Chapter 27: Euripides

Everyone was pretty mellow in the morning. I woke up with Mary’s bare breasts still pressed against my chest, her lips near mine. Most of the time when I go to sleep with a girlfriend—even if we drift off holding each other—we end up in our own favorite sleeping positions, giving each other room in the bed. Mary seemed to relish being held in my embrace overnight.

And I loved it.

My left arm pillowed her head and my right hand explored her back and her butt. I slipped my hand inside her tights so I could touch the skin on her ass and she hunched her pelvis forward as I caressed her. Her left arm was wrapped tightly around me and I wasn’t sure how her right arm was pinned under her until her fingers twitched and I felt them wrap around my cock.

“I need to get up and use the bathroom, Jett,” she mumbled. “I just don’t want to move from your arms.”

“It is a weekday and we have classes,” I sighed. “I just wish we could lie in bed all day making love.”

“You’re a dreamy lover but school beckons,” she said, finally loosening her grip and rolling away from me. Those gorgeous breasts and their pierced nipples. I bent to lightly kiss each of them. “We’ll get to the rest soon. It’s something ... I haven’t felt rushed with you. I’m enjoying the anticipation, knowing that one day soon I’ll be here with my legs wrapped around your waist as your cock slides in and out of my pussy. Are you anticipating that, too, Jett?”

“I can almost feel it. I’m loving the pace you’ve set.”

“Okay. Now I really have to run down to the bathroom,” she laughed. She popped out of bed and pulled my T-shirt on, catching her leotard up in her hand. She headed for the stairs.

“I need to go downstairs and get some breakfast ready for my lovers. They’ll have a bit of THC hangover this morning.”

And so it began. After I’d used the bathroom, I got out the blender and the fruit I bought yesterday. I scooped some protein powder into the almond milk and added strawberries, blueberries, and bananas. I had to make three blenders full, but by the time sleepy Eva got to the kitchen, everyone had a glass of the protein-rich smoothie.

By some miracle, I made it to my ten o’clock 2D Design class having gotten seven happy ladies off to their day of classes. Perhaps I’d jumped the shark last night, but I knew he was still swimming in the waters around my home for the rest of the week. It was hard to understand how women were at the mercy of a physical process that wrecked them each month. It wasn’t always as bad as it had been this week but to some extent or another they all went through the discomfort each month.

My professor for 2D Design was Lila Jones. The twenty of us in the class came from different disciplines in the arts as it was a core requirement but about a third of the students were graphic arts majors. Oddly, the fine arts students in the class were getting along better than the graphic arts students. Lila—she insisted that she went only by her first name and not by Professor—was a pre-computer graphic artist. She insisted that her students learn the principles of 2D Design without resorting to their computers. It involved a lot of sketching and some drafting. No computing.

The first few weeks of the class had been a survey of design over the centuries. In that way, it resembled my Literature and the Arts class. We started with design and motifs of Egypt, China, and India. Then we jumped into pre-Hellenic Greece and worked our way toward the present. There was a lot about the effect of the printing press on graphic arts as we made our way through the ages to the ‘contemporary’ arts. These were defined by styles and sometimes by influential artists. Names like Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Celtic, Chippendale, Queen Anne, and most importantly, William Morris. We quickly progressed to wallpaper and textile design.

“As we have seen as far back as the second millennium BC, the underlying principle of two-dimensional design is motif. The motif recurs throughout the decorative surface. In order for this to happen, it must be repeated, and that is the second principle. Finally, in the case of room-size design, we have match. Match is the second dimension of repeat. Motif, repeat, and match. That is your first lab assignment. As the practical portion of your midterm, you will present a repeating motif in both vertical and horizontal dimensions. This assignment is to be black and white, ink on Bristol, drafted and measurable. It should incorporate a style element that is reminiscent of one of the periods we have studied. All projects must be received by October twenty-fourth. You have two weeks. Use them well. Next week, we will begin the discussion of textile design and the effect of the industrial revolution.”

Fuck! I’d completely forgotten that there was a practical portion of this class. All we’d had to do so far was sketch examples of each of the periods and styles we’d studied. Now I had to come up with some kind of motif and actually create what was essentially a black and white wallpaper pattern. This was going to be horrendous.

My day continued to go to hell in a handbasket as Mammam used to say. I thought of her every time I got in my car—the little Mini that she loved so much. Well, this time Merck was on a roll. I think he must have switched from pot to speed. If studying Homer was a long lyrical process, Euripides was a rock opera. I swear, he even sang parts of The Bacchae.

He stopped me after class and told me how much he liked my Athena project, hinting broadly that he’d like to watch me paint one of my models. Frankly, I think he just wanted to be in a room with a naked teenager and think it was legit. I told him I’d consider it and talk to the model when the time came. As if.

He hit me with a suggestion for our Euripides section. That was a first. He was really getting into my body paintings. Anyway, he asked specifically if I could take something from Medea and develop it into a statement about the strength and power of women. That was something Euripides was really into. He’d written Medea, The Bacchae, The Trojan Women, and several other plays about the strength of women and in support of women’s rights.

“Of course, I’m not your inspiration,” he said, still talking as fast as he had all through class. “You’re the artist. I just saw a vision with no means of realizing it. Follow your own creative energy. But Medea. Yes. There was a woman for all ages.”

The third project was also due for midterms in two weeks. Great.

And the hits just keep on coming. Blankenship was living up to his nickname, Blankety-blank. I was ready to fill in the blanks with a few choice obscenities. The bright spot was seeing Mary walk in and sit next to me. The smile on her face lit my own as we reached out and touched hands.

“Weaknesses,” Blankety started as he walked into the room at exactly three o’clock. “You have weaknesses in your drawing.” I glanced around. There had been over twenty of us in this class at the beginning of the term. Now there were fourteen. The bastard was living up to his reputation of weeding out students who couldn’t take it. I might have been one of them if I hadn’t bonded with Mary and entered into a mutual support pact. “Just in case you have forgotten your weaknesses, let me review them. You...” he pointed at a girl four seats over from me, “ ... smudge everything. There is nothing that would help your drawings more than an eraser. You...” pointing at the only other guy left in the class, “ ... seem to think this is a drafting class. Your pencils are too hard and ground to too fine a point.”

And so it went on. He hit every single one of us with our ‘isms’ as he called them. He’d pointed them out often enough. Everyone cringed as we waited for him to turn his pointy finger at us. But even I didn’t expect the criticism he directed at Mary. He’d always seemed to avoid directing too much of his wrath at her. This time, though, he went directly to the point. “You can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.” I saw tears spring to her eyes and was reaching for Mary’s shaking hand when the son of a bitch swung and pointed directly at me. “And you can’t seem to draw what’s in front of you. You are wrapped up in reflections and shadows and never get around to actually drawing the fucking object.”

My hand was still partly raised to touch Mary’s even though my eyes were locked with Blankenship’s. He was in rare form and I was giving him back every ounce of hatred I could muster. We were trying to bore holes in each other with our eyes.

And then I felt Mary’s grip on my hand. She was still shaking but so, I realized, was I. I tore my eyes away from Blankety and over to Mary. I saw a determination there that filled me with my own defiance. Both of our hands settled as Blankety raved at another student. He appeared to be taking us randomly, but it was evident that he wasn’t leaving anyone untouched. We would survive.

“Don’t you leave this classroom, young woman!” he screamed at a girl who had burst out in tears when he called her a cartoonist rather than an artist. She’d stood to leave and he froze her with his words. “I don’t lose people after six weeks,” he growled, pacing the floor and pointing the girl back to her seat. She sank down in it. “Despite all your weaknesses, you have lasted this long; you can last the rest of the way. You stubbornly keep drawing no matter how I try to discourage you. You sit down in this class twice a week with a sketch book in front of you and a pencil in your hand, knowing full well that I’m going to blister your ass with my words. Why do you do that? Why do you take this abuse? Because you are artists. Don’t you dare believe that means I’m suddenly going to become nice and compliment you on every scribble you make. You have a long way to go before you draw something that is praiseworthy.”

I glanced around the room and noticed others were looking at their classmates as well. Perhaps we had some kind of perverse pride in having survived six weeks of his abuse.

“Most, if not all, of you will fail your midterm project. Those who pass will do so accidentally. Why? Because you have not yet learned to exploit your weaknesses. You can’t exploit them without knowing them and over the past six weeks I have done my best to point them out to you. Your midterm project will be to draw a still life in black and white. The substrate and medium are your choice. The subject is your choice but it must be a still life. No life drawings, figures, or portraits. No landscapes or nature scenes. You will create your own composition and draw it, exploiting your weakness. There will be no further classes until the project is due. After you have failed the midterm, we will spend the next six weeks working on exploiting your weaknesses so that you become more than draftsmen and stand the chance of becoming artists.”

We seemed to come to life about then. I could hear people shifting in their seats as the fact that there was meaning to the abuse we’d taken for the past six weeks sank in.