Sea Glass Inn (20 page)

Pam laughed at his final sentence, but the rest of the conversation troubled her. They got back to the picnic table and Pam sat facing Mel and Danny. Mel smiled at her, appearing a little more at ease, and started chatting with Danny as if determined to put aside her earlier reserve. Pam was silent as they ate, half listening to their talk about the upcoming holidays. She had been so concerned about reassuring Danny because she thought he wouldn’t want her dating his mother.

To hear him admit he’d be okay with it, and to realize he must have picked up on something between her and Mel, was disturbing. She and Mel might only want a quick fling, but there was another person involved. Now when Pam left, she risked hurting not just Mel but Danny, too. She needed to end this affair before someone started to expect her to stick around permanently.

“What kind of bird is that?” Mel asked quietly.

Pam looked down in surprise to find she had been sketching on Mel’s napkin. “A kingfisher,” she said. “He’s right over there, on the railing.”

Danny twisted around to look at the long-billed, gray bird. “I want to be able to do that,” he said.

“Perch on a railing?” Pam asked, putting down Mel’s pen and taking a bite of chicken salad sandwich.

“Ha-ha. No, I want to draw and paint like you do.”

Pam continued to eat while Mel picked up on Danny’s topic, and the two of them eventually came up with a plan to have Pam give them a lesson.

“We can have it tomorrow in the studio,” Mel said.

Pam sighed. Mel was going to get her on display in that studio if it killed her. “I’m not a teacher.”

“We’re beginners, so we won’t know the difference,” Mel said.

Pam looked at the two of them and wanted to say no. But it had been a day of nos. No whales, no don’t tell your son about us, no I can’t date your mother. This was a chance to say yes, to do something simple for them. But would it be simple to share her art without revealing too much of her private pain? Pam would have to find out.

“Sure, I’ll give you guys an art lesson.” No problem.

Pam set up her easel behind the two she had borrowed from Tia. She put a canvas on each one and then stood back to check the light. She shifted one of the easels closer to the window.

A tall table held a few brushes with freshly cleaned downy bristles and soft-leaded pencils within arm’s reach of her students’ canvases.

She put the palettes and trays of paint next to her own easel. This time, she would mix the paints herself, once she knew what Mel and Danny wanted to paint. She would be quicker to blend the colors, and they could focus on getting a feel for brush on canvas. A faint urge stirred inside when she unpacked the palettes and smelled the phenolic residue from their recent scrubbing. She’d resist the scent of oils, the graphite, the washed canvases. She’d mix paint for Mel and Danny, not for herself.

Pam fussed with the easels again, changing the angle so they wouldn’t be able to see each other’s paintings while they were working.

And an easel for herself, just in case she needed to demonstrate a brushstroke or sketching technique. She was too excited about the lesson to be upset that Mel had finally managed to get her to at least
teach
painting in the studio. She had told Mel she wasn’t an art teacher. But she hadn’t mentioned how much she had wanted to be one. She had been offered a teaching job at her university after she received her Master’s. Only a couple of advanced portrait seminars, but turning down the opportunity was one of her biggest regrets. But the university was Diane’s domain, and she couldn’t bear to have Pam overshadow her there as well. Pam had turned down the job and never again brought up the subject of teaching. Out loud, at least. Inside, she had always wished she had jumped at the chance to share her love of color and shape and texture with others, in such a direct way.

Mel and Danny came in just as Pam was about to move the easels yet again. She got them settled in front of their canvases and adjusted the height so they were comfortable. She kept her focus on the details of art. The lighting, the numbers on the oil tubes, the careful arrangement of tools. Safe and unemotional. The parts of painting she could share with others.

“Where’s the paint?” Danny asked, picking up a brush and feathering it across the blank canvas. Pam took the brush out of his hand and put it back on the table.

“You’ll get that later. First I want you to decide what you want to paint, and then we’ll sketch a pencil outline of the scene.”

“I want to paint the surfers we saw yesterday,” Danny said.

“You are not going surfing in the ocean,” Mel said.

“I said I wanted to paint a surfer, not be one. And why can’t I?”

“Because it’s dangerous. You could hit your head on a rock or get caught in an undertow.”

“Aw, Mom, I know how to swim and—”

Pam snapped her fingers until she had their attention. “Can you argue about this later?”

“There’s nothing to argue about. No way is he going to—”

“Mel? What are you going to paint?”

“The garden with the boat in it,” Mel said, pointing out the window.

“Bo-ring,” Danny muttered.

Pam sighed with relief when she finally got them to stop talking and start drawing. She was starting to rethink her earlier regrets about not taking the university job. Two students were difficult enough.

She wasn’t sure she could handle a whole class of them. Of course, this was nothing like a university class—this was fun, humorous, a way for a mother and son to bond. And while she could lecture about technique and stroke pressure and the properties of oil paints all day, she didn’t think she’d be able to handle it for much longer if Mel and Danny kept treating the lesson like family game night. She walked over to look at Danny’s sketch.

“Not bad,” she said. “But do you see how you’re putting everything in this small corner of the canvas? Three-quarters of your painting will be sky. You could add some rocks here…Mel, why don’t you come over and look at this, too?”

Pam drew light lines to section off the canvas. This she could do. Like when Lisa asked her opinion on a drawing, or when she analyzed pieces before accepting them in her gallery. Stand outside and judge someone else’s work. Untouched and unmoved. “Pretend you’re looking at the beach through a camera lens. If you shift a little to the right, you’re going to get a more interesting scene. You’d have some beach curving around here, and a few pieces of driftwood…”

Pam continued to sketch as she talked about balance and composition. After a few minutes she stopped and sheepishly stepped away from the easel, bumping into Mel who stood close behind her.

“Sorry. I don’t want to tell you what to paint.”

“Amazing,” Mel said, her hand resting lightly on Pam’s waist.

“You re-created the exact scene from yesterday.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Danny said. “I could totally see what you were talking about while you were drawing.”

Pam gave him back the pencil as if it were as hot as a beach rock on a summer day. Tempting to touch, but burning her when she did. “Why don’t you add some more detail or make any changes you want. Mel, let’s see what you’ve drawn.” She studied Mel’s canvas in silence for a few moments. “Um, why is the boat so…big?” she asked tentatively. She chose her words carefully. Mel had asked for a lesson, wanted to be taught, but Pam was wary of giving her opinions on a sensitive subject like art to someone she was sleeping with. She had learned two rules about art critique. Only give advice if asked. And never give advice to a partner, even if asked.

“Because it was so heavy to carry,” Mel said. “I made it extra big to represent the enormous backache I had the next day.”

Danny gave a snort of laughter and Mel grinned at him.

“Really?” Pam asked.

“No. I just drew it. I didn’t realize I was making it bigger than it should be.”

Mel’s smile was beautiful. She looked impish and close to laughter. Completely at ease with herself and with any comments Pam made. Pam felt her body relax as she gestured at the garden she could see through the window. “Look at the proportions of that rock and rosebush compared to the boat.” She tapped the rock Mel had drawn on her canvas. “Now, look at how differently you’ve drawn them.”

“What about perspective?” Mel asked. “Aren’t you supposed to make some objects larger so you can tell they’re in front of other things? Maybe I wanted to show that the boat is closer to us.”

Danny stepped around so he could see the canvas. “So it’s like a mile closer?”

Pam covered her mouth, but not quickly enough to hide her laugh. She glanced at Mel’s face to make sure she didn’t seem hurt by Danny’s teasing. Instead, Mel had joined in their laughter. She threw her pencil at Danny, and he made a show of ducking behind his canvas.

“Go back to your surfers, dude,” Mel said. She picked up a new pencil and handed it to Pam. “Here, fix it so I can get to the coloring-it-in part.”

“This isn’t a paint-by-numbers class,” Pam protested. Still, it would be easier to show Mel what she meant instead of explaining it.

“But I’ll help this time. It’s all about creating the proper ratios.”

Mel watched Pam’s hand as she superimposed her version of the garden scene over the disproportionate one Mel had drawn. A series of lines and curves gradually took shape until the picture Mel had originally conceived in her mind was suddenly on the canvas in front of her. She could see the difference between her drawing and Pam’s, and she
sort of
understood the lecture about proportion and perspective Pam delivered as she sketched, but Mel knew there was no way she’d be able to match Pam’s talent. She must have some sort of spatial deficiency, but she didn’t care. She could have watched Pam’s fingers all day as they lightly gripped the pencil and effortlessly flew across the canvas. She wanted to toss the pencil aside and get those hands on her…

“Do you see what I did there?” Pam asked. Mel made a vaguely affirmative noise, hoping Pam hadn’t expected a more detailed answer.

Apparently she didn’t because she put the pencil on the table and walked over to the paints. She squeezed some paint on two palettes and spent a few minutes blending them without speaking. Then she demonstrated a couple of brushstrokes on the sky portion of Danny’s canvas.

“This first time, don’t worry about anything but getting a feel of putting paint on the canvas,” she said as she handed Mel her palette covered with dollops of color. “If you don’t like the tone, blend it with a little black or white to make it darker or lighter. Or just layer a new color over the top. Let yourselves experiment right now, and then we’ll start to add technique.”

Mel dipped her brush in some white paint and tentatively spread it on her canvas. She painstakingly outlined the edge of the boat, wincing each time her brush crossed the pencil line Pam had drawn.

She wanted to go out to the garage and get her painter’s tape so she’d be able to paint a straight line, but she didn’t think that would be what Pam considered experimenting. She smudged some gray paint over the white in an attempt to give the boat a weathered look and tried to concentrate on her efforts and ignore Danny’s disparaging remarks about the gray blobs on her painting and his comments about how fulfilled and safe his surfers looked. The harder Mel tried to perfect her painting, the worse it seemed to get. She finally lowered her brush and opened her mouth to call Pam over to help.

She closed her mouth again without making a sound. Pam was at her easel, her palette balanced against her hip as if it were part of her body. Watching Pam, she could see what real concentration was.

Focus. Absorption. She had seen Pam painting once before, when she’d created the picture of the storm’s aftermath on the beach, but this was different. There was a sense of calm this time. Pam’s body and mind seemed to know what they were doing and had taken control without the struggle Mel had witnessed that afternoon. But Mel could see the same intensity on her face, in her posture, as if some vision in her head had turned into reality and had completely blotted out the world around her.

Mel had seen this expression before. When Pam leaned over her, about to kiss her, and looked at her as if she was something to be treasured, memorized. As if she mattered. But maybe that intensity was only something Mel had imagined, something she wanted to see.

She didn’t interrupt Pam. Instead, she continued to stroke color on her canvas, some of her attention on her work and most of it on Pam.

Pam could sense when Mel’s attention had turned on her, but she couldn’t stop painting. She had covered her palette with bright colors, intending to doodle to give Danny and Mel some time to play with their paintings. But from the moment the medicinal smell of oils had hit her, the moment she had dabbed green and then yellow paint onto her canvas, she had been instantly drawn into the scene.

No need to sketch any guidelines or borders. She finished the smear of paint that was Danny’s imagined kite, and she continued to fill the sky with swirls of color and movement, a chaos of tails and wings and flapping silk. She and Diane had taken Kevin to the kite festival the same year she had observed the little girl who now hung in Mel’s dining room. She was recapturing the day, when she and Diane had shared a rare afternoon of closeness and freedom. When Kevin had laughed in delight at the riot of color streaming overhead.

But there were differences in this scene. The people Pam added to the painting were abstract, static dabs of color anchored by the flying kites. But the dark-haired boy holding the duck kite was definitely Danny. Mel clearly stood in the crowd of spectators and watched. In a moment of respite from her painting, Pam looked at the beach she had created, surprised to find Diane and Kevin weren’t there. But she was.

Behind Mel, blending in the crowd but unmistakably her.

Usually when she finished a painting, it was the imposition of her memories onto the new image that disconcerted her. Today the lack of memory tugged at her mood, drawing her away from the euphoria of completion and into the depressed state she had come to expect with her art. She wanted to curl up and cry, fling the painting against a wall and destroy it, slash paint across its surface until the picture was no longer visible. But she wasn’t alone.