Izzy’s gaze went from the young woman’s angular features to settle on one of the paintings that hung on the wall behind her. The painting had been rendered in oil pastels and was called Annie Nin. Its subject and the young woman standing under it were identical.
“Maybe it’s because you make us nervous,” Annie said, replying to Izzy’s earlier question.
Though Izzy had long since accepted that her paintings could bring beings across from some otherworld, the reality of this numena’s presence was still a new enough enchantment to fill her heart with awe and set her pulse drumming.
“I make you nervous?” she finally managed.
Annie gave a wry shrug that she might have learned from John, it was so immediately expressive.
“Well, think about it,” she said. “It’s kind of like meeting God, don’t you think?”
“Oh, please!”
Annie laughed. “All right. So you didn’t create us, you just offered us shapes to wear. But we still wouldn’t be here without you, and you’ve got to admit that meeting you would be sort of intimidating for one of us.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel even more guilty, it’s working.”
“Why do you feel guilty?” Annie asked.
She crossed the room, walking toward the window seat. Izzy made room for her and she hopped on the broad sill, leaning her back on the window frame opposite from where Izzy was sitting.
“It’s dangerous for you in this world,” Izzy said.
Annie cocked her head, then gave it a slow shake. “You’ve been talking to John,” she said.
“Not lately, I haven’t.”
“Yes, well, he is stubborn.”
“Why does he hate me so much?” Izzy asked.
“He doesn’t hate you, he’s just too full up with pride. Give him time and he’ll come around.”
“It’s been a year now,” Izzy said. “Is it because I haven’t stopped, you know, painting? Bringing you across?”
Annie frowned. “If it is, he has no right to make you feel that way. We chose to come across on our own, just as he did.” Her features brightened. “And I don’t regret it for a moment. I love your world. We all do. There’s so much to see and do; so many people to meet and places to go. I’d take just a day in your world against never having the chance to be here at all.”
Izzy couldn’t help but return the numena’s smile, it was so infectious. “But why do you keep us all here?” Annie went on. “We’ll soon crowd you out if you keep painting as much as you do.”
“For safety,” Izzy explained. “So no one will hurt you.”
“But who would hurt us?”
“John told me Rushkin would,” Izzy said, and then went on to relate the dream she’d had the night after she’d broken up with John. Rushkin with his crossbow, hunting her numena through a snowstorm so similar to the one that howled outside the studio’s windows tonight. The death of the winged cat, how Paddyjack would have died if not for John’s intervention.
“You must have felt so awful,” Annie said when Izzy was done.
Izzy nodded. “And I don’t ever want that to happen to any of you again. That’s why I have to keep you hidden.”
“We’re very good at hiding ourselves,” Annie assured her. “Nobody can see us unless we want them to.”
“I mean your paintings. I have to keep the paintings safe.”
“But Rushkin’s gone,” Annie said. “He’s left the city.”
“I know. But he came to my last show. He sent me a critique of it.”
Annie’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “That sounds more helpful than dangerous. Are you sure it was Rushkin you saw with the crossbow?”
Izzy nodded.
“But it was in a dream.”
“Well, yes.”
“So, how can you be sure it really was Rushkin?” Annie asked. “I mean, people dream the oddest things, don’t they, and then when they wake up they realize none of it was real.”
“But the ribbons were still there when I woke up and two of the paintings were ruined.”
“It still doesn’t mean it had to be Rushkin.”
“But, John said –”
“I like John,” Annie said, interrupting. “We all do. And we’re certainly harmed if something happens to our gateway paintings, but I’m not so sure we can be positive that Rushkin is the threat. John doesn’t like the man, period, so he’s liable to think the worst of him for no other reason than that he doesn’t like him.”
“I don’t think John would do something like that.”
“I’m not saying he’d do it deliberately. But I know he was jealous of all the time you spent with Rushkin. And besides that, I know he took a dislike to Rushkin right from the first. Paddyjack told me and he knows John better than any of us.”
“Still,” Izzy said. “I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
“No one’s going to hurt our paintings if you put them in a show,” Annie said. “The gallery would have some sort of security, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, but what if Rushkin buys them? He’s certainly got the money.”
“Just tell the woman in the shop not to sell any to him,” Annie said.
Or to his lawyers, Izzy thought. But she still felt uneasy about the whole idea.
“What difference does it make to you if I put the paintings in a show or not?” she asked.
Annie shrugged. “It’s starting to feel crowded in here. We’re each connected to our gateway painting, you see. No matter where we are, all we have to do is think of our painting and we can return to it.” She smiled. “Sometimes it gets pretty busy in here. We like to be near our paintings, but we don’t necessarily want to hang around with each other, if you know what I mean. And besides,” she added, waving an arm about the studio, “this work you hide away deserves a bigger audience than us and the few friends you have over to the studio.”
By the time Izzy and Annie left the coach house, each to go her own way, Izzy didn’t know what to think anymore. When she told Kathy about the numena’s visit, Kathy just looked smug.
“You see?” she said. “I told you they weren’t your responsibility – not in the way you think they are.”
“But if their paintings are damaged, they die. I’m responsible for keeping those paintings safe.”
Kathy shrugged. “God knows I don’t wish any of them harm, or think they should be put into any sort of danger, but I agree with your Annie. That work deserves a larger audience. And if Rushkin’s not the threat –”
“Whoever it is,” Izzy said, breaking in, “is still out there.”
“My advice is to talk to more of your numena before you make any hard-and-fast decisions for them,” Kathy said. “Let them decide for themselves, just like they did when they crossed over.”
“If I can ever track any of them down,” Izzy said.
But Annie’s visit seemed to have done something to help overcome the shyness of the other numena, as well. Two days later Izzy unlocked the studio door to find her lioness numena, Grace, lying on the recamier, reading a magazine. Grace was so tall and gorgeous, and carried herself with such regal assurance that Izzy felt completely intimidated in her presence.
“I think I see what you mean,” Izzy told Annie when the other numena reappeared in the studio that evening. “I mean, Grace wasn’t mean or anything, but I couldn’t help but feel so … small around her. And I don’t just mean in height.”
Annie laughed. “Oh, she’s a piece of work all right.”
“She told me pretty much the same stuff you did,” Izzy went on, “you know, about it getting to be too crowded in here for everyone.”
“I don’t think Grace likes any room that has another woman in it.”
“She told me you don’t like her because you think she stole away this guy you were interested in.”
“I wasn’t interested in him,” Annie protested; then she sighed. “Well, not a lot. But you see what I mean. We’re just like you. We come in all dif
ferent sizes and shapes of personalities and some of them just don’t mesh.”
Izzy nodded. “But I’d still be worried if anything happened to any of you.”
“Then take it on a one-by-one basis,” Annie said. “The ones who want to go out into the world – their paintings can go into your shows. The others would stay here.”
That made the most sense of anything Izzy had heard yet.
“How about you?” she asked. “Would you want to go?”
Annie shrugged. “I don’t mind either way. If my painting was to go anywhere, I’d like it to be to a library because I do so like to read. But I wouldn’t want to be too far from you. I love seeing how the paintings come to life.” She smiled. “Now, that’s the real magic.”
“What was it like in the before?” Izzy asked. “I’ve talked to John about it, but he wasn’t exactly forthcoming.”
“That’s because we don’t really know. I’ve talked to lots of the others about it, but no one can really remember much. It’s like our lives only really began when we stepped across.” She grinned at Izzy’s disappointed look. “But I can tell you what it’s like for us here,” she added.
So that night, while Izzy worked on a new painting, Annie perched on a stool beside her and they chatted away to each other for hours. Later in the evening another of Izzy’s numena arrived, the gargoyle Rothwindle, and the three of them gossiped away the rest of the night, getting to know each other better.
As the days went by, all of Izzy’s numena came to visit at one point or another. Some came more than once, others just to meet her before they carried on with their own lives. The only exceptions were John Sweetgrass and Paddyjack. John’s absence Izzy understood, and pretended it didn’t bother her at all. But she dearly wanted to meet Paddyjack, as much because he was one of the first numena she’d brought across, as to ask him about that winter’s night a year ago.
“He’s too scared to come to this place,” Rothwindle explained one afternoon. “He says this is the house of the dark man who has no soul.”
Annie sniffed. “Sounds like he’s parroting John, if you ask me.”
“Maybe I could meet him somewhere else,” Izzy said.
“Maybe,” Rothwindle agreed, but it never did seem to work out.
So Paddyjack’s painting, like John’s The Spirit Is Strong, were among the few paintings that Izzy wouldn’t put into a show or even give away. They had to make the decision for themselves, and so far as she was concerned, their absence told her where they stood. Except for them, none of the other numena seemed very worried that Rushkin was any sort of a threat, and in time Izzy found herself feeling the same way.
VI
April 1976
Izzy’s third show at The Green Man Gallery was her first to have an overall theme. She called it Your Streets Are Not Mine and used it as a way of exploring the presence of her numena in the city. Each piece contained a strange element, a jolt of the unexpected that could often be missed if the viewer wasn’t paying enough attention. It might be the glimpse of a sunlit meadow ablaze with wildflowers, which appeared in the rearview mirror of a yellow cab driving down a benighted Newford street, the pavement slick with rain, the reflections of the neon lights in the puddles broken and distorted by the spray of passing vehicles. It might be the leonine main figure of Grace, the tufts of bobcat hair rising from the points of her tapered ears mostly hidden by the spill of her cascading red-gold hair. Or it might be the painting from which the show took its title, which depicted a row of gargoyles crouching on a grey stone cornice looking down at the busy street below; most people missed the fact that the figure on the far right, half-secreted in shadow, was a real boy rather than a stone figure.
After a lot of soul searching, she’d finally let herself be convinced to hang a few of her numena paintings in the show. It wasn’t until the theme took shape in her mind that she realized how essential those paintings would be to its success. She was careful, as always, not to make the numena too outlandish in appearance so that they could fit in more easily when they wandered about the city, but once the decision to include them was made, she felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her.
She continued to feel responsible for the numena, but finally came to accept that it really was their decision to cross over or not, to have their paintings remain in the studio or go out into the world. They had lives of their own, which had only as much to do with her as the friendships she made with a few of them, and in some ways, she was happy to see the paintings gain a wider audience rather than have them stockpiling in her studio. She wasn’t like Rushkin in that sense. Art, she believed, was made to be seen, not squirreled away. At the sums these paintings were selling for – Albina had priced them all in the fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars range – she was sure that their owners would take good care of them and the numena would remain safe from harm.
Albina was delighted by the decision and priced the three numena paintings – Grace; Your Streets Are Not Mine; and one of a scarecrow-like figure chasing crows from a back lane garden, called Why the Crows Fly – at the high end of the show’s price scale. Of the fourteen paintings in the show they were her favorites and also the ones most singled out by reviewers. There was so much positive response to them that Izzy almost regretted not putting her other completed numena paintings in the show, but they hadn’t seemed to fit in as well with the theme.
The show took a little longer to sell out, but that, Albina assured her, was only because people were more cautious with their checkbooks once the art entered this price range.
“Trust me, Isabelle,” she said. “We can consider this show an unqualified success and a harbinger of even more success to come.”
One of the real surprises of the show, insofar as Izzy was concerned, was making a reacquaintance with one of her fellow students from her last year at Butler U. She spotted him at the opening, all freckles, tousled red hair and rumpled clothes, and remembered thinking, Oh God, Thomas Downs. Why did he have to come? In class he’d always seemed so full of himself, and she’d hated the way he constantly argued about fine art versus commercial. He had little good to say about any of the professors at the university, singling out Professor Dapple in particular, which hadn’t endeared him to Jilly, either. He wasn’t even in any of Dapple’s classes.
Izzy hid a grimace when he came up to her, but she wasn’t able to hide her surprise at what he had to say.
“I owe you an apology,” he said.
“You do?”
He gave her a disarming smile. “Oh, it’s nothing I’ve ever said or done.”
“That doesn’t leave much to apologize for.”
Tom tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s the way I’ve thought about your work in the past. You see, I’ve always dismissed you as a Rushkin-wannabe –”
“But now you’ve found out that I studied under him,” Izzy finished for him, “so you’ve changed your mind.” This was so boring. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard variations on this theme.
“Not at all.” Tom waved a hand in the general direction of her paintings. “These changed my mind.”
“I don’t get it. I can see Rushkin’s influence in each one of them.”
Tom nodded. “Yes, but that’s because you’re now seeing things the way he might have – distilled through your own ability to perceive the world around you, to be sure, but you’re obviously now using the tools of vision that he taught you to use, rather than merely aping his style. Your earlier work didn’t have this sense of vision – personal, or Rushkin’s.”
“Well, thanks very much.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I know how hard a process this can be. I had the same early luck as you, except I got to study under Erica Keane – you know her work?”
“Oh, please,” Izzy said. “Give me some credit.”
Keane was only one of the most respected watercolorists in the country, at the top of her field in the same way that Rushkin was
in his. She had a studio in Lower Crowsea and Izzy had been there once during the annual tour of artists’ studios that the Newford School of Art organized every spring. She’d come away stunned at the woman’s control of her medium.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “You know how closed-minded people can be when it comes to a discipline other than their own.”
“I suppose.”
“You’d be surprised at how many oil painters don’t recognize her name, much less have any familiarity with her work.”
“I love her mixed-media work,” Izzy said. “Especially her ink-and-watercolor pieces.”
Tom smiled. “Me, too. But to get back to my point, my work’s been saddled with endless comparisons to hers just because I’ve studied under her, but what the critics seem to miss is that what a good mentor teaches his or her students isn’t simple technique and style, but the way in which they view the world. We can’t help but incorporate that way of seeing things into our own work and, because of that, because a Keane or a Rushkin has such a unique perspective on things, I think it’s a little harder for their students to break free and paint with their own – shall we say, ‘voice.’
“You’re beginning to do that with the work I see here tonight, and I admire you for it because I haven’t been able to do the same thing myself – or at least not yet – and that’s why I felt I owed you an apology. You might be a wannabe, but what you want to be is your own woman and you’re making remarkable inroads to attaining that goal.”
Izzy gave him a long searching look, certain that he was making fun of her, but the gaze he returned was guileless.
“Apology accepted, I guess,” she said finally.
“Great.” He paused, looking a little self-conscious, before he added, “Are you doing anything special after tonight’s festivities wind down?”
Izzy gave him another considering look, but this time for a different reason.
“You’re beginning to get a reputation,” Kathy had told her a few weeks ago.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kathy had shrugged. “Just that you like to have a good time and you’re not big on there being any strings attached. You’re a very attractive woman, ma belle Izzy, and there are a lot of men out there who are more than happy to take advantage of what you seem to be offering.”
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