Mr. Velton, the painting instructor, sent him out with a sketchbook, and when he came back with simple drawings of tombstones in the cemetery, sent him away again. It was clear enough to Gene what Mr. Velton wanted: he wanted landscapes crowded with trees, stones, houses, a sky full of clouds; but when Gene looked at landscapes he saw only a meaningless jumble. At last, in despair, he sketched a pile of junk on a vacant lot: barrel hoops, old tires, tin cans. Velton looked at this with pleased surprise, and pointed out various dynamic relationships of which Gene had been unaware.
In his frustration he dropped the oil painting class and signed up for Madame Porgorny's china painting class on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. The other students, gray-haired women in smocks, were already painting on dishes, but Madame Porgorny gave him glazed tiles to practice on: first to learn the strokes, and then to draw simple patterns of stems and leaves. There was something wrong with her hands; the knuckles and fingers were swollen, and she could not straighten them entirely, but it never seemed to interfere with her painting.
When she came to Gene's table, she said, "No, it is not good. See here, the lines are broken, that is ugly. In nature are no broken lines. Every line must be one line, not three." She took his brush from him and fitted it into a leather strap she was wearing on her hand, so that the brush stood out beyond her swollen knuckles. She took a blank tile, dipped the brush, and drew in one motion a long delicate curve that became a curled leaf; then another. "Do you see now?"
"Yes, but why are you doing it with that?"
She looked at him. "Sometimes my fingers will not hold the brush," she said. "It does not matter. Painting is with the wrist, so, not with the fingers. Now make for me a yellow flower like this one." She showed him a design in the book.
He dipped a brush in yellow and painstakingly drew each of the five petals; he mixed a little white with the yellow and tipped each petal, then a little orange and darkened their stems. Madame Porgorny came back while he was finishing.
"No, again it is wrong. Look here." She sat beside him in a cloud of perfume. She took his brush, fitted it into the strap of her hand, dipped up paint, and with one stroke made a perfect petal, then another, and another, until there were five. "Now do you see?"
"I'll never do that," Gene said.
"You can learn if you wish, but why should you? This is not what you want. Tell me, why did you take this class?"
"It was the figure drawing. I can't do it big the way Miss Williams wants me to."
"And so you thought you would do china painting because it is small? But you see it is the same. Big, small, it does not matter, you must learn to use wrist, not fingers. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Figure drawing you must have, if you want to be artist. I will speak to Miss Williams."
"Let's try something different," Miss Williams said to him the next day. She took the paper off his easel and handed him another sheet. It was torn off a roll like the other, but it was white and faintly glossy. When he had pinned it up, she gave him a cup of black paint and a soft round brush.
Almost from the first, he discovered a new freedom with the brush and paint. He was not tempted to use the brush like a pen; he could stand away from the easel and let the brush move by itself. His drawings were no longer cramped and tight; they were not so accurately detailed, either, but he liked them better because there was a sense of volume in them. When he was interested in something, the hands, for instance, he allowed himself to make them bigger, out of proportion, and yet they seemed right. "Now that's a lot better," said Miss Williams, and he was filled with a gratitude and love that choked him.
Every other month he measured himself against the wall with a book, not the way most people do, balancing the book on the top of the head, but in the proper way, using the book as a carpenter's square pressed firmly against the head and the wall. He marked his height each time, and dated the marks. Each one was a little more than three-eighths of an inch higher than the last; he was growing at the rate of two and a half inches a year.
He was sprouting hair in unexpected places, and he discovered that he had to wash oftener than before, especially his armpits, or he would smell. One morning when he lay naked on his bed after a shower, his penis stiffened, rose, and began twitching in a slow rhythm. He watched this phenomenon with interest until it stopped. The third or fourth time it happened, a few weeks later, he touched his penis curiously, feeling how the thin skin slid up and down as if it were not attached at all. After a few moments, to his utter astonishment, his penis stiffened convulsively and a spurt of milky fluid came out. The pleasure he felt at the same moment was so intense that he knew instinctively it must be wrong.
He bought a book about sex and discovered that masturbation, or "self-abuse," would weaken your system or even drive you insane; but he kept on doing it anyhow.
One afternoon Madame Porgorny stopped him in the hall. "You are thin," she said critically, holding him at arm's length. "You do not eat enough. Come to my house for dinner, tomorrow at eight o'clock." She took a pad from the pocket of her smock, scrawled an address.
Gene was alarmed .by this invitation but dared not refuse. After school the next day, he washed and put on clean clothes. The address she had given him was an apartment house on Nob Hill. By the time he got there he was already very hungry; ordinarily he would have eaten dinner an hour ago. In the lobby he found her name ornately lettered on a card, with another name under it:
Mine. Evgenia Porgorny Mlle. Vasilisa Tershchova
Above, the door was opened by a heavy gray-haired woman in an apron; her face was very wide, her eyes narrow and shrewd. She smiled when she saw him. "Come in." Her accent was even thicker than Madame Porgorny's.
She urged him through a narrow hall cluttered with dark furniture into a living room where Madame Porgorny sat in a blue dress, her hair done up tidily for once. "Ah, Stephen," she said. "Sit down. This is Vasilisa, she does not speak English very well."
"No English," the woman agreed, with a broad smile. "Welcome. Sit down."
"I'm glad to know you," Gene said.
"Welcome," she repeated. "Good." She patted him once on the shoulder, then turned and left the room.
"You are hungry?" Madame Porgorny demanded.
"Yes, a little."
"Good. Dinner will be very soon. Do you like our apartment?"
Gene looked around him politely. All the furniture was heavy, dark, and old; there were many pictures in gold frames, lamps with tasseled shades, china figurines. "It's very nice. Have you lived here long?"
"Sixteen years. We came from Paris in nineteen thirty-nine. Now any longer you could not find such an apartment." She picked up a fluted glass and drank the last few drops of something pale as water, then called through the doorway. The other woman's voice answered.
"Come," said Madame Porgorny, "now you will see how Russians eat." She led him into a dining room where a table was set for three. Vasilisa came in carrying a soup tureen; when she lifted the domed cover, fragrant steam came out. She ladled the soup into their bowls; it was dark red, almost the color of blood, with things floating in it.