Better Than Running at Night (12 page)

"Stare at the orange. Stare at it, Ralph. Ellie. Sam. Don't move your eyes. I know you have to blink, but try not to," Ed commanded.

Then he removed the orange sheet, leaving a white one on top.

"Now look at the white! What color do you see? What color, Ellie?" He scampered over to me.

"Blue," I said.

"Exactly. You see blue! And do you know why? Do you know, Sam?"

Sam looked at him, but didn't answer, cap shading his eyes.

"The reason, Sam, is because blue and orange are complementary colors! They are opposites on the color wheel! When you look at a color for a long time, your eye produces an afterimage! But the afterimage isn't really there! It's an optical effect!"

Ed shuffled through the pile of papers, searching madly.

"Ah, perfect. Perfect, perfect! Okay, now I want you to do the very same thing you just did." He laid a small green piece over a large red piece. "Ready ... begin! Stare at the colors! Make sure you're looking at both colors!"

We stared.

"Do you see how the colors are vibrating? This is what happens when two complementary colors are beside one another! Boy, is that crazy, or what? Here we have two inanimate objects, but my eyes are picking up movement! Vibrations!"

Ed rubbed his eyes in disbelief.

"Okay, you can stop staring," he said, putting the white on top once more.

This time the red and green had traded places.

"Ed, isn't this bad for our eyes?" Ralph asked.

"No. No, Ralph. Not at all. On the contrary. This is great training for your eyes. It will help your color sense significantly."

"I mean, all you're doing is making us see spots. Couldn't you teach us color theory without making us see spots?"

"I suppose so, Ralph. But I find that this demonstration is a
great introduction for first-year students. And I have such fun every time I teach it!"

He grabbed Ralph by the sleeve.

"Ralph! Just look at your shirt! It doesn't get any better than this!" It was purple with a yellow paisley print.

Ed focused on the fabric. Then he turned to the white paper.

"Holy bazungas! You guys should check this out! That is great! Those yellow spots are purple now! Try it, Ellie. Try it, Sam. And Ralph, if you can get a good enough angle on that shirt, you try it too! It would be a shame for you to miss such a textbook example!"

While I was walking down Artist's Row Friday morning, Nate whooshed by with a fresh painting about half his size.

"Can't talk. I'm in a rush!" he yelled, as if I couldn't tell. "Call me tonight!"

The canvas bumped against his back as he ran. It was another girl. But this beauty was buck-naked. Or "nude," as they say in art school.

No, if it's a classmate, she's buck-naked.

I knew who it was. Sloane Boocock, who had stood behind me in the new ID line. She'd lost her old one at the Artist's Ball. Her voice was high-pitched, as if only her body had made it through puberty. She wore a clingy cropped sweater beneath her unzipped coat.

"This school is a meat market," she'd warned me, pointer finger extended. "Don't let 'em fool you. They're all assholes."

Maybe he
was
just painting them. Art students must pose for each other all the time. Besides, I wasn't his girlfriend anyway.

She's
the one who should be bothered by all this.

I had to go bad. And I don't mean number one. I made a run for the dining hall.

There was only one unclogged stall left and I got to it just in time. As I finally began to relax, two chatty girls came in. I hoped they wouldn't be waiting for my seat. Luckily, it seemed they were only making a quick appearance-check. Through the crack in the door I could see them examining their pores.

They were in the middle of an animated debate.

"I
told
you I never posed for that scumsucking bastard of a shit!" one of them said.

"Well, neither did I!
You
at least got to wear clothes!" the other one answered in a little girl's voice. Her breasts looked like they wanted to jump out of her low-cut stretch shirt.

"But they weren't my clothes? I never wear anything that tight?
And are my breasts really that big? And my thighs? I don't think so?" Almost everything this one said sounded like a question.

I squinted through the door. It was them all right.

"No, I'm sure he exaggerated," Sloane said. "His only guide for your proportions was his imagination!"

"Whatever. He could've at least given me something flattering to wear? A robe would have been better? Or even a bathing suit?" Poor Maura; she was always asking questions that would never be answered.

"I just can't believe Fritz didn't say anything!" Sloane ranted. "It's like he actually thinks I took my clothes off for a picture my entire class would crit!"

"Leggings and a bodysuit are just as bad?" Maura's voice trailed off with the groaning door.

As they stomped away in platform-shoe unison, one of them flipped the light switch.

Unfortunately, my business in the ladies room was not entirely finished.

As soon as I was done, my quest for the truth began.

"You didn't
really
paint them, did you?" I asked right away.

"Yes I did. You can see the paintings for yourself." He pointed
at the canvases of Maura and Sloane leaning against his wall. He had pushed aside some fire hydrants to display his new work.

"Of course I see them," I said, "but did they really pose for you?"

"Well, it depends on what you mean. Yes, they posed. But not specifically for me."

Nate told me about his scheme. He'd been superimposing headshots from the Freshman Face Book on various magazine model bodies with Photoshop. Working at the computer lab allowed him ample time to perfect the image before transferring it to canvas. His goal was to do a portrait of every girl in the class alphabetically. There were five; exactly enough for one per week. He already had two down.

Nate thought next week was going to be tough, though. Melinda Cassidy was, as he said, a "gigantress." He didn't want to make her uncomfortable. But skipping over her would be even more insulting. Plus, Melinda was most likely of all the girls to call his bluff.

He was very interested in hearing about Maura and Sloane's outrage, and made me repeat several times what they'd called him.

"A scummy bastard son of a bitch?" He laughed as he paced around the creaking floor.

"No, a scumsucking bastard of a shit."

"What the hell does
that
mean?"

"I don't know. I guess they don't like you."

"Well, they shouldn't. But I'll bet you anything they let me get away with this."

After learning the truth from Nate, I stayed at his place for a pasta dinner. He cooked a pot of fusilli—long twisty macaroni that looks like curly hair. In my haste to see him, I'd forgotten to eat.

I sat on his bed while he cooked.

I turned to face the wall of girls, the wall that I'd tried to avoid looking at every time I was there. Knowing about Nate's scheme made me feel braver.

Then I realized that the wall wasn't a wall of
girls;
it was a wall of
girl!
They were all Clarissa, in different styles. It was like a lineup of Barbies. Punk Rock Clarissa, Churchgoing Clarissa, Math Nerd Clarissa, Cowgirl Clarissa. Her hair varied in length and color. Her clothes went from prudish to risqué, frilly to clean-cut. There had to be at least twenty versions.

"Nate!" I cried. "These pictures are all of Clarissa!"

"Yeah, you didn't know that?"

Boiling water sizzled over the top of the pot. The sound blended with the radiator's hiss.

"I thought they were all different women! I thought they were all the women you'd slept with!"

He laughed. "I guess you could say that. I mean, I do feel like I'm sleeping with a different woman almost every time I see her."

"How does she feel about that?"

"I think that's partly why she does it," he said. "To keep things interesting."

"Would things be boring if she always looked the same?"

"It takes a lot to keep the flame burning, if you know what I mean."

"I guess so," I mumbled.

Part of me felt less threatened, knowing they were all Clarissa. But in a way I felt sorry for her.

The radiator switched from hissing to banging and steaming. It had gotten so hot that I was breaking a sweat. I went over to the radiator to turn it down. The banging was loud near my ears. I couldn't find a knob.

"How do you lower the heat?" I called to Nate in the kitchen.

"You can't! The landlord controls it. It's included in the rent!"

We hung out for a while after dinner. I didn't stay past ten. He tried to coax me into sleeping over, but I said it was too hot in there and I wouldn't be able to sleep through the radiator noises. He walked me down the path to the road, where he kissed me good-night and said, "Come on, don't you think it would be better if you stayed? It's freezing out here."

"No," I said, "it'll be better if I go home."

Or better yet, I thought, if you didn't make me feel like I needed to go home.

"Are you gonna run again?"

"How did you know I ran?"

"I watch you from the window every time you leave. You look so cute bounding down the path."

"I didn't know you watched me." I was blushing.

"Why do you run, anyway?"

"I run to get a head start on the guy who's chasing me."

He laughed.

I laughed.

Then I ran.

I was glad to get a good night's sleep because I was able to wake up early in the morning and go to the NEC AD museum to draw.

I planted myself in front of their biggest sculpture, Rodin's
Hand of God.
Not the original sculpture, but a plaster cast. I figured it would be a good hand study.

Apparently, I had good taste; a guy circled the piece slowly, followed by a girl in a Harvard sweatshirt. He wore thick black retro glasses and a soiled post office jacket.

"So profound," he mumbled.

"What?" she said.

"Sooooo profound," he answered, a few decibels louder.

"What do you mean?"

"This man," he said, pointing at the identification plaque, "was so brilliant. Sooooo brilliant."

She cocked her head sideways at the sculpture, then straightened it.

"In what way?" she asked.

"So there's this huge hand, right? And it's the hand of God, obviously, according to the title. So we know that's Adam and Eve he's scooping out of the clay, right?"

"Right," she said tentatively.

"But it doesn't end there. It's not
merely
the hand of God. That would be too simple. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

"Um, I think so," she said.

"Who else's hand is it?"

"The sculpture's?"

"Close." He laughed. "It's the hand of the sculptor. The artist. The artiste." He paused, absorbing the profundity of his last words. "While God is building his human creation out of clay, Rodin is building this sculpture out of the very same medium. He, in effect, has control over God's creation and God's hand. It's as if the artist is God, is more powerful than God."

"More powerful than God?" she interrupted.

"Well, superhuman, at least," he concluded, scratching his stubble.

"Wow," she said, "I never really
get
art when I look at it. But when someone explains it to me, it's like it all makes sense."

I was listening to Tchaikovsky's violin concerto when Nate knocked on my window. He was holding a big hardcover book.

When he came in he threw the book on my bed. Then he ran to the kitchen and grabbed the champagne bottle my dad had given me.

"We have reason to celebrate," he said, and pulled me by the hand out to the winding hallway, then through the rickety back door. He put the bottle on the ground and lifted me like I was a child and ran across slabs of slate to the center of the patio. He whirled me around before placing me in a long lawn chair. My body sunk into the plastic strips.