Vigil for a Stranger by Kitty Burns Florey

Author:Kitty Burns Florey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497693395
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

The first time Orin called, I said, “No. Please. I can’t see you,” and hung up. The second time, we talked for two hours. He had a knack for calling when James was out. The fourth time, I agreed to meet him in New York, at the Metro.

I told James I had to see George Drescher again.

James grinned at me and said, “Watch out for old George. I hear he’s quite the boy.”

I am trying to paint watercolor portraits of Pierce. I imagine him in Tynan’s: yellows and browns. Or standing in the rain: blue and grey. I think of the colors of the Ohio landscape where we used to hike, and the amber, window-shade light of the New Haven apartment he shared with Charlie.

I can’t get his face right. I can’t remember his face. I can’t paint. I can’t do anything. Everything is wrong: the colors are too thin and wispy, too pastel, the brushwork is too tight.

If I am trying to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of yellow and grey and blue, I am not succeeding.

Emile says, “Maybe watercolor is not the best medium for what you’re trying to do. Maybe you should be working in oil, or making charcoal sketches.”

Emile is my painting teacher. I am taking a night class at the school where he teaches. In the daytime, I clerk in a bookstore. I am pitifully poor, but I want to work at my painting, and I know I need guidance.

“Of course, everything you do is exquisite,” Emile says. “I just wonder if that’s what you want for these subjects—that delicacy, that subtlety you do so well. I wonder if the medium is capable of expressing what you want to say. If it’s powerful enough. There seems to be a violence here that you’re not expressing properly.” He stops talking and stoops down to peer at my painting—one of the rainy, bluish ones. “But this is in so many ways extraordinary, Christine. You astonish me.”

Emile has changed his tune. For the first couple of weeks he gave me good constructive advice during critiques. “Attack the canvas!” he said. “Don’t skimp on the colors. Give up some of your control, let the paper and the paint do some of the work and then go with it!” Now he touches my arm, puts his hand on my shoulder as he leans over the table where I work, looks at my breasts when he talks to me, tells me my work is exquisite. The other students notice. A girl named Diane tells me he’s famous for screwing his students. “Not that he’s not attractive,” Diane says. “But.”

I hate everything I do in the course, but he gives me an A. The day it’s over, he asks me if I will do him the honor of dining with him. He dazzles me. He is tall, lean, distinguished. He has a small, foreign-looking beard, a thin moustache. He smokes Gauloises and calls me chérie. Three months later, we are married.

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