Nineteen

I HAD TO LEAVE FOR CLASS, but I left Lissa in the process of booking her reservation. I told her to get the next available flight and let me know the details. I felt the phone vibrate while I was in Anatomy class, but I disciplined myself not to look until class was dismissed.

“Redeye Friday night. Want another night with you and the boys before I go. Don’t tell Melody.”

Bree was catching up to me when I put my phone away.

“Can we study as a group Sunday afternoon?” she asked. “It would be good to review everything before the final on Monday.”

“Yeah,” I said, a bit distracted. “I won’t be doing anything.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh. Uh ... Lissa is going to fly out to be with Melody,” I said. “Looks like I’ll be alone the next couple of weeks.”

“I doubt that,” she said. “And I’m glad Lissa is going to be with Mel. I’d go myself if it weren’t for finals. And why a couple of weeks? Why don’t you fly out after your final Tuesday?”

“It’s complicated. There’s still another week at PCAD before semester ends. There’s the tournament on the tenth. I promised I’d be here for the Saturday night shift the next weekend. Plus, the boys don’t get out until the end of next week and I’m taking them with me.”

“All right. Well, you’ve still got Kate. And me,” she said. “Not that I’ll sleep with you, but I’ll be around. You’ve got friends.”

“You’re right, Bree,” I said hugging her. “I do have friends.”

Before I went to my Sports Conditioning session with Coach Fredericks, I made a couple more calls. Kate, of course, had already heard from Lissa and was on her way to a ten o’clock class, so I had to be quick. She agreed to meet me after 2D in the afternoon to go to the Studio. Clarice was intrigued. I wanted her to see the piece before it was crated for storage. Then I called Doc Henredon. He’d given me some solid advice about this piece and I wanted to make sure he thought it was decent enough to be stored away or if I should just paint over it. He agreed to join us and seemed excited to see our studio.

I attended the rest of the classes at SCU and then headed over to PCAD for Doc’s 2D class.

“There are only two more classes this term,” Doc said, “and then we have the final. I don’t think any of you will have difficulty with that one. I do promise you a good class, though. For these last two classes, however, I want you to look beyond the translation of three dimensions into two. There are many more dimensions. If we were studying aeronautics, for example, we might work with the dimensions of pitch, roll, and yaw—all valid dimensional criteria. What are some others?”

People in class were slow to answer, but eventually someone said “time” and another brought up “velocity.”

“Okay,” Doc continued. “It’s not important to know every dimension in this class. What I want to know is how you would translate that into a two-dimensional representation. Ideas, please.”

It was the first time that we’d really had a discussion about one of the aspects we were learning that went beyond fifteen minutes. After we’d discussed, Doc told us to put the puzzle on paper and come up with a concept sketch of a tesseract.

“What’s that?” one of my classmates asked.

“The fourth dimensional analog of a cube,” I responded automatically. Everyone looked at me. “Uh ... I don’t know what it looks like,” I said. “Madeleine l’Engle talks about it in her book A Wrinkle in Time. I read all her books when I was in sixth grade.” In fact, I was anxious to read it to the boys when they were a little older.

“O-kay,” my classmate said.

“That’s all the information you need,” Doc said. “A fourth dimensional cube. How do you represent the concept in just two dimensions?”

We started sketching.

Before the class ended, Doc looked at my sketch and started laughing. I was pleased that he got the joke. Why would the two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube look any different than the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional cube?

After class, Kate and I hung back to meet with Doc Henredon and go to the studio. Clarice was waiting for us when we got there and I made the introductions. Doc looked around the studio and admired the lighting I put in. I had a dozen full-spectrum LED lamps that lit the space brightly, but indirectly. The studio didn’t really have any windows for natural light, so this was the best I could do. Doc was impressed, but suggested that I might want to change the wall color to Munsell gray so that I didn’t get as much reflected distortions. I put that on the list to talk to Melody about. I could see the benefit, even though it might make the studio look a little drab.

“Well, what have you to show us, Mr. Ames?” Clarice asked, getting right to the point.

“It would be best if you start over there,” I said, pointing to a spot about twelve feet from my easel. “You can move forward as you want.”

They moved to the spot and I undraped the easel. My three companions were silent as they looked at the piece. None of them moved for at least a couple of minutes. Doc was intent as he looked at it. Clarice pulled back and shook her head. I thought for a minute she wouldn’t look any closer, but when Doc moved forward, she followed, just off his right shoulder. Kate hung back and I could see moisture in her eyes. She was biting her lip.

Kate had seen some of my sketches for anatomy. Everyone had. She’d been there when I showed the original sketch to Doc and listened to what he said about how it could affect my career. She hadn’t seen the picture of Ralph’s face, though.

Doc was whispering to Clarice as he pointed out one or two things to her. Kate shifted her attention to me and we met half-way.

“Are you okay?” I asked. She nodded.

“I’m jealous.” That surprised me. “You’ve gone to another place with your painting, Tony. You’re not even in the same world. If you exhibit that, no one will see anything else in the show.”

“I have to agree with Kate,” Clarice said. “Unless you can provide me with a dozen of this type of painting—and I don’t mean necessarily the subject matter—then I don’t think it should be in your show.”

I sighed. I’d already decided that it was headed for the vault.

“Tony, no one here is going to criticize this work. Some artists stake their entire reputations on being over the edge. It can be done. Subject matter, style, color, level of abstraction. They’re all things you can build on,” Doc said. “You’ve got incredible talent here. I don’t think you should box yourself in with a style that is so dominant that you are forced to paint that forever.”

“I planned to put this in the vault like Clarice suggested,” I said. “The thing is, I feel like I’m being so pretentious by locking up some of my work for fifty years from now.”

They actually laughed at me.

“Pretense would only come into play if you were locking up your childhood refrigerator drawings,” Doc said. “Even though I’m sure they were great. But every artist has things that are too good to share. Take this piece and savor it. When all your work has caught up with it, bring it out. People will be amazed that you were painting at this level all along and were just getting them educated.”

“But also, don’t discount your other works,” Clarice added. “No matter what you read in fantasy stories, I couldn’t start selling your work at $50,000 each at your first exhibition, which is what I’d price this at. Our two to five thousand range is where we should stay. That’s why we’re only looking at twelve pieces from each of you. Your first showing is where people will get their bargain Tony Ames and Katarina Mirela pieces. They will brag to their grandchildren about how they got one of your first pieces at a fraction of what they would cost after you were known. That’s okay. It’s where you build your future.”

“Kate, is your artwork here, too?” Doc asked.

“Some of it. My finished pieces are all here, but there are only six of them so far,” Kate answered. “There are four more that are nearly finished in the art lab at school. I need to keep them there for my final.”

“Let’s see what the two of you will be exhibiting,” Doc said.

Kate and I started pulling our canvases off the shelves. Rhapsody Suite was still on display at the school. I showed the painting of Allison, my Three Graces painting of Lissa, Melody, and Beth, the zoo painting, the painting of Kate with her mother and sister dancing in the firelight. I had one painting of the Singhs, even though both their portrait and Sharon’s had been delivered. They were still slated for the exhibition. The other painting of the Singhs was the one I did based on the sketch of them in the booth across from Clarice and me as Indira breast-fed Mirium. There was the painting I’d done of Tent City from the roof of the athletic pavilion and one painting that I didn’t take the drape off.

They looked at my six and Kate’s six. Doc and Clarice had a big discussion about the relative merits of displaying them as an integrated whole or in two sections as if it were two different exhibitions. Kate’s style and subject matter was very different than mine but, in my eye, better than anything I’d painted. Doc pointed at the draped canvas.

“And that one?” he asked simply.

“Uh ... no one’s seen that one except Clarice. I haven’t decided whether to show it or not.” I looked nervously at Kate and pulled the drape off the painting of Lissa as I imagined she would look in fifty years. Kate looked at it and then just took my arm and hugged it with her head on my shoulder.

“It’s up to you, Tony,” Clarice said. “You could always put it in the vault and see how accurate you were in fifty years.”

“You should explore this style more,” Doc said. “I like your interpretation of things overlaid on what exists. This is a precursor of your new painting. You can see one leading to the next.”

“Where are the matching portraits of Lissa where just her eyes are shifted up?” Clarice asked.

“Oh. Those are at home. I hung them in the living room for the time being. I’ll bring them in for the show, though.”

“I need to organize getting the catalog created and printed,” Clarice said. “I’ll want to bring a photographer over. Can we work here, Tony?”

“Sure. What will he need?”

“She will bring her own backdrop and lights. She’ll display each painting individually on an easel. We don’t need every painting that will be on display, but getting out a pre-announcement will be a good idea. Can we do it two weeks from today?”