Read Very Best of Charles de Lint, The Online
Authors: Charles de Lint
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Collections & Anthologies, #Fantasy
In that sense, even with the red imprint of Rushkin’s hand on her cheek, she still felt as though they were compatriots in some great and worthy struggle, allies standing together against all those small-minded people such as her father who couldn’t conceive of art as being “real work.” Her father’s anger originated in his disdain for her and what she’d chosen to do with her life; Rushkin’s was simply borne out of his frustration that she wasn’t doing it well enough. Not that she shouldn’t be doing it, but that she should be doing it better.
“It … it’s okay,” she said.
Rushkin lifted his head, a hopeful look in those pale discerning eyes of his.
“I mean, it’s not okay that you hit me,” she said. “It’s just … let’s try to carry on.”
“I’m so very sorry,” he told her. “I don’t know what came over me. I just … it’s that I feel time is running out and I have so much I want to pass on.”
“What do you mean, ‘time is running out’?” Izzy asked.
“Look at me. I’m old. Worn out. I have no family. No coterie of students to carry on my work. There’s just you and me, and I can’t seem to teach you fast enough. I get frustrated, knowing that I’m trying to force a lifetime of learning into whatever time we might have left.”
“Are you … are you dying?”
Rushkin shook his head. “No more than we all are. Life is a terminal illness, after all. We have our allotment of years, and no more. I’ve lived long enough that my course is almost run now.”
Izzy gave him a worried look. How old was he, anyway? He didn’t look to be more than in his mid-fifties, but then, when she considered the dates on some of the canvases that hung in the Newford Museum of Fine Arts, she realized he probably had to be in his late seventies. Perhaps even his early eighties.
As though to emphasize that point, Rushkin, moving with obvious difficulty, rose stiffly to his feet.
“Let’s have our lunch early,” he said, leading the way downstairs.
Izzy trailed along behind him, her emotions in a turmoil, worry overriding them all. When they got to his ground floor apartment, he insisted on making them soup. While they had lunch, he opened up for the first time in all the weeks Izzy had known him, telling her about living in Paris in the early part of the century, being in London during the Blitz, the well-known artists he had known and worked with, how he’d paid the bills while he was still making a name for himself by working on ocean steamers, in dockyards, construction sites and the like. Having no education, he’d only done physical labor, and because of his size, he’d had to work twice as hard as anyone else to prove himself capable of holding his own.
“I don’t know when it was that I learned the secret,” he said.
“What secret is th–?” Izzy began, then caught herself.
Rushkin gave her one of those smiles that were supposed to show his humor, but only distorted his features into more of a grimace.
“We’ll make a new rule,” he said. “Upstairs, when we’re working, no questions. You’ll do as you’re told and we won’t ever hear the word ‘why,’ or I won’t be able to maintain the teacher-student relationship the work requires. We’ll never get anywhere if I have to stop and explain myself every two minutes. But when we leave the studio, we should recognize each other as equals, and equals have no rules between them except for those of common sense and good taste. Agreed?”
Izzy nodded. “My name’s Izzy,” she said.
“Izzy?”
“You’ve never asked me my name.”
“But I thought I knew your name: Isabelle Copley.”
“That is my name. Izzy’s just a nickname that my friend Kathy gave me and it kind of stuck.” Izzy paused, then asked, “How did you know my name?”
Rushkin shrugged. “I can’t remember. If you didn’t tell me, someone else must have. But ‘Izzy.’” He shook his head. “I think I will refer to you as Isabelle. It has more … dignity.”
“Let me guess,” Izzy said, smiling. “Nobody calls you Vince. It’s always Vincent, right?”
Rushkin smiled with her, but his eyes seemed sad to her. “No one calls me anything,” he said, “unless they want something, and then it’s Mr. Rushkin this and Mr. Rushkin that. It makes for dismal conversation.” He paused for a moment, then added, “But I can’t find fault with my fame. When I first began my career I had one dictum that I set myself: to be paid for my work, but not to work for pay. Fame makes it that much easier to follow that maxim.” He gave her a sharp look. “At least it does so long as I recognize when I am beginning to paint the obvious, rather than painting what I
must
express. People would rather you did the same thing over and over again and it becomes very easy to fall into their trap – particularly when you’re young and hungry. But the more you do so, the nearer you are drawn to something you should not be a part of: that homogeneity that is the death of any form of creative expression.”
When he paused this time, the silence drew out between them. Looking at him, Izzy got the feeling that he was traveling back through his memories. He might have even forgotten she was there and what they were discussing.
“You were saying something about a secret,” she said finally.
Rushkin took a moment to rouse himself; then he nodded. “What do you know about alchemy?”
“It’s something they did in the Middle Ages, I think. Trying to turn lead into gold, wasn’t it?”
“In part. I consider the search for the philosopher’s stone, which would turn all base metals into gold, to be more of a metaphorical quest than a physical one, especially since alchemists also searched for a universal solvent, the elixir of life and the panacea – a universal remedy. There are so many connections between these elements, they are all so entwined with one another, that they would seem to my mind to all be part and parcel of the same secret.”
Izzy gave him an odd look. “Is this the same secret you started out talking to me about?”
“Yes and no.” Rushkin sighed. “The trouble is, we don’t yet share enough of a common language for me to clearly explain what I mean.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Exactly my point.”
“But –”
“What I am trying to teach you in the studio are not just artistic techniques and the ability to
see.
It’s also another language. And until you gain more expertise in it, whatever I tell you at this time will only confuse you more.” He smiled. “Perhaps now you can understand why I get so frustrated at our slow speed of progress.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can.”
“I know you are,” Rushkin told her. “But it’s a long process all the same. And while you’re still young, I grow older every day. More tea?” he added, lifting the teapot and offering it in her direction.
Izzy blinked at the sudden switch in topics. “Yes, please,” she said when she registered what he’d asked.
“Look at that sky,” Rushkin said, pointing out the window to where an expanse of perfect blue rose up above the city’s skyline. “It reminds me of when I lived in Nepal for a time …”
By the time Izzy left Rushkin that day, she felt that she’d gained a real insight into him, both as a person and as an artist. She’d managed to get a glimpse of what lay hidden underneath the face of the angry artist he presented to the world, and found there a much more human and kinder man. She was in such good spirits as she took the bus back to the university for an afternoon class that she completely forgot about what had happened in the studio earlier that day.
Until the next time he hit her.
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