Heartsong (Logan 2)

"Oh?" He shook his head. "And no one refuses an invitation from Olivia Logan," he added.

"Why should I refuse?"

"You shouldn't if you want to go. Well, maybe the following Saturday. Just like any other employee anywhere, you'll get time and a half for coming," he said as we came to a stop by his house.

"If I come it's not for the money," I said firmly. I felt my eyelids narrow into slits of anger and he saw it, too. It brought a smile to his face.

"You're more like your mother than you know," he said.

"How come you know so much about her if you only spent some time with her?" I countered.

"It's not how long you're with someone, it's the quality of the time," he replied. "Come on, let's get started."

He reached back for the daily groceries he had purchased before picking me up and I followed him to the house. The kitchen was a mess from breakfast, but he wanted to get started on our project right away. After he put away the groceries we went directly to the studio, where he had an easel set up across from the block of marble and a large artist's pad open on it.

"I want to play around with some lines for a while this morning, sort of experiment with shapes, sizes, relationships. All you have to do is stand there as quietly and as still as you can," he added, pointing to the marble.

"Just stand?"

"Stand. I'll give you instructions as we go along."

Ulysses folded his body at Kenneth's feet as I positioned myself in front of the marble. I felt a little silly just staring back at him as he stared at me. My stomach was nervous, too. It made me self-conscious to have him look at me so intently, and for so long, and we'd only just begun. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other and waited.

"Look off to the left. Good. Now lift your chin just a little. A little more. Good. No, don't fold your arms.

Just try to stand with them down at your sides for a while. Okay," he said and worked his pencil quickly over the page. In no time at all my neck began to feel stiff.

"You're not relaxing," Kenneth said. "If you don't relax, you'll get tired faster and need more breaks. But don't worry," he added quickly. "In time you'll get used to it and you'll ease up."

"Do you work with models often?" I asked. He didn't reply for a while.

"Very rarely," he finally said. "Usually, if I need a face or a figure, I take a mental picture and commit it to memory."

"Then why can't you do the same now?"

"This is different. This is very special, and I told you," he said, not without a note of impatience, "the work requires a sense of transition, movement, change. I'm trying to capture a metamorphosis."

"Have you ever done anything like this before?"

"You'll have to stop asking me questions," he said. "You're breaking my concentration."

I pressed my lips together and closed my eyes.

"Don't close your eyes," he said immediately. I opened them a bit wider than usual and he groaned with impatience. "Relax. Please. Try to relax."

"It's not easy," I complained. "Now I know why people are paid a lot of money to do this."

He laughed. "Who said they are?"

"Aren't they?"

"You're tricking me into talking, Melody. Every time I answer one of your questions or you force me to respond, I stop thinking artistically. An artist has to lose himself in the work, not really see the person as a person anymore, but as the object of his art, and that takes very intense concentration."

I thought about Mommy in his paintings and wondered if that was precisely what had happened with her or if was Cary right. Did Kenneth look at her not as his subject but as a woman he desired? If Cary was right, what did that mean about the way Kenneth was looking at me?

Kenneth told me to turn toward him and he studied me for a while. Then he asked me to look more to my right. He flipped his pages and worked and flipped some more pages. Finally, he slapped his pencil on the easel and stepped back.

"Something's not right," he said.