Zero (13 page)

If Dr. Salinger wasn’t so good, I seriously would drop the class. Of course, then I’d have to explain it to Mom and Dad, and honestly, I don’t want to bother.

So I played Good Schoolgirl all week, using the times she
wasn’t here to work on the techniques she’s shown us so far. It’s quiet in the classroom, at least. Part of me is sorta happy; I think I might be getting just a bit better. The other part of me wants her to F’ing
show up
and do her job so I can learn more and put together something decent for my portfolio. And I hung out with Mike Thursday and Sunday, not counting a GR show Saturday, so things could be worse.

Today, Friday, Doc S arrives on time and launches into this
glorious
speech about Dada. Normally I’d be all ears, because Dada sort of inspired the surrealists. But her little asides, as she calls them, are filled with heavy sighs and fluttering eyelashes, giving me a headache, so I paint instead, and she doesn’t seem to care.

When you’re painting, you can see noise. Taste sound. Ten trillion neurons fire in your mind and trigger the fine muscles in your arms to
do
. To create. Your hand moves apart from
You
, this capital-letter thing of fallible flesh. There’s technique, sure. You don’t just pick up a brush or pencil or stick and breathe life into two dimensions. Still … at the time, the rest of the world dissolves away. You know how you sometimes just stare at some fixed point in middle space, unable to blink or avert your gaze? How the peripheral world looks when you do that? Painting and drawing create a similar sensation. You might scratch an itch your consciousness didn’t know you had. You might reflexively shake your hand before it cramps. You might stifle a burp (or worse). Your hands, your eyes, your
You
don’t care. All that matters is each stroke, each whisper-scratch of the stick, as your creation grows, in stages of shade and depth and color, into something uniquely its own.

And when your gaze breaks, when the moment passes,
whether after a moment or a day, you step back and study what’s happened. And the result, for good or for ill, is yours. You are in control of nothing and responsible for everything. Everything you are, everything you may yet become, suddenly gets pulled into crystal-clear focus and rests on this one expanse of once-off-white emptiness. Your mouth dries, and something metaphysical climbs on spider legs up your spine, nesting at last at the base of your skull, where it spreads its long appendages and warms you. It gives you the right to scream.

 … But anyway. I don’t get that at home the same way I do here.

When I check the clock, it’s halfway through class and the room is silent except for the whisker-swish of brushes on canvas. Dr. Salinger pirouettes between the easels, offering comments to each student. When she arrives at my elbow, I stop painting so she can get a look at my canvas.

“Good,” she says. And for one second, I’ve attained nirvana.

“But it’s … 
missing
something.”

Crap. “What,” I say.

“That’s for you to know and me to find out,” she says, and lightly pats my back. “May I inquire as to the subject?”

I swallow, my throat going arid all of a sudden. She’s never asked that before.

“It’s, um … my teacher.”

Dr. Salinger’s head twitches toward me, birdlike. “Go on,” she coos at me.

“Well,” I
go on
, “uh, his name’s Mr. Hilmer? And he was my art teacher in junior high? And … he was … really cool.”

“And how exactly did this
Mister Cool
impact your artistic soul?”

I almost elbow her in the gut. Pick your weapon, witch; we will battle and your skull will decorate my bedpost for eternity if you don’t watch your tone when talking about Mr. Hilmer.

I clear my throat. “Well, like … on the first day of seventh grade, I walked into his classroom and …”

Dr. Salinger perches on a stool and props her chin up with one delicate fist.

I don’t say this, but the first thing I noticed was Mr. Hilmer himself, an older guy of indeterminate ethnicity, with cloud-white, Cyrillic tufts of hair and an omnipresent turquoise beaded choker. He always showed his teeth when he smiled, which was often.

Second was that his classroom walls were covered floor to ceiling with art posters. Baroque, Italian Renaissance, Romantic—not that I knew any of that at the time. Renoir to Matisse, Warhol to O’Keefe (who, by the way, also briefly attended SAIC); Mr. Hilmer’s room was a jumbled gallery of fine art reproductions.

“… and, um, he had all these art prints,” I say. “One of them was Salvador Dalí’s
Persistence of Memory
. It was between a Cassatt and a … Delacroix, I think.”

I shut up for a sec, remembering. I might even smile some.

I went straight to that Dalí poster, which was about eye-level, right near his desk. I barely heard the other kids coming into the room, chattering and teasing. Looking back, I realize now it was the only time and place I didn’t hear the obnoxious
things people said about me, like they didn’t exist in Mr. Hilmer’s room.

I touched one of Dali’s famous melting watches with my index finger, as if to feel the intangible impasto I was sure existed on the original—not that I knew what impasto was yet. I didn’t learn until later that Dalí didn’t use impasto. Turns out he used small brushes and tried to hide his brushstrokes as much as possible. His paintings appear more like photos.

Mr. Hilmer materialized next to me. “What do you think?”

I pulled my finger away, not because he sounded mad that I was touching the poster—he didn’t sound mad at all—but because that soft watch repulsed me. And beckoned.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What is it?”

“Dalí.”

I looked for a Barbie or Kewpie doll, and pointed out that there were no such artifacts in this painting.

“Salvador Dalí.” Mr. Hilmer smiled patiently. “He was a Spanish artist. Do you like it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, knowing even then it was a lie. I was
transfixed
.

“Well, let me know when you decide,” Mr. Hilmer said. “We have plenty of time. There are some books on the shelf there if you want to see more.”

I took all three of his oversized Dalí books to my desk and missed his entire first-day lecture, lost in the books’ color plates. Mr. Hilmer never even tried to get my attention.

Dr. Salinger has no such issue. “Miss Walsh? Hello? Are you still with us?”

My body jolts. Dr. Salinger is peering at me.

“Sorry,” I say. “Uh … he was really nice to me and taught me a lot, and—I dunno, I just wonder about him sometimes. If he’s doing okay. He retired after I graduated.”

She glances at my painting. It’s sort of an homage—or a theft, depending on who you ask—of Dali’s
Portrait of Gala
, in which his wife (yes, Gala) is seated, facing out and toward a
second
Gala, seen from behind. I’ve tried to do something similar with Mr. Hilmer, only more expressionistic, using chunky, thick strokes and lots of matte medium to ghost the image.

“And how do you think your Mr. Hilmer would grade this piece?”

“He wouldn’t,” I say automatically. “He didn’t grade in his art class.”

“Ah!” Doc Salinger goes. “So there is no good or bad art.”

“Well … I don’t think that’s what he—”

“That is
precisely
what he was implying,” she interrupts. She hops to her feet. “Miss Walsh, I take it you fancy yourself an up-and-comer in the world of art, yes?”

My mouth flaps open, closed, open, closed.

“Well? Do you or do you not wish to sell your work? Hm?”

I swallow a couple choice F-bombs, which detonate in my stomach. “Y-yes …”

“Well, then, my dear—say something!”

“What do you want me to say?” I’m whining now, acutely aware of how high-pitched my voice is becoming.

“Not with your mouth,” Dr. Salinger says, her eyes pleading with heaven. “With your paint. Speak to me, tell me what to
think
. Not what
you thought
. Frankly, Miss Walsh, the world is not terribly concerned with what you think. Do you
intend to post signs at the bottom of your frames reading, ‘Dear Matthias, This is a picture of my junior high school art teacher, who I think is simply the bee’s knees’?”

“Who’s Matthias?” This old grandma, Candace, interrupts my mental fit.

“My
lover
,” Doc S says airily, fluttering her eyelashes.

Gag.

Dr. Salinger lasers in on me again, dismissing Candace. “Well, Miss Walsh?”

So I go, “I … um …”

“When I view your picture, I want to think,” Dr. Salinger says. “Present tense, Miss Walsh. This,” she says, pointing at my canvas, “says
nothing
. I should not have to ask the artist what she has painted, or why. I should feel it in the marrow of my bones.”

With that gospel, Dr. Salinger swishes to the front of the class and picks up a thin brush.

“Now, what was I talking about? Ah, yes! Art.” She swipes a dab of acrylic from another student and approaches her own easel.

I jab my brush into a crimson blob on my palette and stab repeatedly at the canvas, creating bloody wounds. Think about this, bitch!
Present tense
.

So what if it ruins the picture? Big deal. I stab harder and harder, nearly puncturing the canvas. It’s an F anyway, right? Since we’re grading now, fine. I’m a failure.

What the hell was I thinking? If I can’t even pass an art class at a community F’ing college, then SAIC’s going to send me a singing telegram striptease, mocking my audacity in reapplying for a
merit
scholarship. I lack
merit
.

When Dr. Salinger’s voice slithers into my ear again, I almost scream; she’s approached from behind me. Assassin. Maybe she’s taken Mike’s ninja class.

“
Now
I’m thinking,” Dr. Salinger whispers. “Anger. Passion. That’s a good start.”

I wonder, if I throw my brush hard enough, will it impale her eyeball?

As soon as Dr. Salinger dismisses us, I pick up my bag and stomp out of the room, feeling a little immature but not caring to hide it. You know what, screw it. I’m dropping.

But the school library is between here and admin, and on an impulse I veer in that direction and slide inside to see if there’s anything I can find out about Dr. Salinger. If Doc S is the real deal, there must be articles or reviews on her shows—if she’s not lying about where she had her showings. And if she is, then it’s an easy case to make for dropping out.

I find a few magazine articles dating so far back they’re on microfiche. But it’s Dr. Deborah Salinger, all right.

In one small photo, she’s wearing a dress that would be dated on my mother. She was thinner then, but not in a good way. The photo is part of a blurb on a show held in San Francisco. These must have been her glory days, as she calls them. Lame.

The entire blurb is a review of her show. I peer closer, hanging on every word:

There’s a little box at the end of the article with a
D
in it. Looking at the other reviews, I see familiar letters:
A, B, C, D
, and
F
.

Holy
shit
! She got
reamed
. I’ve come up with some intricately detailed critiques of my paintings, but this guy makes my words sound like they came from a Sunday school teacher. And how about those
grades
, eh, Doc?

“She sucks,” I whisper to the microfiche machine. Or she did at one point, anyway.

I go through two other microfiche articles that her name came up in. The reviews are positive but dated
before
that one. As of about five years ago, her name is nowhere to be found.

So wait a sec. One minute she’s doing shows, getting reviews; the next she’s teaching
community college
? The articles don’t mention her education; maybe she got her PhD or whatever after her career fell apart?

Is that what happens if you can’t sell? Those who
can’t—teach
? I’ve thought about becoming an art teacher, like for elementary or junior high, following in Mr. Hilmer’s footsteps, but I assumed that was a backup plan. Maybe Doc S had the same idea.

Or maybe she had no choice.

I return the films to the circulation desk. The other reviews were written about exhibits at nice galleries in Chicago and Santa Fe. I’d kill to have a canvas in either of
their freaking
bathrooms
. So much for dropping, I guess. I can’t afford to not find out if she’s got more to teach me. Like what I did wrong in my portfolio. She must know, right?

I stop short of the parking lot as I’m heading to my car when I see Dr. Salinger walking all elegantly toward a cherry-red Porsche idling by the curb. This guy gets out, wearing a faux-casual outfit that makes him look like a catalog model. She picks up her pace as he comes around the hood to hug, then kiss her. Man, they’re sucking face like the other is their only source of oxygen. Ew.

When they’re done slobbering on each other, Doc S gets into the passenger seat and Her Lover Matthias (I assume) gets behind the wheel. He burns rubber peeling out of the lot.

Oooo. I’m
so
turned on. Idiot. I’m glad Mike isn’t a “car guy.”

I wait till they’re out of sight before continuing toward my car. The mystery of Dr. Salinger’s career can remain just that, for all I care. All I want now is to pass her stupid class, stripmine her techniques for anything useful, and move on. Bigger things, better things, or some combination of the two. You want to talk
surreal
? Passing this witch’s class would be as surrealistic as it gets—until I see Jenn pacing near a concrete bench just shy of the parking lot.