“You’ve made that leap, LaDonna. I think you’ve found that magic place, deep inside yourself. That place where art comes from. Wadsworth calls it ‘the inner vision.’ That place where all your senses are involved.”
All LaDonna’s senses and emotions had been so involved this morning that she couldn’t take it, she realized. That was why she had left school. The murder of Katherine Taylor sickened her. Johnny’s pain was her pain. Mary Lou’s fear had echoed her fear of the night before.
“I wish I could have discovered that place without Katherine being murdered,” LaDonna said in a low voice. She didn’t want any of the class to hear her, to join in this conversation.
“You knew her?”
“Not really. But I had met her. That room was near where Johnny practices. He introduced me to her.”
“I understand your feelings, LaDonna.” Roddy touched her shoulder, something he’d rarely done before, observing the unwritten rule of teachers not touching students, even those who so badly needed the touch of a friendly hand. “I could be called a Pollyanna, but I like to think life has balance. That good can come from evil. If your finding that inner eye within yourself from which you can create paintings like this came from Katherine’s death, that can be some comfort to you.”
“I would never have thought of that, Roddy. I’d like to feel that way. Thanks for sharing your feelings, your thoughts about this.”
“That’s what teachers are for.” He changed his tone of voice to teasing. She had seldom heard him serious for long.
“Roddy.” She could tease, too. “You said something in his work touched me. My other teacher. How do you know it was a he?”
“My sincere apology, LaDonna. I try to be politically correct. Something in his or her work touched you. Was the artist you have taken as mentor female?”
She grinned. “No, but I just wanted you to admit it could have been.”
“Done. When will you bring your second work in?”
“Tomorrow. It was still wet.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing it. Now get started on another right now.” Roddy moved to stand behind Merilee Morris, who was staring at them, her eyes red, as if she had been crying. LaDonna wondered if Merilee had bought into Eric Hunter’s flirting ways only to get hurt when she realized he came on to all women that way.
Not my problem, she thought. She set the painting of the yearning child on the floor in front of her easel. She prepared another canvas board, a bigger one this time. Then she stood and stared at it. The blank canvas stared back. She had read about writers facing a white page every morning, or maybe now a blank computer screen. This must be the same feeling.
She had no feeling left, she realized. She had completely emptied her emotions into the picture she’d painted in the basement room. Or—or—she didn’t want to complete her thought.
Eric Hunter kept her from having to, and at the same time restored her strong feelings. He stood staring at the picture on the floor. Then he leaned over and picked it up. She didn’t want him to touch it, but it was too late.
He leaned it on her easel, ignoring the wet white gesso. Stepping back, he caught his chin between his thumb and first finger. She held her breath, not meaning to, not wanting to care what he thought of her work.
“You painted this?”
His tone of voice said she didn’t. Said he didn’t believe that she had. The statement restored her own doubts, but she would never admit them to Eric.
“Are you saying I didn’t?” Her voice was sharp, but controlled. She didn’t care what he thought.
“The style looks really familiar. I’ve seen pictures a lot like it before.”
“The Mexican painter Orozco painted in a similar style. Maybe that’s what you’re seeing.”
“I don’t know his work,” Eric admitted.
“In order to paint or teach you should have a wide knowledge of other painters.” Slam dunk. She loved criticizing him.
He never even noticed the sharp twist of her knife. Some really sensitive guy we have here, wanting to paint and teach art, she thought.
“Who did you copy?” He swung around and stared at her. “Where did you find a picture like this?” His eyes were steel gray daggers, nailing her to the table behind her. She was surprised at the emotion in his voice.
“I resent what you’re saying, Mr.—” She caught herself. They had given him so many nicknames behind his back, she nearly called him another name without meaning to. “Mr. Hunter. I painted this picture. And tomorrow I’ll have another. You’re out of line.”
She took the picture and, wrapping it in a soft dry paint rag, placed it in her tote bag.
“I hope you didn’t learn your teaching skills, your method of criticizing a student’s work at Bellponte College. I plan to study there next year, and I’d hate to think the teachers are anything like you.” She minced no words in cutting him down. She had a great deal of respect for Mr. Rodriguez. She had none, she owed none, to Eric Hunter.
For the second time that day, she left school. Only a few minutes before the class was over, but she realized she couldn’t paint any more today anyway, especially in the art room. With Eric Hunter looking over her shoulder. Doubting. That would be the way to shut up his accusations. To let her watch her compose a similar picture. But it was useless.
She was going to Johnny’s house. She was suddenly worried about Johnny Blair. A strong, deep concern sent her towards his house, almost at a run.
nine
HER INSTINCTS WERE right. Johnny was upset. His mother was glad to let LaDonna in. “I hope you can talk him into practicing. He’s not very good company right now.” Mrs. Blair smiled and pointed towards the next room. LaDonna thought she was probably used to Johnny’s moods, but she seemed concerned about him as well.
Johnny spoke as soon as he saw LaDonna, as if he was really saying, go away, don’t bug me about this. “I can’t go back up there, LaDonna. I keep thinking about that room, about Katherine.” Johnny sat staring out the family room picture window at the rain that had started gently falling, the rain that was predicted to turn to snow by night. A flock of small birds, knowing the weather was changing, fed frantically at the bird feeder. Flames danced as fire crackled in the fireplace.
“You have to, Johnny. You need that piano. This one just isn’t the same.” La Donna indicated the old-fashioned upright that Johnny had started playing on when he was five. She fingered a few keys. The instrument had a lovely tone, but nothing like the baby grand in the practice room.
She sat on the bench for a few minutes, keeping Johnny company in his misery. Maybe she had the solution.
“I’ll go with you. I’ll stay in the room and listen to you practice.”
“You don’t want to do that. You’ll get bored. I’d worry about you being there, getting bored.” Johnny splayed the fingers of both hands, long slender fingers, and looked at them as if they held the answer to his dilemma.
LaDonna knew that after about five minutes Johnny wouldn’t worry about her. He wouldn’t know she was there. “I never get bored with your music, Johnny. But if I do, I’ll tell you. We can go get that pizza I promised.”
Johnny thought about that for a time. Finally he stood up. “Okay. I’m going nuts sitting around here.”
Now Mrs. Blair worried about them getting wet. She insisted they take two umbrellas and that LaDonna borrow her raincoat.
Outside, lowering her umbrella and sharing Johnny’s, LaDonna laughed. “I don’t know if I could take that much mothering. I’m so used to being independent.”
“She means well.” Johnny put his arm around LaDonna’s waist to keep them together under the ribbed taffeta. LaDonna felt warm inside and out and as cozy as she had in the family room.
“She wants her baby to stay well for his recitals,” she teased. “Are you playing in May?” Her plan was to distract him from everything except his music.
“Yes, and I’m nowhere near ready.”
“Yo
u will be. You always are.” They splashed in puddles until they climbed Seventeenth Street hill where water ran towards them in small rivers. “I’m painting again, Johnny. Good stuff. But Eric Hunter thinks it’s not my work.”
“That phony. He’s probably envious. You realize we haven’t seen any of his paintings. Or one sculpture. Whatever he does. You know how you feel about what you’re doing. Ignore anything he says.”
“I will. But I didn’t like his saying this isn’t my work or that I’ve copied something.” LaDonna knew that one reason she hated what Eric said so much was that she had her own doubts. She just couldn’t shake them, believe entirely in herself.
Their silence as she and Johnny walked was comfortable. But when they reached Old Main, LaDonna felt Johnny tense. He lowered the umbrella and stepped away from her, entering the building. He stared at the staircase as if reluctant to start climbing.
“Race you.” LaDonna leaped up the first steps, pounding ahead of Johnny. She heard him behind her. She kept running as far as she could. Then she gasped and slowed to a walk. “I never claimed to be athletic. You can win.”
Johnny was panting, too. “You already beat me. I usually take the elevator.”
“You don’t!” LaDonna laughed, or tried to. Laughter seemed wrong up here.
On the third floor, Johnny hurried to his room, unlocked the door, and slid in, as if once inside he’d be safe from his awful memories. LaDonna knew he’d never be free of them, but she stayed right beside him and kept him talking.
“I’m not going to sit beside you. I’d be in the way. I’ll just sit right here on the floor in the corner, Johnny, behind you. Is that okay? What are you working on?”
Johnny opened the bench. “Rachmaninoff. His Concerto in F Sharp Minor, Opus One. Everyone plays his second. He wrote this when he was about seventeen. I’m way behind.” He set his music on the piano, plopped down on the bench, adjusted the bench, adjusted his shirt sleeves, wiggled to get comfortable. La Donna figured his motions were ritual. He did this every time he sat down in order to get his mind and body ready.
She leaned against the corner wall, slid until she was on the wood floor. Stretching her legs in front of her, she wriggled until she was comfortable. Then she waited.
Johnny limbered his fingers with some scales and bits and pieces of runs and trills up and down the keyboard. Suddenly, his hands both came down hard, making her jump, then his fingers cascaded across chord after chord. Once he started to play the concerto, she was surrounded and caught up in the melody. He didn’t need the music. He had the piece memorized. And in no time she knew he was unaware of her presence.
She was not unaware of Johnny Blair, however. He expressed the music with his whole body, leaning forward, straightening, leaning back, his face tilting up as if, like fine wine, he was savoring the notes he struck.
When the melody softened with a hint of nostalgia, Johnny’s fingers caressed the keys. His hands arched, he raised them on and off the ivory with such grace, like gentle ocean waves slipping in and out on a quiet beach. Without meaning to, she imagined those same fingers caressing her face, her body. She shuddered with emotion.
Now with crashing waves, Johnny poured his heart into the piece. The music intensified as did her emotion. The low notes stirred her deep inside, pounding, churning, sending her into passion she had never even imagined.
A sudden realization flooded her. She was in love with Johnny Blair. She had been in love with him for all of time, their time, as short as it was, as few years as they had lived. She wanted to love him forever.
Pulling her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees, hugged herself into a small ball to contain her feelings. She realized she was imitating Johnny’s position in her painting of him, but where in the picture Johnny was filled with pain, she was filled with love, with passion, with such a deep emotion that it both thrilled and frightened her.
She had to leave. Johnny couldn’t know this—how she was feeling about him. She had no idea if he would return the emotion. She had no idea how he felt about her. They were friends, buddies. They had been friends forever, bonding together in mutual misery, driven by art and music, the need to express themselves with paint and melodies, and in no other way.
Crawling quietly, she moved toward the doorway. Could she leave without Johnny knowing? She didn’t want him to stop playing. She didn’t want to interrupt, intrude on this space he had entered. She had shared it. That was enough. And he had forgotten—for a short time. He was free of fear, of memory. He lived for this moment, and this moment only.
Placing her hand on the doorknob, she twisted it slowly, pulled, stepped into the hall, pulled it closed behind her. Then for a few seconds she leaned against the wall, breathing deeply.
Paint with your passion, your emotion. She heard Mr. Sable speak to her. Yes, she must go immediately to the basement art room. She must capture this emotion that filled her, threatened to spill over, to melt her whole body like candle wax. She must paint.
She turned and fled down the hall to the stairs. Halfway there she froze, staring, at seeing a familiar figure.
Her father leaned forward, his head pressing on the wall. He was crying.
ten
“DAD, IS THAT you?” She knew it was. She just didn’t know what to say to him.
Her dad looked at her through teary eyes. “Donnie?”
He hadn’t called her that since she was little—four or five. It touched her deeply, mixing with the well of emotion already filling her from Johnny’s music, filling her, spilling out. She felt her own eyes water. She blinked to clear them.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” She touched his shoulder. She couldn’t remember the last time she had touched him.
“She was so beautiful—so beautiful. I was standing here remembering. She always spoke to me.”
LaDonna stepped back. “Katherine?” For some reason, finding her father in the hall, this near the practice room where Katherine Taylor was murdered, didn’t feel good to her once he had spoken her name.
“Yes, she was so beautiful.”
A ring of keys hung at her father’s belt. He would have access to any room in this building. Even a practice room that was locked. Locked without anyone in it. Locked from the inside by a student who was practicing. A student who didn’t feel secure up here alone at night in an unlocked room.
“I was up here with Johnny.” LaDonna felt compelled to tell her father what she was doing in The Tower, but not to stay here talking to him for long. “He’s practicing the piano. And I’m going over to where I’m working to paint.”
“Where is that?”
Had he forgotten? For some reason, LaDonna didn’t want her father to know exactly where she was. “In the art building.”
For some reason? She knew why. Her father was scaring her. The suspicion that had flitted through her mind, unbidden, was there now. She felt guilty about it, but it had surfaced, mainly because she realized she didn’t know him really well. The idea of her father killing someone was absurd, but the idea had come to her. It would take some work on her part to make it go away.
“I’ll see you later, unless you think you need to go home. Want me to drive you home, Dad?”
“Oh, no. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I—I just thought of her again.”
LaDonna was glad to leave, to escape. She pounded down the stairwell and out the front door of Old Main. Then she closed her eyes and took deep damp breaths of the rain-soaked air. She still had Mrs. Blair’s cheery red umbrella. She raised it and walked quickly towards her basement room.
He was there. A new painting hung on the wall. This one was more cheerful. Red was the dominant color. A road disappeared on the horizon, a road bordered by fields of red flowers—poppies? But was it cheerful after all? The sky reflected the red flowers as it would an inferno, as if the fields blossomed with flames instead of flowers.
“At first I thought it was cheerful
, but I changed my mind,” LaDonna said out loud. “Is it anger or frustration?”
He laughed. “You’re getting the idea. Each painting carries an emotion, touches an emotional chord in the viewer. You’re ready to paint, aren’t you?”
The emotion she’d felt because of Johnny’s music, and maybe because she’d discovered that she loved him, had dissipated somewhat by meeting her father.
Sitting, she closed her eyes and willed herself back into that practice room, back into that Rachmaninoff concerto. As she heard the notes again, her heart, chest, throat swelled with renewed passion.
She took her paint brush, squeezed a few colors on her palette, started to place the color on a canvas. Totally lost in the moment, she worked until she felt exhaustion set in. Then she stepped back to see what had come from her subconscious. That was where the good work was hidden, she realized. If she tried to force a picture, tried to reason it out, it was flat and amateurish. When she gave over, dug deep, let go, she got a picture that was worthwhile. That pleased her to learn that. Learning about the place from which a painting came was a giant step forward for her work.
She was flying. In the picture she was flying. She laughed out loud. Long plumes of scarlet and purple and blue covered her body, but elongated arms pointed across the sky. Long legs with bare feet trailed. Flames from the ground licked towards her. Thunderous gray clouds threatened on her left. She flew towards a bright light coming from the right side of the picture. The source of the light was hidden. That didn’t matter. There’s where the viewer would use his or her imagination. What was the source of the light she flew towards so eagerly?
“It’s uplifting without being frivolous. Good work, LaDonna.” His praise made her feel like flying. “Is flying always so hazardous for you?” His voice was deep, his laughter rumbling deeper.
She sighed and started cleaning up her brushes. “Sometimes just living seems awfully hazardous, Mr. Sable.”
“You’re thinking of the girl who was murdered, aren’t you?”
The Gallery Page 6
