress snaked over her voluptuous figure and stopped just above matching silver stilettos.

  I can’t believe he brought her tonight. Her parents were here!

  When her mother finished her conversation, Marie approached. “I thought you vetted all the press for tonight,” she hissed.

  Her mother’s gaze followed hers to the silvery vision that was Maya.

  “She wasn’t invited. Not by me, anyway.” Eileen Witherspoon frowned.

  “So much for dressing up and being nice to Richard. This is what I get in return. Public humiliation.”

  “You’re being a little dramatic, Marie.”

  “How is this not humiliating for me? He’s parading his mistress right beneath my nose. At my own mother’s event! Aren’t you embarrassed by it?”

  “Maya Redfearn is not important enough to be embarrassed by. And I seriously doubt that Richard will ever marry her. Mistresses rarely become wives.”

  * * *

  Marie Witherspoon passed within mere inches of him, so close he could have reached out a hand and grasped her sleeve. Or better yet, grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into the crowd with him. Why had he given her that stupid ultimatum? I only take on passionate students. In my dreams, he thought as he watched her disappear into the throng of people.

  He’d wanted to get rid of her, get rid of the temptation to kiss her again. But the minute she was gone, he regretted his impulsive decision. He wanted the temptation. Wanted it bad.

  He took his beer and stationed himself by the silent auction tables. He’d been abandoned by Samantha again for one of her gallery’s patrons. Sam was here to do business, not raise money for her alma mater. Luc was supposed to be here for the same reason, though his heart wasn’t in it tonight. He’d rather be home painting or, failing that, drinking. But Sam persisted in dragging him to these functions.

  Samantha Smith was a classmate of Luc’s from their grad school days at the University of Virginia. Sam had married well and now divided her time between raising her daughter and running a local art gallery in Leesburg, Virginia, on the outer fringes of the DC suburbs. Her gallery was the only place Luc’s paintings sold these days—and even those weren’t the sort of paintings he really wanted to do. Sam’s clientele had an almost insatiable appetite for still lifes and local landscapes. There were places in Virginia Luc could practically paint with his eyes closed by now.

  They, along with his commissions, paid the bills so he tried not to resent it, but it was increasingly a struggle. He was thirty-seven now. This wasn’t how his life was supposed to play out. A failed middle-aged artist and disgraced professor, the grandson of a beloved artist. Living in virtual exile and obscurity in the country, alone.

  Back when he was a Ph.D. student, he’d envisioned a life of teaching in the fall and spring, painting in the summer, a wife and houseful of children. Even in his most hopeful moments—and they were few and far between now—he saw none of that. Stretched ahead of him as far as the eye could see was simply more of the same. Painting rich people. Letting Sam fix him up with newly divorced women.

  He looked around for Sam and spotted her over by the bar now, muscling her way through a thicket of people. It was hard to miss Sam’s mass of amber ringlets in a crowd. He sent her a text asking for another beer.

  “Monsieur Marchand?”

  He turned in the direction of his name. A petite—almost childlike—woman with stiff, messy blonde hair was smiling hopefully at him. In her hands she held the clear lucite clipboard for the family portrait he had donated to the silent auction.

  “Yes?” he replied, mustering a small, polite smile.

  Her hands were positively skeletal, he thought. He didn’t understand the desire of women of a certain age to starve themselves into the bodies of thirteen-year-old boys.

  “A friend of mine, Amanda-Lynn Trevor? She’s a client of yours? I’m looking for someone to paint a portrait of my children and she recommended you?”

  Her penchant for speaking in questions grated on his nerves.

  “Yes, Amanda-Lynn.” He’d painted Amanda, her beloved children, her beloved horses and her husband’s beloved Lamborghini.

  The woman waved the clipboard in the air between them. “I bid but, you know, I never win these things? So if I don’t, what does your schedule look like? Amanda said you’re pretty busy?”

  Luc pulled his phone from his suit pocket and swiped open the calendar. “How many children and how old?”

  “Three. Ages four, six and twelve.”

  He swiped through several months. “It would have to be after Christmas.”

  Her face fell. He was expecting that. People like Christmas portraits, but the idea never occurs to them until the weather begins to cool.

  “But if you wait until spring, an outdoor portrait is always nice. Or we can fake a Christmas scene inside and you’ll have it for next year,” he suggested.

  The idea of a fake Christmas portrait seemed to cheer her a bit. He handed her a business card. “Call me if you don’t win.”

  The woman continued to stand in front of him, inspecting the card, both front and back, as if it were potentially counterfeit or held some secret message. He hoped she wasn’t planning to stay and chat him up further. The women at these events were never his kind. Too forward. Everything you needed to know about them was right there on the surface. They had no hidden depths. Luc liked hidden depths in people, those dark caves where they lived their true lives.

  Of course, some people fall into their caves and never come back out. Grace had done that, blonde, delicate Grace with the voice like church bells. Luc had been the cave that opened up beneath her feet and swallowed her whole.

  “Here. Sorry I was gone so long.” Sam was back at his side with a fresh bottle of beer for him. She glanced at the woman studying Luc’s business card. The woman took the hint and left.

  “I see you emerged from your shell long enough to drum up some business.” Sam handed him the beer.

  “She wants a portrait of her children done.”

  “Children are tough.”

  “Easier than horses. And more interesting than cars.”

  He took a long draw from his beer, watching across the gym
nasium where Marie Witherspoon was either arguing or intensely conferring with her mother. Marie looked like a younger, prettier version of her mom.

  “Poor kid,” Sam said. “If I were her, I’d be hiding in the ladies room right about now looking for a window to crawl out of.”

  “Why?”

  Marie Witherspoon had nice legs, he noted.

  “Both her estranged husband and his mistress are here tonight.”

  “Ouch.”

  Lovely hair, too. Long and silky, a melange of red and brown. He hadn’t noticed that so much when she was in his studio. She had worn it pulled back in a ponytail that day.

  “Ouch is right. Plus, her parents are here of course. Her father is a former senator and a powerful lobbyist in the defense industry. Her mother has a direct line into half the wallets in DC.” Sam’s gaze searched the room. “Her husband is over there, next to her father. And the mistress is behind him and to the left.”

  Luc eyed the woman. She was not as pretty as Marie Witherspoon, although he could see why she appealed to some men. But to Luc, she could have stepped straight out of a comic book, with her exaggerated and unnatural curves, the overly wide-eyed look that made men believe she was hanging on their every word. And of course, there was a segment of the male population that had eyes only for blondes, even though any discerning pair of eyes could see that she really wasn’t.

  “Why would she come then?” he asked, looking back at Sam. He blinked to erase the image of the other woman from his vision.

  “I doubt she had a choice. She works for her mother. Though she doesn’t seem as cut out for it as her mother is.”

  “Ah.” Marie Witherspoon had seemed upset last weekend when he asked about her family.

  “They practically arranged her marriage to Senator Macintyre. That didn’t take either, obviously.” Sam shook her head sadly. “Poor kid,” she said again.

  Luc watched Marie as her conversation with her mother ended. He could practically see the energy rushing out of her body. She looked like a poor kid tonight, her shoulders slumped beneath her sweater, her eyes dull and defeated, her husband’s mistress circling her like a shark.

  But the Marie Witherspoon he kissed last weekend behind his studio had been no kid. He was not in the habit of kissing students. But Marie Witherspoon appealed to him in a way no woman since Grace had. If she hadn’t kissed him back, if her indignation had gotten the better of her, he would have stopped.

  But she did kiss him back. She’d been soft and pliant in his arms, her lips warm and sweet, her struggle to breathe pushing her breasts against his chest. The memory had sustained him all week.

  Chapter 4

  She wasn’t looking for Luc Marchand. Really she wasn’t.

  She mingled. Chatted up her mother’s big donors. Introduced herself to new faces. Said hello to the school’s headmistress. Smiled at people whose conversations dropped off a cliff when she approached. Pretended that her husband’s mistress was invisible.

  But her gaze found him over and over again. He was too easy to spot, in his sharp black suit. And something about him made him stand out in the crowd. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Maybe it was just that he was European. It was always easy to tell which tourists were European and which were American. The clothing was always just a little bit different, and the men wore shoes that no self-respecting American man would ever don.

  Luc’s date kept leaving him alone, which was unwise, Marie thought. Every time she left, another woman approached to fill the vacuum, though Luc Marchand was never more than merely polite. From the expression on his face, he looked like he was answering questions he’d answered a million times already.

  Marie was disappointed that he had a girlfriend. Now when she replayed that kiss in her mind, an image of his beautiful girlfriend was going to pop up. She didn’t want to be the other woman, even in her dreams. She’d spent enough time on the other end of that situation herself.

  But the gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach wasn’t a bad reaction to the wine. She was a tiny bit jealous. She sighed. This was the last thing she needed right now. An unrequited infatuation. Why had he kissed her when he was seeing a woman who looked like that? Sure, it could have been part of his teaching technique, as he’d claimed, but he could have given her a lesser sort of kiss. A polite buss on the lips. That would have sufficed. There’d been no need to practically devour her, to ... to arouse her.

  Yes, that’s what he’d been trying to do. She had tried to avoid that conclusion all week long, but there it was. That kiss had been intended to turn her on. But why? And the more important question: could she pay him to do it again? Just one more time? Then she could die happy. Maybe whatever Nishi had paid for the lessons would be enough to purchase a kiss. If he wasn’t going to give her the lessons anyway, on account of her insufficient motivation ...

  She shook her head to clear her internal ramblings, shake herself back into the present moment. Buying a kiss? That was desperate.

  At nine o’clock, her mother announced the winners of the silent auctions. She watched as the winner of Luc’s portrait—one of her mother’s midlist donors—pressed her body into his for the photographer. There was the sour gnawing in her stomach again. How could his girlfriend just stand by so casually, watching and smiling happily, when Marie was fighting back the knowledge that she could look up where the auction winner lived in her mother’s database, then go burn down her house or something?

  “Bid on anything?”

  Maya had sidled up to her, and was now standing way too close for Marie’s comfort. Marie leaned away, plastering an obviously fake smile on her face. Anyone watching would forgive her that.

  “I was going to bid on my husband, but ...”

  Maya cut her off, her own fake smile never wavering. “Don’t be a bitch, Marie darling. He was always too much man for you.”

  “Heard he’s being challenged for his seat already,” Marie countered. “Will you still want him when he’s on K Street?”

  “I love him. It doesn’t matter to me whether he’s in Congress.”

  “Well, K Street does pay better,” Marie said in a louder voice than was strictly necessary. She tipped the rest of her sauvignon blanc down her throat and walked away. Two could play at this game. After all, she was the wronged party here.

  Still, the gossip hurt and Maya knew that, went out of her way to fuel it whenever it began to subside. Marie’s mother was right: mistresses never become wives. That truism was behind the gossipy speculation that followed Marie around. Why wasn’t Richard just keeping her as a wife? There must be extenuating circumstances causing him to buck tradition and divorce her. She couldn’t have children, people said. She was in the closet. She was frigid. She was a harpy. She drank too much, used pills, had multiple DUIs. Her father and Richard weren’t getting along.

  All false, of course. But it stung, nonetheless.

  At nine-thirty, she said goodbye to the handful of people who would be offended if she left without doing so. She spotted Luc Marchand holding court across the gym. He caught her eye and smiled. She gave him a tiny wave—all that she could manage before her heart stuttered dangerously out of rhythm. Unless she could come up with an acceptable reason for taking drawing lessons, she’d likely never see him again.

  Look on the bright side. At least now she knew that kind of kisser existed. It wasn’t just a cruel hoax perpetrated on women by Hollywood.

  Outside, the school parking lot was dark. She walked past row after row of luxury sedans and SUVs, looking for where she had parked her Honda. She was halfway down the aisle to her car when she heard quickening footsteps behind her. Damn him. Richard was following her. She picked up her pace and pressed the key in her hand. She saw the lights flash and the comforting beep-beep as the car unlocked. She could make it. Her car was just ahead, six cars away. Five. Four. Three. Two ... she whirled around, in a rage.

  It was Luc Marchand.

  “Marie.” He smiled at
the anger on her face. “Expecting someone else, I hope.”

  She fell back against her car. “I thought it was my—”

  “Your ex-husband? I have to say, I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark parking lot either.”

  She looked at him, confused. How would he know who Richard was? She’d never taken Richard’s last name. Richard hadn’t wanted her to. It was her name he had married, after all.

  He cocked his head toward the school. “My friend Sam pointed him out.”

  Marie looked around. “Where is she?”

  “She left in her own car.”

  “You came in a separate car from your date?”

  Luc laughed. “Sam? I’ll have to tell her that one. Even if she weren’t already married, she wouldn’t date me with a ten-foot pole.”

  “So ... you’re not ...?”

  “No. Sam is a friend of mine from university.” He shook his head. “I may be French, but even a Frenchman wouldn’t leave his date to follow another woman out to her car.”

  “You followed me?”

  “I’ve been following you all night with my eyes.”

  Oh my. She looked down at the macadam, away from his heated gaze. Even in the dim light of the parking light, Luc Marchand’s eyes glittered with something Marie wasn’t sure she could handle.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, all the nerve and pluck of her encounter with Maya vanished into the night. “I haven’t figured out yet why I want to take drawing lessons. I’ll work on that this week. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday ...”

  She was rambling but powerless to stop. He was following her with his eyes? She couldn’t look up at him. How much she wanted to kiss him again was written all over her face, she was certain. He took a step toward her and touched her shoulder lightly. A shiver ran through her body, even though it was early September and still summer in the Washington area. “I thought I might offer up a few suggestions,” he said. He pressed a finger to her chin and lifted her face.