The Genius and the Muse (2 page)

“Hey, Kate? Are you in here?”

She turned, hearing a familiar voice call from the entrance of the gallery. She smiled when Michelle, her friend and roommate from freshman year, walked around a corner. Kate lifted a hand in greeting.

“Hey.” She scooted over to share the small bench. “How’d you know I was in here?”

“Where else are you before your first class on Thursday?” Michelle sat down beside her. “Still studying the enigmatic portrait?”

“Mmhmm,” Kate said with a nod; then both girls fell silent as they stared toward the wall. “It’s just so… not him.”

“But it is him.”

“But it’s not.”

Michelle huffed. “Whatever, photography geek. You’re obsessed.”

The picture that continued to fascinate Kate, even after years of contemplation, was a small 8x10 in the top right corner of the wall. It wasn’t a typical “O’Connor portrait” for a number of reasons—though it might appear to be to someone less well-versed in his work. It had always caught her eye, despite the fact that it wasn’t the most prominently displayed picture on the wall.

The light was unique. The lens, less sharply focused. Most importantly, instead of a singular focus for the camera's eye, the model was shown as if the photographer was looking over her right shoulder, and a man’s hand was visible resting on it, as if he was trying to capture the girl or get her attention.

It was in soft black and white. The light spilled over the gentle curve of the girl’s jaw, shadowing her neck and reflecting off the soft strands of hair, which waved behind her ear. Her head tilted as if the photographer had captured the image just before the subject turned her head, and the rise of the cheek hinted at a smile without showing one.

The man’s hand rested on the shoulder, but the tips of the fingers curled, as if they were just about to grab hold. They were long and stained at the tips. Dark hair dusted the back of the hand and wrist. The nails were neat, but the skin was cracked near the cuticles. She’d always wondered if O’Connor was the owner of the hand and who the model was whom he’d captured with such uncharacteristic tenderness.

“Don’t you have class at nine?”

Kate shrugged, still staring at the print on the wall.

“Kate?”

“Yeah?”

“Class, Kate.” She felt Michelle shove her shoulder. “You know… the reason you’ve been coming here every day for six years?”

Finally, she shook her head and looked over at Michelle. “Yeah… class. What time is it?”

“About ten till. You should get going.”

She grumbled and bent to pick up her backpack and camera bag. Tossing another look at the mystery portrait and hoisting her bags over her shoulder, she trudged toward the exit with Michelle.

“Hey!” Kate suddenly stopped, looking at her friend. “What are you doing in here? You don’t have class on this floor, do you?”

“Oh!” Michelle’s eyes lit up. “Professor Seever told me about some new sketches that someone cleaning out the painting studio found last month. They’re by Rhodes, from when she was going here. Just anatomy studies, I guess, but she’s notable enough now that they matted them and put them up. I was going to take a look.”

Kate nodded toward the painting section. “Well, let’s go. My class is right down the hall, so I still have a few minutes. Plus”—she grinned— “Bradley’s teaching this one; he won’t mind if I’m a little late.”

“A little?” Michelle laughed. Heading toward the opposite side of the long, narrow gallery, the two girls approached a collection of paintings from various graduates, some still known and many others who had drifted into obscurity. In the middle of the far wall, between an abstract portrait in charcoal and a watercolor seascape in oils, hung three simple frames containing pen and ink studies. They were small, no more than eight by twelve inches, but had been matted so the notable signature of the artist was evident.

S. Rhodes.

The top sketch was a study of a man’s arm and neck from the side. It was long and muscled, the definition particularly detailed along the neck and shoulder. The middle picture was a leg and foot. The thigh was lean and defined, its knee bent as if the model was lying down on a flat surface.

It was when Kate’s eyes reached the bottom sketch that her breath caught in her throat. She stepped closer, her eyes riveted to the wall. Inside the plain matte was the study of a male hand—a very familiar hand. In fact, one glance told her that the long fingers, smooth calluses and slightly cracked cuticles of that hand belonged, without a doubt in her mind, to the same man who grasped the shoulder of the model in the mysterious O’Connor portrait.

She stared, transfixed by the same hand that she had studied from a different angle, in a unique work, done in an entirely separate medium on the other side of the gallery.

“Kate?”

“It’s the same,” she whispered. “It has to be. Who—”

“Kaitlyn?”

Her wide blue eyes finally left the frame to stare blankly at her friend.

“Huh?”

Michelle looked at her watch. “Class, Kate. You’re going to be
really
late if you don’t leave right now.”

“Oh.” She drew in a ragged breath. “Okay, thanks.”

Michelle cocked her head and looked at her. “You all right?”

Kate nodded. “Uh-huh. Sure. We, uh… we better go.”

Glancing back at the sketch, Kate turned and left the alumni gallery where the two hands, one drawn in pen and one captured by the lens, almost seemed to reach toward each other from opposite silent walls.

Part Two: The Professor

CHAPTER TWO

Foothill Art Institute

Claremont, California

March 2010

K
ate gratefully slipped off her heavy backpack and dumped it beside her chair in Professor Christopher Bradley’s empty office. Her camera bag was set carefully on the work table in the corner. She reached into her backpack to retrieve her graduate portfolio and the binder where she kept her notes for her thesis project on Reed O’Connor and twenty-first century interpretations of beauty. Finally, she leaned back and closed her eyes for moment, resting while she waited for her advisor.

She was almost dozing when she heard the door swing open and heavy footsteps enter the room. She kept her eyes closed, though she heard his chair squeak as he sat behind his desk.

“You know, Kate, if I can stay awake to teach that class when I have a three-month-old baby at home, you could at least make the effort to
appear
to be awake.” His sardonic voice reached through the fog of her exhaustion as she finally opened her eyes.

She stared into the amused face of her graduate advisor. “Why were so you insistent I take this class, Professor Bradley?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Will you ever call me Chris? You call Dee by her first name, but you refuse to call me Chris. I really don’t ask my grad students to be so formal.”

“It just feels weird… Chris.” Kate visibly grimaced when she said her professor’s first name.

Chris Bradley and his wife Deepali were both Foothill graduates. He was a professor; she was a commercial photographer. Both were in their mid-thirties and would often invite graduate students over for meals on the weekends. Those evenings had been some of Kate’s favorite memories of art school, and she knew that she would miss both Professor Bradley and Dee when she finished her thesis that summer.

Chris Bradley just laughed and shook his head. “You can call me Professor if you must. Even though it makes me feel old.”

Kate gave him her best smart-ass grin. “You
are
old, Professor Bradley.”

“You do remember I have control over your graduate requirements, right?” He narrowed his brown eyes. “I foresee the need for a new grad student to teach the Intro to Digital Photography seminar very soon. There’s one coming up in a few weekends, in fact.”

“
Young
, I mean. You’re so young to be a professor here, Chris. Didn’t you just graduate a few years ago?” She plastered an innocent smile on her face, and he couldn’t help but smile. “Besides, I will be out of your clutches very soon, Professor Chris. You will have no power to inflict me on freshmen and retirees in a few months.”

She may have called him “professor,” but Chris Bradley was more friend than teacher to Kate, no matter how she addressed him. She knew his patient mentoring had taught her to be a better photographer. His passionate emphasis on the basic elements of photography had given her an appreciation and thorough knowledge of aspects she would have otherwise skimmed over in her enthusiasm for new techniques. In addition to that, Kate knew he and Dee had looked out for her personally, and she would always think of them as friends.

Nevertheless, Kate sighed. “Seriously, Prof—Chris, why are you making me take this history course? It’s dead boring… despite your riveting presentation, of course.”

“Oh, of course.” He chuckled. “Pay attention, Kate. You can learn a lot from history. It informs everything we do as artists. Our vision is formed by our past.”

“I thought our vision is what we want to see in the future.”

“It’s both, of course.” He ran his fingers through messy brown hair and kicked his chair back. “Our history informs what steps we take toward the future. We can no sooner dismiss our past than we can dismiss the medium we choose to express ourselves through as artists.”

Kate whispered, “Yes, Master Jedi.”

He shook his head and smiled. “So young,” he said. “You’ll figure it out eventually.”

“And moving along with the theme of ‘figuring it out,’ I have some questions for you on the aperture settings I was using in that canyon shoot. Can you take a look?”

The two photographers launched into a discussion of light and shadow, wrapped in the technical jargon of digital photography. Kate did all of her work in digital medium. She loved the freedom it gave her to manipulate images and experiment with different effects. In her opinion, it was also easier to process. Instead of spending hours in a darkroom peeling the skin off her hands with water and chemicals, she ruined her eyes with hours spent in front of a computer monitor. Art, she knew, would always take a toll, whether it was calluses or eye strain. Kate had picked eye strain.

They argued and debated back and forth for forty-five minutes as they studied her proofs. By the end of their appointment, Kate and Chris were both drained, and it was nearing lunch time.

Professor Bradley asked, “Want to join me? I packed leftovers from dinner last night.”

Kate’s eyes lit up. “Did Dee cook?”

“Of course. Why do you think I brought the leftovers? It’s chicken biryani.”

“Yes, please!” Kate grabbed her binder from the desk, inadvertently knocking over a picture on her professor’s desk along with a half-empty coffee cup. “Oops, sorry. Let me help.”

She quickly bent to her backpack to retrieve some napkins she’d stuffed there the day before. Turning back, she started to mop up the coffee as Chris did the same on his side. Luckily, he was a fairly organized teacher, so his desk wasn’t littered with anything other than lens caps and a few filters.

Kate picked up the picture she’d knocked over, turning it to wipe off the front where it had fallen in the spill. It was a color snapshot of a group of young people sitting on the porch of an old log cabin she’d never really noticed before. Looking more closely, she realized she recognized some of the people in the picture.

She grinned. “Is this you and Dee?”

Chris glanced up to see her holding the frame. A small smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Yes, we were still in school. Maybe… seven or eight years ago? We must have been about your age when that was taken.”

Kate smiled and looked over the young faces in the picture. There was Dee and Chris. A tall African-American woman who looked vaguely familiar and a laughing blonde with messy hair. Sitting beside her professor and his wife was one other couple with their arms wrapped around each other.

“Is that—” Kate paused and squinted, unsure of who she thought she was seeing. “Is that Reed O’Connor with you?”

O’Connor’s piercing blue gaze stared into the lens. Kate hadn’t known he had blue eyes. He was rarely photographed in public, and when he was, he always wore dark glasses.

“Yes, that’s Reed. I thought you knew we went to school together. We graduated the same year, in fact.”

Kate had never seen a picture of him from his past, even though she’d looked through old yearbooks in the library. The few pictures of the photographer she’d seen had all been taken in the last few years, since his photography had become nationally known. And he was always alone. Even in group pictures, he seemed to hold himself separate.

She looked again. O’Connor’s dark hair was longer in the snapshot and curled a little as it fell around his ears. A messy dusting of stubble was visible on his jaw. Though he wasn’t smiling, there was a slight smirk at the corner of his mouth as if he was restraining himself from breaking into laughter at whoever was holding the camera.

She shook her head. “You know, I never really thought about it. You look like you were friends.” Kate narrowed her gaze at her advisor. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We… uh, we were friendly.” Chris chuckled. “But I wouldn’t call us friends. He and Dee were friends. Though he did steal my girlfriend once.”

Kate’s mouth gaped in shock and she looked back at the picture. “What? But Dee—you’re with Dee here.” She stopped and frowned. “I’m confused.”

Chris just laughed. “It’s not what you’re thinking, and ‘girlfriend’ is an exaggeration.” He paused. “I’m not talking about me and Dee. I’m talking about Sam, the blonde.” He nodded toward the picture in her hand, and Kate looked again.