Kill Me If You Can

Within seconds, half a dozen kids were vying to see who could get the biggest laugh. Katherine just grinned and didn’t try to stop them.

But I did. “None of you is as funny as George Luks,” I said, pointing at the painting on the wall.

“You think this picture is funny?” the Puerto Rican romantic said.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “But the guy who painted it, George Luks, was a stand-up comedian and a comic strip illustrator. Then he teamed up with seven other artists and they became known as the Ashcan School.”

“Cool,” the kid said.

“He was pretty cool,” I said. “Until one night he got the crap kicked out of him in a barroom brawl and was found dead a few hours later. Now, if you paid attention to your teacher, you could learn a lot of cool stuff like that.”

I walked away.

A half hour later Katherine found me gawking at Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning.

“Where’s your class?” I said.

“I’m not their teacher,” she said. “I just do volunteer work at the museum every Wednesday. The kids liked you. They were sorry you left.”

“I’m sure you handled them just fine,” I said.

“I did. But I was sorry you left, too. How do you know so much about art?”

I shrugged. “I just do. It’s not a very exciting story.”

“I love to hear what other people think about art,” she said. “If I bought you a cup of tea and a pumpkin muffin at Sarabeth’s Kitchen, would you tell me some of the least boring parts?” She smiled and her soft gray eyes were full of mischief and joy and promise.

“I couldn’t do that,” I said.

Her smile faded and her eyes looked at me, more than a little surprised.

“But I could buy you a cup of tea and a pumpkin muffin at Sarabeth’s Kitchen,” I said. “Would that work?”

The smile flashed back on. “Deal,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Katherine Sanborne.”

“Matthew Bannon,” I said. Her hand was warm and soft and about half the size of mine. I held it for only a second, but it was long enough for me to get that jolt that goes through your body when you touch someone who has touched your heart.

We had tea.

I told her about my dream to be a painter.

“Maybe I can help,” she said. “I teach art. I’d love to see your work. Maybe you can bring some samples to my office tomorrow after my class.”

“I thought you said those kids in the museum weren’t your class.”

“They’re not. I don’t teach high school.”

“Oh, okay. That makes sense,” I said. “You’re pretty young. You probably wouldn’t want to put up with a bunch of hormonal teenage boys all day. What grade do you teach?”

She smiled. “It’s not a grade,” she said. “It’s a master’s program. I’m a professor of Fine Arts at Parsons.”

It was now official: Katherine Sanborne was beautiful and brilliant.

I was totally out of my league.

Chapter 3

I SPENT HALF that night trying to figure out which of my paintings I should show her. Was this one too predictable? Was that one too boring? Or worse, completely pedestrian? I was seeing my work in a whole new light. Not just was it any good, but was it good enough for Katherine?

The next day I was in Professor Sanborne’s office with fourteen photos of what I hoped was the best work I had done thus far. I doubt I’d ever felt more vulnerable and exposed in my life.

“No wonder you knew so much about the Realists,” she said after she looked at them. “Your work reminds me of Edward Hopper. In his early days.”

“I suppose you mean back when he was finger-painting in kindergarten?”

She laughed, and I decided it was gentle humor, kind humor, rather than the savage variety some professors strive to perfect.

“Not that early,” she said. “As you know, I’m sure, Hopper is legendary for his ability to capture reality. But his early works are so impersonal. That’s where you are now. In my opinion, anyway. Over time, Hopper’s paintings began to take on emotions — loneliness, despair, gloom. Nighthawks is probably his best work — my favorite — and he didn’t paint that till he was sixty.”

“I hope it doesn’t take me that long,” I said, “to do something half as good.”

“It won’t,” she said. “Not if you study at the right school.”

“Like where?” I asked. “Any suggestion you have would be so helpful. Honest.”

“Like here,” she said.

I shook my head a couple of times. “I don’t think I have the talent to be accepted at Parsons.”

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “Loser buys the winner…I don’t know — dinner at Peter Luger. I love Luger’s.”

Six months later, Professor Katherine Sanborne and I were having the porterhouse medium rare at Peter Luger in Brooklyn.

I paid for dinner.

We started seeing each other regularly after our celebratory dinner, and six months after that, I was in her Group Critique class at Parsons. We did a pretty good job of keeping our relationship a secret from the other students, I thought.

The best part of Group Critique was being able to be near her three times a week. The worst part was enduring the critiques by my so-called peers.

The morning before I found the diamonds, my latest painting was being thoroughly trashed by Leonard Karns. Karns was short, round, pretentious, and bitterly, unnecessarily nasty. He waddled over to my canvas and explained to the rest of the group why it sucked and, by proxy, why I sucked.

“So it’s a bunch of nobodies in line at an unemployment office,” he said. “But do we really care about any of them? I could take the same picture with my cell phone camera. It’s like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht said, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’”

“And you don’t think Mr. Bannon has shaped this piece?” Katherine said.

“No,” Karns said. “But I think he should take a hammer to it.”

If he was hoping for a laugh from the rest of the class, he didn’t get it. Most of my fellow students sat in silence and winced. It was the last day of the semester, and by now Karns had managed to systematically piss off every one of them with his condescending elitist bullshit.

He would have pontificated longer, but Katherine cut him off. When class ended, she gave us back our term papers. The assignment had been to write a five-thousand-word critique of public art in New York City. It counted as a third of our grade, so I’d spent a lot of time on it. I’d hoped for an A.

But I didn’t get it. There was a yellow sticky on the front page. It said, C+. Matthew, see me after class.

I sat in a depressed funk while everyone else filed out of the room. Katherine Sanborne finally came around her desk and walked toward me.

“C-plus?” I said. “I thought the paper was a little better than that.”

“If you’re willing to put in the time, I can give you a chance to improve your grade,” she said.

“What do I have to do? I’m not afraid of hard work.”