Kathy pushed her little heap of torn paper aside and picked up a menu. She looked at it for a moment, then shut it again.
“I don’t have any appetite,” she said. “I can’t eat because my stomach’s all in knots, just thinking about what happened to Rochelle.”
Izzy closed her own menu. She tried to imagine what Rochelle had gone through last night, how she’d be feeling today, and felt sick herself. “Let’s just go home,” she said.
That night Izzy’s dreams were particularly bad. When she entered Rushkin’s studio, there were dead people strewn in among the ruin of her artwork, the subjects of her paintings given physical form and then cut and burned with the same methodical brutality that had been employed to destroy her art. She woke before dawn, weeping into her pillow, and couldn’t fall asleep again. By seven o’clock, she was dressed and out the door, heading for the studio, where everything was as unchanged as it had been when she left except that she could tell from the canvas on Rushkin’s easel that he’d continued working long after she’d left the coach house the previous thy.
Yesterday, he had barely sketched in his main subject; today, a completed painting was drying on the easel.
IX
Your friend is quite correct,” Rushkin said when Izzy brought up the idea of pure evil and pure good later in the morning. “And that is why you and I must proceed with such care in our endeavors. We are haunted by angels and monsters, Isabelle. We call them to us with our art—from the great beyond, perhaps, or from within ourselves, from some inner realm that we all share and visit only in our dreams and through our art, I’m not sure which. But they do exist. They can manifest.”
Izzy gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t act so serious about it. You’re starting to give me the creeps.”
“Good. For this is a serious business. Evil is on the ascendant in these times. What we create, what we bring forth, counteracts it, but we must be very careful. The very act of creating an angel opens the door for the monsters as well.”
“But we’re just ... just painting pictures.”
“Most of the time, yes,” Rushkin agreed. He laid down his brush and joined her where she was taking a break. She was lazing in the windowseat that over-looked the lane running by the coach house and pulled her legs up to her chest to give him room to sit. “But we aspire to more,” Rushkin added. “We aspire to great works in which the world may revel and find solace. Those works tap into that alchemical secret I wish to share with you, but the formula is so precise, one’s will and intent must be so focused, that without the vocabulary we are building up between us, I would never be able to teach it to you.”
Izzy studied him for a long moment, looking for some telltale sign that he was putting her on, but his features were absolutely serious.
“You ... you’re talking about more than making paintings,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
Rushkin placed a stubby finger against the center of her brow. “Finally you begin to open your eyes and actually see.”
“But—”
“Enough of this chatting,” Rushkin said. He stood up and smoothed his smock. “There is work to do.
I believe your friend Sprech has requested more paintings from you?”
“Yes, but—”
Rushkin continued to ignore her attempts to have him expand on the new scattering of hints and riddles that he’d left for her to consider. “The gallery has sold how many now?” he asked as he returned to his easel. “Fifteen?”
“Twelve, actually.”
Rushkin nodded his head thoughtfully. “I believe it’s time you had your own show there,” he said. He picked up his brush and regarded his new canvas for a long moment, then turned his gaze toward her, one brow cocked. “Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. But what about these angels? You can’t just leave me hanging now.”
“I can’t?”
He seemed amused more than threatening, but Izzy knew better than to press him on it. Their relationship had progressed to where she had more freedom to question him, but she also knew her limits.
“You should finish the Indian,” Rushkin said as Izzy swung down from the windowseat. “It could well be the centerpiece of your show.”
Izzy gave him a surprised look. “I thought you didn’t like the fact that I put him in jeans and a T-shirt.”
“Nor am I overly fond of the city backdrop you have given him, but I can’t deny that it’s a powerful piece.”
Izzy could feel herself redden, but she was pleased as much as embarrassed at his praise. She was proud of how the painting was turning out.
“But you won’t sell it,” Rushkin added.
“I won’t?” Then she remembered what he’d told her the first time she’d been choosing paintings for Albina’s gallery. “Because it’s got a soul?”
“Partly. But also because having one or two items marked ‘not for sale’ will make your audience that much more eager to buy the ones which are available.”
“Oh.”
It made a certain kind of sense, Izzy supposed, but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was more to it than that. Still, she didn’t press Rushkin on this either. He had already returned to his own work and she knew from experience that she’d heard all he had to say on the matter.
Taking down the still life that was on her easel, she replaced it with the unfinished canvas of the young Kickaha man. She’d seen him this past summer in Fitzhenry Park—or at least the idea of him. Following Rushkin’s rule of thumb, she had used the value studies and sketches she’d done that day as a basic blueprint for the piece. The details that made him an individual she’d drawn up from within herself so that the young man looking back at her bore no real resemblance to the original model except for how he was posed. Oddly enough, it made her subject appear more real to her than if she’d simply rendered the young man she’d seen in the park. She couldn’t explain why, any more than she could put into words what Rushkin was teaching her. All she knew was that there really did seem to be a connection between what she brought to life on her canvas and some mysterious place that was either deep inside her, familiar only through dreams and her art, or elsewhere entirely. Like Rushkin, she couldn’t say which, only that the connection existed and that through her art, she was allowed to tap into it.
She worked on the painting for the rest of the morning, then cleaned up and left as soon as she’d gotten Rushkin his lunch. She was taking half-classes at Butler U. this semester and she had to hurry to get to Dapple’s art-history class for two. Much as she appreciated what she was learning at the university, it was at times such as this, when her work in Rushkin’s studio was going particularly well, that she wished she hadn’t gotten the student loan to continue her schooling. Why go into debt this way, when she was already learning everything she felt she’d ever need from Rushkin?
“Look,” Kathy had told her. “You’re two-thirds of the way to getting your B.A. Do you really want to throw away all the work you’ve done over the past two years?”
“No,” she’d replied. “Of course not.”
But her time seemed at such a premium that she couldn’t help wondering some days if she wasn’t throwing away the hours she could be in the studio by taking these courses. What was she going to do with a degree anyway? Hang it on her wall? She’d much rather put a painting there. But she stuck with it all the same, if only to prove—to Kathy, and perhaps to her parents, if not herself—that she wasn’t a quitter.
When Dapple’s lecture was finally over, she was the first out the door, running across the common to where she’d agreed to meet Kathy. The bus they took to the hospital to visit Rochelle was crowded, standing-room only, but Izzy didn’t mind. Nor did she really register Kathy’s muttered complaints. Her head was full of the canvas waiting for her at Rushkin’s studio, planning brush strokes and the details of the painting’s background, until they reached the hospital. But then the harsh reality of what Rochelle had suffered cut through her daydreams.