40
THE NEXT WEEK’S MOVIE was, I don’t know, Frozen Dust or something like that. It was a love story, but a falling-out-of-love story rather than a falling-in-love story. Its tone was chilly and bleak. So was the weather. The characters—Sven, Ingrid, and Sigrid—seemed to mistrust one another from the start. Over the course of the first two hours or so of the film, each of them accused the others of one offense after another, from stealing mail to poisoning a canary. Then the three of them went on an elaborate picnic, with servants, and for an hour and a half they said hardly a word. At last Sven spoke.
Sven: “What was that?”
Ingrid: “What?”
Sven: “I thought I heard the cry of a herring gull being disemboweled by a goshawk.”
Sigrid: “Nonsense.”
Sven: “Must have been my imagination.”
They sat in silence, resigned, eating bits of pickled fish. They didn’t yell at one another, or cry out against fate, or throw the heavy crockery from which they ate. A cold rain began to fall, and that was that.
The characterization must have been weak, because for most of the walk home the girls and I couldn’t think of much of anything to say. A cold rain began to fall. We hurried through it, toward home.
At the door of the studio, I gave each of them a peck on the cheek. Margot went directly upstairs without a word. Martha leaned toward me and said, “Have a good night. Make us beautiful.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “Don’t let the goshawks get you.” Then she turned and followed her sister up the stairs.
I closed the studio door behind me, locked it, and went right to work. I wanted to get the students’ drawings improved as quickly as I could so that I’d have plenty of time to improve my pictures of the dark-haired girl.
Impatience, impatience, impatience: I could feel it in the tightness of my chest, in the way my hand trembled. This was not the trembling we feel when we’re hesitant, or afraid; this was that trembling we feel when we’re overeager, like a horse that’s going to come out of the gate too soon. Hastiness: I could see it in the lines I laid on the paper. They betrayed my indifference to the task, and my eagerness to see it done, to get past it to something that interested me more. I threw one drawing away and began again, but the second try was marred in the same way—by lines that wobbled, by lines that trailed away to nowhere because I was in a rush to finish, to be done with it. I didn’t discard any more work. Why bother? Good enough would have to be good enough. I finished as quickly as I could.
As soon as I had finished, I flipped through the drawings I’d done and saw how bad they were. I had let Andy down, and he was sure to notice. I thought of starting over. There was a lot to be done, and if I did it right it would take a long time. Was Andy really likely to notice? He was distracted by his own work, so maybe he wouldn’t pay enough attention to mine to see how careless I’d been. Maybe he wouldn’t care. The students wouldn’t notice. They’d just think they had had an off week. To hell with it.
I spread all of the students’ drawings out on the floor of the studio and began scuttling among them like a crab, down on all fours, shifting and shuffling from one to the next, looking for bits and pieces of the dark-haired girl.
When I had enough to go on, I began to draw. I worked slowly, carefully, so entirely engaged in what I was doing, so fully attentive to my work, that I noticed and relished the buzzing vibration in my fingers when I drew the pencil across the surface of the rough paper, lengthening her hair.
Slowly, slowly, patiently, I advanced the work, bit by tiny bit, progressing slowly, but always progressing. I never had to go back and erase because I never allowed myself to go beyond what I could see clearly in my mind’s eye. Among the things I had learned during those nights that I had spent locked in Andy’s studio improving student work was the wisdom of taking tiny steps toward wherever it was that the work was headed, with the conviction that there would be time to bring it to its destination eventually, however long it might take. I may have ignored that wisdom with regard to the students’ work, but I wasn’t going to ignore it in mine. If it was a bit of self-deception to tell myself that there would certainly be time—tomorrow or the next day or next week—to bring the work a little closer to what it ought to be, it was a useful bit of self-deception, for it made me leave the work in decent condition whenever I left it, so that if I was forced to abandon it, then what I left behind would be incomplete but not incorrect.
Her hair was longer and even fuller than I had supposed. Her shoulders were much clearer, thanks in large part to the way her hair fell over them. I began to be able to see—not clearly, just sketchily—how she held her arms.
When I finished, I considered what I’d done. This was good. This was better than I had imagined I could do. Imagined. Could this be the product of my imagination? A figment of my imagination? If it was, I had some imagination.
I stretched out on my cot and went to sleep, where my imagination occupied itself with a dream that would have been an unblemished delight if the pickled fish and the goshawk had stayed out of it.
I didn’t give a thought to the hasty work I’d done until I heard Andy knocking on the studio door and calling, “Peter?”
“Mm.”
“Are you still asleep? Time to wake up.”
“I’m up. I’m up.” I went to the door and opened it.
“How did it go last night? Did the work go well?”
“Yes,” I said, too heartily, in the manner of liars everywhere. “Very well!”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 863, Mark Dorset considers Birds of Prey: Goshawk from this episode.
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