She was a lean, tall, gray-haired woman, within a year or two of his age, whose appearance and gentleness reminded him of Phoebe. Her name was Millicent Kramer, and she was the best of his students by far and, coincidentally, the least messy. She alone, in what he charitably called "Advanced Painting," managed to finish each class without having dripped paint all over her running shoes. He never heard her say, as others did, "I can't get the paint to do what I want it to do," or "I can picture it in my mind but I can't seem to get it on the canvas," nor did he ever have to tell her, "Don't be intimidated, don't hold back." He tried to be generous to them all, even the hopeless ones, usually those very ones who came in and said right off, "I had a great day – I feel inspired today." When finally he'd heard enough of that, he repeated to them something he vaguely remembered Chuck Close's having said in an interview: amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work. He didn't start them with drawing, because barely a one of them was able to draw, and a figure would have set up all sorts of problems of proportion and scale, so instead, after they'd finished a couple of sessions going over the rudiments (how to lay their paints out and arrange their palettes, and so on) and familiarizing themselves with the medium itself, he set up a still life on a table – a vase, some flowers, a piece of fruit, a teacup – and encouraged them to use it as a reference point. He told them to be creative in order to try to get them to loosen up and use their whole arm and paint, if possible, without fear. He told them they didn't have to worry about what the arrangement actually looked like: "Interpret it," he told them, "this is a creative act." Unfortunately, saying that sometimes led to his having to tell someone, "You know, maybe you shouldn't make the vase six times larger than the teacup." "But you told me I should interpret it" was invariably the reply, to which, as kindly as he could, he in turn replied, "I didn't want that much interpretation." The art-class misery he least wished to deal with was their painting from imagination; yet because they were very enthusiastic about "creativity" and the idea of letting yourself go, those remained the common themes from one session to the next. Sometimes the worst occurred and a student said, "I don't want to do flowers or fruit, I want to do abstraction like you do." Since he knew there was no way to discuss what a beginner is doing when he does what he calls an abstraction, he told the student, "Fine – why don't you just do whatever you like," and when he walked around the studio, dutifully giving tips, he would find, as expected, that after looking at an attempt at an abstract painting, he had nothing to say except "Keep working." He tried to link painting to play rather than to art by quoting Picasso to them, something along the lines of their having to regain the child in order to paint like a grownup. Mainly what he did was to replicate what he'd heard as a kid when he started taking classes and his teachers were telling him the same things.
He was only called upon to be at all specific when he stood beside Millicent and saw what she could do and how fast she got better. He could sense right off that she had a knack that was innate and that far exceeded what little gift some of the others began to demonstrate as the weeks went by. It was never a question with her of combining the red and the blue right off the palette but rather of modifying the mixture with a little black or with just a bit of the blue so that the colors were interestingly harmonious, and her paintings had coherence instead of falling apart everywhere, which was what he confronted much of the time when he went from easel to easel and, for lack of anything else he could think of, heard himself saying, "That's coming along well." Millicent did need to be reminded "Don't overwork it," but otherwise nothing he suggested was wasted on her and she would look for the slightest shade of meaning in whatever he told her. Her way of painting seemed to arise directly from her instincts, and if her painting didn't look like anyone else's in the class, it wasn't solely because of stylistic distinction but because of the way she felt and perceived things. Others varied in their neediness; though the class was largely full of good will, some still resented it when they needed help at all, and even inadvertent criticism could make one of the men, a former CEO of a manufacturing company, frighteningly touchy. But never Millicent: she would have been the teacher's most rewarding pupil in anyone's amateur painting class.
Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it's the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it's what's inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.
"Don't you have some medication you can take?" he asked her.
"I took it," she said. "I can't take any more. It doesn't help but for a few hours anyway. Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse. I'm sorry I'm in such a state. I apologize for this."
Near her head on the bed was a back brace she'd removed in order to lie down. It consisted of a white plastic shell that fit across the lower spine and attached to a web of elasticized cloth and Velcro straps that fastened snugly over the stomach an oblong piece of felt-lined canvas. Though she remained in her white painting smock, she had removed the brace and tried to push it out of sight under a pillow when he opened the door and walked in, which was why it was up by her head and impossible not to be continually mindful of while they talked. It was only a standard back brace, worn under the outer clothing, whose plastic posterior section was no more than eight or nine inches high, and yet it spoke to him of the perpetual nearness in their affluent retirement village of illness and death.
"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked her.
He could see by looking into her eyes how difficult the pain was to bear. "Yes," she said weakly, "yes, please."
Her husband, Gerald Kramer, had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a county weekly, the leading local paper, that did not shy away from exposing corruption in municipal government up and down the shore. He remembered Kramer, who'd grown up a slum kid in nearby Neptune, as a compact, bald, opinionated man who walked with considerable swagger, played aggressive, ungainly tennis, owned a little Cessna, and ran a discussion group once a week on current events – the most popular evening event on the Starfish Beach calendar along with the screenings of old movies sponsored by the film society – until he was felled by brain cancer and was to be seen being pushed around the village streets in a wheelchair by his wife. Even in retirement he'd continued to have the air of an omnipotent being dedicated all his life to an important mission, but in those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheelchair – a man no longer able to smash a tennis ball, to sail a boat, to fly a plane, let alone to edit a page of the Monmouth County Bugle – could answer to his name. One of his dashing eccentricities was, for no special reason, to dress up from time to time in his tuxedo to partake of the veal scaloppine at the village restaurant with his wife of fifty-odd years. "Where the hell else am I going to wear it?" was the gruffly engaging explanation that went out to one and all – he could sometimes woo people with an unexpected charm. After the surgery, however, his wife had to sit beside him and wait for him to crookedly open his mouth and then feed him gingerly, the swaggering husband, the roughneck gallant, with a spoon. Many people knew Kramer and admired him and out on the street wanted to say hello and ask after his health, but often his wife had to shake her head to warn them away when he was in the depths of his despondency – the vitriolic despondency of one once assertively in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute.