Charles De Lint: Memory and Dream

Kathy gave a disdainful sniff.

“Enough with Choira already,” Alan said. “Tell us about Rushkin. I don’t know the first thing about him except that his work is brilliant.”

“Palm Street Evening, “Jilly said, the envy plain in her voice as she mentioned one of Rushkin’s more famous pieces. “God, if I could paint like that I’d think I’d died and gone to heaven.” She, too, turned to Izzy. “I want every detail. What’s his studio like? Does he really grind his own pigments? Did you see any of his sketches?”

Izzy felt her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish as she tried to slip a word into the flurry of Jilly’s questions. But she knew exactly how filly was feeling. If their roles had been reversed, she would have been pressing Jilly for as many details, if not more.

“Well, he’s overbearing,” she said. “A bit of a bully, really, but he ...”

Her voice trailed off as her memory called up what Rushkin had said to her about his desire for privacy concerning his private life: The art speaks for itself ... to allow a view of any other part of myself relegates the art to secondary importance. Looking up, she found three gazes expectantly fixed upon her, waiting for her to continue.

“Actually, he’s a pretty private person,” she said, knowing how lame this sounded. “I don’t really feel right, you know, gossiping about him.” Jilly rolled her eyes. “Oh please.”

“I got the feeling that he doesn’t want me to,” Izzy added. “It’s as though, if I do talk about him, or what goes on in his studio, he won’t ask me to come back.”

“You sound like you took a vow of silence,” Kathy said.

“Well, not in so many words. It was more implied .. • .”

“This has all the makings of a fairy tale,” Alan said with a smile. “You know how there’s always one thing you’re not supposed to do, or one place you’re not allowed to go.”

Jilly nodded, getting into the spirit of it. “Like Bluebeard’s secret room.”

“God, nothing like that, I hope,” Izzy said.

But thinking of the story Jilly had been referring to reminded her of how she’d basically spent the morning in a state of barely controlled fear, not just because of who Rushkin was and how much she respected his work, but because he could look so terribly fierce, as though any moment he might come out from behind his easel and hit her. She gave a nervous laugh and then managed to change the subject.

No one seemed to mind. But she had cause to remember that conversation later.

VI

So what made you clam up about your morning with Rushkin?” Kathy asked as the two of them walked back to their dorm together. “I thought that if it really did turn out to be him, you’d be so excited that none of us would have been able to get a word in edgewise.”

“I was embarrassed.”

“About what?”

Izzy shrugged. “Well, for one thing, I didn’t learn anything—no, that’s not right. I did learn a couple of things by watching him work, but he didn’t teach me anything. He just had me posing for him. That’s all I got to do.”

“He’s doing a painting of you?”

Izzy nodded.

“Well, that’s a real compliment, isn’t it? Immortalized by Rushkin and all that.”

“I suppose. But it doesn’t say a damn thing about my art.” Izzy glanced at her friend. “I just felt so awkward. I mean, I knocked on his door and he didn’t even say hello or anything, he just told me to take my clothes off and start posing.”

Kathy’s eyebrows went up.

“Don’t even say it,” Izzy told her. “It was strictly business.” She pulled a face at the thought of Rushkin touching her. “But it felt, I don’t know. De-meaning.”

“Why? You don’t think the models in your life-drawing class are being demeaned because of what they’re doing, do you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“So what was the problem?” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know how to explain it exactly,” Izzy said. “It’s just that I got the feeling that he wasn’t painting me in the nude because he was inspired to paint me so much as that he wanted to humble me.

He was establishing his control.”

“Power-tripping.”

Izzy nodded. “But it wasn’t a man-woman thing. It went deeper than that. He talked a bit about elitism—in terms of art—but I think it’s something that touches all aspects of his life. You know he never even asked me my name?”

“Sounds like a bona fide creep,” Kathy said.

“No,” Izzy said. She took a moment to think about it before she went on.

“It’s more as though so far as he’s concerned, he’s the only thing that’s of any importance; everything else is only considered in how it relates to him.”

“Lovely. You’ve just given me the classic description of a psychopath.”

“Or a child.”

“So do you think he’s dangerous?”

Izzy considered the fear she’d had to deal with the whole time she’d been in his studio. In retrospect, Rushkin’s attitude had presented her with more of an affront to her own sense of self-worth than any real sense of danger.

“No,” she said. “It’s just disappointing.”

Kathy gave her a rueful smile. “Well, I can see why you’d be disappointed, especially considering how much you love his work. That’s the trouble when you meet famous people sometimes—they’re all wrong. They turn out to be everything their work would never let you expect them to be.”

“But maybe we’re at fault as well,” Izzy said. “Because we’re the ones with the expectations.”

Kathy nodded. “Still, you don’t have to like him to learn from him, do you?”

“Well, it would sure make things easier.”

“Nothing worthwhile is easy,” Kathy said; then she grimaced. “Who thinks up those sayings, anyway?”

“Storytellers, like you.”

“You can’t blame me for that one.”

“But it is true,” Izzy said.

Kathy nodded. “So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I think I should be able to juggle my schedule so that all my classes are in the afternoon.”

“By this, do I take it you’re going to keep going to his studio?”

Izzy smiled. “Well, I’ve got to let him finish my portrait, don’t I? And he did say he’d start showing me things after it was done, so I should give it at least that long.”

“Good for you,” Kathy said.

VII

Newford, October 1973

“No, no, no!” Rushkin cried.

Izzy cringed as his gravelly voice boomed in the confines of the studio. “My god, you’re hopeless.”

She’d been coming to the upper floor of the coach house every morning for a month now, and while she herself had seen a marked improvement in the quality of her work, even in such a short space of time, she had yet to win one word of praise from her teacher. So far as Rushkin was concerned, she could do nothing right. She’d gotten worse, rather than better. She wasn’t even fit to clean a real artist’s brushes, or sweep up his studio—both of which were tasks she performed for him every day, as well as making him lunch, fetching his groceries and supplies and running any number of other errands.

“What can you possibly be thinking of?” he demanded. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t think.”

He had yet to ask her her name.

“I think a bug would be more able to follow instructions than you.”

“I ... I was trying to do what you told me ....” Her voice trailed off at the withering look he gave her.

“You were trying, were you? Well, if this is the best you can come up with when you’re trying then perhaps you should be considering some other career. Anything but the arts. Anything that doesn’t require you to have the half a brain you need to follow a simple set of instructions.”