Shirelle had moved down the hall and was now rooming with a girl named Kelly. When Izabel went back to the dorm, to change clothes, she sometimes saw them in Kelly's room, the door open, watching movies under a poster of a Georgia O'Keeffe flower, eating microwave popcorn and giggling. Wade was following her back to the room by now. Professor Edelman had come to regard them as a couple and had given them to understand that he approved. A favored pair, they'd been over to his house for dinner and called him by his first name, Marius. After class, they'd routinely have coffee or a drink in his office, the two of them slouching in front of his desk he sat behind, surrounded by shelves of papers and books and incunabula, pictures tacked up everywhere, a scholarly collage. He and Wade would discuss personalities of the art world while she stared at a pornographic Mesopotamian piece directly behind Marius's head. It had dawned on her that Wade and Marius were the same person, just a few years apart: Wade was what Marius had been as a young man, and Marius was what Wade would become. In either case they were equivalent; it was a transitive property of men. She could see Wade at forty and at sixty, still intense and thin and profusely hairy, though his hair would turn salt-and-peppery and start sprouting out of his nose; he would still gesture with thin fingers in support of his many points.
While she painted, Wade would put his hands on her shoulders, or his arms would encircle her from behind. His body temperature was always high, as if to match his mental energy. He was in love with Izabel, he said, and he brought her gifts, including paints, books, cups of coffee. She didn't know when he found the time to paint, but his canvases grew daily, a huge seven-by-ten wall of color. Her paintings looked like watercolors by comparison, little washed-out sagas of women and men. While she painted, he whispered a stream of plans for their future together and memories of their past, to him already richly detailed. Their relationship was like a painting he was building on canvas, blocking it out section by section, adding layers and color; it had its own internal references and symbols, flowers and the angles of wrists, an iconography of past and future, things that stood for love.
On the phone Iz's mother wanted to know when she was coming home, her voice plaintive and distant. She was preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving, and making a special dressing. In the background Iz's father growled about the rising costs of college tuition. Iz imagined the clean, silent house, where all her old toys lay trapped in liquor boxes stored in the basement, Ken and Barbie forever silent and entwined, like Baucus and Philemon, who grew into a tree. Ken and Barbie could never become a tree, except maybe a plastic one, and perhaps this could be another painting in the series: Ken and Barbie Grow Together into a Fake Potted Plant.
Iz's mother said, “Your father wants to know if you're taking any accounting classes.”
“Mom, I'm not taking accounting. I'm taking English, math, history, and Visions of the Erotic in Art. Do you remember me, Izzy, I'm an art major? Does he? Does he even remember who I am?”
Her mother sighed into the receiver, low and loose, a sound like flatulence: self-flatulating. Her father's voice rumbled darkly in the background. He had been like this all her life, a shadowy, angry figure, rarely present, issuing proxy commands, whose wrath must be avoided at all costs.
“Your father,” translated her mother, “wants me to tell you that you should take economics or computer science. Otherwise he won't pay for next semester. It's a practical thing, Izzy. It's about your future.”
Iz said, “Well, since this is my last semester of school, I might as well stay here for Thanksgiving. I guess I'd better get the most of it while I can.”
Her mother sighed again and said, “Your father and I only want the best for you.”
In France we do not celebrate Thanksgiving, said Izabel. Please, what ees sweet potato pie? Out of loyalty to her and her foreignness—“An exile in your own country,” he said, “but aren't artists always exiles?”—Wade decided to stay on campus, too. The college saved on heating costs over the long weekend and the two of them shuffled morosely around the studio in winter coats, breathing clouds of smoke. Feeling like an orphan, Izabel caught cold and began to sniffle and cough. She did not paint. The canvas around Ken and Barbie was murky and indistinct, featureless and gloomy, like the November weather. This, she decided, was the landscape of the suburbs, so she kept it that way. Wade brought her chicken noodle soup and covered her with blankets on the mattress they kept in the corner.
Remote with fever, Izabel slept. She slipped into a dream that felt like church, floating under stained-glass lights; men murmured, first a drone and then a hum. Wade was on top of her, a solid, hairy weight, and she couldn't breathe. This was not a dream. She pushed him away, but this didn't stop him, any more than her laughter had stopped him the first time. Oh, Izabel. To him it was ecstasy, it was a frenzy of joining. She didn't need to see his face to know this. He was unstoppable as Zeus, but didn't need any disguise. The pain was the color red, and the sheets were red, and the sounds he was making were also red. The world was a canvas splotched with red, and she was the paint; she thinned and spread.
When she woke up, Wade was gone. She sat up and then, pain shooting, lay down again.
Wade came back and lay beside her, stroking her hair. “Are you all right? Do you feel okay?”
“Oui, ça va.”
“Do you want any more soup?” The hair on his chin hurt her skin.
He held her in his arms. He still did not stop talking; he was incapable of silence. She closed her eyes and dreamt of men: young gods who spoke little, yet eloquently, in heavily accented English. A French trapeze artist, wearing tights, beckoned to her. Come away with me, Isabelle. I beg it of you. They would join le cirque and perform gravity-defying feats together, catching each other without fail midair. Or perhaps she'd had enough of French, and instead would meet a German, a nobleman, and they would leave America together, travel to the Old Country, and live in the Black Forest, eating Black Forest cake. Dreaming again, she was now her own mother, walking through a church that was also a shopping mall but still beautiful, like a shopping mall in France or ancient Greece. In its high, domed ceilings, angels hung from the rafters singing songs of purchase, sweet hymns of sales reductions on ladies' wear and pantyhose, the sun shafting through the skylights down to the foodcourt and the altar. It was so beautiful, so warm and light, that she wanted to get closer, but she couldn't figure out how to. She couldn't move at all. She was in a world so beautiful that it didn't require signs or maps. All she needed was a red dot with an arrow labeled You are here. The angels swooped down toward her, singing You are here, holding red sheets open between them like a banner. Where is here? she asked, but the angels wouldn't stop to answer the question. They flew off, these pale, singing cherubs, toward a shoe store where everything was 40 % Off.
After Thanksgiving, Izabel was sick for a long time. She moved back into her dorm room and stayed in her bed, sickness a haven she didn't want to leave. Shirelle came back to take care of her, clucking in a gratified, motherly way, and making her tea with molasses, which in Shirelle's family counted as a special treat. As Izabel moved in and out of fever, Shirelle sent Wade away every time he came to the door. Izabel had papers and tests, but did none of them, Shirelle writing notes for her and forging doctors' signatures. The college granted her extensions on everything: everything, they said, could wait. They were so kind that Izabel didn't have the heart to tell them she wouldn't be back. She was going to freeze in her bed and waste away like Echo, disappearing into sound. Shirelle wouldn't hear of this and brought her Rocky Road ice cream to eat in bed. Wade left a twenty-five-page letter in a manila envelope outside her door; it looked like a term paper, double-spaced, in a ten-point font, complete with footnotes and an index of lists. In it various issues of importance to their relationship were exhaustively explained, all the scholarly evidence marshaled in favor of Wade's argument. Dear Izabel, I have been doing a lot of thinking and have come to certain conclusions, which are elaborated in the following pages. We can be friends, can't we? We have so much in common. For example … he wrote, and then gave five pages of examples. He reproduced entire conversations. In conclusion, even if you don't love me anymore, we can be friends. Please be my friend. Be my best friend.