going home, she let some young poet, two years junior to her venerable twenty years of age, take her home to his bed.
Around four in the morning she woke up with the feeling that they were being watched. She sat up and looked around the unfamiliar room, then went to look out the window. The bedroom was on the third floor and there were no trees outside, no fire escape that someone could have climbed up, not even any vines or gutters.
Instead of returning to the bed, she got dressed and went to the bathroom. It took her a few minutes to track down a bottle of aspirin. She took three with a glass of water, then left the poet’s apartment and walked the two and a half blocks back to her own on Waterhouse Street.
She didn’t return to the poet’s bed, but two nights later she slept with his best friend.
Izzy had seventeen pieces hanging in her second solo show at The Green Man Gallery. By the end of the first week of the show, every one of them had sold.
“Obviously we priced them too low,” Albina said the night that she, Kathy, Alan and Izzy went out to celebrate.
They had a corner table in The Rusty Lion with a view of Lee Street. The shops were all closed, but the street, even on this brisk November evening, was bustling with people, an even mix of bohemian types and commuters, tourists and area residents, on their way home, on their way out for a night on the town, or just on their way from one indefinable point to another. In the midst of the crowd, Izzy spotted a tall woman with a lion’s mane of red-gold hair. She walked with a pantherish grace, oblivious of the chill, her light cotton jacket hanging open. Men turned to look at her as she went by, noting her obvious charms rather than the way her ears tapered into narrow points from which sprouted small bobcat-like tufts of hair. But it was dark, Izzy thought, and the red- gold spill of the woman’s mane hid them from sight.
Izzy had finished the painting that brought this numena over two days before hanging her show. She hadn’t named the piece yet, but seeing the woman in the flesh, admiring the fluid movement of her musculature as she glided by, she decided to call it simply
“I’m truly sorry,” Albina said.
It took Izzy a moment to realize that Albina was speaking to her. Alan smiled.
“She’s become far too successful now to talk with plebes like us,” he said. “Haven’t you, Izzy?”
“Ha-ha.”
“The next time,” Albina went on, “we’ll definitely ask for more.”
“Yes,” Kathy declared loftily. “We must ask two or three times the current price for subsequent shows. We have here the makings of a true artiste to whom all the world will one day bow in homage.”
“Oh, please,” Izzy said, aiming a kick at Kathy’s leg under the table, but she blushed with pleasure.
Kathy moved her leg and all Izzy succeeded in doing was stubbing her toe on the rung of Kathy’s chair.
“Now, now,” Alan told her. “You don’t see Van Gogh carrying on like this.”
“That’s because Van Gogh’s bloody dead,” Kathy said. “Don’t you keep up on current events?”
Alan’s features took on a look of exaggerated shock. “You’re telling me he’s passe?”
“Or at least passed on,” Kathy said. “Unlike our own
While Izzy knew that they were only teasing her, she still couldn’t stop feeling somewhat awkward at how well the show had done. The paintings all selling. The reviews all so wonderful. Other painters she only knew from their work or their reputations coming up to congratulate her. The success was more than a little frightening, especially when she knew that what had ended up in the show hadn’t been her best work. She hadn’t put one of the pieces that called up the numena in the show, and they were all far better than the cityscapes and real-life portraits that had sold. It wasn’t that she had invested more of herself in the paintings that called up numena; they just seemed to draw the best up from her, to push her artistic limits in a way that the other paintings didn’t. Or couldn’t. The ones she’d sold had been technically challenging. The paintings of her numena challenged something deep inside her to which she couldn’t attach a definition.
“Unlike your so-called friends,” Albina said, “I’m being serious. We’re really going to have to reconsider our pricing for any future work of yours that the gallery hangs.”
Izzy hated to talk business. She gave a shrug that didn’t commit her to anything. “Whatever.”
“We can talk about it later,” Albina said.
“That’s right,” Kathy announced, raising her wineglass in a toast. “Tonight we’re here to celebrate.
Here’s to Izzy—long may she prosper!”
Izzy blushed as Albina and Alan echoed Kathy’s toast. She could feel the people at the other tables looking at her.
“Let’s put this in its proper perspective,” she said, clinking her glass against theirs. “Here’s to us.
May we all prosper.”
Kathy smiled at her. “Amen to that, ma
It was after dinner, while they were having their coffee, that Albina brought up Izzy’s paintings of her numena.
“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that you have any other finished work at your studio, what with having to prepare for the show and all?”
“Nothing that I want to sell,” Izzy told her.
“Jilly tells me you’ve been working on a series of fairy-tale portraits—something along the themes she’s beginning to undertake in her own work, only not quite so fanciful.”
Izzy nodded. “But they’re just something I’m experimenting with.”
“I’d have a look through them, if I were you. The sooner we can hang some more of your work, the better it would be. We have a certain momentum going for us at the moment. It would be a shame to not build on it.”
“I suppose.”
Izzy looked out the window at Lee Street. The crowds had thinned by now. Christy’s brother Geordie was busking with his fiddle on the corner in front of Jacob’s Fruitland. He started to pack up as she watched, with a couple of guitarists waiting in the wings, as it were, for their turn on the pavement stage. Across the street a mime and a hammered-dulcimer player were vying with the few straggling passersby on their side of the street.
It was odd how often she would spot her numena now, blended into crowds, caught from the corner of her eye, but so far none of them had approached her the way that John had. She had the sense that they were as curious about her as she was of them, but something held them back. Sometimes she wondered if John had warned them away from her. Or maybe they thought that she wanted to ask after him. The first time she got to talk to one of them, she would set the record straight. She was completely over John Sweetgrass, thank you very much. She didn’t even think of him anymore.
She resisted the urge to put a finger to her nose to see if it started to grow at the lie.
Albina touched her arm. “Izzy?”
Izzy focused on her friend and gave her a vague smile. “I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.”
“About those paintings you have finished—these experiments. I’d be interested in having a look at them.”
Izzy shook her head. “Sometimes you have to do things just for yourself,” she said, trying to explain.
“It’s like, if everything you do goes up for sale, you’ve nothing left for yourself. There’s no way to judge where you’re going, how you’re doing. I need the freedom of knowing that there are paintings I can do that aren’t for sale, that don’t have any consideration in how or why they came about, or in what they have to say. Paintings that just are, that I can look up from my easel and see them hanging on the wall and ... oh, I don’t know. Grow familiar with them, I guess.”
“I think I understand,” Albina said.
Perhaps she did, Izzy thought. Perhaps what she was telling Albina did make sense to someone who didn’t
