“I got your letters,” she said after she’d taken a sip. “I found them really helpful.”
“Then it was worth the time I took to write them.”
“I couldn’t tell where you were when you mailed them – the postmarks were all smudged.”
Rushkin shrugged. “Here and there – who can remember?”
“I was surprised that you even had a chance to see the shows.”
“What? And miss such important moments in the life of my only and best student?”
Izzy couldn’t help but bask in the warmth of his praise. When she looked about the studio, she saw that it was full of paintings and sketches again, only they were all unfamiliar. Some looked as though they’d been painted in Greece or Italy or southern Spain. Others reminded her of the Middle East, Africa, northern Europe, the Far East. Landscapes and portraits and every sort of combination of the two.
“I only wish I could have been in town for the openings,” Rushkin went on, “but my schedule being what it was, I was lucky to be able to fly in and see the shows at all.”
Izzy wanted to ask why he hadn’t stopped by the studio, but the question made her feel uneasy because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer. She didn’t fear Rushkin simply for the sake of her numena or because of his temper. There was a darker undercurrent to her fear that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Whenever she reached for it, it sidled away into the shadowed corners of her mind that she could never quite clear away.
“You’ve been busy,” she said instead, indicating the new paintings.
“Indeed I have. And you?”
“I suppose. But not like this.”
She felt warmer now. Still holding her mug, she walked about the studio, admiring the new work. It never ceased to amaze her how, after all the years Rushkin had been painting – and especially when you considered the sheer quantity of superior work he’d produced – he never failed to find a fresh perspective, the outlook that other artists invariably missed. No matter how prosaic his subject matter might appear at an initial glance, he had a gift for instilling in it a universal relevance. His use of light was as astounding as ever, and looking at this new work, Izzy felt the inspiration for a dozen paintings come bubbling up inside her.
“I’d like to see some of your current projects,” Rushkin said. “Perhaps I could come by your studio one afternoon.”
“I’m kind of in between studios at the moment,” Izzy told him.
“Well, when you get settled into a new place then.”
Izzy was surprised at the disappointment she felt when he didn’t try to convince her to come back and work here with him. Instead, he joined her as she walked about the studio and spoke about the various paintings and sketches, gossiping about the places and people they depicted, explaining particular problems he’d had with certain pieces and how he’d solved them. By the time she left Izzy realized that she’d learned more in the few hours she’d spent just listening to him than she had in all the time he’d been gone.
It was with real regret that she finally left the studio and trudged back home through the cold.
XV
June 1978
Izzy finally got herself a new studio at the beginning of April. It was no more than a large empty loft in a refurbished factory on Kelly Street, but she loved it. Up to that point she’d been depending on the kindness of others for studio space – initially Rushkin, then Professor Dapple – so this was the very first time she had a place of her own, chosen by herself, for herself. She paid the rent and utilities. She was entirely responsible for its upkeep. And because it was her own place rather than Rushkin’s, which she’d had to keep private even when none of his work was in it, this year she was able to participate in the annual spring tour of artists’ studios organized by the Newford School of Art, something she’d wanted to do from the first time she moved to the city. She didn’t have much available for sale, but everything she did have sold on the first day.
There were things she had to get used to with the new studio beyond having to cover her expenses. The hardest thing was losing touch with most of her numena. In the period between moving from the coach house to finally finding her own place, those whose paintings she still kept hadn’t liked to visit her in the apartment. It wasn’t private enough for their tastes. They came less and less often until, by the time she moved into her Kelly Street studio, her only regular visitors were Annie Nin and Rothwindle. Rosalind and Cosette still came by whenever they were in town, but that wasn’t all that often. The rest of her numena seemed to just drift out of her life. Most of them she saw about as often as she did John, and she had yet to meet Paddyjack.
Her art took a new direction when she was finally settled in enough to begin work. Inspired by the paintings that Rushkin had done on his travels – taken mostly by how, as Tom Downs had put it, Rushkin saw things, rather than simply his technique she embarked on an ambitious series depicting the architecture of Lower Crowsea, juxtaposing the vanishing older buildings with those that were replacing them, or had been renovated. What she found particularly intriguing in working on the series was giving a sense of entire buildings while concentrating only on a few details in each painting: a doorway and its surrounding vine-draped brickwork and windows; an alleyway with an old grocery on one side, a new lawyer’s office on the other; the cornice of the old fire hall showing two of its gargoyles, behind which rose a refurbished office block with all new stonework and an additional two stories.
Figures appeared, where appropriate, in a few pieces, but only one had a new numena. She was a kind of Paddyjill, since she looked to be a twig-girl cousin of sorts to Paddyjack, standing half-hidden in the vines that covered the riverside wall of the old shoe factory on Church Street. The painting was an immense work called Church Street II: Bricks and Vines, and Izzy saw it as the centerpiece of the series, which she’d taken to calling Crowsea Touchstones. It was due to be hung at The Green Man in October.
Albina was excited about the show and all of Izzy’s friends loved the series, but the person whose opinion she really craved was Rushkin, so that was how their weekly visits to each other’s studios began.
She dropped by his studio at the beginning of May and, after a pleasant hour or so of conversation, invited him to come by her studio the next day to have a look at some of her new work.
Every time Izzy saw him, Rushkin couldn’t have been nicer. By the end of June, the faint niggle of anxiety she’d associated with him had entirely vanished. They never spoke of numena – nothing odd or strange or out of the normal world ever came up in their conversations at all. Instead they talked about art; Rushkin criticized, gently, and praised, lavishly. Izzy forgot John’s warnings, forgot Rushkin’s temper, forgot everything but the joy of creating and sharing that joy with an artist that she admired so much it was almost an infatuation.
She didn’t mean to hide the fact that she had renewed her relationship with Rushkin, it just never came up whenever she was around Kathy. Her roommate might have heard it from someone else, except that, having finally received her share of the advance for the paperback sale of her book, all her time was caught up in the work of establishing her children’s foundation – everything from finding suitable staff and applying for charitable status, to renting a small building in which to house the operation.
As she’d predicted to Izzy back in January, the money from her advance wasn’t nearly enough – not even starting at the modest scale at which she planned. Late in June she organized a combination benefit concert and art auction, which, when added to her fundraising efforts once her charitable status came through, raised another seventy-two thousand dollars. Eleven thousand of that came from the sale of one of Izzy’s paintings.
“The doors open July twelfth,” she told Izzy a few days after the benefit.
“Are you going to have a party to celebrate it?” Izzy asked.
“Of course. But it’s going to be a potluck affair. I don’t want any of the Foundation�
�s money to be used for anything except for the kids. The thing that really worries me is that we’re going to get swamped and I don’t want to turn anybody away.”
“So organize another benefit,” Izzy suggested.
“I don’t think it would be as successful. People only have so much money and there are a lot of other worthwhile causes. It’ll work better on a yearly basis, I think.”
Izzy smiled. “You better get writing then.”
“I am. I have – whenever I can spare the time. Alan says there’s already a lot of interest in a second book and the first paperback’s not even out yet.”
“Will you take it to the same publisher that’s doing the paperback edition?” Izzy asked.
Kathy shook her head. “I’m letting Alan publish it first and then he’ll offer it to them. It’s a chance for his press to really establish itself, and after all he’s done for me, I figure it’s the least I can do to repay him.”
“But if he gets fifty percent of the next paperback sale as well,” Izzy began.
“He won’t. He didn’t even take that for Angels.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”
“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”
“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”
“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”
“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.
“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.
“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know – that maybe I can save some kids from having to go through the shit I had to.”
But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.
XVI
July 1978
It seemed as though everybody that Kathy and Izzy knew showed up for the open house party to celebrate the opening of the Newford Children’s Foundation. The only exceptions were Rushkin and John, both of whom had been invited – Rushkin by Izzy and John by Kathy, who’d run into him in the Walker Street subway station the week of the benefit. The house had been furnished in what Jilly called Contemporary Scrounge, because everything had been acquired from flea markets and yard sales.
“The furniture just has to do its job,” Kathy had said, resenting any money spent that didn’t go directly to the kids. “It doesn’t have to be pretty.”
To offset the battered desks and filing cabinets, Izzy and Kathy, along with a number of their other artist friends, had spent a few weeks repainting all the rooms, making curtains, wallpapering, painting wall murals in the kitchen and offices, and generally giving the rooms a more homey feel. The centerpieces of the waiting room, which also housed the reception desk, were the two paintings that Izzy had based on Kathy’s stories: La Liseuse and The Wild Girl. She’d given them to Kathy a year ago.
“I’m so glad you hung them here,” Izzy said as she and Kathy finally got a break from greeting the guests and were leaning up against a wall in the waiting room, sipping glasses of wine.
Kathy smiled. “I love the way they look in here. I know you based them on stories in Angels, but they perfectly suit what the Foundation’s all about. The Wild Girl is all the kids we’re trying to help, and La Liseuse is a perfect image of what so many of them have never had and never will have: the quintessential mother figure, about to read them a story before bed. I can’t imagine them anywhere else. In fact, they’re part of the Foundation’s assets now and I’ve written in a stipulation in our charter that says they’re always to hang in the Foundation’s waiting room, no matter where we eventually move, no matter what happens to me personally.”
“I like that,” Izzy said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about any of the arts – that we each get to put our own interpretation upon the message that’s being conveyed. There’s no right or wrong way to appreciate, there’s only honest or dishonest.”
“I see her from time to time, you know,” Kathy said. “Rosalind.”
Izzy looked at her, feeling a little confused. Considering what she knew of Rosalind’s feelings about meeting Kathy, she was surprised to discover that the numena had managed to overcome her shyness in the matter.
“Really?” she said finally.
“Oh, I’ve never talked to her or anything,” Kathy explained, “but I catch glimpses of her from time to time – across a street, sitting in a café, walking through a park. It’s both odd and neat to see someone from one of my own stories walking about in the city. It gives me a better idea what it must feel like for you when you bring the numena across.”
Izzy really wished that Rosalind could overcome her shyness. She just knew that the two of them would get along famously. She’d often considered secretly setting up a meeting, but then she’d think of John, she’d think of how Rosalind had entrusted her with her feelings, and she wouldn’t let it go any further than a thought.
“And Cosette?” she asked. “Do you ever see her?”
Kathy shook her head. “I’m too civilized to visit the kinds of places that she’d hang around, don’t you think? But I’ll bet Jilly’s seen her.”
“I think Jilly knows every fourth person in the city.”
“More like every third, and she’s working on the rest.” Kathy paused. “How come you’ve never told her about the numena? It’s so up her alley.”
Izzy shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not trying to be selfish or anything, but I feel like everything would change if I told anybody else.”
“You told me.”
“That’s different,” Izzy said. “That’s more like telling another part of myself.”
“Are we going to be friends forever?” Kathy asked.
Izzy turned to look at her roommate. Kathy looked so serious that Izzy stifled the humorous response she’d been about to make.
“We’ll be friends forever,” she assured Kathy.
Kathy gave her a quick smile. “That’s good, because, you know, you’re the only good thing I ever had in my life that didn’t turn around and hurt me.”
“Look around you,” Izzy said. “All these people are your friends, Kathy. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for you.”
“I know. But the way I feel about them isn’t the same as I feel about you.”
Izzy put down her wine glass to give Kathy a hug. “That’s because a person can only ever have one real best friend,” she said, “and we’re stuck with each other.”
Kathy hugged her back. “Stuck together. Like salt and pepper.”
“Crackers and cheese.”
“Bacon and eggs.”
“Now I’m getting hungry,” Izzy said.
“Me, too.”
Izzy plucked her wine glass from the windowsill where she’d set it down earlier; then, arm in arm, they aimed their way through the crowd to see what was left of the potluck dinner.
XVII
August 1978
A few weeks after the open house at the Newford Children’s Foundation, Izzy came back from sharing a picnic lunch with Tom Downs to find her studio looking as though it had been vandalized. There were sketchbooks, loose papers and art books scattered everywhere. The floor was a jumble of paint tubes, brushes, pencils, sticks of pastel and the like. The easel lay on its side, her current work-in-progress beside it on the floor – face up, she realized, thanking
whatever gods there were for small mercies.
She walked numbly through the mess. Straightening the easel, she replaced her canvas on it, then slowly took stock. Her first thought was that the place had been burglarized, but nothing appeared to be missing. A quick inventory of her numena’s gateway paintings told her that all were still present and hadn’t been harmed. But who could have done this?
She bent down to start putting pastel sticks back into their box when some sixth sense made her look under her worktable. There she saw a familiar red-haired figure leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs.
“Cosette,” she said, the shock plain in her voice.
The wild girl turned a tear-streaked face toward her. “I … I knew it was wrong … even while I was doing it,” she said in a small broken voice, “but I … I just couldn’t stop myself.”
Izzy knew she should be angry, but the hurt and confusion she saw in Cosette’s features wouldn’t allow the emotion to take hold. She regarded the wild girl for a long moment, then crawled under the table to join her. She gathered Cosette in her arms and stroked the bird’s nest of her hair, gently working at the tangles with her fingers.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I was … I was trying to draw a picture, but it wouldn’t come out right. No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t come out right at all, at all. But still I tried and I kept trying, but then everything … everything started to feel … I felt like I was choking … and I just pushed all the papers off the table and it didn’t … the choking feeling wasn’t so bad then … and the more I kicked things around, the more it went away. I knew it was bad. I knew it was wrong. I … I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t stop myself.”
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