Forever in Blue (9 page)

She realized that another person from the campus was nearby, appreciating the same view. It was a woman she had not yet seen or met.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the woman said.

Carmen sighed. “It really is.”

They fell into step together along the path. “Are you part of the theater program?” the woman asked. She was wide hipped and somewhat graceless. She wasn’t an actress, Carmen decided, and felt a sense of camaraderie.

Carmen nodded.

“What are you trying out for?”

Carmen pushed a stray hair behind her ear. “Nothing. I’m doing sets, hopefully.”

“You’re not going to try out for anything?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not an actress.”

“How do you know? Have you tried?”

“I guess not. No.” Though my father claims I’m dramatic, she added silently.

“You should try it. It’s really the strength of this program.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“Huh.” Carmen spent two seconds pretending to consider this so she wouldn’t seem rude. “Hey, would you point me in the direction of the canteen? I got off track and I have no idea where I’m going.”

“Sure,” the woman said. She pointed to the left when the path split.

“Thank you,” Carmen said, looking over her shoulder.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Carmen.”

“I’m Judy. Good to meet you, Carmen. You try out, okay?”

Carmen couldn’t say okay if she didn’t mean it. “How ’bout I’ll think about it?”

“That’s all I can ask,” the woman said.

Later, when Carmen was trying to fall asleep and all the lines and lines and lines were scrabbling around in her head, she did think about it. She mainly thought of why she would not do it.

Lena walked around with that overstimulated feeling.

She didn’t like it very much. She forgot to eat and she wore eye makeup to painting class. She forced herself to look at Leo only once every pose and to keep to herself during breaks. She hoped, she silently begged for him to notice her. She racked her brain to find ways to hedge these hopes, to keep them safe.

She looked at her painting in a new way. At first she was so disgusted by it, she could barely look at all. But then she settled down. She tried to relax and see better and deeper than she had before. She felt like a track runner who was pushing herself to break a five-minute mile only to have somebody tell her it could be done in four. If it could be done, then she had to reframe her sense of possibilities. She had to at least try.

She thought about Leo. She asked around a little, casually, she hoped, and learned that he was in his third year, that he didn’t live on campus and was rarely seen at campus events. His mystique only grew.

The next Saturday the Traveling Pants arrived from Bee. Lena wore them for courage and struck out from the safety of her dorm room. Not for the courage to talk to Leo; the courage to visit his painting again.

She was so intent on her agenda, so eager and yet so furtive, she almost felt like she had gone into the empty studio to steal something. She walked straight past her painting in favor of his. She stood in front of it, as she had been secretly longing to do all week. For every session he worked on it, she found herself wishing she could watch, to see exactly what he did. How could she now retrace a whole week’s worth of work?

She needed to think about her own painting with as much vigor, she knew, but for now she was living in the world of possibilities.

If she could have crawled inside the paint, she would have, so desperate was she to understand what he did, how he did it.

“You learn a lot in art school by looking around,” Annik had said to her on the phone a few nights ago.

How true this was. She found herself only wanting to hear what Robert the instructor said when he was talking to Leo.

The beauty of Leo’s work waned as she took it apart, dissected it. And then she’d lose her focus for one second and it snuck up on her again. Finally she stopped trying so hard and let her eyes fuzz a bit as she just admired it.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen transcendent paintings before; she had. She’d stared at paintings that were far more accomplished than this. She’d been to the National Gallery hundreds of times. She’d been to the Met and other great museums, big and small.

But Leo was painting exactly the same subject she was—in the same studio, at the same angle (though in mirror image), by the same light. He was an art student, not a master. This was apples to apples: They were handling the same forms and dimples and hairs and shadows. It made her able to appreciate what he was doing in a thrilling though humbling way.

She just looked at it. The lines of the shoulders. The elbows. For some reason she thought of her grandfather. Emotions Lena usually stowed down deep came to hover at the surface. She felt a flush in her cheeks and the wateriest of tears flood her eyes. She thought of Kostos next, and she thought of the fact that she hadn’t really thought of him in a few days.

Was Carmen right? Was she really capable of forgetting him? Was that what she should be striving for?

She wasn’t sure she wanted to be striving for that. How disorienting it felt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be the forgetting type, even if she could be. If she forgot Kostos, she feared she’d forget most of herself along with him. Who was she without him?

“What do you think?”

Lena was so deep down in her brain she felt she had to travel miles to get back to the sound and the light. In quick succession she realized that Leo was standing a few feet away from her, that he was talking to her, that she was standing in front of his painting for no reason she was prepared to explain, and that she had tears running down her face.

Instantly her hands went to her face and she wiped them off. She pressed wet fingers to her thighs and remembered she was wearing the Traveling Pants. Well. These weren’t the first tears to dry on the Traveling Pants.

He looked at her and she scrambled to think of what was supposed to happen. He was looking at her Pants. Should she try to explain them? But he had said something, hadn’t he? He had asked a question. Did that mean she was supposed to answer it? So manic was the fluttering of her thoughts she feared it was audible.

“It’s okay if you don’t like it,” he said, wanting to help her out.

“No! I do like it!” she nearly shouted at him.

“I’m having problems with the head.” He reached out with his thumb, and to Lena’s horror, actually smudged a patch of wet paint that composed Nora’s jawbone.

“No!” she burst out. Why was she shouting at him? She made herself be quiet. She realized she didn’t want him to look at her quite this hard.

“Sorry,” she hurried to say. “I just—I like that part. I don’t think you should smudge it.” She wondered if she was more connected to his painting than he was.

“Oh. Okay.” He thought she was crazy. She wished he would go back to not looking at her at all.

She tried to calm down. She wasn’t going to be cool, so she could at least be honest. “I really love your painting. I think it’s beautiful,” she said at a normal volume.

He looked at her in a different way now, trying to gauge her tone, surprised by her sincerity. “Well, thank you.”

“The thing is, though…looking at it makes me realize I have no idea what I’m doing.” Who could have known that Lena would actually talk to Leo? And that when she did, she would be so disarmed she’d be truthful?

He laughed. “Looking at it makes me realize I have no idea what I’m doing.”

She laughed too, but miserably. “Shut up,” she said.

Had she just told him to shut up?

“It’s true, though,” he said. “I look at it in a certain way and I only see what’s wrong with it. Isn’t that what we all do?”

“Yeah, but most of us are right,” she said ruefully.

Was she actually having a conversation with Leo right now?

He laughed again. He had a nice laugh.

“I’m Leo,” he said. “Where are you set up?”

She pointed to the easel directly across the room from his, trying not to feel too crushed by the fact that he really hadn’t noticed her at all. “Lena,” she said in a slightly defeated voice.

“Are you a year-rounder or here for the summer?”

“All year,” she said crampily. “I only finished my first, though.”

He nodded.

The fact of this conversation settled upon her at last. Here was Leo. In an otherwise empty studio. Did he have a girlfriend? Did he have a boyfriend? Did he make time in his life for such frivolity?

She realized he wanted to work on his painting. She suddenly felt so self-conscious she couldn’t carry on. She made an excuse and fled.

When she got home, she twisted and turned in her unmade bed for a while, and then she called Carmen.

“Guess what?”

“What?”

“I think I have a crush.”

Carma,

Here are the Pants and a little sketch I made of Leo. From memory, not from life. (And no, I’m not thinking of him day and night. God.)

Funny hair, huh?

He did not realize I was in his class. I think I’m making a big impression around here.

Love you,

Len

At seven-thirty the light waned and Peter still sat with Bridget at the edge of the trench. She knew he felt he had to stay because he was supervising, and also to show her he appreciated her work ethic. She only hoped he was enjoying it as much as she was.

“Hey, Bridget?” he said at last.

“Yeah?”

“Can we go get some dinner?”

“Oh, fine, fine.” She pretended impatience. “Let me finish recording.”

“We’ll drop the stuff by the lab on the way.”

They fell into step companionably. She tried wiping her face and made it even dirtier.

“Would you call me Bee?”

“Bee?”

“Yeah, as in bumble.”

“Okay.”

“That’s what my friends call me. You can call me Bridget if you want, but I may think you are slightly mad at me.”

He smiled at her. “Bee, then.”

They washed up hurriedly by the outdoor pump, but dinner had been cleared from the big tent by the time they got there.

“It’s my fault,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed in his agreeable way.

The Turkish ladies who provided most of the food service kindly found some leftover bread and hummus and salad for them. One of the ladies brought over an unlabeled bottle full of strong red wine. It was a tricky business drinking wine after working in the sun all day. Bee mixed hers with water.

Was this awkward? she wondered.

It wasn’t awkward exactly. It was good, slanty fun. He was handsome and he was nice and she was drawn to him for these and probably other reasons.

Would it be less awkward if he weren’t so handsome and nice? Would it be less fun?

What about the fact that she was a girl with a boyfriend? That he was…who knew what?

Was having a boyfriend honestly supposed to make you not feel attracted to people? Was it supposed to make you not attractive?

And now she wondered, how did he see her? Was it all in her mind, this tension she felt in the way they reached for things and shared the space?

Oh. She felt like smacking herself. She was incorrigible. Why was she feeling this way?

Hmm. Was she feeling this way?

What way was it, exactly?

The sun was long past set, but they walked along the hillside toward the embankment. She felt the dizziness, the giddiness of the wine. Was his tread a little happier, a little less directed too? They intended to join what was left of the party like they did most nights, but it had mostly scattered. There was some awkwardness about whether to sit down. At least in her mind. He did sit down and she joined him. Was it strange that they should be spending time together like this?

No. If she weren’t incorrigible, it wouldn’t be.

Incorrigibly, she pulled the elastic out of her hair. It was coming out anyway, she told herself, though she didn’t quite buy it. Her hair was unusually long from not having Carmen around to trim it since they’d gone to college. It was down to her elbows, almost, halfway down her back. It had the particular feature of absorbing moonlight. She knew he had to notice it. He was probably wishing he hadn’t sat down with her.

Why was she behaving this way? She was older now. She’d learned her lessons. What was she trying to prove?

Her limbs had that forward tingle. She couldn’t help herself.

Was it all in her mind?

It was, wasn’t it? Maybe that was for the best.

She looked at his eyes to try to gauge the mood of the moment faithfully, but he unexpectedly met her gaze. They stayed there for a moment too long before they both looked away.

Shit.

He fidgeted. He clapped his hands together as if he were summarizing an argument. “So, Bridget,” he said. “Tell me about your family.”

She felt her body bending away from him without actually moving. She had nothing to say about her family at present. “So, Peter,” she said, a little too fierce. “Tell me about yours.”

How much the air had cooled. In a dry place like this the sun left and took all the heat. There was nothing in the air to hold it. “Let’s see. My kids are four and two. Sophie and Miles.”

His kids were four and two. Sophie and Miles. It had seemed to her that this might come at the end of the questioning rather than first thing out. She had somehow thought he’d tell her about his parents or his siblings. Her brain fitfully worked backward. He was a father, which presumably meant he was a husband.

“And your wife?”

“Amanda. She’s thirty-four.”

“Are you thirty-four too?”

“Almost thirty.”

“Older woman.”

“Right.”

She had misread him. She had let her thoughts get away from her. It was time to get them all back.

The Traveling Pants called to Carmen from under her bed. The other times Carmen had gotten them in the last several months, she had carried them from place to place, but she had not actually worn them.

The Pants were outstanding, and Carmen hadn’t been in the mood to stand out very much. She hadn’t been in the mood to answer questions Julia would certainly ask about them. It was again the issue of the compartments. She couldn’t figure a way to introduce that Carmen to this one. Also, she was scared she was too fat.