Catie looked curiously into the pan. “What’re you making?”
“Eggs Benedict. Don’t distract me, this is for school.”
Catie blinked at that. He had finished his home arts course last year. “Which class?”
“Chemistry.” He stirred faster and dumped the egg off the plate into the pan. “Don’t bug me now, Catie, this is important!”
“Eggs Benedict? For chemistry?” But her brother didn’t say anything, just stopped stirring and watched the egg slip down to the bottom of the vortex he had created and, whirling there, begin to poach.
Catie shook her head, wondering what on earth they’d done to the tenth-grade chemistry syllabus since she’d taken it, and turned away to dump her bookbag on the table. As she turned she saw that her father was leaning his tall rangy self against one side of the kitchen doorway, scrubbing thoughtfully at his hands with a turp-soaked rag while he watched Hal’s performance. He was, as usual, dressed in work clothes — jeans that had already been old and tired early in the century and were now washed and faded nearly to white, and on top an ancient and faded T-shirt featuring a stripe-beaked toucan standing on stenciled letters that read GUINNESS. Also as usual, like his work, her father and his clothes were all colors of the rainbow, an abstract pseudo-Impressionist study in smears and smudges. Warren Murray had won much critical acclaim over his career for his “luminous and inventive use of color.” At the moment, though, the inventiveness seemed mostly to consist of getting it into his dark thinning hair in ways only nervously contemplated by other, lesser artists. Catie looked at her dad and shook her head, knowing what her mother was going to say about the laundry in a day or two, not to mention the carmine streak radiating jaggedly back from his parted hair on the right side.
“Daddy,” she said, “why don’t you at least change over to acrylics?”
He looked up at Catie and smiled slightly, a tired look on that long face of his, but a satisfied one. “They just don’t get the same color saturation as oils, honey, you know that….”
“Did you even sleep last night?”
“Eventually, yeah.” But she could see that he hadn’t actually stopped work, since he was only now cleaning up. “I crashed out on the studio couch. I knew I was almost done, and there wasn’t any point in cleaning up. Finished now, though.”
Catie went into the fridge for the ever-present pitcher of iced tea, and also brought out a bottle of Duvel for her dad. When he finished a piece of work, he routinely allowed himself a beer to celebrate. “You really should use electrons instead of paint,” she said, handing him the little wire-stoppered bottle and turning to get the specially shaped Duvel glass and a tumbler for her iced tea out of the cupboard over the sink. “It wouldn’t get all over the couch.”
“It’s all electrons when you come down to it,” her father said. “It’s just that some of them are wetter than others.” He started to push back the one lock of forehead hair that always got in his way, and then paused, looking at the blue and green paint that was still all over the back of that hand. He started scrubbing at it with the rag, then pushed the rag into his pocket and turned his attention to getting the Duvel bottle open.
“What were you doing?”
Hal, peering into the pot he had been stirring, now began to speak in some language that certainly wasn’t English, and from the sound of it didn’t involve concepts that Catie was eager to have translated. Apparently something had gone wrong in the pan. Her father raised his eyebrows and said, “Come on down and see. We can get out of Escoffier’s way.”
Catie followed him down the hall past the bedrooms and into the studio. Its door was open, and the smell of oil paint and linseed oil was still strong, though she could hear the air purifier working all-out to get rid of it. This time of day the north light that came in through the back windows and the skylight was at its best, the sun having swung around the other side of the house. In the middle of the room, well away from the Net access box and the implant chair, under the spots and within range of the digital rendering camera, a canvas stood on an easel blotched with every conceivable color of paint.
It was a piece of background work, one on which text would be superimposed during a virtcast, a swirl and rush of blues and greens…but there was more to it than that. “Dry yet?” Catie said.
“You kidding? We can put a colony on the moon, but we can’t develop a drying agent for oils that works faster than twenty-four hours….”
“This is the one for CNNSI?”
“Yeah, for the FINA swimming championships next year.” They stood back together and regarded the canvas. On first glance, an unsuspecting viewer might have called the work an abstract. But then, as your glance sank into the greens and blues and viridians of it, you began to perceive the flashes of hotter, brighter color half-submerged in the glassy hues, streaks and submerged ripples of red and gold, and you got a sense of splashing strength, shapes cutting the water or plunging into it, all going somewhere at speed. The effect was subtle, and yet the longer you looked at it, the more you saw swimmers and divers, moving — even in so static a medium.
“They’ll want me to animate it, of course,” her father said, and raised his eyebrows in an expression that said, clearly enough, The idiots! “Probably they’ll want it to ripple like water. If they had the brains God gave bluepoint oysters, they’d notice that if you just sit still and look at it for more than five seconds, your brain’ll begin producing that effect itself.” He gave Catie a wry sidelong look. “But getting even the art director to sit still that long, these days, is a challenge. Not to mention the virtual audience, who are going to have to view the work nearly completely covered with flashing crawling text, in a window that they may keep sized down to the size of a postage stamp in the virtual ‘field of view,’ half the time…so the art director is going to insist that there be something about it that moves, to remind the viewers that it’s there.” Her dad turned to look at the canvas again. “If I’m unlucky, the thing is going to wind up looking like an ad for toilet bowl cleaner by the time they’re through. If I’m lucky…” He sighed, and shrugged.
Catie stepped closer to look at the way her father had layered the paint over the flash of color that was meant to represent a swimmer. The palette knife had been involved, which was probably the scraping Hal had heard last night. “You’ll get some ‘print’ sales, though….”
“Oh, yeah,” her dad said, taking a long drink of the Duvel, and smiling slightly. “The collectors will notice it when it airs. And anyway, there are always people who suddenly notice a nice graphic for the first time and want a copy for their workspace. We’ll do okay from that.”
Catie looked at the work for a moment. There was more speed inherent in it than just that of swimmers and divers. “You were in a hurry on this one….” she said.
Her father started to push his hair back again, and stopped himself, laughed, and had another drink of beer. “Yes. It’s not due yet, but I want to get the stuff in before deadline…so I can get well ahead on the next commission, and have plenty of time to sort everything out and clean up in here before the builders arrive.” His expression showed that he was already dreading the incursion.