39
AFTER THE NEXT WEEK’S FILM, the name of which I can’t even recall, I hurried the girls through the park, past the Nevsky mansion, toward home.
“You’re in quite a rush this week,” said Margot.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a little chilly, and I’ll be happy to get home.”
“You’re going home?” said Martha.
“No,” I said. “I meant—home—you know, home to your house.”
“Oh,” said Margot. “I see. Home. Where the heart is. Someplace cozy and warm.”
“Right.”
“Like under a thick quilt in a big bed?” asked Martha.
“Don’t I wish,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘Don’t I wish’?” said Margot.
“I mean I wish I could, but—”
“But what?”
“But I have so much work to do.”
“Oh, come on, Peter,” said Martha. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It’s an obligation I have,” I said. “I told your father I’d do the work, and well, when you say you’ll do something, it’s a promise, and a promise—”
“Oh, shut up,” said Margot.
At the door of the studio I said, “Good night, kids. Maybe I’ll finish early, and—”
“Don’t bother,” said Martha.
I let myself in, locked the door, and hurried to the stack of drawings. I set to work at once.
My work had become harder and harder as the weeks had gone by, because some of the students were beginning to develop individual styles. Increasingly, I found that I had not only to improve the work in a general direction as I had at the beginning—nudging the students, I suppose, in the direction of my own style, toward an idealized rendering that suited me—but I also had to learn to see certain tendencies in the student’s work toward a developing but quite mysterious individuality, to follow those tendencies, and even to further them, so that the student would not merely see the work improving, but also see himself developing as an artist. It was intriguing and challenging. At times, I had the feeling, derived from working on a student’s drawings over the course of several weeks, that we were fighting each other, and on this night the realization came to me that from the student’s point of view, this tug-of-war we were having must have felt like a struggle against certain unwelcome habits—or might have felt like a struggle, depending on how conscious the student was of a tendency to draw in a certain way. Maybe some of the students were deliberately trying to break away from the uniformity of style that I had been imposing on the class through the alterations I made to their work—unbeknownst to them, of course. I found myself developing a new respect for the people whose work I doctored. I also found, increasingly, that when I discovered or thought I had discovered a tendency in one of them to begin drifting away from the crowd, to start taking the lonely way, I led him along it, darting ahead like a native guide, checking out the terrain for the difficult spots and helping him, lending him a hand to get him over them.
I’d been working for nearly three hours before the dark-haired girl began to appear in the drawings. She took me by surprise. Suddenly, there she was, manifested in a certain fullness of Margot and Martha’s hair in some drawings that came up in a row. Margot and Martha had straight, fine hair, but here they were depicted with thicker, wavier, darker hair that had to come from interference with the students’ recollections of the other model.
I compared my earlier drawings of the dark-haired girl with the new traces of her in these drawings. The line of her shoulder: did it begin to curve here, higher than I had thought last week? I shuffled through the drawings. Suppose it curved sooner, as it easily might, judging from the students’ representation of it in their drawings of Margot and Martha. I worked all night, and by dawn I had come a full step closer to seeing her:
When Andy knocked at the door, he startled me.
“Peter? Are you still asleep?”
“Huh! What?”
“Time to wake up. How did it go last night?”
“What?”
He opened the door and came in. “Did your work go well?” he asked.
I hadn’t finished. “Um, pretty well,” I said, “but I didn’t quite finish.” I turned my back to Andy and hid the drawings of the dark-haired girl under the stack, and as I did so, I realized that I must be hiding them because I felt that I had been doing something I wasn’t supposed to do, something more than shirking my duties. I had the feeling that I had discovered something I wasn’t supposed to discover. Surely that couldn’t be. Andy and I had—well—trust between us. We were bound together by trust. Weren’t we?
“Andy,” I said, pulling the sheet from the bottom of the stack and handing it to him, “who is this?”
He looked at the drawing. He squinted at it. He took it to the windows and looked at it in the morning light.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you draw these?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a friend of yours?”
“She’s not modeling for you?”
“No,” he said. “What made you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “Just my imagination, I guess.”
[to be continued]
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