“Unlike your so-called friends,” Albina said, “I’m being serious. We’re really going to have to reconsider our pricing for any future work of yours that the gallery hangs.”
Izzy hated to talk business. She gave a shrug that didn’t commit her to anything. “Whatever.”
“We can talk about it later,” Albina said.
“That’s right,” Kathy announced, raising her wineglass in a toast. “Tonight we’re here to celebrate.
Here’s to Izzy—long may she prosper!”
Izzy blushed as Albina and Alan echoed Kathy’s toast. She could feel the people at the other tables looking at her.
“Let’s put this in its proper perspective,” she said, clinking her glass against theirs. “Here’s to us.
May we all prosper.”
Kathy smiled at her. “Amen to that, ma belle Izzy.”
It was after dinner, while they were having their coffee, that Albina brought up Izzy’s paintings of her numena.
“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that you have any other finished work at your studio, what with having to prepare for the show and all?”
“Nothing that I want to sell,” Izzy told her.
“Jilly tells me you’ve been working on a series of fairy-tale portraits—something along the themes she’s beginning to undertake in her own work, only not quite so fanciful.”
Izzy nodded. “But they’re just something I’m experimenting with.”
“I’d have a look through them, if I were you. The sooner we can hang some more of your work, the better it would be. We have a certain momentum going for us at the moment. It would be a shame to not build on it.”
“I suppose.”
Izzy looked out the window at Lee Street. The crowds had thinned by now. Christy’s brother Geordie was busking with his fiddle on the corner in front of Jacob’s Fruitland. He started to pack up as she watched, with a couple of guitarists waiting in the wings, as it were, for their turn on the pavement stage. Across the street a mime and a hammered-dulcimer player were vying with the few straggling passersby on their side of the street. Grace’s numena was long gone, and Izzy could see none of the others at the moment.
It was odd how often she would spot her numena now, blended into crowds, caught from the corner of her eye, but so far none of them had approached her the way that John had. She had the sense that they were as curious about her as she was of them, but something held them back. Sometimes she wondered if John had warned them away from her. Or maybe they thought that she wanted to ask after him. The first time she got to talk to one of them, she would set the record straight. She was completely over John Sweetgrass, thank you very much. She didn’t even think of him anymore.
She resisted the urge to put a finger to her nose to see if it started to grow at the lie.
Albina touched her arm. “Izzy?”
Izzy focused on her friend and gave her a vague smile. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.”
“About those paintings you have finished—these experiments. I’d be interested in having a look at them.”
Izzy shook her head. “Sometimes you have to do things just for yourself,” she said, trying to explain.
“It’s like, if everything you do goes up for sale, you’ve nothing left for yourself. There’s no way to judge where you’re going, how you’re doing. I need the freedom of knowing that there are paintings I can do that aren’t for sale, that don’t have any consideration in how or why they came about, or in what they have to say. Paintings that just are, that I can look up from my easel and see them hanging on the wall and ... oh, I don’t know. Grow familiar with them, I guess.”
“I think I understand,” Albina said.
Perhaps she did, Izzy thought. Perhaps what she was telling Albina did make sense to someone who didn’t know about the numena and how they came to be, but she still felt that the only person at the table who could read between the lines of her explanation was Kathy. When she glanced over at her roommate, Kathy smiled and gave her a wink.
III
Two weeks after that night at The Rusty Lion, Izzy came back to the apartment from working at the studio to find a fat manila envelope waiting for her on her bed. Her pulse quickened when she recognized the handwriting as Rushkin’s.
Why now? she wondered. Why was he contacting her now after all these months of silence?
She picked the envelope up and looked for a return address. There was none. The postmark was too smudged to read, but the stamps were domestic, which narrowed down its place of origin to someplace between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It could have been mailed from Newford, for all she knew.
After hesitating for a long moment, she finally opened it. Inside was a thick sheaf of paper covered in Rushkin’s handwriting and profusely illustrated with ink sketches. It was, Izzy realized, once she started to read it, a review of her show at The Green Man. Rushkin had gone to it. Gone and loved her work.
But
She read on, nodding her head at his critiques, glowing at his praise. Much as everyone had loved her work in the show, Izzy’d had misgivings about certain of the pieces—nothing she could put her finger on, nothing that anyone else might even notice; she just knew that something wasn’t quite right and had no idea how to fix it. For each one of those paintings Rushkin provided a detailed critique, showing her where she’d gone wrong and how to fix it, should the problem arise again.
His insight astounded her. She enjoyed working on her own—painting in Rushkin’s studio now gave her the freedom she’d had at the Grumbling Green-house Studio behind Professor Dapple’s house, with the added benefit of being provided with everything she could possibly require to do her art. But she realized that she missed her erstwhile mentor. Not the way he was when he got angry, not when she had to tippy-toe around his ego and temper. But all those many other times that far outnumbered the bad.
When they worked together and he would step over to her easel and point out this or that mistake. Or she could go to him with a problem she was having and he would either solve it for her, or give her the tools and information she needed to work the problem through on her own.
It wasn’t the same with him gone, she thought, holding the letter against her chest. It was so unfair, both Rushkin and John disappearing out of her life at the same time.
She wondered when he’d gone to the show. Where he was now. When he was coming back.
The letter answered none of those questions. Its tone was affectionate, but it addressed only the works that had been hung in the show, nothing else. There was no news, no inquiries after her, how she was doing, how she felt. She couldn’t even answer him, because there wasn’t a return address anywhere inside the envelope either.
She sighed. In this way Rushkin was exactly like John. They could both be so frustrating.
IV
February 1976
At four o’clock in the morning, Izzy found herself out on the street, shivering from the cold. It was well below zero with a bitter wind cutting through the tunnels of the downtown streets, making it feel far colder than the weatherman had claimed it would be. She’d gone out for a night of clubbing and hadn’t dressed for really cold weather, thinking she’d be inside and traveling in cabs all night. Now she wished she’d forgone fashion for practicality. Her feet felt frozen in their thin leather boots. Her hands weren’t too bad, tucked into her armpits, but the cold was turning her stockinged legs blue under her short skirt and she was sure she was getting frostbite on her ears and face.
She could have stayed in the warm bed she’d vacated a half hour ago, but no, she had to get up and go home the way she always did, forgetting that she didn’t have any money left after a night of buying and consuming far too many drinks. Not enough for a bus or the subway. Certainly not enough for a cab. Not even a dime to call someone like Alan to give her a lift—not that she would, mind you. Three hours ago, before she went home with whoever it was she’d gone home with, she might have been tempted. But s
he’d been so tipsy and she didn’t want to be alone in her bed—that always came after, when she woke up in someone else’s bedroom and simply had to go home.
Maybe she should sleep with Alan some night, she thought. At least then she’d only have to walk across the street to go home. But she liked Alan too much. She couldn’t sleep with Alan and not have a relationship with him and what she didn’t want was a relationship. Alan was her friend. If they started sleeping together, sooner or later he’d walk out of her life and she’d lose another best friend the way she’d lost John.
Oh, don’t get all maudlin, she told herself, and with practiced ease she pretended to put John Sweetgrass out of her mind.
She was so cold by the time she finally got home that she could barely stop her hand from shaking to insert the key in the lock. But she finally managed. When she opened the door and stepped inside, it was to find Kathy sitting up, reading.
“I th-thought I’d d-die out there,” Izzy told her through chattering teeth. “There’s tea made.”
Izzy shook her head. “No, I’d just be up peeing all night. Is there anything left in that bottle of whiskey that Christy gave us?”
“Let me go see.”
While Kathy went into the kitchen, Izzy pulled off her cold coat and boots and settled down on the pillows near where Kathy had been reading. There was an afghan there, and she wrapped herself in it.
“There was enough for one shot for each of us,” Kathy announced, returning with the small glasses, half full of amber liquid.
Izzy accepted hers gratefully. The first sip went down like liquid fire, and within moments its warmth was spreading through her.
“That’s better,” she murmured, snuggling deeper into the afghan. “You were out late,” Kathy said.
Izzy shrugged. “I was out clubbing and met this guy ....” She let her voice trail off and took another sip of the whiskey.
“You’re meeting a lot of guys these days,” Kathy said. “It seems like every week there’s one or two new ones.”
“I didn’t know you were keeping count.”
Kathy sighed. “It’s not like that, Izzy. I’m just a little worried, that’s all. This isn’t like you.”
Izzy gave her a bright smile. “I’m experimenting with drunkenness and promiscuity,” she announced with a solemnity that was belied by the twinkle in her eyes. “You know, trying to live a life of mild debauchery the way all the great artists have.”
“You still miss him, don’t you?” Kathy said.
There was no need to name names, not for either of them.
“I don’t know who you could possibly be talking about,” Izzy said.
Kathy sighed again. “God, I feel like a parent. I’m just going to shut up, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But I hope you’re being careful.”
Izzy slipped her foot out from under the afghan and hooked the strap of her shoulder bag so that she could pull it toward her. Rummaging around in it, she came up with a handful of condoms that she gravely showed to Kathy.
“I’m being ever so careful, Mom,” she said.
Kathy just threw a pillow at her.
V
March 1976
Izzy was working late at the studio the night she met Annie Nin. She had a new painting-in-progress on her easel, but it wasn’t going well, and hadn’t been for the past two days now. With the new show due to be hung in less than a few weeks’ time, she knew she had at least two more paintings to finish, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate on the work at hand. All she wanted to do was paint numena, which was fine except that painting numena wouldn’t get her any further ahead in terms of being prepared for the show, since she still refused to part with any of the numena paintings. But the cityscape she was working on bored her, and it showed in the painting. Finally she dropped her brush into a jar of turpentine and went to slouch in the window seat.
It had started snowing earlier in the evening; now it was a regular blizzard, one of March’s last roars.
A blustery wind was busy sculpting drifts that had grown progressively taller throughout the evening. The plows would be out on the main thoroughfares, but they wouldn’t get to the lane that ran alongside the coach house until sometime tomorrow, so here the drifts were free to expand into graceful sweeps of snow that blocked the entire width of the lane in places.
The snow depressed her. Winter depressed her. March especially depressed her. It was a full year now since she’d broken up with John, and this week everything seemed to exist not in its own right, but as part of a conspiracy to remind her of how stupid she’d been that night. Correction, she thought. How stupid she’d been since that night. Throwing herself at whoever happened to come along. Drinking too much. Partying too much. Feeling sorry for herself way too much.
Her art was the only thing that kept her sane—in particular, her numena paintings, but she felt guilty every time she did one. She had two voices arguing constantly in her head: John’s telling her to be responsible, to be careful, to not play god; and Kathy’s assuring her that the numena were in no more danger when they were brought into the world than was anybody else who lived here, life itself was a risk, and besides that, it was their own choice, whether or not they crossed over, Izzy wasn’t making them inhabit the shapes she painted.
Both arguments made sense and she didn’t know which of them was right. She wished sometimes that she’d never learned the process of bringing numena across, but those paintings brought her closer to the soul of her art than anything else she painted and it was a hard thing to consider giving it up. With everything else seeming to have gone askew in her life, the numena paintings were the only things she felt that still connected her to herself.
She guarded the numena paintings carefully—almost to the point of paranoia. She’d changed the lock on the coach house’s second-story door so that only she had access to the studio. Every morning when she arrived, she took inventory and then studied each of the paintings to make sure that nothing had happened to any of them. She constantly monitored her dreams, faithfully scrutinizing them for any hint of the horrors that had visited her before.
Her vigilance appeared to have paid off. The paintings remained safe. The numena they brought across were free to make their own lives in the city without fear of attack. But she still felt a constant guilt that wouldn’t ease. It was no use talking to Kathy about it; she already knew everything Kathy had to say on the matter. As for John, the fact that his views hadn’t changed was made very clear simply through his continued absence in her life.
Sighing, she got up from the window seat and went to stand in front of the wall on which the numena paintings hung.
“Why won’t any of you talk to me?” she cried. “Why won’t you tell me how you feel?”
There was no reply, but then she wasn’t expecting one. She heard only the wind, whistling outside the studio’s windows. The shift and creak of the building as it stoically bore the fury of the storm.
Shaking her head, Izzy walked back to the window seat. What she should do, she thought, was go home and get a good night’s sleep, but she didn’t want to leave. That would be too much like giving up. And she knew as well that if she did leave, the temptation to drown her troubles by making a round of the bars and clubs would more than likely win out over a night’s sleep.
Because drunk, her problems would temporarily fade and for a few hours, she wouldn’t remember them.
She scraped a new buildup of frost from the window and stared out at the storm. Reflected movement on the darkened glass caught her eye, and she turned to find herself no longer alone in the studio. A slender red-haired figure stood by the wall holding the numena pictures—a gamine in jeans, her body overwhelmed by the large sweater she wore.
Izzy’s gaze went from the young woman’s angular features to settle on one of the paintings that hung on the wall behind her. The painting had been rendered in oil pastels and was called Annie Nin. Its subject and the young woman
standing under it were identical.
“Maybe it’s because you make us nervous,” Annie said, replying to Izzy’s earlier question.
Though Izzy had long since accepted that her paintings could bring beings across from some otherworld, the reality of this numena’s presence was still a new enough enchantment to fill her heart with awe and set her pulse drumming.
“I make you nervous?” she finally managed.
Annie gave a wry shrug that she might have learned from John, it was so immediately expressive.
“Well, think about it,” she said. “It’s kind of like meeting God, don’t you think?”
“Oh, please!”
Annie laughed. “All right. So you didn’t create us, you just offered us shapes to wear. But we still wouldn’t be here without you and you’ve got to admit that meeting you would be sort of intimidating for one of us.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel even more guilty, it’s working.”
“Why do you feel guilty?” Annie asked.
She crossed the room, walking toward the window seat. Izzy made room for her and she hopped on the broad sill, leaning her back on the window frame opposite from where Izzy was sitting.
“It’s dangerous for you in this world,” Izzy said.
Annie cocked her head, then gave it a slow shake. “You’ve been talking to John,” she said.
“Not lately, I haven’t.”
“Yes, well, he is stubborn.”
“Why does he hate me so much?” Izzy asked.
“He doesn’t hate you, he’s just too full up with pride. Give him time and he’ll come around.”
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