by Karis Walsh
Pam fussed with the easels again, changing the angle so they wouldn’t be able to see each other’s paintings while they were working.
And an easel for herself, just in case she needed to demonstrate a brushstroke or sketching technique. She was too excited about the lesson to be upset that Mel had finally managed to get her to at least teach painting in the studio. She had told Mel she wasn’t an art teacher. But she hadn’t mentioned how much she had wanted to be one. She had been offered a teaching job at her university after she received her Master’s. Only a couple of advanced portrait seminars, but turning down the opportunity was one of her biggest regrets. But the university was Diane’s domain, and she couldn’t bear to have Pam overshadow her there as well. Pam had turned down the job and never again brought up the subject of teaching. Out loud, at least. Inside, she had always wished she had jumped at the chance to share her love of color and shape and texture with others, in such a direct way.
Mel and Danny came in just as Pam was about to move the easels yet again. She got them settled in front of their canvases and adjusted the height so they were comfortable. She kept her focus on the details of art. The lighting, the numbers on the oil tubes, the careful arrangement of tools. Safe and unemotional. The parts of painting she could share with others.
“Where’s the paint?” Danny asked, picking up a brush and feathering it across the blank canvas. Pam took the brush out of his hand and put it back on the table.
“You’ll get that later. First I want you to decide what you want to paint, and then we’ll sketch a pencil outline of the scene.”
“I want to paint the surfers we saw yesterday,” Danny said.
“You are not going surfing in the ocean,” Mel said.
“I said I wanted to paint a surfer, not be one. And why can’t I?”
“Because it’s dangerous. You could hit your head on a rock or get caught in an undertow.”
“Aw, Mom, I know how to swim and—”
Pam snapped her fingers until she had their attention. “Can you argue about this later?”
“There’s nothing to argue about. No way is he going to—”
“Mel? What are you going to paint?”
“The garden with the boat in it,” Mel said, pointing out the window.
“Bo-ring,” Danny muttered.
Pam sighed with relief when she finally got them to stop talking and start drawing. She was starting to rethink her earlier regrets about not taking the university job. Two students were difficult enough.
She wasn’t sure she could handle a whole class of them. Of course, this was nothing like a university class—this was fun, humorous, a way for a mother and son to bond. And while she could lecture about technique and stroke pressure and the properties of oil paints all day, she didn’t think she’d be able to handle it for much longer if Mel and Danny kept treating the lesson like family game night. She walked over to look at Danny’s sketch.
“Not bad,” she said. “But do you see how you’re putting everything in this small corner of the canvas? Three-quarters of your painting will be sky. You could add some rocks here…Mel, why don’t you come over and look at this, too?”
Pam drew light lines to section off the canvas. This she could do. Like when Lisa asked her opinion on a drawing, or when she analyzed pieces before accepting them in her gallery. Stand outside and judge someone else’s work. Untouched and unmoved. “Pretend you’re looking at the beach through a camera lens. If you shift a little to the right, you’re going to get a more interesting scene. You’d have some beach curving around here, and a few pieces of driftwood…”
Pam continued to sketch as she talked about balance and composition. After a few minutes she stopped and sheepishly stepped away from the easel, bumping into Mel who stood close behind her.
“Sorry. I don’t want to tell you what to paint.”
“Amazing,” Mel said, her hand resting lightly on Pam’s waist.
“You re-created the exact scene from yesterday.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Danny said. “I could totally see what you were talking about while you were drawing.”
Pam gave him back the pencil as if it were as hot as a beach rock on a summer day. Tempting to touch, but burning her when she did. “Why don’t you add some more detail or make any changes you want. Mel, let’s see what you’ve drawn.” She studied Mel’s canvas in silence for a few moments. “Um, why is the boat so…big?” she asked tentatively. She chose her words carefully. Mel had asked for a lesson, wanted to be taught, but Pam was wary of giving her opinions on a sensitive subject like art to someone she was sleeping with. She had learned two rules about art critique. Only give advice if asked. And never give advice to a partner, even if asked.
“Because it was so heavy to carry,” Mel said. “I made it extra big to represent the enormous backache I had the next day.”
Danny gave a snort of laughter and Mel grinned at him.
“Really?” Pam asked.
“No. I just drew it. I didn’t realize I was making it bigger than it should be.”
Mel’s smile was beautiful. She looked impish and close to laughter. Completely at ease with herself and with any comments Pam made. Pam felt her body relax as she gestured at the garden she could see through the window. “Look at the proportions of that rock and rosebush compared to the boat.” She tapped the rock Mel had drawn on her canvas. “Now, look at how differently you’ve drawn them.”
“What about perspective?” Mel asked. “Aren’t you supposed to make some objects larger so you can tell they’re in front of other things? Maybe I wanted to show that the boat is closer to us.”
Danny stepped around so he could see the canvas. “So it’s like a mile closer?”
Pam covered her mouth, but not quickly enough to hide her laugh. She glanced at Mel’s face to make sure she didn’t seem hurt by Danny’s teasing. Instead, Mel had joined in their laughter. She threw her pencil at Danny, and he made a show of ducking behind his canvas.
“Go back to your surfers, dude,” Mel said. She picked up a new pencil and handed it to Pam. “Here, fix it so I can get to the coloring-it-in part.”
“This isn’t a paint-by-numbers class,” Pam protested. Still, it would be easier to show Mel what she meant instead of explaining it.
“But I’ll help this time. It’s all about creating the proper ratios.”
Mel watched Pam’s hand as she superimposed her version of the garden scene over the disproportionate one Mel had drawn. A series of lines and curves gradually took shape until the picture Mel had originally conceived in her mind was suddenly on the canvas in front of her. She could see the difference between her drawing and Pam’s, and she sort of understood the lecture about proportion and perspective Pam delivered as she sketched, but Mel knew there was no way she’d be able to match Pam’s talent. She must have some sort of spatial deficiency, but she didn’t care. She could have watched Pam’s fingers all day as they lightly gripped the pencil and effortlessly flew across the canvas. She wanted to toss the pencil aside and get those hands on her…
“Do you see what I did there?” Pam asked. Mel made a vaguely affirmative noise, hoping Pam hadn’t expected a more detailed answer.
Apparently she didn’t because she put the pencil on the table and walked over to the paints. She squeezed some paint on two palettes and spent a few minutes blending them without speaking. Then she demonstrated a couple of brushstrokes on the sky portion of Danny’s canvas.
“This first time, don’t worry about anything but getting a feel of putting paint on the canvas,” she said as she handed Mel her palette covered with dollops of color. “If you don’t like the tone, blend it with a little black or white to make it darker or lighter. Or just layer a new color over the top. Let yourselves experiment right now, and then we’ll start to add technique.”
Mel dipped her brush in some white paint and tentatively spread it on her canvas. She painstakingly outlined the edge of the boat, wincing each tim
e her brush crossed the pencil line Pam had drawn.
She wanted to go out to the garage and get her painter’s tape so she’d be able to paint a straight line, but she didn’t think that would be what Pam considered experimenting. She smudged some gray paint over the white in an attempt to give the boat a weathered look and tried to concentrate on her efforts and ignore Danny’s disparaging remarks about the gray blobs on her painting and his comments about how fulfilled and safe his surfers looked. The harder Mel tried to perfect her painting, the worse it seemed to get. She finally lowered her brush and opened her mouth to call Pam over to help.
She closed her mouth again without making a sound. Pam was at her easel, her palette balanced against her hip as if it were part of her body. Watching Pam, she could see what real concentration was.
Focus. Absorption. She had seen Pam painting once before, when she’d created the picture of the storm’s aftermath on the beach, but this was different. There was a sense of calm this time. Pam’s body and mind seemed to know what they were doing and had taken control without the struggle Mel had witnessed that afternoon. But Mel could see the same intensity on her face, in her posture, as if some vision in her head had turned into reality and had completely blotted out the world around her.
Mel had seen this expression before. When Pam leaned over her, about to kiss her, and looked at her as if she was something to be treasured, memorized. As if she mattered. But maybe that intensity was only something Mel had imagined, something she wanted to see.
She didn’t interrupt Pam. Instead, she continued to stroke color on her canvas, some of her attention on her work and most of it on Pam.
Pam could sense when Mel’s attention had turned on her, but she couldn’t stop painting. She had covered her palette with bright colors, intending to doodle to give Danny and Mel some time to play with their paintings. But from the moment the medicinal smell of oils had hit her, the moment she had dabbed green and then yellow paint onto her canvas, she had been instantly drawn into the scene.
No need to sketch any guidelines or borders. She finished the smear of paint that was Danny’s imagined kite, and she continued to fill the sky with swirls of color and movement, a chaos of tails and wings and flapping silk. She and Diane had taken Kevin to the kite festival the same year she had observed the little girl who now hung in Mel’s dining room. She was recapturing the day, when she and Diane had shared a rare afternoon of closeness and freedom. When Kevin had laughed in delight at the riot of color streaming overhead.
But there were differences in this scene. The people Pam added to the painting were abstract, static dabs of color anchored by the flying kites. But the dark-haired boy holding the duck kite was definitely Danny. Mel clearly stood in the crowd of spectators and watched. In a moment of respite from her painting, Pam looked at the beach she had created, surprised to find Diane and Kevin weren’t there. But she was.
Behind Mel, blending in the crowd but unmistakably her.
Usually when she finished a painting, it was the imposition of her memories onto the new image that disconcerted her. Today the lack of memory tugged at her mood, drawing her away from the euphoria of completion and into the depressed state she had come to expect with her art. She wanted to curl up and cry, fling the painting against a wall and destroy it, slash paint across its surface until the picture was no longer visible. But she wasn’t alone.
Mel and Danny were standing by their easels, their own paintings finished. They were waiting for her to continue the lesson, and Pam surprised herself by shaking off her pain and walking over to them as if nothing were wrong. But everything was wrong. Blended, mixed up. Past and present, her old family and this new one to which she didn’t even belong, memories that existed yet didn’t exist.
She came to Danny’s easel first. She was too disoriented, too shaken to continue the lesson. She needed to make an excuse and leave the studio, but Danny’s picture and his smug-looking smile as he waited for her comments were somehow enough to distract her from her jumbled thoughts. Enough to ground her in the present again. Surprisingly, enough to make her want to laugh. She tried to take in the painting as a whole, but she couldn’t stop staring at the surfers. “This is…well, you have a good sense of color. The tones are well-balanced and…did you drip paint down here?”
She pointed at the surfers, black stick figures with bright white-and-red marks on their heads.
“Those are their eyes and mouths. See? They’re smiling and having fun. Who wouldn’t want her son to be one of them?”
“They look like zombies,” Mel said with a snort. “Way to convince me.”
“This is supposed to be art, not propaganda,” Pam said. She had been pulled away from the trauma of painting too quickly. Back to lightness and fun. But she was okay. She’d get through it. “Let’s see yours, Mel. Oh.”
Pam searched for something positive to say about Mel’s painting.
“You paint in sort of a primitive style. And nice bold colors. We might want to try something more abstract next time.”
“Ouch!” Danny said.
Mel put her hands on her hips. “So what I hear you saying is, I don’t have any talent, but if I just sling some paint at the canvas, I’ll have a slim chance of producing something decent?”
“Hey, if monkeys can do it—”
Pam held up her hand to stop Danny from finishing his sentence.
“I’m not comparing anyone to a monkey. And there’s much more to an abstract painting than random slashes of paint. Maybe we should stop for the day. You both did very well for your first lesson, although now your teacher needs a drink.”
“Thanks, that was fun,” Danny said, giving Pam an awkward one-armed hug. “I’m going for a walk on the beach before dinner.”
He left the studio and whistled for Piper to join him as he headed for the beach access. “There’s a girl about his age who lives a few cabins down the beach,” Mel told Pam. “At least he’s getting some exercise walking back and forth in front of her house. Now can I see your painting?”
“Your painting, if you want it,” Pam said as she followed Mel to her easel. “I have some primary colored sea glass I could use on the kites. It might look nice in the rose-colored room on the third floor.”
“Dragon fruit,” Mel said as she stared at the kite painting. “That’s the color of the walls. And you’re right. This will be perfect. It’s like a rainbow, and I don’t know how you can make oil paint… move like this. It’s so beautiful.”
Pam stepped behind her, wrapping her arms around Mel’s waist and leaning her chin on Mel’s shoulder. Somehow, from this angle, it was easier to look at her own painting without being bombarded by too many emotions to process. Mel leaned into her embrace. Pam welcomed the physical jolt as it ran through her. Sex, bodies, sweat, touch. Smells that would be strong enough to wipe away the lingering scent of paint. She needed to get Mel out of here. Into bed.
“That’s Danny, isn’t it? Flying the green-and-yellow kite? You captured his posture even though there aren’t many details on your people.”
“I can paint in some zombie eyes and bright red smiles, if you want me to,” Pam offered. Even as she joked with Mel, she considered her words. She had earned her reputation as an artist by painting portraits, but since Diane took Kevin away, she had never returned to them. Now the infrequent humans in her art were faceless, unfinished figures.
Mel turned in her arms and rested her forehead against Pam’s.
“Are you okay? I know painting is private for you, and Danny and I were here…”
Pam brushed her lips against Mel’s, just a taste, a reassurance.
“I didn’t mind having you in here at all,” she said. Not a lie, but not exactly true.
She kissed Mel again instead of saying what else was on her mind. That having Mel and Danny talk to her, ease her tension and bring her back to reality, had made this the least difficult painting she had completed in years. Whether she struggled to paint or failed
to paint, she had always kept her efforts private. But not this time.
The connection she felt with Mel, her son, the painting wasn’t something she could bring up with Mel because it was too intense.
Too frightening. Mel and Danny were too damned close.
Pam had always felt emotionally vulnerable after painting.
Hypersensitive to touch, to smells and light, to even her breath moving in and out of her lungs. Just because she could feel her enhanced emotions while she was kissing Mel was no reason to think their attachment was deepening. It was simply a matter of proximity.
Her body’s reaction to Mel’s hands as they slid around her neck and into her hair had more to do with the act of opening the channels so she could pour her feelings onto the canvas than with her feelings for Mel. Any attractive woman would have made her heart beat faster, or made her shift uncomfortably as she felt wetness seeping through her underwear. She had to believe that, or she’d have to leave right now.
She lifted her head and rubbed Mel’s upper arms.
“You’re cold,” she said. “You have goose bumps.”
“Yeah, cold,” Mel said. “I need to find a way to heat the studio.
We have at least an hour before Danny comes back. We could go inside and warm up.”
“My room?” Pam asked.
“Your room,” Mel agreed, pulling Pam behind her toward the house.
Chapter Twenty
Pam sorted through the box and picked out all the sky-blue puzzle pieces before she started to fit them in place. Danny and Mel had started the puzzle the night before, after dinner, and they had completed the outline of the jigsaw puzzle. Pam had been tempted to join them, to continue the camaraderie she had felt during their painting lesson and the closeness to Mel that lingered from their lovemaking. But she had gone out instead, to check on the progress of her house and to meet with Tia about her upcoming art show fundraiser. Now Danny had gone back to Salem, and Mel was curled on the living-room couch reading some DIY books. And Pam worked alone on the puzzle.
