"I beg your pardon?"
"I said, It's too wet. I told Ned this morning he'd just make a mess of it, but off he went."
Kate, bewildered, followed his gaze for a clue, and then realized that Ned was the son, and he must be referring to a disagreement over the wetness of the soil. She waited for a long moment while they both watched the tractor pull (struggle?) up a rise and then disappear down the far side.
"Mr. Jameson…"
"Yes, I heard your question, Miss Martinelli. He wasn't prosecuted because there was no evidence, and nobody would squeal on him. They were all either in love with him or scared to death of him, and the sheriff couldn't get anything on him. Yes, I think he gave her drugs. I know that for the five months she was hanging around with him, from December to the end of April, she was not herself." He circled abruptly away from the window wall to the stored paintings and without hesitation pulled out one from near the right side, set it upright, and fished out another, smaller one from a few slots down. He set it to the left of the first and pushed his chair around next to Kate.
"The one on the left is dated October; the one on the right is from the following March, when she was still involved with him. She always dated her paintings when she finished them, on the back. Still does, I think."
The smaller painting was a deceptively simple study of a girl, almost a young woman, sitting with her back against a tree trunk, one knee up, a gaudy paperback in one hand. She was dressed in shorts and a white cotton shirt. Her right hand was absently fiddling with a lock of her light brown hair, and her eyes were both on the book and far away. Simple, unassuming, intimately personal, it was the work of a mature artist.
The larger one was still technically superb for the work of such a young painter. Its subject was another young woman, this one seated at a mirror, grimacing open-mouthed as she applied a wand of makeup to her eye. She wore a tight, sleeveless knit shirt, and a bra strap peeked from the edge of it. The colors of the palette were harder, the brush work slightly coarser, but it was a finished painting that many artists would have been proud of. The difference appeared when the two were put side by side.
The earlier painting was a gently humorous glimpse of a girl on the edge of womanhood, a look at the potential, the choices, the dreams that lay before her. Her back slumped with the unself-conscious grace of a child into the curve of the tree, and though her legs were brown and a Band-Aid could be glimpsed on one shin, their positioning was somehow deliberate, an experiment with seduction. The indication of as yet unnoticed breasts lay under the fabric of her grubby T-shirt. In different hands, adult ones, male ones, it would have edged into nostalgia, cuteness, even verged on pornography. This painting, however, was too utterly honest, and could only have been made by someone who was painting a self-portrait, though the face was not her own.
The larger one was the vision of another set of eyes altogether. Where the first girl was growing into her womanhood, this one was grabbing it by the handful. The nubs on her chest pushed against the too-snug shirt; the viewer suspected padding. Too much makeup, inexpertly applied, served not to enhance her womanliness but rather to underscore her denial of what she was, and her carefully disarranged hair brought to mind snarls and tangles rather than evoking a bedroom scene. It was graceless, hard, a nonetheless powerful statement of political and sexual rebellion. The first painting revealed the complexity of a life from within, a loving, accepting vision of an individual and the stage she was passing through. It was not particularly profound, but very human. The second painting called harsh judgment on a life from without, a sarcastic condemnation of someone who was trying to be something she was not. The first was confident, sure, and open; the second angry, pitiless, and completely without empathy for the human being depicted.
"I see what you mean," she said drily. "You'd say, then, that these two are representative of her state of mind at those two times?" She sounded like a prosecuting attorney, she thought, annoyed. Still, it was risky to place too much emphasis on two paintings, and after all, didn't every teenager go through that period of scornful rebellion? True, few had the ability to express the state so eloquently, but the talent and the temperament that had produced the March painting did not necessarily depend on chemicals to see the vision. Her own eyes were not sufficiently trained in either art or psychology for her to feel confident in judging the potential imbalance in that later painting, but the madness in it seemed more anger than psychosis. She wished Lee were here to advise her.
"Representative?" Jameson was saying thoughtfully. "You mean was all of her stuff like that," he pointed at the larger one, "during those months? I guess so. She didn't do all that much then—started a lot and then scraped them off the canvas, mostly. There's only that and a couple others."
"Any unfinished ones?"
"Vaun never left anything unfinished. If she didn't like it she'd scrape it off or throw the canvas into the incinerator, but once she was satisfied she'd put her name on it and never touch it again." He paused, thinking, and Kate held still, though she ached to sit on the bed.
"It was like her eyes changed during that time. Not how they looked, though that too, but it was like there was someone else behind them. She was always kind of strange, the way she'd look at you. Put a lot of people off, especially when she was small. You ever had your portrait painted, or drawn?"
"Once, yes."
"Well, you know how it feels to have someone staring at you, while you're sitting there frozen, and then they get up and look at your nose for a while, like it's some troublesome piece of machinery they're trying to figure out, and then they go back to the easel, and a few minutes later they're standing over you staring at your eye, but they're only seeing the shape and the color of it, and you're not there at all, not looking out of that eye, you're just buried underneath the cornea and the iris or whatever, wondering where to look and feeling like a damned fool?"
Kate burst out laughing, and went to sit on the edge of the bed. It was surprisingly firm.
"Vaunie was a bit like that all the time. You always had the feeling that at least part of her was studying your face and the wrinkles in your skin and the hair that came out of the end of your nose and the way your mouth moved when you made words, and it was very off-putting sometimes. I'm sure it was one of the reasons she had so few friends. But at times it was even more than that, and it would seem like she was still studying your face and your hands and the way you walked, and you'd feel self-conscious, and then you'd begin to get the feeling that she was also looking through your eyes right into your brain, that she was studying the way you looked on the inside too. Not physically, though she could do that too. I remember one night she sat with her sketchbook and drew the bones of my hand, and then she attached the muscles to the bones, and then the skin, and ended up with my hand, perfect—it was eerie. But I mean that she seemed to be memorizing the inner things that make a person work as well as the outer way he looks, and how the two come together, like the bones and the muscles and the skin. There were times, even when she was little, when you'd catch her studying you so seriously and you'd wonder if she knew about how a barn full of hay made you feel, or how it felt to be in bed with your wife, or how deep-down angry the thought of your wife's old beau made you. Not even if she knew, but how she could know those things. Like you were being taken apart, a little impersonally but with respect, and affection. Does that make any sense at all?" he asked somewhat desperately.
"Oh, yes," she said emphatically. He seemed encouraged, and went on.