Imagine what we could do if we could actually learn to speak that ancient tongue.”
It made so much sense when Rushkin spoke to her of it, but Izzy couldn’t seem to translate it when she tried to repeat what she was learning to her friends.
“You should attend more of Dapple’s lectures next year,” filly said. “Just before the finals he got us all into this really interesting dialogue about what we were doing with our art, where we wanted to go with it and why.”
Izzy gave up trying, as she invariably did, and went with the new turn their conversation had taken.
“You really like Professor Dapple, don’t you?”
“He’s been great to me,” filly said. “He’s even going to let me use one of his spare rooms as a studio over the summer. Someone else was using it last year and they left behind all kinds of supplies. He said I could use whatever I wanted for myself.”
Kathy laughed. “Sounds like he’s got the hots for you.”
“Oh please.”
“Well, really.”
Jilly shook her head. “What about you, Izzy?” she asked. “Are you going to work at Rushkin’s studio full-time until school starts up next year?”
“Actually, I don’t know if I’m going back to school next year.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of this,” Kathy said. “What’s going on?”
Izzy sighed. “My scholarship’s dependent on my keeping up my grades and I was stretched so thin this year that all I managed was a C-minus average. That’s not enough, so the scholarship’s been cut off.
I won’t be able to afford to go back in the fall.”
“What about your parents?” filly asked.
“They don’t have any money, or if they do, they’re not telling me about it. They think I’m wasting my time anyway.”
“But your work’s so
“I told them,” Izzy said, “but my father’s really down on the whole idea of my becoming an artist. My mother’s not so bad, but he’s basically written me off as a lost cause. We don’t talk about it anymore.
Actually, we don’t talk anymore, period.”
“You should have told me,” Kathy said.
“I didn’t know how to,” Izzy said. “It means I have to leave residence, and I’m going to miss you so much, that I just ...” She shrugged helplessly.
“We’ll get a place together,” Kathy said. “Off campus. Alan says there’s all these really cheap bachelors and lofts available on Waterhouse Street. He’s planning to move into one himself on the fifteenth.”
“I’m living in a rooming house just a couple of blocks north,” Jilly said. “It’s a great area, cheap but still pretty. There’s all sorts of artists and musicians living around there. You’d love it, Izzy.”
Kathy nodded. “We’ll be a real community. And you could get a student loan.”
“I don’t know.”
“And you could sell some of your paintings,” Jilly said. “You must have a ton of them by now. I know a gallery you could show them to. I can’t guarantee they’d take them, but you could try.”
“Or sell them down by the Pier to the tourists,” Kathy said.
Jilly nodded. “Sophie sells pen-and-ink sketches of Newford landmarks there on the weekends and she says sometimes she makes a real killing.”
Izzy regarded her friends through a film of tears that blurred her gaze. She’d been so depressed, trying to figure out how to break the news to Kathy, trying to figure out what she was going to do for money. She wanted to stay in the city, to be close to her friends and keep studying under Rushkin. She wanted to finish her B.A. at Butler. But mostly she refused to crawl back to the farm, dragging her tail between her legs and proving her father right.
“You guys are so great,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Kathy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “That’s what friends are for, ma
Jilly’s got this friend at a gallery who’ll look at my work, you see,” Izzy said.
She eyed Rushkin nervously, but he merely nodded a “yes, go on” in response. His features gave away nothing of what he was thinking, which only made Izzy feel more jittery. Although he hadn’t hit her again since that last time just before Christmas, some things hadn’t changed. He was still dictatorial and bad-tempered, needing very little provocation to launch into a scathing tirade of verbal abuse. She’d tried to be supportive about his therapy, but he simply wouldn’t discuss it, and though it was true that he hadn’t laid a hand on her again, there were many times she went home in tears. She would sit up, unable to sleep, trying to understand why she put up with all she did from him, vowing that she’d have it out with him, once and for all. Except invariably, once she arrived at the studio the next day, he’d be warm and supportive, and all her good intentions would drain away, if not her confusion.
He had a hold on her that went beyond their student-teacher relationship and she knew it wasn’t healthy. She admired him tremendously, for his talent and his insight and his dedication to his art, but he also seemed to mesmerize her, and in so doing, exacted far too much control over her. His moods ruled their relationship, and she often got a headache trying to second-guess what he was thinking or how he would react to even the most innocuous comment or incident.
It had taken all her courage this morning to bring up the question of taking some of her work into a gallery, and even so she could only approach it by a circuitous route.
“So I thought maybe I’d do that,” she went on, “because I’m really broke and I need the money to get an apartment.”
She kept expecting him to explode into one of his rages, but his features remained a bland mask. His apparent calm fed her jumpiness, making it increasingly more difficult for her to go on, never mind actually come right out and ask him what she wanted. In the end, all she could do was stand there beside her easel, fiddling with a cleaning rag, unable to finish.
“And how is it that I enter the equation?” Rushkin finally asked.
“Well, the only paintings I have that are any good—that I think are any good—are here.”
“And you want me to help you choose which ones to take in?”
Was it going to be this easy? Izzy thought. Unable to trust her voice, she nodded in response.
“What was the name of the gallery again?”
“The ... Green Man.”
“I see,” Rushkin said. And then he said the last thing she’d been expecting. “Well, I think it would be an excellent venue—not so highbrow that your work might be diminished in comparison to that of their more established artists, yet with enough of a reputation to insure that the paintings will be viewed with some seriousness.”
“You mean it’s okay?”
“Your ability has been progressing by leaps and bounds,” Rushkin told her, “and I think you are due some recompense for the dedication you’ve shown to date.”
Thank god she’d caught him in a good mood, Izzy thought.
“Besides,” he added with a smile. “I can’t have you sleeping in alleyways. Think of what it would do for my studio’s reputation if the word ever got out that I drove my best student into penury.”
The morning took on a surreal quality for Izzy. From Rushkin’s actually cracking a joke, to his helping her choose and frame a half-dozen paintings, none of it seemed real. It was as though she’d strayed into an alternate world where everything was almost, but not quite, the same. She wasn’t complaining, though. The Rushkin of this hypothetical other world was such good company that she wanted to stay here with him forever.
Still, obliging and good-natured as he was, the old Rushkin hadn’t entirely disappeared. The choices he made seemed so arbitrary at times that Izzy couldn’t fathom what his reasoning might be. More than once he would pass
