She escaped to the studio and stayed there whether she was painting or not. Sometimes she just sat around reading books about Greek mythology. She was fascinated by the stories of gods and women, of rapes and transformations. Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan. Apollo turned Daphne into a tree. She was sketching out a whole series of paintings where the women turned around and began lustfully attacking the gods, who promptly ran away, terrified by the women's desire. The men, meanwhile, were turned into objects from the modern world of America, Kit-Kat bars and McDonald's golden arches. Apollo became the Lone Ranger, and Zeus became a 1970 s Corvette, his head sticking out in front, like a hood ornament. Her fellow artists thought this was a real critique.
Only one of them, Wade, thought it was bullshit. Short, dark, wiry, and intense, he was very hairy and always had five o'clock shadow, and he walked around the communal studio dropping art terms into casual conversation, contraposto, chiaroscuro. He was from New Jersey but said he was from New York. Supposedly his parents owned a gallery.
“Well, I mean, look, I like it, I do, I think it's clever, I certainly think it's very glib, very facile. I just think it's possibly a little bit too self-conscious, you know, the self-flagellating American artist?” This was what he said of Izabel's sketches, standing with one hand holding the other elbow, motioning with his thin, hairy fingers.
“Excuse me please, what ees self-flatulating?”
“Flagellating,” said Wade.
“Oh,” Izabel said, smiling apologetically. “Excusez-moi.”
In class discussion, Wade's remarks were articulate and penetrating and difficult for her to follow. Sometimes the professor, a short, rotund man with a plummy, not-quite-British accent like Cary Grant's, would abandon the pretense of speaking to the whole class and converse with Wade for a few minutes, both men serious and collegial, holding certain things to be understood between them. The classroom was dark, windowless, and hot, and Izabel frequently fell asleep during their discussions. Nevertheless she liked the dense, enclosed air and felt she continued to learn even when asleep, through osmosis, the art slides imprinting themselves on her brain, translucent and colored, like stained glass.
Wade drove around the ivy-walled campus in an old Toyota that had been crumpled in some accident and was missing all the windows on the left side. The whole left side of the car, in fact, was wrapped up in plastic and taped together. It looked like somebody's refrigerated leftovers. He asked Izabel to a movie and drove there talking the entire time, his thin fingers jerking and pointing. The art world was like the Roman Empire near the end, he told her, in that it had stopped responding to the world and responded only to itself, speaking its own decadent language. When he asked her if the situation was different in France, Izabel shrugged.
“I get it. I get it,” said Wade, grinning, and tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. “The true artist cannot be moved by these considerations. Okay, I see, the artist creates outside of the institutions that sponsor him — or her, as the case may be. Well, okay, fair enough. I mean, I understand there's a certain legitimacy to that point of view, but personally I think it's sort of naïve in this day and age. I mean after the eighties you can't really think the art world exists outside of a context of politics and commerce, can you? I don't think anybody can, not even you.”
“Not even me?” Izabel couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. Feeling out of her depth, she turned to look out through the cloudy plastic. “Don't people in America fix their cars?”
After the movie they drank coffee while Wade continued to talk. He held passionate views on many subjects, and Izabel was amazed by the sheer number of things he found to say. As he spoke he leaned very far over at the table and pressed his hand against his forehead, as if trying to contain all the furious activity inside his brain. After a while she became convinced that this was, in fact, what he was doing. Whenever he asked for her opinion, which wasn't often, she shrugged. The shrug, she decided, was her best weapon. She couldn't really follow all that he was saying, not because it was necessarily so difficult, but mostly because it was so rapid and exhausting. Her mind wandered. She looked at Wade's hand pressed up against his head and started thinking about one of the Barbie dolls she'd had as a child. Ballerina Barbie came with a crown sticking out of her blond hair like a tumorous silver growth. It looked all right when she was dancing, but when she was just hanging out it seemed ridiculous. Izabel had once tried to remove the crown with a pocket knife, but it wouldn't come off and eventually the doll was hospitalized in a shoebox. She never recovered. She had a hard life compared to regular Barbie and Ken, whom Iz kept together in another shoebox and who engaged constantly in passionate, violent lovemaking. They did nothing else, had no other hobbies or jobs. Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie. After the ballerina's operation, Ken and Barbie came to visit, sighing condolences, but then rapidly stole away to squirm and bash their plastic bodies against each other. They only ever had one thing on their plastic minds. While Wade spoke to Iz, she decided to work on a series of paintings in which Ken and Barbie reenacted the romances of Greek mythology. She would tell the class, I call thees one “Ken Appears to Barbie in the Form of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.”
That night it turned out that Wade, too, only had one thing on his plastic mind. Back at the studio, they looked at some of his canvases, which were enormous, geometric and monochromatic. Izabel had no idea what they were supposed to be about.
“It's a post-Rothko thing,” Wade said, and put his hand on her breast. His eyes were hazel, his expression as intense as a sideshow hypnotist's. Izabel couldn't help laughing, but to her surprise this didn't make him stop or even blush. He kept his hand there and started moving it around, and then she quit laughing, and they stayed together in a dark corner of the studio, behind a stack of stretched-out canvases. Oh, Ken. Oh, Barbie.
In class they were studying eroticism in art. Everyone was working on being mature about it. They were looking at fairy tales and oil paintings, woodcuts, each detail laced with meaning, the importance of flowers and the angles of wrists. Professor Edelman was isolating the elements of the erotic, cataloging them with his plummy voice and his red laser. He had a dry wit and parchment skin to match it, and Izabel wondered if he could even imagine the physical realities, as opposed to their artistic representations: herself and Wade each night in the studio after everyone else had left, the messiness of their fluids and sounds. The professor pointed in the dark at women facing sideways, huge breasts projecting outward like crescent moons, their nipples like rocks. These breasts weren't just breasts, they represented the fertility of the earth. This was art, where layers of meaning were contained beneath the obvious. It was its own language, just like Wade said. Zee language of love.
By October, Wade would not leave her alone. He stood behind her and talked to her while she painted. She was trying to find the exact fake-flesh color for Barbie's breasts. Barbie was trapped in a prison, locked inside, but the prison was the regular kitchen of a suburban American home, with a red-checkered tablecloth on the table. Ken's head was vaporously visible in the steam rising from her bowl of chicken noodle soup. Her breasts leaned toward him precipitously, and tiny chunks of chicken hung from the non-separated strands of his hair. Barbie was looking at him with a complex swirl of emotions — shock, confusion, a terrified desire — that Izabel was trying to convey within the limited range of expression afforded by the trademark Barbie smile.