He gave her an expectant look, but Izzy didn’t know how to reply to that. She knew about being inspired—what most people meant when they spoke of a muse—but Rushkin spoke as if it was an actual person who came to him and wouldn’t let him rest until she’d gotten what she needed from him.
“You’ll see,” Rushkin told her after a few moments.
“What’ll I see?”
But Rushkin was finished with that conversation now. “It’s a good thing we’ve had you working in such standard sizes,” he said. “I think I have finished frames for all the pieces we’ve chosen. Help me bring them up from the store-room, will you?”
Izzy knew better than to press any further. She followed him downstairs and they spent the remainder of the morning framing the paintings Rushkin had chosen and carefully wrapping each of them for transit.
“How were you planning to take them to the gallery?” Rushkin asked when they were finally done.
“My friend Alan’s waiting for me to call. He’s going to drive me over.”
When Alan arrived, Rushkin helped them lug the paintings down to Alan’s car. He shook hands with Alan, wished Izzy good luck, then disappeared back into his studio before Izzy had time to thank him for all his help. She adjusted the paintings in the backseat of Alan’s Volkswagon one last time, then got into the passenger’s seat beside him.
“So that’s Rushkin,” Alan said as they pulled away from the curb. Izzy nodded.
“He’s not at all like what I expected.”
Izzy glanced over at him. “What were you expecting?”
“I thought he’d be more like that drawing you showed me of him last year.”
“Like it how?”
“Well, more grotesque, I suppose. I didn’t realize you’d done a caricature.”
“But I didn’t do a caricature ...”
“Whoops,” Alan said. He gave a quick embarrassed laugh. “I guess I put my foot in my mouth this time, didn’t I? Look, don’t pay any attention to me, Izzy. What the hell do I know about art? Hey, are you and Kathy really planning to get a place on my block?”
“If we can afford it.”
She let him steer the conversation away, but she couldn’t get what he’d said out of her mind. She knew that all artists had blind spots in how they perceived their own work, thinking it better than it was, or worse, but she hadn’t thought that she could have gone that far astray when she’d redone her sketch of Rushkin last September. Granted, she hadn’t had him sitting in front of her the way he’d been in the original drawing that he’d taken away with him when he left, but still ...
IV
Albina Sprech—the, as she put it, “proud owner and sole employee” of The Green Man Gallery—was much older than Izzy had imagined she would be. Because Jilly had referred to her as such a good friend of hers, Izzy had been expecting someone in her mid—to late twenties, but when she thought about it, she really shouldn’t have been surprised. July’s friendships crossed all borders: age, race, sex, social standing, and lack thereof.
Albina was in her fifties, a small, compact woman with greying hair that had lost none of its luster.
Her facial features, the pronounced cheekbones and high brow, combined with the pale blue eyes that didn’t seem to miss a thing, reminded Izzy of a Siamese cat. She had a feline grace when she moved, as well, a lazy elegance that, like a housecat’s, couldn’t quite belie the wild spirit lying just under the veneer of her cultivated demeanor. She was dressed casually in a wool sweater and slacks, her only jewelry a pair of small gold hoop earrings and a gold broach shaped like an artist’s palette. Izzy hoped she’d age half as well herself.
“Jilly certainly didn’t overstate your talent,” Albina said after studying the paintings that Izzy and Alan had brought into the gallery. “Although I must admit that I am somewhat surprised at the maturity that’s already so evident in your work. Quite a remarkable achievement for an artist of your years.”
“I, urn, thank you,” Izzy mumbled, her cheeks burning.
“We don’t see enough of this style anymore,” Albina went on. “At least not from the younger artist.
Realistic, certainly, yet undeniably painterly. It—I hope you won’t mind me saying this—but these paintings of yours remind me a great deal of Vincent Rushkin’s work. Your palette, your use of light, your handling of textures.”
“I study under Rushkin,” Izzy said.
Albina gave her a considering look, eyebrows arching. “Oh, really. Isn’t that odd. I’ve heard so little of the man in the past decade or so, I thought he’d passed away, or at least retired.”
“He still paints every day; he just doesn’t show anymore.”
“And,” Albina said, her eyes taking on a faraway look, “does his work still retain its power?”
“Very much so. If anything, he keeps getting better.”
“You’re very lucky to be working with him. Whenever I look at The Movement of Wings, I can’t help but shiver. I have a reproduction of it hanging in my dining room at home.” She looked up and smiled at Izzy. “I think his work was what drew me into this field in the first place.”
Izzy returned the gallery owner’s smile. She’d had a postcard of The Movement of Wings on the wall of her bedroom back on the island and lost herself a thousand times in Rushkin’s cloud of pigeons, circling about the War Memorial in Fitzhenry Park.
“I know exactly what you mean,” she said.
“Well, then.” Albina shook her head as though to clear it. “This puts an entirely different light on matters.”
“How so?”
“Frankly, while I was quite taken with your work, I felt it was perhaps a little too derivative of Rushkin’s style to take for the gallery. You know how the word can get around, how spiteful people can be. At this stage in your career, the last thing you need is to be thought of as simply an imitator. A critique like that can stay with you throughout your entire career. But there is, of course, a long tradition in our field, of a student’s work reflecting aspects of her mentors’.
And I can see, particularly from your use of perspective, that you have already begun to gain a sense of your own style.”
“I’m trying,” Izzy said.
“Of course you are. And while these things should never be rushed, I can see where you will be having your own shows in the not too distant future.” Lead-ing the way back to her desk, Albina added,
“Now we’ll have to fill out a few forms. We take a forty-percent commission and our checks go out once a month. That’s not a hard and fast rule, however. If something of yours has sold and you’re desperate for some cash, I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out. But please. Don’t be calling me every day to see how your paintings are moving ....”
V
All right!” Alan cried once they were out on the pavement in front of the gallery. “You did it!”
Izzy accepted his hug, but she was finding it a little hard to muster as much enthusiasm herself
“What’s the matter, Izzy? I thought you’d be thrilled.”
“I am, I guess.”
“But ... ?”
Izzy gave him a halfhearted smile. “It’s just that I feel the only reason she took my stuff on was because of Rushkin. It’s like my paintings only have validity because they were done in his studio, under his eye.”
Alan shook his head. “Whoa. Wait a minute now.”
“No. You heard what she said. She thought my stuff was too derivative for her gallery until I told her I was studying under Rushkin.”
“Well, so what?” Alan asked. “Don’t knock it, Izzy. Whatever works, you know? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get your work hung in a good gallery?”
“I know. But still ...”
“And besides. In the long run, people are going to buy the pieces because of what you put into them, because of your talent, not because they’ve got a whiff of Rushkin about them.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I know so. Kathy’s not your only fan.”
“No,” Izzy said. “Just my biggest.”
They both had to smile, thinking of the way Kathy championed the work of her friends, particularly Izzy’s.
“I can’t argue with that,” Alan said.
He unlocked the VW’s passenger door for Izzy, then went around to the driver’s side to get in.
“Wait’ll I tell her,” Izzy said, her excitement returning as she thought of how Kathy would react. She slipped into her seat and banged the door shut. “She is just going to die.”
“Now, that’s better. For a minute there I thought you’d lost all sense of perspective.”
“Oh, but didn’t you hear what Albina had to say back there?” Izzy said cheerfully. “My perspective’s particularly my own.”
“I thought she said peculiarly.”
Izzy punched him in the arm.
“Hey,” Alan told her. “Careful of how you treat the driver.”
Izzy stuck out her tongue at him and then sank happily back into her seat for the drive back to the university. Things were still going to be tight when it came to luxuries, but at least she knew she could now afford to get that apartment with Kathy on Waterhouse Street, and that was what was really important. All she’d have to do was sell one of those paintings at the gallery and she’d have her next month’s rent, plus a little to put aside.
Things were definitely looking up.
VI
But the excitement of Albina’s agreeing to hang her work in The Green Man was brought down a second time when Izzy returned to her dorm and looked at the sketch she’d done of Rushkin last year.
Alan had been right. What she held in her hands was a bad caricature of the artist, not a realistically rendered portrait. How could she have gotten so far off base?
Rushkin was homely, but her sketch made him look positively grotesque: a gargoyle in tramp’s clothing. And while it was true that he was short, he wasn’t a dwarf. He slouched a great deal, but he didn’t have a hunched back. His wardrobe was out-of-date, the clothes well-worn, but he wasn’t the tatter-demalion her drawing made him out to be. She’d drawn a raggedy troll, not a Mari.
She cast her mind back to that first sight of him she’d had, feeding the pigeons on the steps of St.
Paul’s, and saw only the Rushkin she knew. But something niggled at her memory when she looked down at the sketch in her hand. She knew herself. She wasn’t given to the exaggeration that this sketch represented, and familiarity, while it could make one overlook something such as a hunched back or dwarfish stature in one’s dayto-day dealings with a person, couldn’t physically take the fact of it away.
Yet the only other explanation seemed even more implausible: that Rushkin had looked like this when she’d met him and he had since changed.
No, Izzy thought, comparing the drawing to how Rushkin had looked when she’d left his studio today. Not changed. He would have to have been completely and utterly transformed.
She stared at the sketch for a long time, then finally stuffed it away. Rushkin hadn’t changed his appearance. She’d just had a bad day with her faculties of recall the day she’d drawn it. It wasn’t as though Rushkin had actually been in front of her when she’d done the second drawing. She’d just remembered him wrong. Lord knew Rushkin was an odd bird. It would be so easy to fall into caricaturing when trying to draw him from memory after only one brief and rather confusing encounter.
She had to smile then. Wasn’t that just the whole story of her relationship with Rushkin: an endless series of confusing encounters. But before she could take that line of thought any further, Kathy came in and asked about how it had gone at The Green Man that day and Izzy was able to set the whole confusing puzzle aside. Kathy’s infectious excitement about the good news made it impossible for Izzy not to get excited all over again herself, and this time the feeling didn’t go away.
But that night she had a dream that had come to her before. In it, she walked into the section of Rushkin’s studio where she did her work to find that all her paintings had been destroyed. Some of the canvases were slashed, others were burned, all of them were ruined beyond repair, even the unfinished piece that was still on her easel. She knew when she woke that it wasn’t true, that the dreams were just her subconscious mind’s way of dealing with those feelings of self-consciousness that plagued every person who ever tried their hand at a creative endeavor at one point or another in their career. Some people would dream that the world ridiculed their work, their peers laughing and pointing their fingers at what they had done; she dreamt that her work was destroyed—the ultimate act of censorship.
Somehow destruction seemed worse. More personal. More vindictive. And though it was only a recurring dream, and she knew it was no more than a dream, she wished her subconscious mind would find another way to deal with her feelings of inadequacy because when she was in the dream, it felt too real. She would wake up so upset that she’d skip breakfast and rush out to the studio, where she could be reassured that the paintings were, in fact, unharmed.
Rushkin never asked her why she arrived so early some mornings and immediately took stock of her paintings, and she never told him about the dreams. The one thing Rushkin didn’t lack was self-confidence, and she knew he simply wouldn’t understand. She didn’t think anyone would. Oh, they might be able to relate to her occasional bouts with a lack of self-confidence, but they wouldn’t understand why the dreams felt so real and why they upset her as much as they did, even when she knew they weren’t real.
She wouldn’t be able to explain it because she herself didn’t know why the dreams’ despair lingered so strongly when she woke, lying like a black cloud over her day until she could hold the paintings in her hands and be reassured that they were truly safe.
VI I
Newford, October 1974
Izzy found living on Waterhouse Street to be everything Kathy and Jilly had promised it would be.
While Crowsea itself had always been a popular home base for the city’s various artists, musicians, actors, writers and others of like persuasions, for two blocks on either side of Lee Street, Waterhouse was as pure a distillation of the same as one was likely to find west of Greenwich Village in its own heyday. Izzy quickly discovered her new neighborhood to be the perfect creative community: a regular bohemia of studios, lofts, rooming houses, apartments and practice spaces with the ground floors of the buildings offering cafes, small galleries, boutiques and music clubs. She met more kindred spirits in her first two weeks living there than she had in the whole nineteen years of her life up to that point.
“There’s a buzz in the air, day and night,” she told Rushkin a few weeks after she and Kathy got their small two-bedroom across the street from Alan’s apartment. “It’s so amazing. You can almost taste the creative energy as soon as you turn off Lee Street.”
Living on Waterhouse Street was the first time that Izzy really felt herself to be part of a community.
She’d got a taste of it living in Karizen Hall, but now she realized that what she’d experienced there wasn’t remotely the same. The main commonality shared in the dorm had been that they were all attending Butler U. Beyond school life, her fellow students’ interests and lives had branched down any number of different, and often conflicting, paths. The bohemian residents of Waterhouse Street, on the other hand, despite their strong sense of individuality, shared an unshakable belief in the worth of their various creative pursuits. They offered each other unquestioning support and that, Izzy thought, was the best part of it all. No one was made to feel as though they were wasting their time, as though their creative pursuits were frivolous trivialities that they would outgrow once they matured. It might be three o’clock in the morning, but you could invariably still find someone with whom you could share a front stoop and have a conversation that actually meant something, who would celebrate a success or raise you out of the inevitable case of the blues to which everyone involved in the arts was susc
eptible at one point or another. Perfect strangers offered advice, shared inspiration, and didn’t remain strangers for long.
And it wasn’t all seriousness. The residents of Waterhouse Street could party with the best of them, and there always seemed to be an open house in full swing on one block or another. Although she could appreciate their need to cut loose, Izzy wasn’t quite as uninhibited as some of her friends. Sometimes she thought a little too much drinking went on, too many psychedelics were ingested, too much hash and marijuana was smoked. She herself didn’t drink, and she was scared to death of drugs, but no one forced her to partake of one or the other, and if it sometimes seemed that everybody had slept with everybody else at some point or another, well, no one forced that upon her either.
The tolerance, the way they took care of each other, was what utterly charmed Izzy and let her forgive all the other excesses. That such strong-minded individuals could still be so open-minded to conflicting tastes and ways of life gave her hope for the world at large. If we can do it here, she would think, then someday it’ll be like this everywhere.
She loved the little apartment she shared with Kathy. Their furniture consisted of wooden orange crates and scattered pillows in place of sofas or chairs; bookcases made of salvaged brick and lumber; throw rugs, lamps and kitchen necessities bought at the Crowsea flea markets; on the walls, posters and various paintings by Izzy and their friends; in the bedrooms, mattresses on the floor; in the kitchen, a scratched and battered Formica kitchen table with mismatching chairs rescued from a curbside one night before garbage day. Izzy knew her mother would have been horrified at the way she was living, but she didn’t care. Her father would have been disgusted by the company she kept, but she didn’t care about that either.
To her, Waterhouse Street was the beau ideal to which the rest of society should aspire; and perhaps that was why, when the harsh reality of the outside world did intrude to leave its mark upon their lives, Izzy always took it as a personal betrayal.
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