Better Than Running at Night (5 page)

"Yes, I'm sure they wouldn't do it for free," Mom would answer.

"But would they make as much if they kept their clothes on?" he'd ask. "I bet you all could be saving some money if you brought this to the attention of the administration."

They were tight for cash, since Dad was in law school. He encouraged my mom to use her creative talents to make money. She taught herself how to stencil and faux finish so she could fix up fancy apartments. Her customers were guaranteed to be wealthy. Eventually she was able to make any paintable surface look like any type of wood or stone.

It wasn't only for him that she withdrew from fine art, she told me; it was fun going into strangers' homes and completely changing the mood of the place. But she also said I shouldn't follow in her footsteps. I had more talent and it would be sinful to waste it.

Well, I hadn't planned on wasting it. That was the jumpy guy in the front of the room's fault.

By the end of class I was so fed up with Ed's basics that I ran up the hill and through the quad arches to the NECAD library. They had a whole section on anatomy. Some of the books were for artists and some were medical. I recognized most of them from the library in New York. I picked out my favorite:
Human Anatomy for Artists
by Eliot Goldfinger.

I settled down with it on a fuzzy blue couch. There weren't many people in the library, but every footstep and closing book echoed through the cavernous room. The overhead lights didn't do much to brighten the place, but there were antique lamps at every table and beside every couch. The high ceiling was patterned with skylights.

Goldfinger's book made anatomy look more simple than Leonardo's drawings. Plus, it was written in English and from left to right. But it wasn't the English most of us learn to speak; there were so many technical terms, it was almost like reading a foreign language.
Anterior
meant front view,
posterior,
back view, and
lateral,
side view. Then there were different types of movement:
flexion
and
extension; inversion
and
eversion; abduction
and
adduction.
I couldn't keep them all straight.

The names of the bones sounded like titles for prehistoric royalty: The Great Trochanter, Corocoid the Almighty, Princess Phalanges.

I took off my shoes, lay back, and placed my feet on the arm of the couch. Darkness fell over the skylights.

I held the book up to the lamp. I couldn't get enough of the pictures. Goldfinger made line drawings showing the basic geometry of the bones. Then, beside those diagrams, were drawings of the muscles that lay on top of the bones. Next there were photographs of real people, showing what the muscles looked like with skin on top.

This is what Ed should be teaching us, I thought.

But there wasn't anything stopping me from learning on my own, so I checked the book out and started running home.

Before I got home, I stopped and turned back toward the path to Nate's house. Wind was blowing through the creaky bare branches. I walked halfway up the path, not even sure why I was there. I didn't have time to hang out or anything; I had to get up early for class.

His lights were out. I thought I saw his thick hair moving above where his futon would be, but after a few seconds I couldn't see him anymore. Must be a reflection in the window, I thought.

I remembered Nate's lips against my ear. And how he kissed
my body in the night. I wondered what would happen next time I saw him. I had finally gone beyond first base. Beyond second, too. I imagined what it might be like to go all the way with him. Maybe someday we would.

I saw the movement through his window again. But this time it looked like two heads. And one was a girl's. My heart sped up. I walked a few feet closer to the house and squinted at the window for a few minutes. Nothing there.

A gust of wind blew at my face and reminded me how cold it was. 1 turned back down the path and ran home. The sky was clear and the stars looked like snowflakes stuck in place. I wasn't ready to go inside, to let the cold layer on my throat defrost. I ran a circle around my house, feet stamping the frosty grass.

I tagged stray rocks with my toes as I went, wind slapping my hair across my cheeks.

When I completed the circle, I ran up the steps to my apartment and through the door. Then I collapsed on my bed, heart pounding.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the feel of Nate's hair in my hands.

"Remember, blocks have thickness!" Ed shouted. "Be sure to include every side that you see." He circled around us.

Ed had arranged our easels at equidistant points around the block setup.

"And no modeling!" he shouted. "Only lines! You'll have plenty of time for modeling later. Modeling is the frosting on the cake!"

Modeling
was the word Ed used for rendering the lights and darks. He called it modeling because it created a sculpturesque three-dimensional illusion.

Ed wanted our lines to be perfectly straight. We weren't allowed to use rulers. I wondered if Leonardo had ever drawn from a setup like this. It seemed too simple to be a real art-school assignment.

But it was harder than I'd expected. If you didn't get the base lines at exactly the right angles, the blocks looked like they were floating rather than sitting. If the edges didn't appear to be parallel, you would have a lopsided cube, which really isn't a cube at all. If you didn't give each block enough space, they would look like they were occupying the same space on the table, which is physically impossible.

The class was quiet, other than Ed's constant shuffling around.

As I drew I thought about Nate. About Nate in my bed.

I wondered if I would actually have time to spend with him. Ed had made it clear that he was going to work us hard; lectures and instruction all day and assignments for evenings and weekends. There
must
be time for dating, I thought.

"Yes yes yes, you're almost there, Ellie!" Ed shouted in my ear.

I jumped to the side, breath caught in my throat.

"You see? All it takes is some concentration! Just lower the curve on the bottom of that cone a smidge and watch out for the
tall cylinder! It looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa! Get that worked out and you'll be ready for the next step!"

He moved on to Ralph, whose sky-blue shoes matched the cloud scene on his shirt.

"Achoo-achoo-achoo!"

"Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!"

"Ed, I'm allergic to sawdust," Ralph said accusingly, rubbing the bottom of his nose with one finger.

Ed looked down and kicked at the dust.

Ralph sneezed.

Ed blessed.

"My goodness, you
are
allergic, aren't you!" Ed gasped. "Well, we'll certainly have to do something about that, won't we? At the break, Sam, Ellie, what do you say we mop up this mess for our friend Ralph?"

Sam and I exchanged glances. "Okay," I said. Sam nodded once.

"Terrific!" Ed shouted, then turned back to Ralph. "It's pretty good, Ralph, it's pretty good," he said, pointing at Ralph's drawing. "But that sphere in front looks about eight times bigger than the sphere in the back, and really, they're the same size! And next time you could shrink the whole image by five percent!"

"Five percent?" Ralph asked, shooting me a
Was I the only one who heard that
? look.

"Yes, Ralph," Ed said. "It would give your page more space and it would give your teacher some peace of mind. I feel claustrophobic when I see an image that doesn't have room to breathe!"

"And how are we doing, Sam?" he asked on his way to Sam's easel.

"Okay," Sam mumbled, pulling nervously on the brim of his cap.

"Straighten out those lines, Sam, and you'll be in business. Right now you've got blocks made out of noodles!"

At noon Ed yelled, "Everyone, put down your charcoal and pick up a broom! Everyone except Ralph, that is!" He handed a broom to me and one to Sam, and kept the third for himself. "Ralph, you are free to go if you wish."

But Ralph didn't wish to go. Instead, he stuck around and pointed to spots we'd missed, sneezing all the while. When we had swept every last bit out the garage door, Ed presented us with mops. We filled the buckets in the human-size sinks.

By the time we were soaking the floor, Ralph decided it was safe to leave.

As he left the room, I mopped my way past Sam. He said almost imperceptibly, "That guy needs to take a chill pill."

Ed gave us an extra half hour for lunch because we did such a "sparkling good job." Ralph was finishing the last bites of his spinach salad when we got there. Unlike us, he had to be back on time so he left just as we were sitting down. He didn't even thank us.

Since we had both taken seats facing Ralph, Sam and I were left eating side by side. I was cornered in against the wall, so I thought it was his job to move to the chair across from me. But he stayed where he was, the two of us facing outward as if the dining hall was a play we were watching.

"So Ralph had us working for him today," I said, unable to think of anything less obvious.

"Yeah," Sam said. "Bummer."

From then on chewing was the only noise we made.

I kept sneaking glances at Sam as he munched. He had the most well-defined masseter muscle I'd ever seen.

We had finished eating before the half hour was up.

"Do you want to head back?" I asked.

"Okay," Sam said.

He snatched an apple from the fruit bin on our way out, when no one was looking. You weren't supposed to take any food out of the dining hall.

As we walked down the hill, Sam said, "You're quiet. Like me."

"I'm not really quiet," I said. "I just can't think of anything to say."

He handed me his apple. "You want this?" he asked. "I'm not hungry."

"Why not." I chomped on it the entire way back. It kept me from having to invent conversation with him.

For the next couple of hours, we worked out our drawings' imperfections. Ed circled around, giving us advice.

After six or seven rounds, Ed entered the center of the room and stood by the blocks.

"Everybody!" he announced, extending both arms as if offering us a gift. "It is time to proceed! Proceed to the modeling!!"

You would think, from the expression on his face, that he'd just told us we had won the lottery.

I should've known better than to wear brown pants and a green shirt to the studio. It was our third day of Foundation, and we were working in the evening on our first out-of-class assignment.

Ralph's face lit up like an ambulance on the run.

"Ellie, you're a tree!" he exclaimed, as if I had dressed just to please his freaky fashion sense.

Sam was on his way out.

"Leaving already?" I asked.

"Gotta get dinner," he said, pulling on his cap. "Haven't left since class."

Ed wanted us to draw compositions from the blocks, which he had rearranged in a new setup. The assignment was to imagine cutting geometric chunks out of the shapes in our drawings, making sure they looked perspectively correct. When we had all the lines right we could begin to model the drawing. We had to keep our invented lighting inside the holes consistent with the lighting on the forms' exteriors.

"Remember, the shadow is always darkest when it is closest to the light!" Ed had reminded us that day in class.

It was a pretty mechanical process, and I soon forgot that Ralph was standing at the easel beside me.

But he stopped drawing after about two hours and turned in my direction, hands on his hips and nodding. My drawing had just begun to come into focus, and I was almost ready to plan where I'd be cutting into my blocks. Ralph hovered around me, eying me from head to toe and squinting as if he was doing calculus in his head.

"There could be branches coming out of the shoulders. We'd be sure to place them where they wouldn't obstruct your vision. And we could hint at roots growing out of your shoes! I wonder if you could weave actual wood into the fabric—little pieces like in Chinese curtains!"