WHEN MAUDE COMPLAINED about life class to Bruno, he laughed, as he did at most things, including her reluctance to sleep with him. “Charcoal! Why do we have to use charcoal?” she complained, just as the Levittown housewives had in Milt’s class. “It’s impossible to get a clean line or clarity. It’s muddy. It isn’t even black. You can’t even make it opaque. And newsprint—it makes my skin crawl to touch it. It’s like raw wood.” She grimaced, closed her eyes, and shuddered.
Bruno, in the swivel chair at his desk, showed the gap between his teeth. “Why not just take a photograph?” he said with his hard grin.
“Very funny. What do you know about visual art?” Bruno had arrived at conceptual art, as it was lately being called, by way of beatnik bongo poetry and then happenings. She unrolled an abomination she’d committed, of the nude model, sub-Immerman. “Look at this. I could always draw, and look at this. Penelope”—the drawing teacher—“says she has no idea what I’m doing. As if I were from the moon.”
“You are from the moon.” He enjoyed her glare at him and the dangerous jungle look she had lately adopted, braiding her hair at night to bush it out into a wild cloud that jiggled and floated when she jerked her head. But he saw that she might really be upset. “Come on, moon maiden.” He pulled her onto his knee. He patted her back—pat, pat, as if someone asked you to pat their dog and you didn’t believe anyone could like doing that. “I know you can draw.”
“You’ve never seen my drawings.”
Life class, Maude thought, was deathy. It was silent except for the scratching of charcoal on newsprint, and the pacing footsteps of Penelope, prowling from easel to easel. The twenty of them straggled in, set up their pads of newsprint, got out their little boxes of fragile, brittle charcoal sticks and grimy gum erasers, eased onto stools, and sat stolidly while the model—they were professionals who seemed dulled to everything except their own desire for physical comfort—shed his or her robe and began posing.
The one-minute poses were the worst. You could get down only the ugliest, most approximate scrawls, nothing you’d ever want to see again. Then five-minute poses, not much better. Then twenty minutes. Even these ended too soon for Maude. She was always just discovering some complicated mismatch of profile and ear at that point, finding that the left side didn’t connect with the right.
It was a good thing she had the titillations, worldly connectedness, and acknowledged superiority of Concepts class and Bruno—supports thin as an eggshell but with a reassuring suggestion that all potential in the universe had not been sucked away. Because, otherwise, not being able to draw was like the final loss of potency. She had sustained herself for years by enacting her fantasies on paper. They had even, her drawings, seemed too alive sometimes, like the “monsters of the id” that made a certain sci-fi movie from some lonely afternoon’s television viewing indelibly scary. That was one reason it had begun to look attractive to do something else, anthropology, something.
But that would be making a choice. Simply being unable felt as if her father’s unconscious evil wishes for her were magic far stronger than what she could muster, as if Milton’s jealous desire to drive out everything from her life, so that only he remained, controlled the universe; as if she couldn’t move so much as a literal finger without drawing his cosmic fury and punishment. At this remove, it was even as if he had driven Danny and Weesie away and claimed Bay Farm—where he had been lauded! as a lecturer!—for himself. She was scared of him. He had killed her cat, poor Ghostly, her greatest love, then, in the world. White fur with black blood congealing.
But that was ridiculous. Magic didn’t exist. That was stupid.
“Class,” said Penelope, her lank ponytail twitching down to her ass, “from next Monday, you can use whatever materials you like—black conté crayon, pencil, charcoal, any kind of paper, so long as it’s at least eighteen-by-twenty-four. We’ll be doing long poses—one-hour, two-hour, and at the end, when we work with color, the same pose for several classes. Okay. See you next week.” She swung one skinny arm up, in an olive-green sweater, by way of waving to them, while looking down at her shoulder in the aversive way she had, as if they were too much for her.
Maude fell in with a serious girl she had talked to a few times, Myra. “I’m going down to New York Central. Want to come?” Myra offered. New York Central Art Supply, where Cooper students bought their supplies.
They walked downtown together through the just-beginning New York spring, the trees still bare but an occasional daffodil showing on a playground border or in front of the big, white apartment buildings at the edges of the Village. The girls’ hair blew in their faces. There were still a few weeks of germination time for the envelopes from colleges applied to in January, thin if bad news, thick if fruitful.
In the narrow, stock-crowded store, with its rainbows of Windsor & Newton tubes and square pastels sold by the stick, Myra introduced Maude to compressed charcoal, “nothing like what we’ve been using—you have no idea.” The compressed charcoal was cylindrical and solid; the hardest grades had a sheen; the softest were velvety and left promising smudges on her fingers. There was special paper, striped by watermarks and with a furred nap to catch and hold the charcoal powder.
With these tools, at the next meeting of their life class, it was as if Maude regained use of her tongue, and more than regained it. “God, that’s photographic,” said a classmate, not altogether approving such retrograde naturalism.
It felt uncanny that she could do this suddenly. It felt as if she’d unwittingly learned French in her sleep. Penelope stood a long time behind Maude’s easel. “It’s interesting to see,” she announced to the class. “Some of you just needed to find your own medium.”
Maude didn’t mention to anyone in Concepts, oh, by the way, she could now capture reality, nor did she show her drawings. If it felt like evil magic possibly emanating from Milt that she couldn’t draw as she’d always been able to, it felt equally magic that she suddenly could draw better than she ever had. It might not happen again. Not that the Concepts people would care. In Concepts class, they had been working on an exquisite corpse. The Dadaists had made exquisite corpses on paper, one person starting a drawing, folding the page over so only part of the scribble showed for the next person to continue, and then that person would do the same. The one the class was creating began with a sound tape, which the rest of them would hear for the first time in that day’s class. The clue Maude had gotten was a nonsense word written on a strip of paper. You were at the mercy of the level of talent or intelligence of the person before you. That day, the rest of the corpse was to be revealed. The exercise turned out to work more like a game of telephone than like the Dadaists’ experiments, each clue worse than the last, the continuations uninspired, including Maude’s, degenerating from zingy juxtaposition to vapidity, corpsily devoid of spark.
Several days onward, when Maude had “spoken French” in life class again, and more than once again, she brought her drawings to Bruno’s office. She knew he was a bad audience for anything in this line, but she was bursting. She unrolled one on his desk. “Hey!” he said, his circle-of-sky eyes lighting, as if the magic of representation were, finally, irresistible. “Shitass. That’s Pink Pearl,” he said, using the nickname the students gave to a certain slack old model. “It actually looks like her. Shitass. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one of these drawings of models with a face.”
Actually, there was a girl in life class whose drawings were always accurate, recognizable, and poetic in the way they captured light. They had faces; they had everything. But Maude was pleased to accept the compliment.
Maude sat on Bruno’s desk, elbow on knee, chin on hand. “You’re just supposed to care about light, mass, shadow, and the composition of the page. You know, for it to come out, you do kind of have to kind of forget what it is and just draw the shapes of the shadows.”
“You drew the shapes of the shadows, all right.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Hey, if you’re going to draw so graphically, do one of someone sexy. Do me one of you!”
“I suppose you’d want full beaver.” She just didn’t like him enough. She didn’t believe she could like anyone enough. She missed Danny as if they had parted that minute.
Bruno showed his gap, but he looked differently at her, as if nervous in the presence of a spell that worked, even though it was no more than a competent life drawing. “What? What is it?” he asked.
Her festive air was gone. He saw a thoughtful absence. She spoke into her lap. “I promised someone else a picture. Ages ago. It just occurred to me he might really want it.” She had never really believed Danny’s request until this minute, until Bruno asked for a sexy one, of her. Danny really wanted her. Suddenly, she felt sick with the need to undo the wrong. She had punished him above and beyond what he deserved. She had been cruel. He hadn’t asked for much. It was just that what she’d wanted was to give him everything.
“You’d better not be doing him a full beaver.”
“How do you know it’s a him?”
Bruno sat back heavily in his chair. She was not going to sleep with him again. He was sure of it. He wished he couldn’t tell. He would rather not have noticed. He picked up the drawing of Pink Pearl. “Let me have this one. Just sign it.”