Amanda had not painted since leaving Hudson van Buren’s office.
Every time she even thought about doing so, she found herself reliving the humiliation of that meeting; of allowing herself to be manhandled and half undressed while semisloshed on champagne; of having him casually dismiss her in that patronizing, paternalistic way.
Mostly, she was furious. At him for being a pig. At herself—for drinking the champagne, for not wearing something more prim, for sitting on the couch when she should have selected a chair, for being too stunned and drunk to slap his smarmy face the moment he touched her, for all the things she should have done differently but hadn’t.
Between the self-blame, the shame, the embarrassment, the fear of what a Hudson van Buren blackball would do to her career, and the simple worry that no one would believe her anyway—ultimately, it was her word against his, and who was she?—she hadn’t told anyone what had happened.
Even Tommy and Barb. Especially Tommy and Barb. To them, Amanda had related the part about her work needing more maturity and left it at that. She said she hadn’t been painting because she wanted to reflect on that.
But, really, enough. It was time to get back to work. For her own self-esteem—and sanity—as much as anything.
She set up the easel by the window in Tommy’s old bedroom, positioning a drop cloth underneath to protect the carpet.
The curtains were open wide. There was just no substitute for natural light when it came to revealing a painting. The canvas could look so different in the long red hues of early evening than it had in the direct white blare of noon.
Amanda’s gift, if she had one, was that she could close her eyes and imagine what she wanted to paint. She knew exactly what image she was trying to create. Whether or not a painting succeeded was in how closely it hewed to that vision.
Her subjects were always personal, things she had seen. Many of the images came from her childhood in Mississippi. Her mother—or a woman like her mother—was a frequent subject. The woman scrubbed toilets. Or she cooked boxed mac ’n’ cheese, the store brand because it was cheaper than the name brand. Or she smoked a cigarette while looking anxiously out the window of a double-wide trailer.
They were common scenes, depicting the people Amanda had grown up with, the white working poor of the rural South, the forgotten underclass of American life. Amanda brought empathy and understanding to them because, despite whatever refinement distance may have given her, she still was one of them. You could see it in every line and shading, in expressions that were grim or determined or focused or joyful or pained.
There were other subjects too. Some from her time in New York. Some from other places she had been. Traveling with Tommy had helped her see an America that was bigger and more varied than she previously understood.
Still, what Amanda had really discovered through her art and her travels was that people everywhere, of every age and shade, were basically alike. How they styled their hair or what clothes they chose, those superficial choices, were really secondary. What mattered to them were their own stories. The things they wanted. The people they loved. The goals they felt they still needed to accomplish. If you could capture that, you weren’t really painting poor white house cleaners in Mississippi or wealthy Saudi expatriates in Manhattan. You were representing something far more universal.
Art journalists had labeled her work postfauvist, said she was influenced by Matisse. She understood they had to come up with something. The absence of real knowledge never stopped any critic.
She just didn’t want to be defined by any labels. When Amanda Porter was painting, she wasn’t trying to be pre-something or post–anything else. She was just copying the image that was most prominent in her mind.
What was in there now wasn’t her mother or anyone like her mother.
It was a man.
Without overthinking what she was doing, she had loaded her pallet with blues and purples, like she was preparing to paint a three-day-old bruise. She might add other colors later, to provide accent or contrast. But that initial palette usually defined the work.
She started slowly, but her left hand—like a lot of artists, Amanda was a southpaw—quickly picked up its pace, as often happened once she hit her stride with a piece. This was pretty much the only area in her life where she could let go of the caution that otherwise defined her. When she painted, she allowed herself to be totally uninhibited. Her strokes were bold and unafraid. They lived, they breathed.
The critics might call this genius. Amanda called it practice.
Entering a kind of artistic trance, she could knock out a rough draft of a work in just a few hours. Later, she went back and added details. But by that point, shape and form and theme had basically been decided.
As this one leapt off her brush, what appeared was a man, peeking out from behind a curtain. There was darkness behind him, light ahead. He was about to go somewhere.
Half his face was visible, and perhaps a quarter of his body. He was not a tall man. But he was handsome. Dark hair. Dark eyes. His curled arm was thick with muscles. He was leaning toward something, about to propel himself forward. His momentum was undeniable.
What she had really captured was his yearning. This was a man who wanted something. It was in front of him, not behind him.
She worked into the afternoon. Then, gradually, the light changed. Amanda found herself looking at the painting in a different way.
Then she realized whom she had painted. And suddenly she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. She knew what he wanted, and it scared her.
Removing the canvas from the easel, she wrapped it in two large garbage bags.
Then she walked outside and dropped it in the trash.