Living at Dad’s sucks in terms of getting to school. It takes two subways and a bus to get up to North York. Dad’s cool about it if you want to skip some days. He never liked school either.
And ever since the Faith/Bernadette scandal, you don’t trust anyone—they’re all snobs and bitches underneath, even though everyone has pretended to forget. You and Bernadette grit your teeth and wait for summer.
Since she kicked you out, Mom calls to fight about money with Dad, but doesn’t ever ask to speak to you.
Screw her. You can wait her out.
“Mar,” Bernadette says one day when you’re having a butt behind the bleachers, “you can’t keep cutting class. I know this place sucks, and not to sound like a nerd, but grades are important.”
You sigh, take a long drag.
“Besides, if you flunk out, your mom’ll win.”
“You think?”
“You want to show her you don’t need her?”
You narrow your eyes. “Yeah, of course.”
Bernadette looks at you with her bright, wise eyes. “Then succeed. Figure out what you want to do and then rock at it.”
You feel a burn, a surge of energy. Despite the transparent reverse psychology, she’s right.
“And if it’s too hard commuting, you can always crash at my house. You know my mom loves you.”
You finish the year with a 90% average, and it feels good.
Summer arrives and so does Bernadette’s driver’s license and a blue Miata.
“Waaaaahoooo!” Bernadette hollers as you head downtown with The Cure blasting and the windows down.
Music on Queen Street, vintage jeans from Kensington Market, sandalwood incense, vegetarian food, Doc Martens, Chinese restaurants where they don’t ask for ID...
Art.
Paintings, drawings, sculptures in galleries large and small! You ache from your toes to your solar plexus to make things—to paint, to capture something, to yank it from inside and put it onto paper, onto canvas, onto anything.
Suddenly you know; this is it.
Bernadette picks you up at Dad’s one day, her eyes leaping with excitement and talking fast.
“Mar, you won’t believe it. I can’t believe I didn’t know. Fucking suburbs, we’re so sheltered there...”
“Huh?”
“There’s a neighborhood! Right around the corner from here, a gay neighborhood! They call it The Village. How’d we miss it all this time?”
“Cuz we’re antisocial losers?”
“Exactly! But no more. We have to go, we have to go today! How do I look? There are bars and coffee shops and...and...others!”
“Other what?”
“Other gay people! We might be able to go dancing, maybe they won’t care that we’re sixteen. Can we go? I know we’re supposed to go to the gallery, but...please? We can walk from here! Oh my God, I’m so nervous, I’m going to have a heart attack!”
And so begins your lifelong traipsing up and down Church Street by the side of Bernadette.
Bernadette learns to flirt. You don’t. Instead, you bargain for time: girl bars for her at night, galleries and art stores for you during the day.
At the Chamber Gallery one day, you stand in front of a painting for so long that Bernadette gets bored and begs to meet up with you later.
“Sure, go,” you say, barely turning your head. “I’ll see you.”
It’s not her fault she doesn’t feel the longing, the tug, the absolute YES that ricochets through you when you see something so wild and beautiful.
You will never be this good, but now you have to spend your life trying.
And so you stand and stare...and stare...and try to take it in.
You nearly jump out of your skin when someone speaks right behind you.
“Sorry to scare you,” he says. “You’ve been standing there so long, I just wondered, what do you see?”
You search for the words. “Fire? Fire inside her and...something bad, something, I don’t know, rotten.”
“How do you see that? Where?”
You haven’t even turned around, but you can tell this guy isn’t one of those looking-for-art-to-match-the-couch people.
“Her limbs...the angle, the way they fall. And her eyes—one of them is wider than the other. Some of her edges are sharp and others are kind of dissolving.” You point. “See?”
“Mmmhm.”
You turn to look at him. It’s the man from the desk who never talks to anyone that comes in. His face is compelling—eyes wide and dark, etched with mournful lines, chiseled cheekbones and a nose that’s been broken. He looks like a tree in November, leafless, naked, battered by the wind.
You look back at the painting, his face now in your mind.
Ah ha.
“She’s dying,” you say. “Is that what you meant? When you did this?”
“Ah…”
“You are Caleb White, aren’t you?”
He smiles for the first time. “How old are you?” he says.
“Sixteen.”
“You see a lot for sixteen.”
“Thank you.”
He nods.
“No one ever looks at anything for so long.”
“I do,” you say, and then take a deep breath. “Could you teach me?”
“What?”
“To paint like that.”
“Oh. I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t teach,” he says.
“Please?” you say. “Where do you work? Maybe I could just observe.”
“What, you think I’m fucking Picasso?”
“I’m sure I could learn a lot if you’d just let me watch.”
Something flickers in his eyes and then one side of his mouth twists up into a smile.
“You want to watch, huh?”
“That’s right,” you say, and return his look without blinking.
You know what he’s thinking, but if that’s what he wants, you don’t care.
Sex is nothing.
You would give more than your body to paint like Caleb White.
***
He’s surprised when you show up the next morning.
He doesn’t know you yet.
He offers coffee and then, fumbling, a soda. Alone with you in his apartment, he’s suddenly awkward, bustling, nervous. Not such a big bad wolf.
“Oh please,” you say. “Coffee. I take it black.”
“It’s a bad habit,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to corrupt you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m corrupted already.”
He laughs, lets his eyes stray down your torso for a moment, then shakes himself and walks away down a long, creaky hallway.
“Studio’s back here,” he says.
Curtains made of sheets hang beside the windows and stacks of canvases lean against the walls. There is only one chair and he gestures toward it.
“Sit.”
“Don’t you...”
“I stand.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Note: stands while painting.
“Why do you stand?”
“Didn’t say I’d give a running commentary.”
“Sorry.”
You try to make yourself comfortable in the spindly, paint-flecked wooden chair, and realize he’s placed you where you can’t see the damned canvas.
But you don’t want him to change his mind so you watch his hands, his eyes, the movement of his arm as he dips the brush and then strokes paint on. You listen, too, hearing the rasp of the bristles, the even, deep sound of his breathing. He ignores you, and you stay still, hoping to be inconspicuous.
For three hours you sit and he paints. Neither of you speaks.
Maybe he thinks he’ll drive you off by boring you to death. If so, it isn’t working.
You synchronize your breathing to his and try to guess what he’s painting until he turns the easel toward the wall and tells you it’s time to go.
“Okay,” you say, and let him see you to the door.
For a week you go every morning.
Caleb says virtually nothing.
“Mara,” Bernadette says on Friday afternoon, as you browse the bead section at Courage My Love, “this is dangerous, don’t you think?”
“I gave you his address and everything,” you say. “But trust me, it’s fine. He has zero interest in me.”
(Which is getting annoying, to be honest.)
“Still...I support you and everything, but I worry.”
“I worry about you fooling around in alleyways with strange women, too.” You point to a huge glass bead. “What about this one?”
“Oooh,” she says. “You think that’ll look good with my eyes?”
“Absolutely. I’ll buy some leather string and make it for you tonight.”
“Cool. About this Caleb guy, though...”
“Listen, artists have always had apprentices, and many great artists started out as apprentices. That’s what I’m doing, apprenticing. It’s totally normal.”
She sighs and shakes her head.
“So you paint?” Caleb asks you one morning in the second week of your apprenticeship.
“Yeah.”
“What?” He’s talking without looking up from his work, but at least he’s talking.
“Just...so far whatever they ask us to in Art—a bit of everything. Mostly I like painting and drawing.”
“You any good?”
You consider this question for a long time.
“Compared to the other people in my class I am, but it’s only high school. So no, not really. Not yet.”
He looks at you for a moment.
“Hm,” he says.
You’re dying for him to take a look at your work, but you’re afraid to ask and afraid of what he might say. He’s blunt and it could hurt.
“I’ve been imagining what you’re painting as you go, since you won’t let me see it,” you say. “And then later when I get home at night I paint what I’ve been imagining.”
He laughs. “Come look then.”
You uncurl from your chair and walk over. This deviation from the set routine feels odd, but it’s progress. He steps back as you move in front of the easel and look.
It’s different from his previous work. From what you’ve seen, he usually does portraits.
This is a lake. Just a lake.
A half-frozen lake in silvers and grays, surrounded by pine trees and the shells of falling down houses. The longer you look at it, the further you’re drawn in. It’s not just a lake, it’s a bleak, beautiful, haunting lake.
“How do you do that without having it in front of you? How do you get all those details?” you ask.
He taps his temple and then his heart. “Got it here,” he says. “What do you think of it?”
You turn towards him, finding him unnervingly close and somehow taller. Except to pass you a coffee in the morning, he has not come within three feet of you.
“Nice,” you say, “not bad.”
And then walk away and back to your chair.
“What were you imagining?” he asks, eyes narrow.
“Something else,” you say.
“What do you want from me, Sixteen?”
“I told you already, I want to paint like you.”
He steps out from behind the easel.
“Not possible,” he says.
“Apprentices did it with the Old Masters. People do it.”
He shakes his head and rubs his hands on his jeans, still looking at you.
“Bring something,” he says. “Bring something tomorrow.”
You duck your head to hide your smile.
***
You’re not smiling when you arrive the next day with two scrapbooks and a large canvas—you’re sweating and nervous as hell.
Caleb opens the door, glances down and then lets you inside. You lean your stuff on the wall by the door and perch on a stool while he makes the coffee.
Oh God, you might throw up. If Caleb says you have no talent, you’ll have no purpose in life.
He hands you your coffee, and you see him notice your hand shaking. He smiles.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s see.”
He walks over, picks up one of the sketchbooks and starts flipping through. It takes about five seconds. He puts it down and picks up the other. You try to breathe quietly. Five seconds and then he is pulling the garbage bags off your canvas, propping it back against the wall and stepping back to look.
He grunts and then runs a hand through his shaggy black hair. He shakes his head.
“You want to learn to paint like me?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t.”
Oh fuck. Oh no.
“There are things you can learn, but you gotta paint like yourself. This is okay,” he points to the canvas, “but it’s imitation. Imitation is crap, it’s bullshit. Your sketches aren’t bad, though.”
“Do you think I have...” you swallow, “talent?”
He hooks thumbs in his belt loops and shakes his head.
“Lots of people have talent,” he says. “You have to put the work in.”
It’s not exactly the highest praise, but you feel a vast relief.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s get to it.”