the cost of making herself sound like a fool.
“He was pulling your leg, right?” John said.
Izzy shook her head. “No. He seemed quite serious.” She hesitated a moment, then decided to plunge on ahead. “He even warned me against you. He told me you were evil and I should destroy the painting and send you back.”
A frown took the humor from John’s features. “He should talk.”
Izzy blinked in surprise. “You
“I know his kind. They don’t live in the world, but they’ll sit in judgment of those who do and take what they want from it and from us.”
“No, you’ve got him all wrong,” Izzy said. “He’s a brilliant artist.”
“I don’t think so. True artists live in the world from which they take their inspiration. The two are inseparable—the subjects and those who render them. They return to the world as much—more—than what they take away.”
“He goes out,” Izzy said, thinking of how she’d first met her mentor.
“Oh yes,” John replied. “To observe. To take back what he’s found and capture it in his art. But not to partake of life. What does he give back?”
Me, Izzy thought, because that was all she knew Rushkin gave back. He teaches me. But he didn’t show anymore, and he’d told her often enough that he didn’t like to go out, didn’t like to talk to people.
“Can’t think of anything?” John asked.
“He’s just a little reclusive, that’s all,” Izzy replied. “But he’s inspired any number of people to enter the arts, so you can’t say he’s never given anything back. I can’t tell you how many people I know who got involved in the arts in one way or another because of him.”
John shrugged. “Any good a man such as he might do, is inadvertent.”
His reaction had been so strong to what Izzy had hoped would just be an amusing anecdote that she felt depressed. It was beginning to look as though they weren’t going to agree on anything. And what was worse, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about what Rushkin had told her. She realized that for the past twenty minutes or so she’d been really studying John, almost as if she were trying to find the brushstrokes.
Suddenly she leaned across the table to get a closer look. John returned her scrutiny with a mild curiosity, but he didn’t say anything.
John leaned forward as well. He put his hand behind her head and gently pulled her toward him and then he kissed her in a way Izzy had never been kissed before. There was tenderness in the soft brush of his lips, but urgency as well; he was utterly focused upon the act, putting all of his attention on her and the contact of their lips until Izzy felt she was swimming through thickened air.
“What do you think?” he asked when he finally drew back.
Izzy took a long steadying breath. She couldn’t stop the smile that widened her lips. She didn’t want to.
“I don’t think it matters,” she told him. “I don’t think it matters one bit.” This time she was the one to initiate the kiss.
Izzy didn’t go back to Rushkin’s studio the next day, or Friday, but by Monday morning she was itching to return. All her art supplies were there, all her paintings, and while Rushkin might be an odd bird, she knew that she’d learned more in the months she’d studied under him than she could have in years of working on her own. If he wanted to believe that some paintings could bring their subjects to literal life, that they could in effect create real physical representations of what appeared on the canvas, let him. She didn’t have to buy into the extremes of his eccentricity to keep learning from him. And one or two odd ideas certainly didn’t invalidate all she had learned, and could yet learn, from him.
But she was still nervous, returning to the studio. Not for fear of their continuing that weird discussion, nor even that Rushkin might really want her to start destroying certain paintings, but because of his temper. Since that awful day last December, he’d been true to his word and he hadn’t hit her again, but Izzy had gotten no better with confrontations and she could easily see this fueling more of them. But that Monday she returned, Rushkin kept his word once more. He didn’t bring up the subject again. The weeks went by and their conversations revolved around art, if they originated from Rushkin; anything else they talked about, Izzy had to bring up first. It got so that she forgot Rushkin had ever tried to convince her that she had brought John to life by painting him.
It was John who reminded her.
“Do me a favor, Isabelle,” he said when she was trying to decide where to store her painting of him,
“and keep it somewhere safe.”
At that time the painting was leaning against the wall of her bedroom, but her bedroom was so small and cluttered that she was afraid of inadvertently damaging the canvas by dropping something onto it, or putting her foot through it on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It was too imposing to hang anywhere in their little apartment, and besides, she thought it was a little weird, the idea of having this huge portrait of her boyfriend up on her wall.
“What do you mean, keep it safe?” she’d asked him. “I thought you didn’t believe what Rushkin told me.”
John gave her a lopsided grin in response. “I just like it,” he said. “And there’s no harm in being careful, is there?”
And that was all he would say on the matter. When she tried to press him on it, he’d turn her questions aside. He was good at that. Whenever something came up in their conversation that he didn’t want to talk about, he’d steer them onto some other topic so skillfully that it wouldn’t be until she was at home in bed, or maybe even the next day working at her easel, that Izzy would realize she never had gotten a straight answer.
John liked to retain a sense of mystery about him, and Izzy learned to accept it. She knew he was staying with an aunt who “didn’t much like white girls”; that he worked at odd jobs; that he never seemed to have much of an appetite; that he had an unquenchable thirst to know about everything and anything so that he was never bored and, consequently, it was hard to be bored in his company, for his enthusiasm for the most mundane subject inevitably became catching; that he had a great treasure of the stories and history of his people that he would share, but very little to relate in terms of personal history except that he’d been in trouble a lot when he was younger and he didn’t like to talk about it anymore.
He was also the best lover Izzy had ever had. She knew she didn’t exactly have the world’s largest experience along those lines, having only taken three up to the time she’d met John, but each of those previous relationships had been disasters. For some reason, when it came to boyfriends, she was always attracted to men who treated her badly, or indifferently. John treated her as if she were made of gold.
She got the impression, from the little he talked about the trouble he used to get into, that he had a violent side to him, but it was never turned toward her. She had seen him angry, but it was always directed toward something or someone else, never at her.
If she had one real complaint in their relationship, it was that they were rarely a couple around her other friends. Somehow he was just never there when they were all getting together. He tended to call her at quiet times, or would simply show up when she was alone—returning from the studio or from the university—and then they went off on their own. It never seemed planned, but for all that most of her friends had met him, after three weeks, he was even more of a mystery to them than he was to her.
Talking about it with him never seemed to resolve anything because they always ended up talking about something else that was of far more immediate interest, and since it never appeared to bother any of her friends, eventually Izzy just let it go. Everyone was intrigued with him, but no one seemed to be insulted that he was rarely a part of the crowd.
Kathy was particularly happy with John’s appearance in Izzy’s life, having mother-henned her roommate through almost two and a half years of Izzy’s bad luck with men.
“You see?” she’d said after the first time she met John. “There are still good people around.”
“But I don’t know anything about him.”
“All you have to know is that he’s a good person,” Kathy replied, reversing their roles now that she’d met
