Charles De Lint - Memory and Dream

As though to emphasize that point, Rushkin, moving with obvious difficulty, rose stiffly to his feet.

“Let’s have our lunch early,” he said, leading the way downstairs.

Izzy trailed along behind him, her emotions in a turmoil, worry overriding them all. When they got to his ground-floor apartment, he insisted on making them soup. While they had lunch, he opened up for the first time in all the weeks Izzy had known him, telling her about living in Paris in the early part of the century, being in London during the Blitz, the well-known artists he had known and worked with, how he’d paid the bills while he was still making a name for himself by working on ocean steamers, in dockyards, construction sites and the like. Having no education, he’d only done physical labor, and because of his size, he’d had to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove himself capable of holding his own.

“I don’t know when it was that I learned the secret,” he said.

“What secret is th—?” Izzy began, then caught herself.

Rushkin gave her one of those smiles that were supposed to show his humor, but only distorted his features into more of a grimace.

“We’ll make a new rule,” he said. “Upstairs, when we’re working, no questions. You’ll do as you’re told and we won’t ever hear the word ‘why,’ or I won’t be able to maintain the teacher-student relationship the work requires. We’ll never get anywhere if I have to stop and explain myself every two minutes. But when we leave the studio, we should recognize each other as equals, and equals have no rules between them except for those of common sense and good taste. Agreed?”

Izzy nodded. “My name’s Izzy,” she said.

“Izzy?”

“You’ve never asked me my name.”

“But I thought I knew your name: Isabelle Copley.”

“That is my name. Izzy’s just a nickname that my friend Kathy gave me and it’s kind of stuck.” Izzy paused, then asked, “How did you know my name?”

Rushkin shrugged. “I can’t remember. If you didn’t tell me, someone else must have. But ‘Izzy.’” He shook his head. “I think I will refer to you as Isabelle. It has more ... dignity.”

“Let me guess,” Izzy said, smiling. “Nobody calls you Vince. It’s always Vincent, right?”

Rushkin smiled with her, but his eyes seemed sad to her. “No one calls me anything,” he said, “unless they want something, and then it’s Mr. Rushkin this and Mr. Rushkin that. It makes for dismal conversation.” He paused for a moment, then added, “But I can’t find fault with my fame. When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay.

Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim.” He gave her a sharp look. “At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I must express.

People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap—particularly when you’re young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression.”

When he paused this time, the silence drew out between them. Looking at him, Izzy got the feeling that he was traveling back through his memories. He might even have forgotten she was there and what they were discussing.

“You were saying something about a secret,” she said finally.

Rushkin took a moment to rouse himself; then he nodded. “What do you know about alchemy?”

“It’s something they did in the Middle Ages, I think. Trying to turn lead into gold, wasn’t it?”

“In part. I consider the search for the philosopher’s stone, which would turn all base metals into gold, to be more of a metaphorical quest than a physical one, especially since alchemists also searched for a universal solvent, the elixir of life and the panacea—a universal remedy. There are so many connections between these elements, they are all so entwined with one another, that they would seem to my mind to all be part and parcel of the same secret.”

Izzy gave him an odd look. “Is this the same secret you started out talking to me about?”

“Yes and no.” Rushkin sighed. “The trouble is, we don’t yet share enough of a common language for me to clearly explain what I mean.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Exactly my point.”

“But—”

“What I am trying to teach you in the studio are not just artistic techniques and the ability to see. It’s also another language. And until you gain more expertise in it, whatever I tell you at this time will only confuse you more.” He smiled. “Perhaps now you can understand why I get so frustrated at our slow speed of progress.”

“I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“I know you are,” Rushkin told her. “But it’s a long process all the same. And while you’re still young, I grow older every day. More tea?” he added, lifting the teapot and offering it in her direction.

Izzy blinked at the sudden switch in topics. “Yes, please,” she said when she registered what he’d asked.

“Look at that sky,” Rushkin said, pointing out the window to where an expanse of perfect blue rose up above the city’s skyline. “It reminds me of when I lived in Nepal for a time ....”

By the time Izzy left Rushkin that day, she felt that she’d gained a real insight into him, both as a person and as an artist. She’d managed to get a glimpse of what lay hidden underneath the face of the angry artist he presented to the world and found there a much more human and kinder man. She was in such good spirits as she took the bus back to the university for an afternoon class that she completely forgot about what had happened in the studio earlier that day.

Until the next time he hit her.

The wild girl peers out through a gap in the tangled skein of branches that make up the wild rosebush thicket in which she sits. She has an elbow on one knee, her chin cupped in her hand, her head cocked. Her red hair is a bird’s nest of uncombed snarls, falling around her features and spilling over her thin shoulders like a tumble of catted wool. Her features have a pinched, hungry look about them. Her eyes dominate herface and hold in their irises both the faded grey of the late-afternoon sky above the thicket and the pale Alizarin madder of the rose petals that make up the tiny blossoms surrounding her. She is wearing an oversized white dress shirt as a smock, the sleeves rolled up, the collar unbuttoned.

The shirt draws the eye first, its stark whiteness only slightly softened by the echoes of shadow and local color that are reflected across its weave. Then the eye is drawn up, through the tangle of branches and rose blossoms, to the wild girl’s face. She is at once innocent and feral, foolish and wise, preternaturally calm, yet on the verge of some great mad escapade, and it is the consideration of these apparent dichotomies that so entertains the imagination.

It is only afterward, when one’s eye gives a cursory glance to the more abstractly rendered background into which the rosebushes have been worked, that a second figure can be seen. It is no more than a vague shape and is so loosely detailed that it might represent anything. Friend or foe. Ghost or shadow.

Or perhaps the eye has simply created the image, imposing its own expectations upon what is actually nothing more than an abstract background.

The Wild Girl, 1977, oil on canvas, 23 X 30 inches. Collection The Newford Children’s Foundation.