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 co
uldn’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?