See What I See (5 page)

A friendly Detroit Department of Transportation website shows me routes, and I plot my course. One bus and a half dozen blocks of walking will do it.

I'm nervous about starting school. I look at my paintings again. After what Dad said about them, it's hard for me to get back my confidence. What if after all this I'm not an artist? I call Justin on my cell, needing to hear his voice. Before I left we talked about our future and decided we'd be best off as friends. Justin and I have a lot in common. We both know what we want to do with our lives, only I want to do it in Larch and Justin can't wait to leave Larch for some bigger city. We both believe we have a future, just not a future together.

“What's going on?”

Just the sound of his cheerful voice makes me feel better. “I'm afraid I've been kidding myself into thinking I'm an artist, and I'm not.”

“What do you mean you're not an artist? Of course you are. You're going to be a star at that school. They certainly wouldn't have given you that scholarship if they didn't believe in you.”

That's just what I need to hear. I chat with him about what his school is like and about his geeky roommate who is online all hours of the night playing chess with someone in Russia. When I hang up, things look better, and in a rush of energy I answer Dad's emails and turn the leftover chicken into potpies.

When I call him for supper, Dad snatches up his plate and takes it into the studio to eat and I'm left alone at the table. Fine with me. Evidently my cooking is going to be takeout.

After supper I walk up the street toward the store, thinking maybe I'll see Thomas. But it's Sunday and the store is closed. I wander up and down the unfamiliar streets, looking in the lit windows of the houses, where families are sitting together talking or watching TV.

Later when I call Mom, I ask her about a serial we were watching.

“Doesn't he have a television?”

“No. Dad just paints. It doesn't matter—starting tomorrow I'll be busy with schoolwork.”

“Kate, it's not too late to come home. You could take courses at the community college. They have a very good faculty.”

“Mom, we've been over this. The time will go by fast.”

“Fast for you. You'll be busy.”

That hits me. Mom has never been the self-pitying kind. She must be really lonely. I want to tell her how much I miss her and how miserable I am, but I know that if I do, she'll make me come home. Tomorrow school starts and everything will be fine. “I love you,” I tell Mom.

When she says good night, her voice shakes. Maybe I
should
go home. I don't know.

There's nothing left for me to do but get into bed. I don't hear Dad come upstairs. I decide he must be lost in his painting. I know the feeling. One idea after another grabs you and you can't bear to stop because you know the ideas might never come again. All the anger leaks out of me as I realize he's racing time.

In the morning I dress carefully for my first day at school, wondering what kids wear in the city, eventually pulling on my jeans and an old T-shirt. I'm there to learn to paint, not to make a fashion statement. I take a deep breath, suck in my stomach, zip my jeans, grab my backpack, and tiptoe down the stairway, anxious to get away before Dad is up. I feel like a captain deserting a ship. Don't I have a right to my own life? I promise myself I'll be especially nice to Dad in the afternoon when I get back.

As I leave, I lock the door behind me, shutting Dad and all the mean and selfish things he has said to me inside. I'm on my own. I'm not just my mom and dad's daughter. Today I'm whoever I decide I'm going to be. That's frightening. It's like when your canvas is empty and you know that your first line or your first splash of color will help set the course for what the painting will become. Today is the start of a new painting for me.

I
had no idea the city could be so beautiful. In the creamy, golden light of the September morning all the grime of the city is swept clean. The old elm trees that yesterday looked diseased and faltering now appear brave and sturdy. Traffic that had been so overwhelming is cheerful and full of purpose. People know where they're going. On the bus everyone seems to welcome me, as if they have been waiting for me to join them. When I push through the doors of the school, I know I have my life back. I'm in exactly in the right place at exactly the right time. I want to grab hold of someone and say,
Isn't this great? Aren't you happy?
But I play it cool and just move along with the other kids, trying to look like it's nothing special. I'm relieved to see that almost everyone is wearing jeans. I think about how funny we'd look if God played a joke and suddenly made all the denim in the world disappear.

I have to ask where my first class is, and when I find the room, the students who are already there give me friendly, nervous smiles that say we're all in this together. English lit, the official start of my college career.

The professor says right away, “I know most of you resent having to sit through this class and would much rather be in a studio painting, but some of the best paintings have been done by artists inspired by great books or poems, just as some excellent books have been inspired by paintings. A single painting, Poussin's
A Dance to the Music of Time
, inspired Anthony Powell to write twelve terrific novels, hundreds of thousands of words.” I try to look interested in this writer I've never heard of. The girl next to me rolls her eyes, and I grin.

Next up is art history class, where the professor is dressed in a long, flowing skirt that's been out of style since before I was born, but the skirt has patches of paint on it so I know she doesn't just talk about what she's teaching. Her voice is mesmerizing and intimate at the same time, as if she's talking just to me.

She shows us slides of still lifes with fruit and flowers and some paintings of landscapes by nineteenth-century American painters, each painting more lush and beautiful than the last. “All very pleasurable,” she says, “but let's look at some work that shakes us up, that makes us turn away yet want to look at the same time. Let's talk about the beauty of ugliness.”

A slide goes up of a couple sitting at a table looking starved and miserable. “Van Gogh,” she says. “Notice how he's made use of the color blue to set the mood of the painting.” Another slide. This one of a firing squad, officers aiming their guns at a row of prisoners. “Goya. You can see he spares us nothing. These are not easy artists.” The next is a slide of a woman down on her knees scrubbing the floor of an empty office building, the darkness of the night leaking in through the windows. The woman's hair is hanging over her face, which has crumpled with fatigue and hopelessness. The painting is so depressing, I can hardly bear to look at it. A shiver goes through me. I know the artist.

“Dalton Quinn,” the professor says. “He's a contemporary artist, still active but hasn't done much lately. Actually Quinn is rumored to be living right here in Detroit. Look at these paintings and see for yourselves how interesting ugliness can be if it's more than just ugliness, if the artist catches us up and makes us wonder about the people in his painting, makes us want to reach out to them.”

My hand shoots up. “Why would an artist pick ugly things to paint when there's so much that's beautiful?” I want to know why my father's paintings are supposed to be great.

She looks surprised. “Are you saying there are no hungry people or countries where men are executed for their beliefs or women down on their knees scrubbing to earn a living?”

“No, but . . .” I was going to say,
I don't want to see them
, but that sounds stupid and selfish. “I just wondered . . .” I back off.

“You raise a good question. Remember there are many different ways of approaching truth.” At the end of class the professor gives me an encouraging smile, as if to say there are no dumb questions.

At lunchtime I'm sitting alone in the cafeteria and I'm relieved when a girl from art history sits down next to me. I noticed her in my English class too. She's tall, nearly six feet, and thin, mostly legs. Her hair is trimmed close to her head, giving her an African queen profile. She's wearing an amazing outfit, a short black skirt and a long-sleeved purple silk blouse sewn with bright blue beads and cinched with a green belt. Her shoes have three-inch heels, as if to say,
You want tall. You've got it
.

She says, “I wanted to ask the same question you did. I'm glad you spoke up. Where're you from?”

“Northern Michigan,” I say.

“So where are you living in Detroit?”

“I'm living in Hamtramck with my grandfather.” The lie comes easily. I don't want questions about my dad. I don't want anyone finding out I'm Dalton Quinn's daughter.

“I'm from out of town too. Flint. Maybe we could get together and hang out. I don't know a soul here.”

I hesitate, afraid to give her Dad's address. He'd be furious. He wouldn't want anyone in his house, certainly not an art student.

She notices the hesitation. “Your family doesn't want a big black girl hanging out in their neighborhood?”

“No, it's nothing like that. It's just that my grandfather is pretty sick. He's not up to having company.”

“That's tough. I'm staying with my auntie, helping her with her sewing. She does alterations. She can stitch up anything. You should come over and see us. My auntie loves company. It gives her a chance to cook up a feast.” She scrawls her address and her email and hands it to me, and I give her my cell number. “By the way, I'm Lila Brock.”

“Kate Tapert.”

“I'm not interested in being another van Gogh,” Lila says. “I'm into fashion design. I'm going to get a job with
Vogue
and live in Paris and eventually I'll have my own atelier. Isn't that a gorgeous word?” She looks me over. “Kate, girl, you have got to break loose from the jeans and T-shirt mode. And what's with that braided leather belt? You've got a great body. Loosen up a little. And could you believe that professor with her hippie outfit? I'm going to wave a wand over her.”

Lila and I sit next to each other in my afternoon life class, where you draw from models. “I told them I wanted to sketch people dressed, not naked,” she says, “but they told me I have to understand how the body works, so I'll know how to hang clothes on it.”

There's no model today. Instead we have a doctor from a nearby medical center with slides showing the body's insides, things like bones and muscles that you really don't want to think too much about. He tucks his glasses in his shirt pocket and sets up a real skeleton. We get a lecture on how Leonardo da Vinci spent hours on dissection before he began drawing the body. “You have to see what's underneath the flesh,” the doctor says. “Actually, it would do you good to come over to the medical school and sit in on some dissection of cadavers. Thomas Eakins thought artists should observe surgeries and even perform dissections.” He shows a slide of Eakins's famous painting
The Gross Clinic
, which depicts medical students watching the removal of a bone from a leg. Lila looks at me and pretends she's throwing up. Someone makes a joke about the name of the clinic. The professor hastily thanks the doctor, cutting off the chatter, and promises us he'll have a model the next day. “A live one.” He winks.

At supper that night I can't keep still, I'm so excited about my first day. I tell Dad, “I've never been around kids my own age who actually care about art, who want to live and breathe it. We're all there for the same purpose, and who knows, maybe one of us will go on to be famous. And I met this great girl who's so funny and friendly. She wants to be a dress designer. A doctor came and showed us a real skeleton. All the professors were great, and one of them showed us a painting of yours! It was the one of the scrubwoman. I didn't say anything about you being my dad, because I know you don't want publicity. She talked about how it has the beauty of ugliness.”

Dad puts down his spoonful of chili. “You're paying money to have someone tell you what my painting means when I'm right here?”

I quibble. “I'm not paying money. I'm on a scholarship. Anyhow, aren't you interested in what people think of your painting?”

“The last thing an artist should be thinking about is what someone thinks of his painting. You're like a kindergartner coming home with stories about playing ring-around-the-rosy, Kate. I don't want to hear another word about your school.” He pushes his half-full bowl of chili away as if it has been poisoned and gets up from the table. Before he heads into his studio, he says, “I'm going to ask Morgan for another advance on my work. It can pay for a dorm room for you at your precious school. That will solve both of our problems.”

I'm stunned. For a minute I consider taking the money and getting out. All these years Dad hasn't given me a cent, and I'm certainly due a little help from him. I'd have a place to live with the other kids, and he'd have this place to himself. But I'd lose my chance to get to know my father, even if knowing him is all misery and punishment. And if he gets sicker, who will take care of him?