taking responsibility for my brutality. But when that rage comes upon me, I am no longer in control. It is as though I have been possessed. The monster rises up and I can do nothing but weep at what it leaves in its wake.”
Rushkin lifted his head. “I’m sorry. None of what I’m saying can alleviate in any way the repugnance towards me that you must be feeling.” He rose slowly to his feet. “You should go home. Let me call you a cab—or ... or do you need to go to the hospital?”
Izzy slowly shook her head. She was bruised and sore, but the last thing in the world she wanted was to have some doctor pushing and prodding away at her. And how would she explain what had happened to her? It would be so humiliating.
She flinched as Rushkin stepped toward her, but he was only retrieving her painting. He placed it in her knapsack, then closed the fastenings.
She didn’t flinch as he approached her again, but she rose to her feet under her own steam. Rushkin didn’t offer to help her up. He merely waited for her to put on her coat, then handed her the knapsack.
“That ... that painting,” she said.
“Please. Take it. It’s yours,” he said contritely. “It has a certain charm and I’m sure it will delight your friend.”
Izzy nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She hesitated, then added: “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Certainly.”
“Have you ... have you thought of seeing somebody about this problem you’ve got with your temper?
Like a ... a therapist of some sort?”
She almost expected him to fly into another rage, but all he did was slowly shake his head.
“Look at me,” he said. “I have the appearance of a monster. Why shouldn’t I carry one inside me as well?”
Izzy did look at him and realized then that her familiarity with him had changed the way she viewed him. She didn’t see him as ugly at all anymore. He was just Rushkin.
“That doesn’t have to be true,” she said.
“If you really believe that, then I will do it.”
“You’ll get some help?”
Rushkin nodded. “Consider it a promise. And thank you, Isabelle.”
“What do you have to thank me for?”
“For showing me the charity that you have after what I’ve done to you.”
“If you really mean it,” Izzy said, “then I want to keep coming back to the studio.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Rushkin told her. “A therapist might well not be able to help me and even if I should have success, there’s no guarantee that the monster won’t arise again before the process is completed.”
“But if you’re going to do this, I can’t just walk out on you,” Izzy told him. “I can’t let you go through it alone.”
Rushkin shook his head in slow amazement. “You have a spirit as generous as it is talented,” he said.
Izzy lowered her head as a hot flush rose up her neck and spread across her cheeks.
“I will phone my doctor this afternoon,” Rushkin said, “and ask him to refer me to someone as soon as possible. Still, I think we should take a break for a few weeks.”
“But—”
Rushkin smiled and wagged a finger at her. “You’ve been working hard and you deserve a rest. You can return in the new year.”
“You’ll be okay?”
Rushkin nodded. “With the faith you’ve shown me, how could I be otherwise?”
Izzy surprised herself as well as him then. Before he was quite aware of what she was doing, she stepped up to him and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Vincent,” she said, and then she fled.
Feeney’s Kitchen was busy Friday night, crowded and loud. Smoke hung thick in the air and not all of it originated from tobacco. On stage a four-piece Celtic group called Marrowbones was ripping through a set of Irish reels, and the small dance floor was filled with jostling bodies attempting their own idiosyncratic versions of Irish step dancing, flinging themselves about with great and joyous abandon.
Izzy sat at a table near the back with Kathy and Jilly, enjoying the raucous mood for all that it made conversation next to impossible. It was only when the band took a break that they could talk with any hope of understanding each other. After the waitress brought them another pitcher of beer, the conversation got around to a discussion of the benefits of a fine-arts curriculum at a university such as Butler as opposed to an apprenticeship under an established artist. Izzy, being the only one of the three involved in both, found herself elaborating on one of Rushkin’s theories, which brought cries of elitism from both her companions.
“That’s where Rushkin’s got it all wrong,” Jilly argued. “There’s no one way to approach art; there’s no
“Amen,” Kathy said.
“But without the proper technique, you don’t have the tools to work with.”
Jilly nodded. “Sure. I agree with that. You can teach technique; just as you can teach art history and theory. But you can’t teach the use to which a person puts their technique and theory. You can’t tell someone what to have in their heart, what they
“You mean their passion,” Izzy said.
“Exactly. You can nurture it in somebody, but you can’t teach it.”
Over the course of the past nine months, Izzy had begun to approach the heart of Rushkin’s alchemical secret in her own work; she could feel something opening up inside her, the way a window seemed to open in a canvas sometimes and the painting almost appeared to create itself. But she’d also come to accept the truth of what Rushkin had meant about a new language being required to explain it.
She wanted to share what she was learning with her friends, especially with Jilly since it so specifically applied to the visual arts, but as they sat here talking she realized that they really didn’t have access to the same lexicon she had come to acquire studying under Rushkin. And without it, she was helpless to do more than fumble for words that simply didn’t exist.
“But what if you could teach passion?” she asked. “What if there was a way to take a piece of yourself and put it into the canvas?”
“But isn’t that what art’s all about?” Jilly said.
“The same goes for writing,” Kathy added.
“Yes, I know,” Izzy said. “But what if that process could be taught?”
Dilly topped off their glasses from the draft-beer pitcher and took a sip from her own. “If Rushkin’s been telling you that, he’s pulling a scam. I’ll grant you that working with an artist of his caliber, you couldn’t help but feel you were privy to secret techniques, but when it comes down to the crunch, everything worth anything still has to originate from inside yourself.”
But it does, Izzy wanted to tell her. It’s just with what I’m learning, that process is so much more intense, and the end result so much closer to the original vision. But she knew it was pointless. They’d been having variations on this conversation for a couple of months now, but their disparate vocabularies remained an insurmountable barrier.
“All language was one, once,” Rushkin had explained to her when he was in one of his conversational moods. “Then we tried to not only touch God, but to think of ourselves as gods as well, and our tower was brought tumbling down about our ears. It wasn’t just language that splintered on that day, but all the arts. We lost our ability to communicate in every medium—not just with words—and that original language has all but vanished from the world.
“What we’re doing here in this studio is trying to reclaim a portion of the original language, an echo of it. We are desperate voices, trapped in Babylon, seeking what we lost and coming close—so very close; that and no more.
