The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (27 page)

“This is the view out your apartment window again?”

I nod, a little embarrassed. I've been painting this same subject for a month now. Honestly, I think I've been painting the same
painting
for a month now. “He doesn't seem to have noticed.”

Renee stops milling in front of Mary Cassatt's infinitely pleasing impressionist portrait,
On a Balcony.
In it, a pleasantly stout woman is reading a paper in her day dress, sitting comfortably, even slouched a bit, in a wrought metal chair in a close garden overrun with roses. Renee sighs heavily. “Isn't it heavenly?”

I agree that it is. Perhaps this is some latent sexism speaking, but I have always thought Mary Cassatt was such a
tender
painter, choosing—or perhaps just seeing—in her subjects only the moments most incredibly weighted down with feeling.

“I think it's the pink ones. That's what's otherworldly about it.”

“Pink what?” Renee asks.

“Pink roses? The one on her dress plus the two behind the newspaper? Like a spotlight of her attention?”

“Oh, yes. I guess the roses are nice. But I was actually thinking of the way she is sitting someplace quiet and just reading a paper all by herself. I bet that woman does not have any children. Maybe not a husband either.”

“I always thought she might be pregnant. Look how the dress doesn't have a waistline. And she's full in the face.”

“Ugh. Don't ruin it for me.”

“It's just an idea.”

“Typical Cassatt,” Renee says bitterly. “Romanticizing everything about motherhood because she didn't have kids of her own.”

“Tough times in the Larsen household?” I ask her.

She sighs deeply. Her face looks a little dark. A little pained. For a moment I wonder if I've said something terribly wrong. Then she shakes her head and says, “Stop trying to change the subject from your so-called painter's block. Artists make work. You wanna be an artist? You gotta paint.”

“I am painting,” I say in my own defense. “Just very badly.”

“What do you think brought this on? Is it something that happened at the showing?”

I shrug. I never thought of that. Last month, Mitchell gave me a little reception for my latest series. Everyone was very nice to me. But it was all strangers—my friends have grown tired of my endless shows and openings, and I felt very alone and on display.

“I kind of wish you had been there,” I venture. “Everyone was so ridiculous. You would have loved making fun of the scenesters.”

Renee shakes her head at me. “I'm just so busy at work,” she says defensively. “You know that.”

“I know. I'm not mad or anything. It was just a weird vibe. Everyone wanted to hear what I had to say until I said it. Then they seemed disappointed.”

“What did you say, exactly?”

I shrug. “People were sort of theorizing that my work was a statement about our generation. Something about me seeing everything as though it were on the screen of a smartphone. I can barely work my smartphone. I said my work had nothing to do with smartphones.”

“That's true,” Renee says. “You can barely work your smartphone.”

“Do you think that was what it was like for Mary?” I ask, gesturing to the woman in the painting. “Everyone buzzing about how she painted a woman reading a newspaper instead of doing needlepoint—what a statement! When maybe this is actually about something completely different?”

“I think having people trying to interpret your art, even poorly, is a wonderful compliment.” Renee wanders away from the Cassatt and casually takes in the American landscapes that surround it. “Icebound,” she reads from the placard next to a painting by John Henry Twachtman. “God, doesn't that look nice too?”

“They should call this the Hall of Wish Fulfillment,” I say, looking at the sight of ice floes closing up a rocky emerald stream. “With the Whistler seascapes, and the bronze Diana who doesn't need to wear a bra when she goes hunting.”

“And then there's her,” Renee says, gesturing to the full-size nude by John Singer Sargent. “I would kill for that ass.”

The Sargent, titled
Study from Life,
was one of those standard-bearers of my art education, crammed down our throats like Grant Wood and Jasper Johns. In it, an impossibly tall Egyptian woman stands with her weight on her right foot as she turns to look over her left shoulder, all while braiding her nipple-length hair. In college I thought it was preposterous—who stands like that? But here in the gallery I see the perfection of the work for the first time.

“She is really beautiful.” I nod, my eyes tracking the lines of her calves, the shading of her twisted back. “Do you remember when we took our first life drawing class freshman year? How hairy that lady was? How we tried to grow out our armpit hair and it looked like a fourteen-year-old boy's first beard?”

Renee doesn't seem to hear me at first. Then she says, “Not really, Lils. That was a long time ago. Practically another lifetime.”

“Well, I mean,” I stammer. “It was only ten years ago. It would have been a pretty short lifetime. Anyway the sensation of itchy growing-in armpit hair stays with a person forever.”

“Hm,” she says, not listening. Her phone dings. “I think I better get back to work.”

“Already? We've only been here for twenty minutes!”

“You wanted the artist's life,” Renee says suddenly, out of nowhere. “But some of us did not. Some of us have real jobs.”

I shut up. It's not out of nowhere. Renee is busy. She works hard. She doesn't want to hear about my so-called block. “Of course,” I say after a moment. “But I hope you don't mind if I stay here. Just a little longer. There are a few more things I still want to see.”

 

Sixteen

 

I spend the next week in Minnow Bay painting. Each beautiful frosty morning, I fire up the stove in the studio, and then go back to the inn for granola or oatmeal in Colleen's kitchen, keeping her company while she preps breakfast for four ravenous cross-country ski racers staying in two rooms on the second floor, directly below my new room. Then, when I get back, the studio is warm and I am too. And ready to work. What has been like pulling teeth in Chicago is like rolling down a hill in Minnow Bay. Dreaming of the steamy summer in this painting, imagining the heat of an August sun, the glare of a cloudless day, and the yellows of a overheated earth, and sketching for a new series, keeps me engrossed. I forget the time until someone comes and gets me and shakes me out of the trance. This being Friday, that someone is Simone, racing here between early release at the high school and her shift at the café. She opens the door with a clatter and says, “Oh
God,
what are you doing?” when she walks in, and I realize I have been standing with my face exactly perpendicular to my painting on the left side, trying to figure out what the sky still needs.

“I'm working,” I say, rubbing the ache out of my neck.

“You are such a weirdo.”

I stand back from the painting and look at her outfit and know I am in good company. She is wearing black-and-white zebra-print parachute pants and a sequined yellow crop top. Said top was once was a full-length knit sweater, and has a jagged edge where it was unwillingly and aggressively abbreviated.

“Simone, what are you wearing?”

“I could ask the same of you.”

I look down. I am wearing a man's button-down from Goodwill as a smock, and black leggings, and warm boots. There is nothing noteworthy about my outfit in the slightest.

“Okay,” I sigh, defeated. “What do you think?” I gesture to the painting, which is almost half-done.

“It's ugly. What do you think of mine?”

She opens her unusually large sketchbook, flips through a few pages, and turns to a watercolor I've never seen before. “I did it this week.”

“Oh, Simone. Honey.”

It is Ben Hutchinson, of course. So far I've seen nothing from her but different brightly hued interpretations of Ben Hutchinson. But this time it isn't just his portrait. This time it is his face, imposed on the body of Michelangelo's David.

Michelangelo's
naked
David.

“This just isn't appropriate,” I tell her as gently as I can.

“Yeah, I'm gonna burn it. But look at the lines.”

I do look. It's a copy of a great work, and though quite representative, it brings nothing interesting or new to the party. It's junk and she knows it. “Simone, why did you paint this?”

“I don't know. I told you I'm stuck.”

“So you decided to just reproduce something the whole world already has burned into its retinas?”

“I needed a reference point. I don't actually know what Mr. Hutchinson looks like naked. Unlike some people.”

I blush. “I haven't seen him naked,” I say.

“Not even back in Vegas?” Over the last week I have, against my better judgment, told Simone the full story of our marriage. My side of it, at least.

“… in ten years,” I amend.

“Maybe if you describe your memories to me in great detail I could be reinspired.”

“No. Just, absolutely no.” I sigh. “Painting someone in the nude without their permission is a terrible violation of their privacy. Painting them in the nude poorly is a violation of their privacy and their taste.”

“But you have to have nudes in your portfolio to submit to art school,” she whines. “How am I supposed to get someone to pose nude for me in this town?”

I look at her, unmoved. “You can do me. Hang on, I have to make a note on where I'm at.” I move to my sketchpad. “Can you crank up the stove? Start by burning that painting.”

“I do not want to see you naked,” Simone says, though she does obediently feed the horrible Ben/David into the fire, to my great relief.

“I know you don't. That is never, ever the point.”

“Tell that to Picasso.”

“Yeah, okay. Let's just give him the whole ‘genius who changed the world forever' pass and then not worry about how the rules apply to him. For you, a sixteen-year-old girl trying to apply to art school, what matters isn't
who
you paint. What matters is what you
see.
”

“I see someone who is too old to pose naked. God, put that smock back on. What happened to you? Is that back fat?”

“You're in love with Ben Hutchinson, right?” I ask her, as I hang the smock on a hook just to the right of my easel. Under it I am wearing a camisole, white, paint dabbled.

“You know that I am,” she replies.

“Great.” I pull off my camisole, revealing a highly functional wireless black cotton bra. Simone pretends to shield her eyes in horror. “Now, for the sake of argument, let's just say you actually know what the hell love is, and let's also say you're under the impression that I've stolen him from you.”

“You have. And I do.”

“You're excellent at playing along,” I tell her. “Now, how does the woman who stole the man you love look to you?” I unhook my bra. Like every art student ever, I posed nude for extra money in school. I have zero self-consciousness about it.

“Your boobs are droopy,” she tells me.

I raise my eyebrows “If that's what you see, start sketching.”

Simone sighs deeply. “You're the worst. You're actually kind of pretty and sort of talented and now you're, like, a deep thinker too.” I'm amused by this assessment. I may be confident in the studio, today, after a good day of work. But what if Renee heard me described that way? She'd pee herself laughing.

“Why aren't you embarrassed to be naked?” Simone asks.

“I'm not naked. I have my pants on.”

“Please leave them that way.”

“I promise. Waist up is enough for art school. Plus, it's still pretty cold in here.”

“Just tell me you're a little self-conscious,” she pleads.

“Not even a little. When you paint a fruit bowl, you might look hard at each apple, and turn each one over, and look at the shape and the color and find bruises and lumps and see everything there is to see. That's your job, to see everything. But the apple is just busy being an apple. That's the apple's job. What you
see
has nothing to do with what the apple
is.
”

“Your apples look more like pears,” she says.

“There will be a day when being naked doesn't make you ashamed,” I tell her, and say a silent prayer that it will be true. “Now shut up and sketch.” I take a seat on a high stool, arms in my lap, shoulders curled slightly from the cold.

Simone stares at me critically, and then finally starts drawing, furiously, her hand moving over the page and turning black with smudging. Despite my lecture, I start to wonder at what she sees that I don't. Not in me, of course. I know what I look like. I have my mother's small, soft bone structure and her easily flushed skin. I have a large top lip that keeps me from wearing lipstick because it would feel too overtly sexual. There are exaggerated arches in my eyebrows from overzealous tweezing last week during an episode of
Extreme Cheapskates
at the inn. My eyes are dark, dark brown.

But what does she see in Ben Hutchinson? She says she's loved him since she first saw him. I can understand that from one respect: he is handsome, without a doubt. His face is angles and shadows. His mouth is set sternly but there are smile lines by his eyes. His body has that triangle-on-its-tip shape, shoulders to hips, that I don't remember from Vegas. It is probably earned from shoveling snow and chopping wood. He is tall, and because I am not, I feel yippy around him, like a Chihuahua chasing a bicycle.

Simone is easily six inches taller than me. I suppose when she sees her teacher, she sets her chin up just an inch so she can half lower her eyes at him, the universal language of come hither. When I see him I tend to stare at his chest.