Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (27 page)

“How so?” asked Grace. “Surely they had to toughen them up for what they’ll endure out in the real world.”

“Oh, you must think I’m being an overprotective mother,” Mary Ellen demurred.

“Not at all. Please, it sounds like you have a story.”

“Well, it wasn’t even Donnie who bore the brunt of it. It was the other students. During a critique session in front of the other artists, one professor said a student’s painting obviously showed he harbored homosexual tendencies. This was back in the early Nineties, you know. Things were different then. The student left, but Donnie kept in touch with him. That student never painted again.”

Donald steered the conversation in another direction, and Grace obliged, but the anecdote now made her reflect on that shadowy dream of Chester’s. She prepared her mind—and this time, her heart, too—to receive it, whatever was Chester’s burden from all of the students who must have crossed the thresholds of his classrooms over the years.

This time, the voices became audible. They were a swarm of vision and desire, of reaching and stretching and wanting to express something in their hearts and minds. Not all of them were altruistic. Some were about money and fame, and some were about the sexual conquests that would come to them as celebrated artists. Grace felt her spirit descend into Chester’s, and she was laughing at them at first, a bitter, cackling, dismissive laugh. Fusing with Chester’s consciousness, she felt a blanket contempt for these students; there was no distinguishing the genuine visionaries from the ones who just wanted to get laid. There were so goddamned many of them, every year, like a bunch of yippy dogs snapping at her heels. She wanted to kick them back where they came from. They were competition; they were the enemy. She thought bitterly that if any of them would actually buy art, or patronize museums instead of selfishly wanting to be great artists, there would be more opportunities for people like her, people who’d put in the time. Where would these sniveling snots be in twenty years? Would they stick with it? Not likely. So it was up to her to teach them a lesson.

Grace as Chester stood at a podium in a room full of their paintings. Thousands of drippy, messy, sloppy paintings. The ones that weren’t that were too clean, too technical, too ordered. Then the students filed in, thousands of them. Hippies with dirty feet poking out of leather sandals, Andy Warhol wannabes in hipster clothes and gelled hair, the frat-boy types defying their parents, the shy girls in worn cardigans, the affirmative-action scholarship kids, the dykes and homos and cross-dressers and pierced goths and Jewish rebels and the ones who weren’t even born in America and could barely speak the language. She loathed every last one of them.

Suddenly some of her students began to cry. Others called her names. A group in the corner drafted a letter to make a formal complaint about her to the dean of the art school. A scattering of women inexplicably tore off their bras and lit them on fire with cigarette lighters. Then someone got a keg and passed out beer. A fistfight broke out. Another group of students played Twister. A few were practicing jiu jitsu in the middle of the room, where they’d cleared away the chairs. A couple near the front, real teacher’s-pet types, kept pestering her with questions about how they could improve their technique.

Into this chaos, Chester’s daughter danced into the room, with Mick as her partner.

Grace as Chester didn’t like the sight of that, not one bit, but she/he was transfixed by the plaintive dance. Mick looked like himself, which is to say not exactly the dancer type. And the daughter—Grace had seen her pictures on the wall behind Louise when they were chatting. The girl was attractive in a generic sort of way, blonde with a pert nose and light freckles on her cheeks. She moved prettily. That’s it: She was a pretty dancer, nothing more. No passion, no greatness. Grace felt Chester’s recognition of this like a slicing pain in the chest.
 

Mick lifted her atop Chester’s podium, and the students who were still paying attention became upset. “Hey, she’s stealing our show!” said one. “Who’s the ballerina?” complained another.

“That’s my daughter!” Grace yelled at them, Chester’s bellowing voice coming out of her mouth.

Mick, distracted by a blank canvas on a far wall, drifted over to it and began to paint.

The bra burning got out of hand, someone having lit a painting on fire, and the flames spread around the room. Grace went with Chester, still fused to his consciousness but beginning to slowly tear herself away from him. Chester lifted his daughter down from the podium. It was as if she were a little girl again, nestled in his arms. How sweet the world was back then, when everything was only possibility, for him and for her.

She reached up, cupping his ear with one hand as if to whisper a secret. “Daddy, when will I be famous? I want to be a star, like Mick.”

She pointed to Mick, who was hard at work on his best-known piece, one of the Conch Series paintings, oblivious to the fire and chaos around him. It pained Chester to know that his daughter had said “like Mick” instead of “like you, Daddy.”

“Someday,” Chester lied to his daughter. “Someday.”

The flames grew stronger.

Grace peeled herself away from Chester as he ran out of the burning room with his girl in his arms.
 

It wasn’t necessary to save Mick in this dream, Grace knew, for this was Chester’s concoction. But she was curious to see his version of Mick, so she went over to her brother at the canvas.

There was the first painting in the Conch Series taking shape under Mick’s brush, exactly the way it looked in the gallery where Grace had seen it in Chelsea. It was glorious, a true shining example of Mick’s talent, and probably his finest piece. So Chester acknowledged that at least in his own dream.

It must have ended then, as Grace popped out of that world before she was ready. She found herself awake as the first light began to stream into the room.

Grace spent the day speaking to Chester’s former students, but this time, she asked them questions about the way he taught. Since they had already been introduced, she called Clive Smith, Norris Grayson, and Annie Lin first. They painted a consistent portrait of Chester’s classroom tactics, which included bullying and making unfair, often blistering comparisons between one student and another.
 

Annie Lin described it this way: “Chester seemed to choose one or two mediocre students every year and hold them up as geniuses.” She scoffed. “In our class, it was this girl from the Midwest who painted nothing but Fourth of July parades. A real Thomas Kinkade type, let me tell you. It was ludicrous. But Chester actually compared Mick to her once. I’ll never forget it. ‘Mick, you’ll never have the fine sense of color that Miss Waters here has,’ he said. I saw that muscle in Mick’s jaw—you know the one I’m talking about. I saw it spasm. He must have been gritting his teeth. The rest of us were happy to have Mick taken down a peg, sure. But that Beth Waters sucked.”

To round out the evidence, Grace enlisted Cat’s help in tracking down more former students who weren’t connected to the case. A few of them had nothing but good things to say about Chester Canon. Grace guessed that these had been the ones he’d singled out for praise. Everyone else reported the same scenario.

After Grace’s last phone conversation, Cat announced, “Here’s something else. Canon’s father was an art critic.”

Grace read the series of profiles Cat had bookmarked on her laptop. His father had a reputation for brutality. He’d singlehandedly killed a number of budding artists’ careers back when critics like him held more sway over public opinion.

Late that afternoon, Grace called Professor Canon’s house, and he answered.

“I’d like to take you to dinner,” she offered.

Recognizing her voice, he replied, “And what makes you think I’d consent to dinner with you?”

Grace was prepared for this. “Two reasons. One, I know without a doubt you didn’t set that fire in Mick’s studio. And two, I know what kind of teacher you were, Professor Canon. And I don’t think you can go to your grave with all that guilt.”

He sputtered a bit, obviously caught off guard. There was a long pause. Then this: “No dinner. Just drinks. The Blarney Stone, five minutes from my house. Eight sharp. And leave Louise out of this. She’ll think I’ve gone for a drive.”

“Agreed.”

Grace met him there as planned, and despite his obviously distressed state, he gave her an appreciative once-over as she came in and sat down, which was understandable, as well as she was able to turn herself out.

She ordered a gin and tonic. He had a glass of bourbon in front of him already.

“So let’s hear it,” he said. “You’ve been talking to my former students, getting the dirt on me, I presume.”

“It wasn’t difficult. Approximately one in ten thinks you’re the bee’s knees. These must be the ones you chose to praise.”

He smiled wretchedly.

“The other nine, however…”

“Crybabies who didn’t get their parents’ love.”

Grace squelched the urge to slap his smug face.

“Don’t try to cast them as prima donnas,” she asserted. “Your classroom methods obviously left a lot to be desired. What awful games you played, Chester! What a waste. It’s a good thing you had tenure.”

“Is that it? I don’t even know why I’m here…”

“You’re here because of Maggie.” That was his daughter’s name.
 

He didn’t respond. “Is she happy?” Grace went on. “Maggie. Is she happy?”

“No.”

“Do you know why she’s not happy?”

Chester took a swig of his bourbon. “Are you seriously here to counsel me on the father-daughter relationship, lady? I don’t even know you.”

Grace regrouped. Chester was a tough nut to crack. She thought about the dream, how he recognized Mick’s achievement.

“Chester, I’m going to stop asking you questions and tell you how it is.”

“Oh, I’m on pins and needles. Enlighten me, sister.”

“First of all, you are a mediocre talent.”

Chester clenched his glass, and for a moment Grace feared he might actually strike her.

“What you should have done was embrace your role in life as a guide for others to discover their talent or the limitation of their talent, and to either be okay with that or transcend it.”

She took a sip of her gin and tonic and then continued. “But instead, you verbally and emotionally abused whole classes of students with your sick, twisted games. So many years and so many classes, and what do you have to show for it? The ones you couldn’t break, like Mick, went on to do great things despite you. Of course, some of the mediocre ones got further than they might have if they hadn’t been falsely propped up by you, so maybe you deserve a bit of credit for their success. But not at the expense of those you harmed.”

Chester was very, very quiet, and his face was expressionless. Grace figured most likely no one had ever spoken to him like this before.

“The worst is your own daughter.” Grace let the words sink in a moment before continuing. “I can’t believe you, Chester. You’re doing to her what your own father did to you, and there’s no excuse for that. Pushing her the way you do, when you know she doesn’t have what it takes.”

“How do you know she doesn’t?” He glared at her across the table.

“I saw her dance, when I was in New York,” Grace lied. “She dances like someone who’s only doing it to win her father’s love.”

“Get out of my face.” Chester pushed away from the table. “I should’ve known better than to have anything else to do with you.”

Grace reached across the table in a spur-of-the-moment gesture and grabbed his hand. “I know you’d do anything for her. You love her like no one else you’ve ever loved.”

He stared at Grace’s hand on top of his, but he did not pull away. Then, letting out a low groan, he motioned for the waiter to set him up with a second drink.

“Well, you’re right about that. That’s the smartest thing you’ve said yet.”

There was a pause as the waiter brought Chester another drink.

“Do you have a daughter, Grace? I’m not talking about a son. I mean a daughter. It’s a whole different ball game, a girl. I should know. I’ve got both.”

“I do,” she said.

“Look, I don’t want you to pity me as somebody who got beat up emotionally by his asswipe of a father. I mean, you pegged him, that’s for sure. And maybe in the beginning I was doing it for him. But that wore off pretty quickly. For most of my career, I painted for myself, not him. But when Margaret was born, it was for her. I wanted her to look up to me.”

Grace gave him a generous smile and patted his hand. Finally, he was telling the truth. But what an emotionally blunted man he was. “I don’t want to sound like a therapist here,” she said. “But Maggie undoubtedly looks up to you for a whole lot of reasons that have nothing to do with art.”

“That’s what Louise always says.”

Grace nodded, wishing more husbands got into the practice of listening to their wives. “All right, back to the questions,” she said. “Does painting make you happy?”

“Of course it does.”

“Then it doesn’t matter how successful you’ve been. You enjoy it, you don’t need to make a living at it, and you have a certain following.”