by Rick Homan
Frank nodded to her. “So important. A great asset. Irving?”
Having cleared his airway, Irving Zorn spoke. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve come up with something very exciting. Animation. Disney pioneered it as an art form, took it to heights never seen before. The digital revolution has created animation tools Disney could never have dreamed of. Animated feature films are now more exciting, more expressive, and more numerous than ever before.
“I propose that we fast-track our students into one of the most promising careers the twenty-first century has to offer. I look forward to the day when our alumni will include some of the biggest names in Hollywood. That should generate some donations to the college, and”—here he allowed himself a chuckle—“I’ll always have someone to stay with when I take a vacation to L.A.”
“Brilliant. Just brilliant,” cried Frank. “Enormous potential. Comments?”
Wilma had none, since that would have required an interest in something other than state teacher certification requirements. That left me to respond.
“Animation certainly is able to do amazing things” I said. “Even in live-action films, CGI is very effective.”
Zorn scowled at me.
“Computer-generated images,” I explained. “They blend it in with what the actors are doing. Most of the time you can’t even tell.”
Zorn relaxed and sat back, but remained wary.
“I am wondering about one thing, though.” The room was not only silent but also motionless as I took a breath. “Personally, I don’t have any background in animation. Do any of us have any experience in the industry?”
My art-department colleagues looked at me as if I were an alien life-form. Clearly “experience in the industry” was not a phrase that came naturally to any of them. At that moment, I understood why this idea of career preparation made me so uncomfortable. I had experience of only one career: college professor.
A knowledge of art history is necessary to a number of careers—in museums, galleries, auction houses, etc.—and helpful to many others such as design, advertising, marketing, journalism, and so on. I knew I could help students acquire that knowledge, but I could do nothing further to prepare them for those careers. Apparently, the same was true for my colleagues. Yet we were talking as if we were going to teach our students to do jobs we had never done.
Zorn spoke with a quiet intensity that was not typical of him. “I teach my students to use line, space, and color to create meaning. Would you not agree that these are fundamental to visual communication? Therefore, are they not fundamental to the art of animation just as your art history courses are fundamental to running a gallery?”
Frank nodded. “Valid points.”
Zorn pounced. “I am a practicing artist with a long list of credits. That means I have a lot to offer my students. I didn’t show up yesterday and charm the president into giving me my own room to play with.”
Frank started waving his hands. “Time out. Different approach. Nicole? Thoughts?”
It didn’t matter what I said so long as I didn’t let my voice quiver. “I agree. Drawing and painting are fundamental. As I recall, Walt Disney offered his employees in-house drawing classes.” I had seen a wonderful exhibit on this at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. “I’m just wondering if we can also offer our students some practical experience in animation, just as we’re offering some practical experience in gallery management.”
Zorn almost turned purple. “You think you know something about practical experience? Let me tell you . . .”
Frank yelled. “Excellent. Everything on the table. Reports: practical applications. To me. Irving, animation. Nicole, gallery management. Meet again next week. All very promising. Adjourned.”
Zorn was up and out of the room before Frank had finished speaking, and he almost overturned a chair as he went.
Wilma glanced at me, then at Frank. “Are we done?” Without waiting for an answer, she gathered her tote bags and left.
“Good thinking, Nicole,” said Frank on his way out.
What had just happened? I wasn’t surprised to see Zorn acting like a bully, but the intensity of his reaction shocked me, especially since we really had no disagreement. Drawing and painting were obviously necessary for working in animation, and I had said so. I didn’t see why he was so angry about the idea of adding practical work in animation as we had in gallery management. Since we were being required to go beyond the traditional subjects in preparing students for careers, it seemed the least we could do.
As I walked up to my office, the stairs seemed steeper than usual.
An idea for a peace offering occurred to me. Hari Kamat, a friend of mine from San Francisco State, worked at Industrial Light and Magic, George Lucas’s special effects company, which had studios in San Francisco. I hadn’t kept in touch, but perhaps I could find him on BudStem,“The Buddy System,” or on some other social media site, and ask him about what he had learned by working in the industry.
If I shared his experience with my colleagues perhaps they would see that I only wanted to make Zorn’s proposed program more effective and more attractive to students. Maybe, if I supported Zorn’s idea in this way, I could ease tensions, and we could avoid wasting a lot of energy fighting over nothing.
I picked up my pace and arrived at my office on the third floor with a spring in my step. It wouldn’t take me long to send Hari a message and then I could start my research on Fabrizio, Weinert, and Dunkle.
Chapter 10
I told BudStem I was looking for a new buddy named “Hari Kamat,” but none of the three people who turned up was the friend I knew from my days at SF State. Rather than spend a lot of time searching the web, I decided to tap the old-style social network by picking up my phone and calling my friend since childhood, Irene Gonzalo.
I got lucky. She answered after a few rings. “Is that ‘Nico Tang?’”
“Yes,” I replied. “Is that ‘Rene Zalo?’”
We laughed like a couple of school girls, which is what we were when we decided to become the next, great, female, singer-songwriter duo. We knew we would need stage names, so she shortened “Irene Gonzalo” to “Rene Zalo,” and I shortened “Nicole” to “Nico” and decided to use my mom’s family name, “Tang.” Once that was settled, we tried writing some songs.
Irene expected to get a guitar for her tenth birthday, so we started rehearsing with my grandfather’s ukulele, which he brought from Hawaii a long time ago. The first song we wrote was, “Cowgirls on the Run.” We came up with two verses and a chorus but couldn’t think of a third verse, so we started working on our next song in which we sang “We are free,” over and over with different harmonies. That’s as far as we ever got, but the dream lived on.
“What’s up, girl? When you coming back?” she asked.
“I was just back there over the summer. I can’t fly back and forth every few months. I’m trying to live on a professor’s salary.”
“Poor baby. Did you just call to hear my melodious voice?”
“No. I called to see if you’ve talked to Hari recently.”
“Hari from SF State?”
“Yeah, I looked for him on BudStem, but he’s not there.”
“No, he doesn’t do social media. The last time I mentioned it to him he went off about living in a police state.”
“Is he still at ILM?”
“Industrial Light and Magic? Yep. Lives in Cow Hollow and rides his bike to the Presidio every day.”
“I need to ask him something and I don’t have his email.”
“Hm. Let me look . . . No. I don’t have it either. You want me to track him down?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No problem. What’s this about?”
“My department is thinking about starting a program to help art students get jobs in animation. I need to ask him what the students should know when they graduate, beyond the obvious like, how to draw.”
; “Very cool. I know somebody he was seeing. I’ll call her. She’ll know how to get his attention.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“Got that right. And, hey, any time: text me your flight info and I’ll meet you at SFO with a bag of pork buns and a six pack of Anchor Steam.”
I had instant hunger pangs. “That sounds so good right now.”
“Get yourself back here before everybody forgets about you.”
“Talk to you soon.”
“Soon.”
After we hung up, I sat in my chair for a moment, thinking about those fluffy buns with a few bites of spicy barbecue pork in the middle. We used to take two buses to get to Chinatown and buy them hot from the oven at the old bakery. My hunger was as much emotional as it was physical.
When Irene said, “before everybody forgets about you,” I felt like I’d swallowed an ice cube. Of course, that’s what was happening back in my hometown. People saw me less often, so my name came up less in conversation. How much longer before they started asking, “Whatever happened to Nicole?”
The thought of losing touch with my home and my friends made me ask, “What am I doing here?”
On a personal level the answer wasn’t encouraging. I was living in a plywood box in a part of Ohio where people like me—people who look Asian—are scarce. Life seemed a little brighter last year when I had Lionel to keep me warm. Dr. Lionel Bell, assistant professor of French language and literature, used to live around the corner in one of the duplexes on Ohio Avenue. We shared trips to neighboring cities, occasionally staying overnight on the weekends, and had great conversations about art, literature, and history.
But Lionel got a job at Northwestern University in Chicago and moved there last summer. I visited him for a few long weekends in the fall, and we talked about keeping up our exclusive relationship while we waited to see where the job market might send me, but by December it was clear we had to part. Frankly, I didn’t see how a good-looking single guy on a tenure track at a great university in Chicago could stay tied down to a girlfriend who lived a ten-hour drive away. I decided to let him go before someone stole him from me.
Once Lionel was out of the picture, the pickings looked slim. With fewer than one hundred faculty members at the college, and most of them too old or already married, I didn’t like my chances of meeting another single guy near my age. All in all, on a personal level, other than my friendship with Abbie, things looked bleak.
On a professional level, I had a job, and it was good for a woman who had spent most of her twenties getting a PhD in art history to have a job that involved art history. For that I was grateful.
On the other hand, art would never be a big department at Fuchs. The college’s resources were going into creating that school of business, scheduled to open sometime in the next academic year. For the foreseeable future, I was stuck with the three colleagues in my department, who were eccentric to say the least, and I was teaching students who were mostly starting from scratch when it came to understanding works of art. While I enjoyed introducing people to the wonders of visual art, I was missing the satisfaction of helping students explore beyond the fundamentals.
The gallery was the one bright spot in my professional situation. The chances of an academic job in San Francisco were almost nonexistent, but there were Cal State campuses within a day’s drive and a few private colleges. If I could land one of those, I could spend weekends at home. That way people wouldn’t forget about me.
Whenever I thought about it, the solution came out the same: teach, research, publish, curate a better exhibit, and apply for better jobs. But first, I had to stop this murder investigation from spoiling Edgar’s reputation and endangering funding for the gallery. My next step was getting information that would prove Paul Weinert and Matt Dunkle hadn’t known Jessica Fabrizio.
Chapter 11
I left my office around three o’clock and walked back to my Rabbit Hutch. Once I had changed into sweats and made a cup of tea, I set up my laptop on the café table in the corner of my living-dining-kitchen room. Since Paul Weinert seemed least likely to have any past connection to Jessica Fabrizio, I decided to start by comparing his background with hers. Quickly crossing him off as a suspect might raise my spirits.
On the website for the University of Louisville, I found Jessica Fabrizio’s biography on the page for the sociology department. She had earned degrees at SUNY at Albany and Case Western Reserve and had joined the faculty at Louisville four years ago. Since Weinert was now about twenty, he would have been sixteen when she started teaching. I couldn’t imagine how he would have come into contact with her during his high-school years unless he was inquiring about a sociology major at Louisville. Since I’d never heard Paul express any interest in sociology, that seemed unlikely.
It was possible there was some earlier connection through their families. I couldn’t recall ever hearing Paul speak about his hometown, but I could easily drop by the gallery sometime this week when he was there and casually ask where he was from. Unless it was someplace where Jessica had a history—Albany, Cleveland, or Louisville—Paul probably had never met her prior to her appearance in the gallery on Saturday, and I could forward that information to Sheriff Adams.
Encouraged by this result, I looked up Matt Dunkle on the Fuchs College website. He had a math degree from Michigan State, and an MS and PhD from SUNY at Albany, the latter completed eight years ago, in the same year he started teaching at Fuchs.
I felt a distinct thump in my rib cage, right where my heart lives. Dunkle and Fabrizio both attended SUNY at Albany. Comparing the dates of their degrees, I saw that their times there overlapped by about three years.
An internet search told me that SUNY at Albany has about 19,000 students and that the campus covers 586 acres. On a campus that size, everyone would not know everyone else. Since Dunkle and Fabrizio were in different academic fields, they had no obvious reason to meet.
Still they were in approximately the same place at the same time. If they knew each other during those years, Dunkle was a suspect because, as Sheriff Adams would say, “he had a prior association with the deceased.” This was not what I had wanted to find.
I could think of only one way to find out quickly whether two people knew each other more than fourteen years ago, and that was to tap into the absurd amounts of personal information people put on social media sites such as BudStem. I opened my account and asked to be grafted to a buddy named “Matthew Dunkle.” If he and I became buddies, then I could see his list of buddies and see if Jessica was among them.
I hit a dead end. Only two people with the name Matthew Dunkle sprouted, and neither of them was my colleague at Fuchs. Apparently, the Matt Dunkle I was interested in didn’t use BudStem.
On a whim I asked to be grafted to a buddy named Jessica Fabrizio. She was there, and the universities she attended with years of graduation were visible for anyone to see, as was her employment at Louisville, and her hometown, Albany, NY. But, I couldn’t get any more information about her without asking her to be my buddy, and of course that was no longer possible.
I thought some of her friends from back in her days at SUNY at Albany were probably on BudStem, and one of them might know if she knew Matt Dunkle, but I had no way of knowing who they were. I asked for buddies with “Sociology SUNY at Albany” and had my choice of several dozen, but I couldn’t buddy up with all of them in hopes of finding with the ones who knew her.
For the moment, I was stuck.
I had a restless night and slept later than usual Wednesday morning. Downing an egg and toast made me late leaving my Rabbit Hutch and I tried to make up for it by jogging as I went along Montgomery Avenue. When I came to the downslope on Ohio, I hit hard-packed snow and my feet went out from under me.
I had learned how to take falls like this during my first winter in Ohio. The trick was to stay loose and roll. I’d gotten so good at this that falling didn’t bother me anymore. I just rolled onto my side, got my legs
under me, and went on.
It also helped that I was wearing my calf-length, down-filled, parka. In effect it was a sleeping bag with sleeves and a hood. Early last winter I had worn a hip-length canvas coat with a zip-in lining. Coming from San Francisco, I thought it was a winter coat because it was warmer than anything I’d worn at home. By the middle of last December, I was tired of shivering every time I walked across campus, so I tried some department stores in Columbus, but their stock of winter coats was low by then, and I refused to shop in the junior miss department.
Abbie told me to find something down-filled and directed me to a store that handled consignments and remainders. There I found this wonderful parka, cut for a woman, in my size, and it was significantly marked down. The first time I wore it outside I fell in love with it. It was lightweight and it kept me warm in the winter wind.
The only thing I didn’t love about it was the color. Since I bought it at a remainder store, I got the color no one wanted: lime green. I swore I would get through my first winter with it and then shop earlier in the season the following year, but, when my second winter rolled around, I felt a certain affection for this coat, even though it made me look a beetle skittering across campus.
In my Wednesday classes—history in the morning, appreciation in the afternoon—I enjoyed seeing some enthusiasm from students who had visited the exhibit. I could tell others had not visited because they tried to sound informed by repeating things they had heard about the paintings. At least they were trying. But I must admit I was preoccupied with the thought of dropping by the gallery that afternoon when Paul Weinert was scheduled to work.
Around three o’clock, as I walked down the corridor on the first floor of Arts and Humanities, I could see Paul was not at the desk by the lectern. Instead he stood at the far end of the room by the first painting in the Youngstown series. He wore the same black suit he’d worn at the gallery opening on Saturday. Students working the exhibits were required to wear business casual clothes, and most wore slacks and a sweater, but it seemed Paul had decided to present himself as if he owned the gallery.