“The artist who stops learning,” Rushkin said, “is either dead or not an artist.”
“Sure, but I’m the student here.”
“Do you think the teacher can’t learn anything from his student?”
“I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”
“Come with me,” he said.
He led the way back to the spare bedroom that he used as a storage space, and there they were, Smither’s Oak, all her paintings, intact, unharmed, just as she’d left them.
“You see?” Rushkin said. “I would never dream of harming your work. I know how important it is to you.”
“But …. Izzy lifted the charred bit of canvas and wood she was holding. “Why did you burn this?”
“Because it’s your work. I did it as a study, for myself, nothing more. I didn’t want to keep such pieces around because … well, what if I were to die and they were found in my estate? Do you think anyone would believe that I had copied them from you?”
Izzy slowly shook her head.
“Exactly. So once I’ve learned what I can from a piece, I destroy it to preserve the integrity of your art. I wouldn’t dream of letting your unique vision appear to be based upon work I’d done, and I was only ensuring that no one else would gather the wrong impression.”
“But what could you possibly be learning from me?” Izzy had to know.
Rushkin hesitated. “I’ll tell you,” he said after a moment, “but remember, you were the one to bring this up, not I.”
Izzy nodded.
“Let me take that,” Rushkin said.
Izzy gave him the canvas that he’d asked for and watched as he dropped it into the brass wastebasket that stood by the door. He led her back into the kitchen then and poured them each a mug of tea from a pot he’d had steeping when she burst in. Not until they were settled at the table did he go on.
“We talked about spirits before,” he said. “Of how artists can call them up from … well, no one knows where. But we call them up with certain paintings or songs or any creative endeavor that builds a bridge between our world and that mysterious Garden of the Muses.”
“I remember,” Izzy said. She got an apologetic look on her face. “I’m just not so sure I can believe in it.”
“Fair enough. But it doesn’t matter. Insofar as the current situation lies, all that matters is that I believe it. Are you with me so far?”
“I suppose.”
“I used to be able to bring them across,” Rushkin said. “I made homes for those spirits in my paintings, gave them bodies to wear. My work was a bridge between the worlds. But no longer. I’ve lost the touch, you see. For many years now, when I paint, I make a painting. A wondrous enough enchantment in its own right, to be sure, but when you’ve known more, merely painting can no longer be enough.”
“But you … you said you were teaching me how to do that.”
Izzy felt a little odd as she spoke. She didn’t believe, but she felt cheated at the same time to learn that this calling up of spirits was no longer possible.
“I was,” Rushkin said. “I am. I still will. You see, I can remember how I did it, but I have lost the ability to do so. Lost the gift. But you have not. It lies strong inside you. So I was copying those pieces of yours in hopes of building a bridge to that other place – to see if I could regain what I had lost by seeing how you did it.
“And?” Izzy asked, forgetting for the moment how she felt about the whole idea. “Did it work?”
Rushkin shook his head. “No. All that resulted was exact duplicates of your work. After each attempt, I destroyed them.”
Izzy frowned, thinking this all through. “So the painting can call up spirits – spirits that can physically manifest in our world.”
“Yes.”
“And do they become real, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Once they’re here in our world,” Izzy asked. “Are they real like you and me?”
“They become real, but not like you or me,” Rushkin told her. “There remains a bond in them to that place from which they originated so that they always carry a piece of otherness inside. They might seem like us, but they don’t have our needs. They require neither food, nor sleep. They don’t dream. And because they can’t dream, they are unable to create.”
“And it’s just people that come across?” Izzy asked.
“Beings,” Rushkin said. “Yes. However, they won’t necessarily seem like people. They have the same source as legend and myth, Isabelle. When the ancients first made their paintings and sculptures of marvelous beings – dryads and satyrs, angels and dragons – they were not rendering things they had seen. Rather they were bringing them into being. Not all of them, of course. Only those artists with the gift. The others were working from observation, but what they observed was what the gifted had first brought across.”
“What about the tree in Smither’s Oak? You said it had spirit. Did it come across as well?”
Rushkin’s shoulders lifted and fell helplessly. “I don’t know. Perhaps. I have never been aware of such a crossing, but it seems possible. Of course, such a spirit would have no mobility. It would be forced to remain at whatever spot it crossed over.”
“And what you were saying earlier,” Izzy asked. “You weren’t just talking about painting. You made it sound like music or writing could build a bridge as well.”
“It seems logical and so I’ve been told, but I know only how to use the gift through my painting. My understanding of it has always been limited in that sense.”
What got to Izzy the most was Rushkin’s sincerity. He took such impossible concepts and damned if he didn’t make them seem plausible.
“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you?” she asked.
“Without question,” he replied. “Though, as I told you before, I was as skeptical when my mentor told me of them, as you are listening to me.”
XVIII
It was while Izzy was riding home on the bus that the fatigue hit her hard. She’d been burning adrenaline all the way to the studio and through her confrontation with Rushkin, so angry that she hadn’t even had time to feel scared. After his explanation, her energy deflated. Her head spun from the emotional roller coaster she’d just been on and she felt so weak it was all she could do to sit upright in her seat. But the events of the day continued to turn over and over in her mind.
She would have cheerfully killed Rushkin, she realized. That easily. And over what? Paintings. It was true that she’d invested an incredible amount of herself in each one, but paintings could always be redone. When she likened what might have been her loss to what had happened to Rochelle, there was really no comparison at all. What had been stolen from Rochelle could never be recovered.
Izzy thought she understood Kathy’s argument better now, seeing it from the other side of the coin as it were. And as for what had happened to Rochelle’s attackers … She didn’t necessarily agree any more than she had earlier, but it was easier to empathize with the killers now.
Killers.
Or killer?
She knew now why John had deflected her question earlier in the evening by handing her that piece of charred canvas he’d found behind the studio. He had done so to make her understand what true anger meant. Justified anger. Had he been involved in the deaths of Rochelle’s attackers? At this moment she thought it was more to the point to ask, was he even real?
Rushkin’s arguments were so seductive that, impossible though they had to be, she had left the coach house half convinced that spirits could be called up through certain art, through the concentration and focus one held while working on a piece. Rushkin had never lied to her before. Why should he begin now? And why with something so bizarre?
If that process Rushkin described was real …
She had painted John before she’d ever met him. John never seemed to eat. He never seemed to sleep. He never spoke of dreams. He remained as much an enigma to her now as he’d been
when they’d first met. It could simply be the way he was. But if Rushkin was to be believed, the mystery she always sensed surrounding John might not be inborn, or self-produced; it might have its source in that piece of otherness that he’d brought with him when her painting had called him up from that other place.
The whole idea was crazy, but she knew now that she had to explore it or she’d really feel she’d gone mad. Imagine if it was real and she turned her back upon it.
She would go to Jilly’s studio, away from Rushkin’s influence, and deliberately attempt to call up a being from that so-called otherworld. Not a man like John, who, because he had the appearance of a normal person, could as easily be a product of either world, but a being for which there would be no question that its place of origin was utterly alien. And then she would wait and see. If it would come to her. Here. In this world.
You’re mad, she told herself as she got off at her stop and walked down Waterhouse to the apartment. Well and truly. Except she knew she had to make the attempt. Because what if …?
She wouldn’t think of it anymore. She was tired enough as it was without exhausting herself further worrying over it. Tomorrow she would just do it. Start a painting. And then see what, if anything, it called to her.
As she was making her way down the block, she saw that John was waiting for her, sitting on the stoop of her building. She thought the spectre of the day’s suspicions would rise again at the sight of him, but either she was too worn out, or the decision she’d made to conduct her own experiment put everything else on hold until that one question was resolved.
“How did it go?” John asked, rising to his feet at her approach. She felt as though she could just melt into the hug he gave her. “Are you okay?” he added.
Izzy nodded against his shoulder. “It wasn’t my painting you found,” she told him. When they sat down together on the steps, she leaned against him, appreciating the support as much as the contact. “It was a copy of it that Rushkin had done,” she went on to explain. “He destroyed it so that people wouldn’t think I was copying from him, even though it was the other way around.”
“Why would he want to copy your work?”
Izzy sat up straighter and turned to look at him. “Because he thinks I’m magic,” she said, smiling. “Remember? He’s lost his magic and he thought he might be able to recover it by doing a painting the way I do it. Or at least that’s what he says.”
John gave her an odd look.
“It’s okay. Honestly,” Izzy said. “I saw my paintings and they were all still there.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh, don’t go all vague on me, John. I’m way too tired. If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”
He hesitated for a long moment, then took her hand in his. He traced the lines on her palm with a fingertip.
“You really thought what I brought you was a piece of your own painting, didn’t you?” he finally asked.
Izzy nodded. “I know my own style. God, I spent so long on parts of that painting I could redo it in my sleep.”
“And the works that were intact – they were yours?”
“Yes.” She started to get an uncomfortable feeling as she saw where this was heading. “Look,” she said. “Rushkin’s a genius. Of course he’d be able to duplicate my work.”
“Enough so that you couldn’t tell the difference?”
“Well, in some ways, that was the whole point of why he did it, wasn’t it? To do it exactly the way I did it. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find this magic whatever-it-is that he’s looking for.”
John nodded. “So how do you know that the paintings he destroyed were the ones he did?”
For a long moment all Izzy could do was look at him.
“I … I don’t,” she said in a small voice. “What are you saying? That he lied to me?”
“I’m just saying to be careful. Don’t be so trusting.”
Again that warning, Izzy thought. John warning her against Rushkin, Rushkin warning her against John. It made her head hurt, trying to work it all out.
“Why would he lie to me?” she asked. “What could he possibly stand to gain by lying to me?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong question to ask,” John replied. “Maybe what you should be asking is, what does he stand to lose if you know the truth?”
“You’re presupposing that he is lying.”
“Doesn’t what he told you about copying your work seem more than a little odd to you?”
“When you come down to it, everything’s odd about him.”
“Just think about it, Isabelle.”
I don’t want to, she thought. But she knew she would. It was the kind of thing that, once someone brought it to your attention, you couldn’t help but think about. She hated carrying around suspicions. It was like today all over again, except it would put Rushkin in the seat of scrutiny instead of John.
She regarded him for a long moment. Suspicions concerning Rushkin, suspicion in general, made her mind travel a certain circuit. Without wanting them to, all her earlier uncertainties concerning John were back in her mind again, demanding that she deal with them.
“Did you kill those men?” she found herself asking.
“No,” John replied.
Believe him, Izzy told herself.
“I believe you,” she said, and by saying it aloud she knew it was true. She did believe.
My word’s the only currency I’ve got that’s of any real worth.
How could she not, and still love him?
“I’m sorry,” she said, “that I had to ask, you know.”
“Friends don’t need to apologize.”
“When one of them’s wrong they do,” Izzy said. She paused, then gave him an uncomfortable look.
“I’ve got to know one more thing.”
John smiled. “And that is?”
“Are you real?”
He took her hand and laid it against his chest. She could feel the rise and fall of his breathing.
“Are you?” he asked.
And that was all she could get out of him that evening.
Paddyjack
Paddyjack crouches by a dumpster in a shadowed alleyway. Light from a streetlight enters far enough from the roadway to play across his curious features: pointed chin, the wide spread of a thin-lipped mouth, nose like a goshawk’s beak, slanted deep-set eyes the color of burnished gold and surrounded by shadows, long ears tapering back into fine points. In place of hair he has a tangle of leafy vines and twigs standing out every which way from under a battered three-cornered hat the color of an oak trunk.
His limbs are as thin as broomsticks, shoulders narrow, chest flat, hips almost nonexistent. His raggedy clothes hang from him as from a scarecrow, a crazy-quilt patchwork of mottled forest colors: sepias and Van Dyck’s brown, ochers, burnt sienna and a dozen shades of green. The rendering of his trousers, shirt and hat is festooned with mere daubs of paint that still manage to convey the notion of shells and buttons, thorny seeds and burrs, all patterned in a bewildering array.
The first impression is that he has the look of an animal caught in the headlights of an automobile, or the sudden glare of a back porch light turned on at an unfamiliar sound. One thinks of a cat or, with those dark rings of shadow around his eyes, a raccoon. But upon closer scrutiny, the viewer can find no fear. He carries, instead, an air of both sly amusement and mental simplicity, an old-world humor utterly at odds with the urban decay of his more contemporary surroundings. And while he has the basic prerequisites of a human being in his appearance – one head, two limbs for walking, opposable thumbs, clothing – it quickly becomes obvious that he has originated from somewhere other than the world of his surroundings, from the pages of the Brothers Grimm, perhaps, by way of Arthur Rackham or Jean de Bosschère.
Paddyjack, 1974, oil on canvas, 10 X 14 inches. Private collection.
Kismet
I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the la
ndscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show.
– Attributed to Andrew Wyeth
Wren Island, September 1992
It would be winter soon, Isabelle thought. She’d paused in her packing to sit in the wing-backed chair by the bedroom window. She could see the island’s autumned fields from her vantage point, running off to the cliffs before they dropped into the lake. In the aftermath of last night’s storm, the sky was a perfect blue, untouched by cloud. She watched a crow glide across that cerulean expanse, then swoop down toward the fields. When it was lost to sight, her gaze moved back toward the house, where the forest encroached a little closer every year. The rich cloak of leaves was already beginning to thin, the colors losing their vibrancy. Movement caught her gaze again and she saw that the raggedy stand of mountain ash by one of the nearer outbuildings was filled with cedar waxwings, the sleek yellow-and-brown birds gorging on this year’s crop of the trees’ orange berries. Putting her face closer to the glass, she could hear their thin lisping cries of tsee, tsee.
Autumn was her favorite time of year. It bared the landscape, it was true, heralding the lonely desolation of the long months of winter to come, but it made her heart sing all the same with a joy not so dissimilar to what she felt when she saw the first crocuses in the spring. It was easy to forget – when the trees were bare, the fields turned brown, and the north winds brought the first snows – that the world went on, that it wasn’t coming to an end. She agreed with what Andrew Wyeth was supposed to have said about the season: something did wait underneath the drab masquerade that autumn eventually came to wear. The whole story didn’t show. But that was the way it was with everything. There were always other stories going on under what you could see – in people as much as landscapes.
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