A Butterfly in Flame (8 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Liz Harmony demanded, “Close the door.”

Fred stood inside it. “My class,” he started.

“Stop playing games,” Abe Baum cut him off. “We made a mistake. We see that. Getting you involved. Taking the advice of an associate we had understood…this was our mistake…that…”

The phone rang. President Harmony suppressed it with a button.

“How do you know which one to push?” Fred asked.

“…you were willing to volunteer your time. Busy man like yourself.
Pro bono.
But why should you?” Abe Baum drove on. “Why work for nothing? Stillton Academy means nothing to you. Why should it? We appreciate all you’ve done. The offer is ten thousand dollars, with our thanks.”

“Mighty generous, considering the place is on its way down the toilet,” Fred said. “For one week’s teaching?”

“With the understanding that you pack your bags now and leave,” Harmony added.

“I’ll stay with my proposal,” Fred said.

“Liz, let me handle this.” Abe Baum gestured to close off the argument that was coming to Liz Harmony’s lips. “Fifteen.”

Fred leaned against the inside of the office door and put his hands in his pockets. “You’re bidding against yourself. If I had time it would be fun to see how high you’d go. Don’t misunderstand the situation here. I don’t work
for
you. I don’t work against you either. Simply because I am here, I have become part of the equation. Your offer is interesting but not attractive. I’ll be at that faculty meeting. Talk it over. Either introduce me according to the outline I gave you, Ms. Harmony, or else—it might be easier—I’ll introduce myself to my new colleagues and explain what’s going on. Don’t make other offers or suggestions. I get confused.”

He strode out before his companions could interpose another theme. In any case, neither of them seemed to have anything to say.

***

Intro to Lit
period had run out. The students had decamped, taking with them any efforts they might have made to carry out his assignment. Meg Harrison’s students were smoking outdoors or wandering the hallway or taking advantage of an extended break. Fred walked into the studio. It was a friendly thing to be surrounded by so much concentrated effort.

“May I?” Fred asked Meg. “I’d love to see what your students are doing.”

Meg’s earlier hostility was, for the moment, put aside. “If you want.”

Because each of the figures in progress was the same size, roughly two feet tall, each made of the same gray clay, and each representing the entire standing figure, it was possible to appreciate how differently the individual students saw, or realized, the same object.

“And because it’s three-dimensional, it’s no excuse they see her from different angles,” Meg said. “Since they can damned well move around and see what happens from all the other angles.” She was following him. Suspiciously? Never mind. Whatever.

A couple of barrels of damp clay stood in a corner by the sinks. Individual supplies of clay that the students had taken for their individual use were clumped on their modeling stands, keeping pliable under damp cloths, next to the works in progress.

“The first two weeks of the pose, they do the armature. The metal skeleton that supports the flesh. If the armature is off the proportions are wrong and you can kiss the rest good-bye. Everyone’s going to have trouble with the arms. You’ll see. Well, no, you won’t, but more than half will likely fall off in the firing if we get that far.”

Fred had stopped next to an effort to which not much clay had yet been applied. The metal rods represented the model’s central, skeletal support. “Could make a person think Giacometti,” he remarked. “Except it hasn’t been elongated to the point where gravity seems to be an afterthought. So you have a kiln.”

Meg gestured with a nod in the direction of the sea, back beyond the studio windows, toward a large dilapidated shed. “The big grinder to prepare the clay, also,” she said. “Sure. The ones that are good enough get fired,” she said. “Propane. I built the kiln myself. For my own stuff as well.”

“I’d like to see it,” Fred said. “Your work.”

Meg responded, “I’ll get Marci rounded up. Otherwise these kids take the excuse to fuck around.”

Fred said, “That President Harmony. Does she care if Stillton Academy lives or dies?”

“Who’s asking?” Meg said. “It depends who’s asking.”

Her students were trickling in again, approaching their own work or looking at others’. Marci appeared, putting down her coffee cup and shedding her robe onto the floor as she stepped up to her pose again. “I got the assignment,” she told Fred. Meg started to adjust the placement of her feet and the degree of twist to her back.

“
Lives and Loves of the Artists,
” Fred told Meg. “Can you believe it? I’d better get in gear.”

***

Word had gotten around. Aside from Marci and Missy Tutunjian, there had been seven students absent from
Intro to Lit,
as Fred had learned when he talked with them individually. But
Lives and Loves
—that’s what the students called the course—was missing only one, as Fred learned when he read out the class list. “Not to find out if you’re not here so I can hurt you,” he said, “but since I don’t know much about what’s going on.”

A number of the names were of Greek, or French, or Portuguese origin. Descendants of fishermen, most likely. If a person had either the time or the inclination, it would be interesting to know…

“How do you folks expect to make your living?” Fred asked. “Just a question that popped up in my mind. Rubens. If you asked him when he was twenty years old, let’s say, how would he answer?”

The question achieved a blank stare of varied disinterest or intensity.

“Because I hope you know,” Fred said, “most people who make art do not make a living at it. Take van Gogh. Without the rich brother…moving on…did these people promise you, when you were done, you’d be able to make a living as an artist?”

A male student broke the silence that Fred allowed to extend until it became obvious that he wasn’t going to let his audience off the hook. “They didn’t even promise we’d get a lover, as an artist,” he said. “Anyone here knows you’re on your own.”

“Unless you’re Design,” a female added.

“Graphic Design,” another explained. “Posters, packaging, book covers, illustration, CD covers, that.”

“Commercial.” The general agreement was not enthusiastic.

“OK.
Lives and Loves of the Artists,
” Fred said. “That’s somebody’s idea of a course and I’m not anybody’s idea of a teacher, so it evens out. Where I come from, I don’t care who it is—Gauguin, Rembrandt, Audubon—when I look at what the artist made, what I want to know is, what does this guy want? Figure that out, the rest starts falling into place. Maybe. At least it’s a start. Beyond enough to eat and a dry place to sleep, what does Michelangelo want? Maybe the work tells you. The guy is long dead. We can’t ask him. Make it easier, forget artists for a minute, as an example—start from what you know—you’ve been with him two years—what does Morgan Flower want?”

Chapter Eighteen

“You’re a friend of his?” It was the same male student who had broken the silence earlier.

Fred shook his head. “Sorry. I kind of jumped into the middle. My name is Fred. Since Morgan Flower’s out, I’m filling in, but I don’t know him. What I’m really doing is looking around, getting to know the place. I have nothing for Morgan Flower and nothing against him. He’s a for instance. Like Rembrandt, where you look at the paintings as evidence and draw some conclusions—I’m guessing—is that what you do in this class?

“Xerox copies,” somebody said.

“Not even in color mostly,” from another voice.

Fred went on, “I’m only saying, let’s take a guy you actually know, look at the evidence you have, and figure the guy out backwards, starting with the main questions. So. Once again, what does Morgan Flower want?”

“Coffee.”

“A folded tarp to sit on.

“The guy hates to get dirty.”

And they were off.

The problem was, Fred’s correspondents did not know a great deal, and they were most reticent about what he most wanted to hear: for example, the teacher’s relations with his female students. The conversation turned, almost randomly, goofy, enthusiastic, poignant, and even—despite the hard world these students were heading into—even optimistic, as if the armor of artistic endeavor was bound to see them through.

Apparently Flower was not one of those teachers who made up for other deficiencies by filling out the time with irrelevant facts concerning his own life and loves. Nobody even knew where he’d been born.

By the time they were done it was lunch time. Fred dismissed the class without making the assignment that occurred to him: Write a list of the twenty movies Rubens would like most. The twenty he would hate most. Say why.

What Fred knew now about Morgan Flower was the make and color of his car, the fact that he had worn a necktie the first day he had appeared in class two years ago, and never again; that occasionally he mentioned the movie
The Wizard of Oz
when searching for examples for some point he was raising, that he brought a blue tarpaulin with him to sit on, after one bad experience with paint.

In short, nothing useful, and nothing that seemed remotely relevant. Education? Place of birth? Age? Marital status? Favorite color? Zero.

The students wandered off. There would be an hour before his final class started—the three-hour session to which Morgan Flower had given the name
Writing About Your Problems.
Fred had started toward home and a sandwich when Meg Harrison caught up with him. “Some of us get together at Bee’s Beehive,” she said. “If you care to join us.”

“Thought I might get away for a bit,” Fred confessed.

The weather was bracing, even invigorating, in a way that seemed hopelessly irrelevant to the matter at hand. The job he’d undertaken, or the project, or whatever it was, could not be done while he meandered around in tight circles in front of a passel of students, pretending to be something he wasn’t. The teacher’s life was constructed of acres of wasted time.

“But sure. Why not?” Fred said.

Wind, seagulls and salt air. Not far away was the regular clinking rattle of tackle against aluminum masts. The foghorn had shut up, since there was nothing left in the atmosphere to complain about. Meg walked quickly downhill toward the center of town.

“What happened to your former leader?” Fred asked. “Fired, I heard. True? What for?”

Meg said, “I pay no attention to art historians. They do their thing, I do mine. Never did. Don’t give a shit. Nothing they say touches what I know or do.”

“Gotcha,” Fred said. “Lonely life.”

“Not for me.”

“For the art historians.”

“Critics too,” Meg said. “If you can tell the difference between one parasite and the next.”

“I’m with you so far,” Fred said. Central casting hadn’t hired enough extras for this scene.

“Except one,” Meg said. She stopped and put a long hand on Fred’s shoulder to stop him. “Talking about—can’t recall the name—about how art was taught in the Paris schools a century ago and more. It got my attention. ‘The study of the nude in the classroom atelier is as common to an artist as are calisthenics to an athlete. As a subject to command the attention of even an unruly student, the human body is hard to beat. It is straightforward, complex, varied, compelling, amusing, and measurable. And it is a valuable teaching tool since it either does or does not translate believably from three dimensions to a two-dimensional plane. Its skin exhibits a surprising variety of colors in an excruciating sequence of almost indistinguishable shifts.’

“It’s the only thing I ever memorized except some of
Oh captain, my captain,
for a school play that I can’t forget now mostly because I forgot it then and I still have nightmares about it. When I’m awake I remember, not when I’m asleep.”

The town, the movie set, seemed uncomfortable, as if nothing about it was quite real. Williamsburg or Sturbridge were made fake by the addition of inappropriate wealth. Did poverty lead to the same feeling of unreality? Shouldn’t poverty feel more real than wealth? Of the mixed age groups on the sidewalks, most were students or of student age. There were next to no children other than a single baby being carried in a pouch across its mother’s chest. Where would a child go to school? There couldn’t be anything closer than fifteen miles.

“Curious town,” Fred remarked. “It’s almost
Lost Horizons
except with Yankees instead of Tibetans.

“Bee gives us a back room,” Meg said. They’d reached the tiny center of the commercial area where Bee’s Beehive, on the opposite side of the road from the Stillton Café, had been closed last night.

Inside was a single room, twenty feet square, where students sat at tables or at the counter behind which a stout woman in red stripes and an apron must be Bee. A jerk of her head, crowned with white curls, motioned Meg and her guest toward an archway back of the counter, which led to a small room where four people sat around a table. A shuffling among them made two spaces.

“Stay away from the meatloaf,” a man said, standing and holding out a tentative hand.

“This is Fred,” Meg told the group. “He’s with me but I can’t vouch for him.”

Wary introductions proceeded. The warning against meatloaf had come from Bill Wamp, a man of perhaps forty-five who taught second- and fourth-year painting. He was dressed more or less like Farmer Jones, in a red plaid shirt and bib overalls clean enough to have been purchased yesterday. He was heavyset and graceful, red faced and balding. And loud.

Arthur Tikrit, a small and dapper man whose fingers seemed never to be at rest, as if he were secretly tormented by musical composition, was responsible for first-year two-dimensional design, color theory, and illustration. Barbara ‘I’m Bobby’ Ballatieri did printmaking. She was in the middle of a speech, “No way can you call what we do here sculpture. Clay, plaster, fiberglass. That’s it. You want to work in steel? Head for Kansas City or L. A. I’m not kidding. Don’t waste your time here. We can’t help you.” Bobby held up her sandwich, declaring it “chicken salad and not half bad. On rye.” She cut a frail blonde figure, in jeans and a black denim shirt.

Slowest to rise, slowest to hold out a hand, slowest to sit again, was Philip Oumaloff, who resembled a caricature version of that caricature of Brahms: thickset, square, and copiously hedged with fat white hair and beard.

“I am emeritus,” Oumaloff proclaimed.