“Sooo,” Caroline prodded, “how was it?”
“Just a kiss,” I said.
She replied, “Delicious.”
Telling her, the kiss became even better than it had been.
I’d never been in the advanced art studio before, because I’d taken only the standard survey art course, Visual Design (or Vis Des), taught by grumpy Mr. Atterbury, whose breath was so redolent of booze that when we came to the welding unit we joked he’d ignite. One of my tasks in Vis Des was to recast a photograph of the chapel in a new color palette by affixing cutout swatches of complementary colored paper. This was an exercise I abhorred. Snipping and pasting when I could have been reading, or napping, or getting ahead in math?
Caroline was holding an actual palette in her hand, arrayed with gobs of pigment. I wanted to press my fingers into it.
“Did he use tongue?” she asked.
“Not much.” Just right, I thought.
“Bad breath?”
“Good, actually.”
“Hands?”
“No, nothing.”
Caroline beamed. “Lacy-o! I like this guy!”
She was working in oils, which we lowly Vis Des students never got to do, and she stood back from her easel so that I finally noticed what she’d been working on. It was a portrait of a woman. Caroline had completed the contouring of her subject’s cheeks and mouth and was bringing forward the eyes, but the hair was still a suggestion and the background untouched. The work was dynamic, as though this woman, whoever she was, was quite literally coming into existence on the canvas. My friend had pencils behind each ear and paint all over her arms.
“My God,” I said, staring at her work. “That’s amazing. Who is that?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You’re making this up?”
She tipped her head at her woman. “I think I’m more letting her out.”
Of course. Caroline could put color on white and make you think, That’s a person. Whereas I had no idea what was in front of me.
Behind her easel a form-mate of ours was working on his own canvas. I hadn’t noticed him before, but he’d allowed us our privacy while I was gushing about Shep. I didn’t know Pete Walters well. He was neither buddy nor jock, a self-contained blond guy who was handsomer than his social standing would suggest, but also more aloof than you wished him to be. He had a brother in the sixth form who was a redhead, and once, looking at him in Chapel, I had wondered what it might have been like to have my own brother at St. Paul’s. But my brother was five years younger, so we couldn’t have overlapped anyway.
Pete’s painting was a hyperrealist depiction of a row of telephone poles along the edge of a desolate road. The earth was yellow and the sky blue, the road gray, and on each telephone pole’s outstretched arms was a Jesus nailed as on the cross. It was one hell of a Jesus he’d painted: head bowed in death, blood weeping from the gash in his side, over and over and over, growing smaller and smaller toward an empty horizon. It was impressive and horrible. As for what it meant, I figured there was a compelling message in there somewhere, maybe about manifest destiny or the rape of the earth, and I’d think about it later.
“Holy cow, Pete,” I said.
He smiled. “Yeah?”
“No, really.”
Caroline stepped out from her own easel. “I know, isn’t Pete doing cool stuff?”
The three of us stared. I counted six Jesuses. I remembered that my mother had once told me that her father, my grandfather, was not a part of her life because he had decided to go work for the telephone company when they were first stringing lines across the West, and my great-grandmother had said that no son-in-law of hers would work for the utilities. “He just wanted to climb telephone poles,” my mother had told me, disgusted, and I remembered wondering what was wrong with that. It must have been obvious, though, because he’d vanished when my mom was an infant and never returned. I did not even know his name.
“My grandfather worked for the telephone company, stringing wires across the West,” I said. More and more at St. Paul’s I found myself saying things that sounded like a script I’d been working on almost long enough to pull off.
“Really?” Pete asked.
“Yeah. He loved it. The freedom. Climbing the poles.” This must have been true, if he’d left his wife and baby daughter to do it.
“Gosh,” said Caroline. “I had no idea, Lace. That’s really cool.”
Pete made big eyes at her. “It’s very cool.”
If it weren’t for the verisimilitude of the dead Jesuses, I’d have guessed Pete might be in the painting studio solely to be close to Caroline. But he had talent. And some serious angst, too, from the look of his work. He puffed his hair off his forehead and squinted. “I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s not quite speaking to me.”
There was a long pause. We heard the stream rushing behind the art building. Pete stood sweetly, his apron doubled at his waist. His painting was accomplished and grotesque. It was a very St. Paul’s project: more intention than meaning and more striving than intention. We three kids cocked our heads at the Jesuses and tried to come up with the right thing to say.
Pete began to laugh. He said, “Maybe it’s a little too…”
Caroline laughed with
