Memory and Dream

She continued to feel responsible for the numena, but finally came to accept that it really was their decision to cross over or not, to have their paintings remain in the studio or go out into the world. They had lives of their own that had only as much to do with her as the friendships she made with a few of them, and in some ways she was happy to see the paintings gain a wider audience, rather than have them stockpiling in her studio. She wasn’t like Rushkin in that sense. Art, she believed, was made to be seen, not squirreled away. At the sums these paintings were selling for—Albina had priced them all in the fifteen-hundred—to three-thousand-dollar range—she was sure that their owners would take good care of them and the numena would remain safe from harm.

Albina was delighted by the decision and priced the three numena paintings—Grace, Your Streets Are Not Mine and one of a scarecrow-like figure chasing crows from a back lane garden, called Why the Crows Fly—at the high end of the show’s price scale. They were her favorites of the fourteen paintings in the show and were also the ones most singled out by reviewers. There was so much positive response to them that Izzy almost regretted not putting her other completed numena paintings in the show, but they hadn’t seemed to fit in as well with the theme.

The show took a little longer to sell out, but that, Albina assured her, was only because people were more cautious with their checkbooks once the art entered this price range.

“Trust me, Isabelle,” she said. “We can consider this show an unqualified success and a harbinger of even more success to come.”

One of the real surprises of the show, insofar as Izzy was concerned, was making a reacquaintance with one of her fellow students from her last year at Butler U. She spotted him at the opening, all freckles, tousled red hair and rumpled clothes, and remembered thinking, Oh god, Thomas Downs. Why did he have to come? In class he’d always seemed so full of himself, and she’d hated the way he constantly argued about fine art versus commercial. He had little good to say about any of the professors at the university, singling out Professor Dapple in particular, which hadn’t endeared him to Jilly either. He wasn’t even in any of Dapple’s classes.

Izzy hid a grimace when he came up to her, but she wasn’t able to hide her surprise at what he had to say.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“You do?”

He gave her a disarming smile. “Oh, it’s nothing I’ve ever said or done.”

“That doesn’t leave much to apologize for.”

Tom tapped a finger against his temple. “It’s the way I’ve thought about your work in the past. You see, I’ve always dismissed you as a Rushkin-wannabe—”

“But now you’ve found out that I studied under him,” Izzy finished for him, “so you’ve changed your mind.” This was so boring. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard variations on this theme.

“Not at all.” Tom waved a hand in the general direction of her paintings. “These changed my mind.”

“I don’t get it. I can see Rushkin’s influence in each one of them.”

Tom nodded. “Yes, but that’s because you’re now seeing things the way he might have—distilled through your own ability to perceive the world around you, to be sure, but you’re obviously now using the tools of vision that he taught you to use rather than merely aping his style. Your earlier work didn’t have this sense of vision—personal, or Rushkin’s.”

“Well, thanks very much.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I know how hard a process this can be. I had the same early luck as you, except I got to study under Erica Keane—you know her work?”

“Oh, please,” Izzy said. “Give me some credit.”

Keane was only one of the most respected watercolorists in the country, at the top of her field in the same way that Rushkin was in his. She had a studio in Lower Crowsea and Izzy had been there once during the annual tour of artists’ studios that the Newford School of Art organized every spring. She’d come away stunned at the woman’s control of her medium.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “You know how close-minded people can be when it comes to a discipline other than their own.”

“I suppose.”

“You’d be surprised at how many oil painters don’t recognize her name, little say have any familiarity with her work.”

“I love her mixed-media work,” Izzy said. “Especially her ink-and-watercolor pieces.”

Tom smiled. “Me, too. But to get back to my point, my work’s been saddled with endless comparisons to hers just because I’ve studied under her, but what the critics seem to miss is that what a good mentor teaches his or her students isn’t simple technique and style, but the way in which they view the world. We can’t help but incorporate that way of seeing things into our own work and because of that, because a Keane or a Rushkin has such a unique perspective on things, I think it’s a little harder for their students to break free and paint with their own—shall we say, ‘voice.’

“You’re beginning to do that with the work I see here tonight and I admire you for it because I haven’t been able to do the same thing myself—or at least not yet—and that’s why I felt I owed you an apology. You might be a wannabe, but what you want to be is your own woman and you’re making remarkable inroads to attaining that goal.”

Izzy gave him a long searching look, certain that he was making fun of her, but the gaze he returned was guileless.

“Apology accepted, I guess,” she said finally.

“Great.” He paused, looking a little self-conscious, before he added, “Are you doing anything special after tonight’s festivities wind down?”

Izzy gave him another considering look, but this time for a different reason. “You’re beginning to get a reputation,” Kathy had told her a few weeks ago. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kathy had shrugged. ‘just that you like to have a good time and you’re not big on there being any strings attached. You’re a very attractive woman, ma belle

Izzy, and there are a lot of men out there who are more than happy to take advantage of what you seem to be offering.”

Izzy had been mortified, though in retrospect, she shouldn’t have been surprised. Her life, when she wasn’t in the studio, really had become one long party. But at the time all she’d wanted to know was

“Where did you hear that?”

“No one place,” Kathy had said. “That kind of thing just gets around.”

“I had no idea ....”

Kathy had given her a sad look. “It’s been over a year now since you broke up with John,” she said.

“The only person you’re hurting is yourself”

She’d wanted to get angry with Kathy, but she couldn’t. Kathy was right. Izzy knew that the reason she was running so wild was to get back at John; the reason she didn’t want to make a commitment to any relationship was that she didn’t want to get hurt again.

“Oh, god,” she said. “This is so embarrassing.”

“No one’s saying it meanly,” Kathy had added. “At least not in our circle of friends. We’re all just worried about you—that you might get into a situation that you can’t handle.”

“I won’t let that happen,” she’d assured Kathy, and she’d kept that promise in the only way she knew how: she just stopped going out to the clubs and parties and poured all her pent-up emotions into her work instead. The visits from Annie Nin and the others had helped a lot.

All of that ran through Izzy’s head as she thought about what Tom had just asked her. He was a very attractive man. She could see them going somewhere dark and pleasantly noisy for a drink, or two, or six. Then back to his place ....

She glanced over to where Kathy and the rest of her friends stood in a gossiping clutch, laughing and talking. Sophie and Alan. Jilly and Tama Jostyn, whose novella “Wintering” was going to launch Alan’s new expansion of the East Street Press from publishing a literary journal to actual books.

“I’ve already made plans,” she said.

Tom nodded. “I sort of thought you might have, but it was worth a shot.”