VIII
The most awful thing’s happened,” Kathy said as she tossed her coat onto the empty seat and slid into the booth beside Izzy.
They were meeting for dinner in Perry’s Diner at the corner of Lee and Waterhouse, a favorite hangout for the neighborhood because not only was the food good, it was cheap. Izzy had been drawing the people at the bus stop outside the window while she waited for Kathy to arrive, practicing three-quarter profiles. She set her sketch pad aside at Kathy’s arrival.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you remember Rochelle—Peter’s girlfriend?”
Izzy nodded. “Sure. She’s promised to model for me when she gets some spare time. I think she has the most amazing bone structure.”
“Yeah, well, some other people weren’t quite so artistically inclined in their appreciation of her bod.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was beaten and raped, Izzy. Three guys pulled her into a car while she waiting for the number sixteen by Butler Green. They dumped her back there early this morning—just rolled her out of the car and left her lying on the pavement.”
“Oh my god. Poor Rochelle ....”
“It just makes me sick to think that there are people like that in the world,” Kathy said. She pulled a paper napkin from its holder and methodically began to shred it.
“Have the police been able to—”
“The police! Don’t make me laugh. What they put her through ...” Kathy looked away, out the window, but not before Izzy saw the tears brimming in her roommate’s eyes. Kathy cleared her throat.
“They might as well have been in on it for all the compassion they showed her. Jilly was at the hospital when they were questioning her and she was furious, so that should tell you something.”
Izzy nodded. Jilly simply didn’t get angry—or at least not so as Izzy had ever seen. She could be passionate, but it was as though she didn’t have a temper to lose in the first place.
“What about Jilly’s friend?” Izzy asked. “That guy she knows on the police force—Leonard, or Larry something. Couldn’t he do anything?”
“Lou. He’s going to look into it for her, but he’s only a sergeant and there’s nothing he can really do about the way the other cops treated Rochelle. It was like a big joke to them. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Lou told Jilly that if they ever do pick these guys up, their lawyer’s going to treat Rochelle even worse once they get into court. Jilly says Rochelle is devastated; she just wishes she’d never reported it in the first place.”
“But that’s so wrong.”
“No,” Kathy said. “It’s evil—that’s what it is.” The little heap of torn paper on the table in front of her grew as she started on another napkin. “What’s really scary is that this kind of thing’s going on all the time. I guess it doesn’t really hit home until it happens to someone you know.”
“It doesn’t always seem so real until you can put a face to the victim,” Izzy agreed.
“Pathetic, isn’t it? We’re letting these sick freaks take over the world, Izzy. Sometimes I think they’re already starting to outnumber us.” She let the last pieces of shredded napkin fall from her fingers. “Maybe Lovecraft was right.”
“Who?”
“He was this writer back in the thirties who used to write about these vast alien presences that haunt the edges of our world, trying to get back in. They exert this influence on us to make us act like shits and try to convince us to open these cosmic gates through which they can come back. The closer we get to their return, the worse the world gets.” She gave Izzy a sad look. “Sometimes I think they’re due back any day now.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Probably. But something’s gone wrong with the world, don’t you think? Every year we lose a little more ground to the bad guys. Five years ago, you didn’t have to worry about waiting for a bus at Butler Green. You could walk through most parts of the city, day or night, and not have to worry; now that’s unthinkable. We’ve loosed something evil in the world—maybe not you or me, personally, but if we don’t fight the problem, then we’re as much a part of it.”
“I don’t know if I can believe in evil existing of and by itself,” Izzy said. “It seems to be that everybody’s made up of a mix of good and bad and what sets us apart are the decisions we make as to which we’ll be.”
“So you can see something good in a child abuser? Or these guys that attacked Rochelle? You could forgive people like that?”
Izzy shook her head. “No. No, I couldn’t.”
“Me neither,” Kathy said glumly. “Rochelle’s only allowed visitors in the afternoons. You want to come see her with me tomorrow?”
“I’ve only got one class,” Izzy said. “I’ll be finished by four.”
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 painti
ngs 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.
The pretty girl who had agreed to pose for Izzy a few weeks ago didn’t seem to exist anymore.
Instead a stranger looked up from the bed when they came into Rochelle’s room. Her face was swollen and discolored with ugly bruises. She had a broken arm, cracked ribs, a fractured pelvis. But worst of all was the lost and hurt look in her eyes. Izzy remembered a sweet, trusting gaze and had the sick feeling now that it would never return.
After giving Rochelle the get-well card she’d made the night before, Izzy sat quietly on the end of the bed while Kathy ancliilly talked to Rochelle, trying to cheer her up. Izzy wanted to join in, but all she could do was sit there and look at the pitiable figure their friend cut, lying in that bed, swathed in bandages, her only sustenance coming to her through an IV tube. It made Izzy feel more determined than ever to continue her studies under Rushkin. If what he taught her could help counteract such terrible injustices as Rochelle had been forced to suffer, then Izzy would do everything in her power to learn what he had to show her. She didn’t fully understand Rushkin’s explanation as to how their art could be of any help. She wasn’t sure she even believed in the idea of angelic manifestations. But so far he’d made good on all of what he’d promised to teach her and she was willing to trust him that everything else would become clear in time.
Looking at Rochelle, she desperately wished it were all true. She wished she really could learn to call up angels. Joyful spirits, protective spirits, guardian spirits. She wished she already knew how, so that she could have prevented what had happened to Rochelle last night. Like Kathy’s growing plans for helping underprivileged children, Izzy was determined to do more than simply rail against the injustices of the world. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of the evils that plagued the world any more than Kathy could.
Like Rushkin’s alchemical secret, they could have their original source from outside a person—be it one’s environment or Kathy’s cosmic evils—or they could originate in the darkness that everyone carried inside them, that most people rightfully refused to allow into the light of day. It didn’t matter where they came from. All that mattered to Izzy was that they were real and confronting them was more than simply tilting at windmills.
X
Izzy finished The Spirit Is Strong the next day, but she had no time to admire her portrait of the Kickaha brave in his urban setting. She had to rush to another class that afternoon and then, when it was done, she spent what was left of the day at the university library, working on a paper that was due the next Monday. When she finally stepped outside, she blinked in surprise. She’d lost all track of time and night had fallen while she was cloistered away in the study cubicle with a stack of art-history books.
Her stomach rumbled and she realized that she’d not only missed lunch, but supper now as well. She felt so tired she could have lain down right there on the library steps and gone straight to sleep except she had just enough common sense left, in the fuzzy space between her ears that was passing for her mind at the moment, to know that she should get herself home first.
“You look beat,” a stranger’s voice said from behind her. “What’re you doing—burning the paintbrush at both ends?”
“You mean candle,” Izzy corrected absently as she turned to see who’d spoken.
A figure stood leaning in the shadows beside the stone lion statue on the left side of the library’s doors. She could see he wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans, and his long hair was dark, but his face was just a daub of shadowed skin color in the bad light and she couldn’t make out his features. There was enough of a nip in the air that she found herself wondering how he could stand being outside in only those short sleeves.
“But you’re an artist,” he said, “so I thought paintbrush would be more appropriate.”
“Do I know you?” Izzy asked. There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“Does it matter?”
Izzy had been about to take a step closer to get a better look at him, but she paused as the memory of Rochelle’s bruised features rose in her mind. Oh shit, she thought, taking a quick look around herself, but they were alone on the library steps. Through the leaded panes of the doors, she could see people moving around inside the building, but she knew they were too far away to do her any good if she had to yell for help.
She wanted to turn and run, but the idea of crossing the dark common with this guy chasing her held no appeal whatsoever. But she couldn’t get by him to go back inside either. All he had to do was grab her and drag her away into the bushes and nobody’d know. Nobody’d know at all.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“I’m not here to hurt you,” the figure in the shadows told her. “Then what do you want from me?”
“Nothing, really. I was just making conversation. Go ahead and leave. I won’t stop you.”
Right, Izzy thought. I’ll just walk off onto the common and make it easy for you. Then something else struck her.
“How’d you know I’m an artist?” she asked.
“You’ve got paint under your nails and you were reading up on art history.”
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