Nick rolled his eyes and slipped his hands beneath the straps of Indy’s backpack, grazing her shoulders through her hoodie.
“Don’t be a hero,” he said, taking the bag. “And be careful; you seem a little shaky on your legs today.” Nick gestured with a nod toward Indy as he put her backpack on the table next to her stuff.
“I will.” She blushed at his mention of their earlier run-in, unzipping her knapsack as she looked over at the lockers, which lined the glass wall facing her bunk. Indy paused before starting to unload all of her stuff.
There was an awkwardly long silence. Not sure what to say, Indigo resisted the urge to mention the e-mail he’d sent her. She knew it wasn’t the time to talk about it—but she wanted to badly.
“Aren’t you exhausted from the trip? I always feel like the first day of camp is the longest.” Nick broke the silence, taking his place back in front of the easel. It was the second time he’d saved her from humiliation that night.
“I just wanted to get a head start on settling in, before everything gets crazy.”
“I like that about you. Indigo Hamlisch, Serious Artist. You might be the only one at the camp, you know.”
“Really?”
“Nah. Everybody here is serious to a fault.” Nick laughed. “But at least from your work, you get the sense that you’re into what you do—for you. You’re not just following your parents’ orders, or drumming up whatever requisite ‘A for effort’ kind of commitment that would get you in to a good college one day for extracurriculars. You’re like Supergirl or something. Plus, you’re talented as fuck.”
Indigo smiled, feeling flattered that Nick would swear around her liberally. It meant he regarded her as a peer, not as a camper—or a mentee, even. “Thanks.” She tried to be confident for once instead of self-deprecating. “Do you mind if I take this big locker?”
“Help yourself.” Nick rinsed his brushes in coffee cans full of Turpenoid while Indy stacked pads and boxes of charcoals, pencils, pastels, and colored pencils in the roomiest locker of the studio.
“Is that Liz Taylor?” Nick looked over at one of the many bulging sketchbooks Indigo was transferring from the pile on the table to the locker next to the sink. Indeed, she had duct-taped a vintage black-and-white photo of Elizabeth Taylor, busting out of a halter top and looking sultry and freckled in some 1960s pinup, onto the cover of the sketchbook she used for life drawing. She had books she kept for research and inspiration, ones she kept for writing, some she kept for collage work, and some for drafting ideas for three-dimensional projects. But this one was full of drawings of people she saw on the subway, in the park, and occasionally, naked, when she went down to Prince Street in SoHo for evenings of life-drawing classes that featured live models and jazz.
Indy nodded. “I found that photo in an old Life magazine I bought from a street vendor in the Village.”
“She was smokin’ hot,” Nick said as he put a brush up to his canvas and marked it with intention. “One of my all-time favorites. But it wasn’t until, like, Cleopatra and Butterfield 8, when she, you know, started looking like that.” He ran a hand through his shiny dark hair and it fell down, a piece at time. Indigo tried not to stare. “I always had a huge crush on her. Liz Taylor, Jane Russell, Diana Rigg. Shall we say, statuesque brunettes. That’s my type.”
Was that a come-on? Indy was a busty brunette and had the style of all those sixties bombshells, at least in her mind. Surely this was about her, wasn’t it?
“I hate Audrey Hepburn,” she heard herself say.
Nick laughed out loud.
“Really? Girls your age generally go bananas for her whole Breakfast at Tiffany’s shtick. But I know what you mean, she was never really my thing. Too skinny, too cold. And that accent always seemed forced. I mean, I know she was English, but it always just seemed sort of overly stylized, hearing her talk.…”
“Affected,” Indigo added.
“Yeah,” Nick said. Then he went back to work.
Indigo decided to set up an easel perpendicular to his and work on what would soon be a painted version of one of the still lifes from her sketchbook—a bowl of rotted fruit on her kitchen table from home, surrounded by boxes of Duracell batteries, Mop & Glo, Sudafed, and Twinkies. It would be a cool statement about the effects of meth on poor white American bodies. She was excited to add the rich colors of the decaying fruit.
Indy adjusted the legs of the easel to match her height and put a prestretched canvas on the bottom clamp. As she taped her reference photos to the top of the easel, she peeked over at Nick, who had stopped working on his painting to stand back and look at it. She went around to join him and examined his piece, too.
It was a five-by-ten-foot landscape of a postapocalyptic desert scene. Miles of soot and sand were littered with cow skulls and machine-gun shells under a green, ominous sky. It was dark stuff they stood before, but Indigo could tell that once it was finished, Nick’s piece was going to be really powerful. Nick shook his head as he stared at what he’d made. He was a perfectionist, too.
“That’s looking pretty cool,” Indy said, cringing as she heard the words escape her mouth. “Pretty cool”? Ugh. It would have sounded so much smarter to draw a comparison to the stark, violent paintings of Francis Bacon. Nick probably would have been thrilled at the reference to one of his idols.
“Yeah, I dunno,” Nick said. He didn’t look over at her. “I’m a little concerned about the composition.”
“Do you think it needs one more big thing, like, off to the side?” Indy asked, thinking that’s what she would have done to the painting. Not that this was anything even close to a piece Indy had ever produced.
“Maybe. I could also just need a break from it.”
“Sure.”
Indigo was thrilled at having just had an artist-to-artist conversation with the guy she’d spent half her life fantasizing about. She tried to play it cool, like she was totally used to giving grown men she idolized casual advice about their work. She started sketching on her canvas just to look busy—like she was just doing her own thing, not anxiously waiting for Nick to respond. Or for him to ask her what she thought of his other paintings. Or to come over to her and spin her around with his big hands, holding her narrow shoulders and bringing her close, then touching his lips to her ropy, pale neck before he’d finally kiss her, in exquisite relief.
She just stood there and sketched her still life as Nick stepped away from his canvas entirely and washed his hands in the sink. Finally, he made his way over to the crappy Panasonic boom box in the corner of the painting studio. Indy heard the sound of a cassette ejecting from the outdated contraption, then Nick popping in another tape. It was hilarious, this antique technology. Indigo had never even seen a cassette tape until she came to Silver Springs her first year and listened to a tinny recording of The Violent Femmes while she learned to throw pots on the wheel. And though Lillian kept trying to install iPod docks in all of the studios, the art students refused. There was just something superior about the nostalgia of cassette decks.
Nick hit a button, and Indy instantly recognized the first track of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People from its opening guitar plucking notes. As Michael Stipe’s deep voice filled the studio with rickety earnestness, Indy felt herself become engrossed in what she was doing.
She drew and drew, until her piece started to resemble something she was excited about. It always amazed her how things took shape. Most of the time it happened in a totally unexpected way. Or just with time.
She went over to her scuffed taupe metal locker and removed her paints, a palette knife, and a rubber-banded cluster of her favorite brushes. She started setting up for the next step of the process, taking pleasure in keeping everything neat and organized while she did.
She squeezed the new tubes of paint Yoshiko had charged to her AmEx last week, delighting in how it felt to dent the plumpness of the aluminum tubes with her thumb. Dots of color went onto her waxed-paper palette pad; the first
leaf since she’d unwrapped it moments before, like a Christmas present. She dumped her brushes next to the pad on the counter surface and walked over to the sinks to fill an old coffee can with Turpenoid.
There she paused to notice Nick, who’d already painted over the sky of his landscape in bold strokes of crimson red, negating all of the progress he’d made on that part of his spacescape. At first she was sad to see what he’d done, but then she shrugged it off as an artist’s choice. They were peers now, and she knew as well as Nick that when you were making art, the only important person to please was yourself.
She also couldn’t help but think about herself decked out in lipstick that color, reclining on some kind of comfy, secondhand couch in the apartment in Brooklyn she’d one day share with him. She would be dressed up in vintage-looking lingerie like Liz Taylor’s and waiting for her future husband to finish up his work so they could make out.
As she mixed her colors, side one of the tape ran out, causing the button to pop up on its own. She wordlessly turned the cassette over, hit play, and the sounds of side two kept Indy and Nick company. This is it, she thought. This is what I am meant to do.
6
Indy could barely keep her eyes open at breakfast the next morning.
“Remind me one more time why campers aren’t allowed to have coffee?” Puja, who sat next to Indigo in the dining hall, moaned out loud to nobody in particular.
“I have no idea,” Yvonne said, appearing from nowhere to sit with them. She slid her tray between theirs. “But I don’t know how I’m supposed to stay regular without my morning Americano.” She took a bite of croissant. “Too much information?”
Indy forced a smile at Yvonne, who meant well but was just way too loud at this hour. She sat and stared at her poached egg. It lay on the corner of her plate next to the financier she’d grabbed when the silver pastry platter was passed around her table. She basically had some version of a hangover.
Last night felt so good. She’d finally been able to get back into a flow of working that came naturally. It wasn’t so easy to get that coordination right; the process of brain to eye to brain to hand to canvas sometimes felt like a horrible, complicated dance routine.
But last night in the studio with Nick, Indigo wasn’t distracted or stuck or stubborn or uninspired or hard on herself. The still life she’d drawn, then painted, completely exceeded her own expectations. She just made something beautiful as easily as she breathed air.
Indigo tried not to credit her surge of productivity to Nick’s presence, but she couldn’t help it. He had some kind of magical influence on her creative brain. Around him, even her mood was calmer, more light.
In a way, Indigo was happy to be half asleep right now. It was like she was extending the dream state of last night—blissfully buzzing with good ideas alongside the man she wanted to lose her virginity to, and marry, and live with, and make babies with, and all of it, right now, forever and ever, amen. She knew her fantasies could get bananas, but sometimes she liked feeling carried away.
“Indigo!”
“Huh?” Indy snapped out of her daydream.
“Good morning, sunshine!” Lucy grinned, decked out in a fresh counselor’s shirt and jean shorts and sporting a toothpaste smile.
“Sorry, not entirely awake yet.” Indy rubbed her eyes carefully. She didn’t want to smudge the coat of dark brown mascara she decided to wear today. You know, just in case she ran into somebody in particular.
Lucy grabbed a chair and sat down next to her. “Did you party last night in the bunk?” Indy scootched her chair over. She could feel the side of her own thigh, exposed in a mini jean skirt, make contact with Yvonne’s ample hips.
“Nah, I actually got started in the studio. Stayed up way too late working on this still life.”
“Seriously? I’m so jealous of your motivation, Hamlisch,” Lucy said, twisting up her perfect blond waves into a makeshift bun, then stabbing a pen through them to hold her hair in place. “So you spent the whole rest of the night by yourself?”
“Well, not exactly. There were…others.” No way was Indigo going to tell Lucy in front of the whole table that she’d been in the studio alone all night with Nick. She smiled to herself just thinking about that notion, and how intimate it sounded.
Lucy took a generous sip of Indy’s orange juice. “Hey, listen—I’m on break at eleven thirty. Want to hang then?”
“Sure,” Indy said, still a little paranoid that Lucy was arranging some kind of special talk so she could tell her about Nick taking her virginity.
“Attention, campers!” Lillian’s goofy, hearty voice boomed over the P.A. system. “After breakfast, please come to the patio of the Main House to receive your adviser assignments. And any adjustments to your final schedules should be made by the end of the day. Thank you all, and have a beautiful day of creating beautiful things!”
Lucy rolled her eyes and smiled at Indy as soon as Lillian’s mic popped off, whining feedback that appeared to deafen the seven-year-olds who sat closest to her station.
“So, are you still working with an adviser?” Puja asked Lucy, “or do you get to be somebody’s adviser?”
“You can choose! I just don’t think there’s anything I can teach somebody right now, so Lillian assigned Rashid as my adviser.” Lucy had this way of being adorably and convincingly self-deprecating. “I guess I’m also assisting him. Do you guys know him at all?”
“Don’t think so. I try not to get too close to the theater people,” Indigo joked. “You guys know we think of all of you as zoo animals, right?” A couple of years ago, Indy had come to meet Lucy and ended up watching the end of one of her experimental theater classes. The students were literally running around in the dance studio howling like monkeys, pretending to pick imaginary lice off one another’s backs.
“That’s fair.” Lucy laughed. “But he’s more of a dance guy, actually. He’s, like, a big deal in the jazz dance world. He has Ben Vereen’s number on his cell under B, which is pretty hot.”
“I don’t know what any of those words mean.” Indigo held her fork up to her mouth.
“Well, I’m looking forward to working with a dance dude because I’ve been really trying to nail the movement side of my acting lately.”
Yvonne, still seated next to Indigo, held up the pastry basket and chimed in. “After this bran muffin, let’s just hope I’ll be able to nail a movement of my own.”
Crickets.
The girls bused their trays and Lucy followed Indigo to the patio outside, where Lillian’s partner, Debra, sat behind a folding table. “Let’s find out who your adviser is!” Lucy squeezed the top of her arm. Indy was wearing a cap-sleeved black Dead Kennedys tee, barely held together with safety pins and a shoelace. She had worn it hoping Nick would notice and be impressed. But he was still nowhere to be found this morning. If she had a choice, though, she would have slept through breakfast, too, considering how late they worked.
They. It was like booze or pot, or a crazy chocolate dessert, the way that word made her feel. Like she and Nick were equals.
“Hi,” Indigo said to Debra, who wore a shiny new whistle engraved with some kind of wiccan symbol around her neck. Debra returned Indy’s greeting with a blank stare.
“Debraaa!” Lucy butted in. “Love that necklace—is it new? Help me out?” She beamed at her like she was auditioning for a role. “So, Indy here wants to know who her lucky adviser is this summer.…” She leaned onto the table, grinning ear to ear. It was like Lucy thought she had to turn on the charm in order to get information from Debra.
Indy loved Lucy, but somehow a shred of doubt she had about her best friend’s loyalty still lingered. She had a glimmer of feeling uncharacteristically annoyed by Lucy’s C.I.T. friendliness, her smile—her way of making every head in a room turn when she entered, or laughed, or sang or danced or tossed her hair back, like she was paid thousands of dollars to do in her shampoo ads. It was hard enough to take her seriously when so many o
f her actions seemed to be for show. As in, there’s no business like. But maybe Indy was just overtired. Yeah, that was it.
“Yes, of course. Indigo Hamlisch! Let’s find out who you’re working with this summer!” Debra replied, with the combined intensity of a major-league coach and a game-show host. Lucy, in a somewhat bizarre new variation on her morning touchy-feeliness, massaged Indigo’s shoulders while Debra pulled out a file card.
“And your adviser is…” She blubbered her lips like she was doing a drum roll of some kind. It was gross.
“…Jen Rant!”
Wait. The weird lady Puja had last year?
“Yo. That’s me.”
Indy spun around to see pretty, petite, twentysomething Jen Rant; a busty brunette in thick eyeglass frames that hid small, sarcastic eyes. Her lips were chapped, and her legs were so short, she cuffed capri-length leggings at her thick ankles. She was dressed in all black, which included a Dead Kennedys T-shirt that was—oh, God—identical to the one Indigo was wearing.
“Well, isn’t this a match made in whatever you choose to believe represents heaven!” Debra exclaimed.
“Thanks, Deb. I’ll leave you guys to get to it,” Lucy chirped, then peeled off.
Indigo gave Jen what could best be described as a cringey half-smile. Jen offered her hand.
“I’ve seen your portfolio, and you’ve got a lot of talent,” she said awkwardly. “I’m a performance artist—I do conceptual pieces, video installations, multimedia monologues, that kind of thing. But I come from a visual-arts background, so going forward, I think we’ll have more than our taste in T-shirts in common.”
“Thanks,” Indy said. Who was this woman wearing her clothes? She was totally trying to do that thing where adults treat teenagers like adults, almost for the sake of being noticed and appreciated for doing exactly that?
Art Girls Are Easy Page 5