The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It didn’t quite work out that way.

  We didn’t need a doctor’s certification in George Town, so the setting up took a little less time. Artist and client lock-stepped into the office where Rhonda waited, studying the pages of notes stacked neatly on her desk.

  There were two piano stools with identical newsprint pads and boxes of charcoal sticks. The idea was to sketch her from eight or ten slightly different angles, Segura moving around her in a small arc while I worked just behind him, looking over his shoulder. Theoretically, I could be anywhere, even in another room, since I was seeing her through his eyes. But it seems to work better this way, especially with a model.

  The sketches had a lot of energy—so much energy that Segura actually tore through the paper a few times, blocking out the darkness around the seated figure. I got excited myself, and not just by feedback from Segura. The negative-space exercise is just that, an art school formalism, but Segura didn’t know that. The result came close to being actual art.

  I showed him that after we came out of the buffer. The sketches were good, strong abstractions. You could turn them upside down or sideways, retaining symmetry while obliterating text, and they still worked well.

  I had a nascent artist on my hands. Segura had real native talent. That didn’t often come my way. The combination could produce a painting of some value, one that I wouldn’t have been able to do by myself. If things worked out.

  Allison and I took the boat out after lunch—or rather, Allison took the boat out with me as ballast, baking inertly under a heavy coat of total sun block. (She and I are almost equally pale, and that’s not all we have in common; I’m also nearly as well-muscled. We met at the weight machines in a Broadway gym.) She sailed and I watched billowing clouds form abstract patterns in the impossible cobalt sky. The soothing sounds of the boat lulled me to sleep—the keel slipping through warm water, the lines creaking, the ruffle of the sails.

  She woke me to help her bring it back in. There was a cool mist of rain that became intermittently heavy. A couple of miles from shore we started to see lightning, so we struck sail and revved up the little motor and drove straight in, prudence conquering seamanship.

  We dried off at the marina bar and drank hot chocolate laced with rum, watching a squall line roll across land and water, feeling lucky to be inside.

  “Photography tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Yeah. And then drawing, drawing, drawing.”

  “The part you like best.”

  “Oh, yes.” Actually, I halfway do like it, the way an athlete can enjoy warming up, in expectation of the actual event.

  * * *

  The next morning I set up the cameras before we went into the skinsuits. The main one was a fairly complex and delicate piece of equipment, an antique 8 × 10 view camera that took hairline-accurate black-and-white negatives. I could have accomplished the same thing with a modern large-format camera, but I liked the smooth working of the gears, the smell of the oak and leather, the sense of contact with an earlier, less hurried age. The paradox of combining the technology of that age with ours.

  The other camera was a medium-format Polaroid. Buffered and suited, I led Segura through the arcane art and science of tweaking lights, model, f-stop and exposure to produce a subtle spectrum of prints: a sequence of 98 slightly different, and profoundly different, pictures of one woman. We studied the pictures and her and finally decided on the right combination. I set up the antique 8 × 10 and reproduced the lighting. We focused it with his somewhat younger eyes and took three slightly different exposures.

  Then we took the film into the darkroom that M&M had improvised in the firm’s executive washroom. We developed each sheet in Rodinal, fixed and washed them and hung them up weighted to dry.

  We left the darkroom and spent a few minutes smoking, studying Rhonda as she studied her law. I told her she was free for three days and that she should show up Thursday morning. She nodded curtly and left, resentful.

  Her annoyance was understandable. She’d been sitting there naked for all that time we were playing in the darkroom. I should have dismissed her when we finished shooting.

  We lit up another cigarette and I realized that it wasn’t I who had kept her waiting. It was Segura. I’d started to tell her to go and then he manufactured a little crisis that led straight to the darkroom. From then on I hadn’t thought of the woman except as a reversed ghost appearing in the developer tray.

  Under the circumstances, it wasn’t a bad thing to have her hostile toward us, if we could capture the hostility on paper. But it goes against my grain to mistreat an employee, even a temporary one.

  We examined each of the negatives on a lightbox with a loupe, then took the best one back into the darkroom for printing. Plain contact prints on finest-grain paper. The third one was perfect: rich and stark, almost scary in its knife-edge sharpness. You could see one bleached hair standing out from her left nipple.

  That was enough work for the day; in fact, we’d gone slightly over the six-hour limit, and both of us were starting to get headaches and cramps. Another half-hour and it would be double vision and tremors. More than that—though I’d never experienced it—you wind up mentally confused, the two minds still linked electrically but no longer cooperating. Some poor guinea pigs took it as far as convulsions or catatonia, back when the buffer drug was first being developed.

  M&M eased us out of it and helped us down to a taxi. It was only five blocks to the hotel, but neither of us was feeling particularly athletic. For some reason the buffer hangover hits people like me, in very good shape, particularly hard. Segura was flabby, but he had less trouble getting out of the car.

  Back in the room, I pulled the blackout blinds over the windows and collapsed, desperately hungry but too tired to do anything about it except dream of food.

  * * *

  Allison had set up the paper, one large sheet of handmade hot-pressed 400-pound rag, soaking it overnight and then taping it down, giving it plenty of time to dry completely. That sheet of paper, the one Segura would be drawing on, cost more than some gallery paintings. The sheet I’d be working on was just paper, with a similar tooth.

  We had set up two drawing tables with their boards at identical angles, mine a little higher, since I have a larger frame. An opaque projector mounted above Segura shot a duplicate of yesterday’s photo onto the expensive paper. Our job for the next three days was to execute an accurate but ghost-light tracing of the picture, which would be gently erased after the painting was done.

  Some so-called photo-realists bypass this step with a combination of photography and xerography—make a high-contrast print and then impress a light photocopy of it onto watercolor paper. That makes their job a high-salaried kind of paint-by-numbers. Doing the actual underdrawing puts you well “into” the painting before the first brush is wet.

  We both sat down and went to work, starting with the uniformly bound law books on the shelves behind Rhonda. It was an unchallenging, repetitive subject to occupy us while we got used to doing this kind of labor together.

  For a few minutes we worked on a scrap piece of paper, until I was absolutely confident of his eye and hand. Then we started on the real thing.

  After five grueling hours we had completed about a third of the background, an area half the size of a newspaper page. I was well pleased with that progress; working by myself I would have done little more.

  Segura was not so happy. In the taxi, he cradled his right hand and stared at it, the wrist quivering, the thumb frankly twitching. “How can I possibly keep this up?” he said. “I won’t even be able to pick up a pencil tomorrow.”

  I held out my own hand and wrist, steady, muscular. “But I will. That’s all that counts.”

  “It could permanently damage my hand.”

  “Never happened.” Of course, I’d never worked with anyone for three weeks. “Go to that masseur, the man whose card I gave you. He’ll make your hand as good as new. Do you still have the card?�
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  “Oh, yeah.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t mean to be personal, or offensive. But is this man gay? I would have trouble with that.”

  “I wouldn’t know. We don’t have little badges or a secret handshake.” He didn’t laugh, but he looked less grim. “My relationship with him is professional. I wouldn’t know whether or not he is gay.” Actually, since our professional relationship included orgasm, if he wasn’t gay, he was quite a Method actor. But I assumed he would divine Segura’s orientation as quickly as I had. A masseur ought to have a feel for his clients.

  The next day went a lot better. Like myself, Segura was heartened by the sight of the previous day’s careful work outline. We worked faster and with equal care, finishing all of the drawing except for the woman and the things on the desk in front of her.

  It was on the third day that I had the first inkling of trouble. Working on the image of Rhonda, Segura wanted to bear down too hard. That could be disastrous; if the pencil point actually broke the fibers of paper along a line, it could never be completely erased. You can’t have outlines in this kind of painting, just sharply defined masses perfectly joining other sharply defined masses. A pencil line might as well be an inkblot.

  I thought the pressure was because of simple muscular fatigue. Segura was not in good physical shape. His normal workday comprised six hours in conference and six hours talking on the phone or dictating correspondence. He took a perverse pride in not even being able to keyboard. He never lifted anything heavier than a cigarette.

  People who think art isn’t physically demanding ought to try to sit in one position for six hours, brush or pencil in hand, staring at something or someone and trying to transfer its essence to a piece of paper or canvas. Even an athletic person leaves that arena with aches and twinges. A couch potato like Segura can’t even walk away without help.

  He never complained, though, other than expressing concern that his fatigue might interfere with the project. I reassured him. In fact, I had once completed a successful piece with a quadriplegic so frail he couldn’t sign his name the same way twice. We taught ourselves how to hold the brush in our teeth.

  It was a breathtaking moment when we turned off the overhead projector for the last time. The finished drawing floated on the paper, an exquisite ghost of what the painting would become. Through Segura’s eyes I stared at it hungrily for 15 or 20 minutes, mapping out strategies of frisket and mask, in my mind’s eye seeing the paper glow through layer after careful layer of glaze. It would be perfect.

  * * *

  Rhonda wasn’t in a great mood, coming back to sit after three days on her own, but even she seemed to share our excitement when she saw the underdrawing. It made the project real.

  The first step was to paint a careful frisket over her figure, as well as the chair, the lamp and the table with its clutter. That took an hour, since the figure was more than a foot high on the paper. I also masked out reflections on a vase and the glass front of a bookcase.

  I realized it would be good to start the curtains with a thin wash of Payne’s gray, which is not a color I normally keep on my palette, so I gave Rhonda a five-minute break while I rummaged for it. She put on a robe and walked over to the painting and gasped. We heard her across the room.

  I looked over and saw what had distressed her. The beautifully detailed picture of her body had been blotted out with gray frisket, and it did look weird. She was a nonbeing, a featureless negative space hovering in the middle of an almost photographic depiction of a room. All three of us laughed at her reaction. I started to explain, but she knew about frisketing; it had just taken her by surprise.

  Even the best facilitators have moments of confusion, when their client’s emotional reaction to a situation is totally at odds with their own. This was one of those times: My reaction to Rhonda’s startled response was a kind of ironic empathy, but Segura’s reaction was malicious glee.

  I could see that he disliked Rhonda at a very deep level. What I didn’t see (although Allison had known from the first day) was that it wasn’t just Rhonda. It was women in general.

  I’ve always liked women myself, even though I’ve known since 13 or 14 that I would never desire them. It’s pernicious to generalize, but I think that my friendships with women have usually been deeper and more honest than they would have been had I been straight. A straight man can simply like a woman and desire her friendship, but there’s always a molecule or two of testosterone buzzing between them, if they are both of an age and social situation where sex might be a possibility, however remote. I have to handle that complication with some men whom I know or suspect are gay, even when I feel no particular attraction toward them.

  The drawing had gone approximately from upper left to lower right, then back to the middle for the figure, but the painting would have to proceed in a less straightforward way. You work all over the painting at once: a layer of rose madder on the spines of one set of books and on the shady side of the vase and on two of the flowers. You need a complete mental picture of the finished painting so you can predict the sequence of glazes, sometimes covering up areas with frisket or, when there were straight lines, with drafting tape. The paper was dry, though, so it was usually just a matter of careful brushwork—pathologically careful: You can’t erase paint.

  Of course, Rhonda had to sit even though for the first week her image would be hidden behind frisket. Her skin tones affected the colors of everything else. Her emotional presence affected the background. And Segura’s feeling toward her “colored” the painting, literally.

  The work went smoothly. It was a good thing Segura had suggested the trial painting; we’d been able to talk over the necessity for occasional boldness and spontaneity, to keep the painting from becoming an exercise in careful draftsmanship. Especially with this dark, sinister background, we often had to work glazes wet-into-wet. Making details soft and diffuse at the periphery of a painting can render it more realistic rather than less. Our own eyes see the world with precision only in a surprisingly small area around the thing that has our attention. The rest is blur, more or less ignored. (The part of the mind that is not ignoring the background is the animal part that waits for a sudden movement or noise; a painting can derive tension from that.)

  Segura and I worked so well together that it was going to cost me money; the painting would be complete in closer to two weeks than three. When I mentioned this he said not to worry; if the painting was good, he’d pay the second million regardless of the amount of time (he’d paid a million down before we left New York), and he was sure the painting would be good.

  Of course, there was arithmetic involved there, as well as art. Fortune listed his income last year as $98 million. He probably wanted to get back to his quarter-million-a-day telephone.

  So the total time from photography to finished background was only 11 days, and I was sure we could do the figure and face in a day. We still had a couple of hours’ buffer left when we removed the frisket, but I decided to stop at that point. We studied her for an hour or so, sketching.

  The sketches were accurate, but in a way they were almost caricatures, angular, hostile. As art, they were not bad, though like Segura’s initial self-portrait, they were fundamentally, intentionally ugly. I could feel Manet’s careful brush and sardonic eye here: How can a well-shaped breast or the lush curve of a hip be both beautiful and ugly? Cover the dark, dagger-staring face of Olympia and drink in the lovely body. Then uncover the face.

  That quality would be submerged in the final painting. It would be a beautiful picture, dramatic but exquisitely balanced. The hatred of women there but concealed, like an underpainting.

  It was a great physical relief to be nearing the end. I’d never facilitated for more than five days in a row, and the skinsuit was becoming repulsive to me. I was earning my long vacation.

  * * *

  That night I watched bad movies and drank too much. The morning was brilliant, but I was not. M&M injected me with a cockta
il of vitamins and speed that burned away the hangover. I knew I’d come down hard by nightfall, but the painting would be done long before then.

  Segura was jittery, snappish, as we prepared for the last day. Maybe M&M gave him a little something along with the buffer, to calm him down. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea.

  Rhonda was weird that morning, too, with good reason. She was finally the focus of our attention and she played her part well. Her concentration on us was ferocious, her contempt palpable.

  I dabbed frisket on a few highlights—collarbone, breast, eye and that glossy hair—and then put in a pale flesh-colored wash over everything, cadmium-yellow light with a speck of rose. While it dried, we smoked a cigarette and stared at her. Rhonda had made it clear that she didn’t like smoke, and we normally went into another room or at least stood by an open window. Not today, though.

  I had a little difficulty controlling Segura: He was mesmerized by her face and kept wanting to go back to it. But it doesn’t work that way: the glazes go on in a particular order, one color at various places on the body all at once. If you finished the face and then worked your way down, the skin tones wouldn’t quite match. And there was actual loathing behind his obsession with her face, something close to nausea.

  That feeling fed his natural amateurish desire to speed up, just to find out what the picture was going to look like. In retrospect, I wonder whether there might have been something sinister about that, as well.

  It was obvious that the face and figure would take longer than I had planned, maybe half again as long, with so much of my attention going into hauling in on the reins. His impatience would cost us an extra day in the skinsuits, which annoyed me and further slowed us down.