Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

“Rushkin,” she said bitterly. “I was so excited when he first approached me to work with him.” She gave Isabelle a knowing look. “You’re probably the only person besides me who would understand just how thrilling it felt to be walking down that laneway and then climbing the stairs up to his studio.”

Isabelle nodded. “So what happened?”

“Probably the same thing that happened to you. I mean, I could tell right off that he was a control freak, but I thought, Okay. It’ll be worth it to put up with some weird shit if I get to paint like him—or like you.”

Isabelle tried to ignore the compliment. She wanted to ask about numena.

What had Rushkin told her about them? How many had Barb brought across? But before she could start to frame the question, if only in her mind, Barb went on.

“The first time he hit me, I let it pass.” She looked away, across the campus, and wouldn’t meet Isabelle’s gaze for a moment. “I didn’t like it,” she added, her voice pitched low, “but he put on such a good show, he was so bloody sorry that I was stupid enough to buy what he was saying and stay.”

“Until it happened again,” Isabelle said.

Barb nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I really couldn’t believe—that’s how stupid I was—but I was mad, too. I hit him back. I picked up the canvas I was working on and just laid it across the side of his head. And then, while he was lying there trying to make me feel sorry for him, I packed up my stuff and left.”

A great admiration for her companion rose up in Isabelle. Where had her own anger been when Rushkin had struck her? Swallowed by her greed to learn from him, she realized. Her anger and her courage and her integrity had all been put aside by her greed. Or was it also part of a pattern that she’d learned from her mother? The way her mother had always sat by helpless through all the verbal abuse Isabelle had to endure from her father?

“I haven’t been back since,” Barb said. She finally looked at Isabelle and gave her a wan smile.

“Was that what you were going to warn me about?”

She doesn’t know anything about the numena, Isabelle realized.

“I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard you were studying under him,” she said. It was only partly a lie. Her first concern had been for the numena, it was true, but she had been thinking about Barb as well.

She’d wanted to spare Barb the pain she’d gone through herself. “I just didn’t know how to approach you. I thought you’d think it was sour grapes, that I was jealous because you’d taken my place in his studio.”

Barb nodded. “I don’t know what I would have thought before it happened. I knew from the first day that he was wired a little wrong. But I could deal with his yelling at me. My father used to yell at me all the time. He only ever hit me once. I left home that night and I’ve never been back.” She gave Isabelle a puzzled look. “Weird, isn’t it? I gave Rushkin more of a chance than I did my own father.”

“My father used to yell at me, too,” Isabelle said. “He was always picking away at me—when he wasn’t giving me the cold shoulder. But he never hit me. Not like—” Her mind’s eye filled with a vision of that winter day in the studio, Rushkin kicking her and beating her, then finally throwing her down the stairs to make her own way home. “Not like Rushkin did.”

“I still don’t get it,” Barb said. “He’s responsible for some of the most ten-der, moving works of art that anyone has ever produced. How can he also be the way he is?”

“I guess we expected too much,” Isabelle said. “We didn’t separate the work from the man who created it.”

“How can you? When the work is so heartfelt, how can it be separated from the artist?”

Isabelle didn’t have an answer for that. It was a question she’d often asked herself. She’d come no closer to answering it than Barb had.

“Listen,” Barb said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but talking about all of this—it’s been good, you know to share it with someone, and I really appreciate having had the chance to meet you, but I feel a little screwed up thinking about all that shit again. I’ve got to go.”

“I understand,” Isabelle said. “But before you go ...”

She asked for Barb’s phone number, explaining how she wanted to give it to Alan, how it might generate some work for her. Barb scribbled the seven digits down in the back of her sketchbook, then tore out the page and handed it to Isabelle.

“I can’t promise anything,” Isabelle said.

“I understand.”

“But I’ll give it to Albina Sprech, as well,” Isabelle added. “She owns The Green Man Gallery.”

“Really? That’d be great. I haven’t been able to get my foot in the door anywhere. It’s really an old boy’s network out there.”

“Maybe we can change that,” Isabelle said.

Barb laughed humorlessly. “I guess we can try.”

“Look, I’m sorry about bringing this all up for you again. I never realized you’d already stopped studying with Rushkin. If I had, I wouldn’t have come bothering you.”

“Don’t be sorry. It gave me a chance to meet you, didn’t it?”

Before Isabelle had a chance to get flustered all over again by the young artist’s admiration for her work, Barb fled as though chased by the ghosts that had been called up by their conversation. Isabelle stood alone on the library steps, lost in thought, until the press of her own ghosts made her leave as well.

She didn’t go as quickly as Barb had, but she walked briskly all the same. And she didn’t look back.

Sometimes I wonder if everything is already known and each of us simply selects the facts that work for us. Is that why we all go through life so disconnected from one another? Not only are our minds these singular islands, each separate from the other, but we’re not even necessarily operating in the same reality. There’s a consensual no-man’s-land that we pretty well agree on, but beyond those basic reference points that we’re given as children, we’re on our own. We run into trouble communicating, not because we lack a common language, but because the facts I’ve selected don’t usually fit with the ones you have. Lacking common ground, it’s no wonder we find it so hard to communicate.

Take art, whether it’s visual, music, dance, writing, whatever. Art is one of the things that’s supposed to break down the boundaries between us and give us some common ground so that the lines of communication can stay open. But the best art, the art that really works, is also supposed to be open to individual interpretations. No one wants specifics in art except for academics. No one wants their work put into a box that says it means this, and only this. So we go floundering through galleries and books and theatre presentations, taking what we can, always looking over somebody else’s shoulder to compare it to what they got, readjusting our own interpretations, until somewhere in the process we end up having processed entirely different experiences from the same source material. Which is okay, except that when we talk about it, we still think we’re referring to the same thing.

No one really knows what you’re thinking, it’s that simple. They can guess the reasons behind what you’re doing, but they can’t know. And how can we expect them to when we ourselves don’t even know the reasons behind the things we do.

I mean, I know why I took Paddyjack from the farmhouse—to save it from the fire. What I don’t know is why I kept it. Why I never told Izzy that I had it. I think it might be because she went so strange afterwards, turning her back on her gift and the numena the way she did. She went so distant.