“I suppose. But not like this.”
She felt warmer now. Still holding her mug, she walked about the studio, admiring the new work. It never ceased to amaze her how, after all the years Rushkin had been painting—and especially when you considered the sheer quantity of superior work he’d produced—he never failed to find a fresh perspective, the outlook that other artists invariably missed. No matter how prosaic his subject matter might appear at an initial glance, he had a gift for instilling in it a universal relevance. His use of light was as astounding as ever, and looking at this new work, Izzy felt the inspiration for a dozen paintings come bubbling up inside her.
“I’d like to see some of your current projects,” Rushkin said. “Perhaps I could come by your studio one afternoon.”
“I’m kind of in between studios at the moment,” Izzy told him. “Well, when you get settled into a new place then.”
Izzy was surprised at the disappointment she felt when he didn’t try to convince her to come back and work here with him. Instead, he joined her as she walked about the studio and spoke about the various paintings and sketches, gossiping about the places and people they depicted, explaining particular problems he’d had with certain pieces and how he’d solved them. By the time she left Izzy realized that she’d learned more in the few hours she’d spent just listening to him than she had in all the time he’d been gone.
It was with real regret that she finally left the studio and trudged back home through the cold.
XV
June 1978
Izzy finally got herself a new studio at the beginning of April. It was no more than a large empty loft in a refurbished factory on Kelly Street, but she loved it. Up to that point she’d been depending on the kindness of others for studio space—initially Rushkin, then Professor Dapple—so this was the very first time she had a place of her own, chosen by herself, for herself. She paid the rent and utilities. She was entirely responsible for its upkeep. And because it was her own place—rather than Rushkin’s, which she knew she had to keep private even when none of his work was in it—this year she was able to participate in the annual spring tour of artists’ studios organized by the Newford School of Art, something she’d wanted to do from the first time she moved to the city. She didn’t have much available for sale, but everything she did have sold on the first day.
There were things she had to get used to with the new studio, beyond having to cover her expenses.
The hardest thing was losing touch with most of her numena. In the period between moving from the coach house to finally finding her own place, those whose paintings she still kept hadn’t liked to visit her in the apartment. It wasn’t private enough for their tastes. They came less and less often until, by the time she moved into her Kelly Street studio, her only regular visitors were Annie Nin and Rothwindle.
Rosalind and Cosette still came by whenever they were in town, but that wasn’t all that often. The rest of her numena seemed to just drift out of her life. Most of them she saw about as often as she did John, and she had yet to meet Paddyjack.
Her art took a new direction when she was finally settled in enough to begin work. Inspired by the paintings that Rushkin had done on his travels—taken mostly by how, as Tom Downs had put it, Rushkin saw things, rather than simply his technique she embarked on an ambitious series depicting the architecture of Lower Crowsea, juxtapositioning the vanishing older buildings with those that were replacing them, or had been renovated. What she found particularly intriguing in working on the series was giving a sense of entire buildings while concentrating only on a few details in each painting: a doorway and its surrounding vine-draped brickwork and windows; an alleyway with an old grocery on one side, a new lawyer’s office on the other; the cornice of the old fire hall showing two of its gargoyles, behind which rose a refurbished office block with all new stonework and an additional two stories.
Figures appeared, where appropriate, in a few pieces, but only one had a new numena. She was a kind of Paddyjill, since she looked to be a twig-girl cousin of sorts to Paddyjack, standing half-hidden in the vines that covered the riverside wall of the old shoe factory on Church Street. The painting was an immense work called Church Street II: Bricks and Vines, and Izzy saw it as the centerpiece of the series, which she’d taken to calling Crowsea Touchstones. It was due to be hung at The Green Man in October.
Albina was excited about the show and all of Izzy’s friends loved the series, but the person whose opinion she really craved was Rushkin, so that was how their weekly visits to each other’s studios began.
She dropped by his studio at the beginning of May and, after a pleasant hour or so of conversation, invited him to come by her studio the next day to have a look at some of her new work.
Every time Izzy saw him, Rushkin couldn’t have been nicer. By the end of June, the faint niggle of anxiety she’d associated with him had entirely vanished. They never spoke of numena—nothing odd or strange or out of the normal world ever came up in their conversations at all. Instead they talked about art; Rushkin criticized, gently, and praised, lavishly. Izzy forgot John’s warnings, forgot Rushkin’s temper, forgot everything but the joy of creating and sharing that joy with an artist that she admired so much it was almost an infatuation.
She didn’t mean to hide the fact that she had renewed her relationship with Rushkin, it just never came up whenever she was around Kathy. Her roommate might have heard it from someone else except that, having finally received her share of the advance for the paperback sale of her book, all her time was caught up in the work of establishing her children’s foundation—everything from finding suitable staff and applying for charitable status to renting a small building in which to house the operation.
As she’d predicted to Izzy back in January, the money from her advance wasn’t nearly enough—not even starting at the modest scale at which she planned. Late in June she organized a combination benefit concert and art auction that, when added to her fundraising efforts once her charitable status came through, raised another seventy-two thousand dollars. Eleven thousand of that came from the sale of one of Izzy’s paintings.
“The doors open July twelfth,” she told Izzy a few days after the benefit. “Are you going to have a party to celebrate it?” Izzy asked.
“Of course. But it’s going to be a potluck affair. I don’t want any of the Foundation’s money to be used for anything except for the kids. The thing that really worries me is that we’re going to get swamped and I don’t want to turn anybody away.”
“So organize another benefit,” Izzy suggested.
“I don’t think it would be as successful. People only have so much money and there are a lot of other worthwhile causes. It’ll work better on a yearly basis, I think.”
Izzy smiled. “You better get writing then.”
“I am. I have—whenever I can spare the time. Alan says there’s already a lot of interest in a second book and the first paperback’s not even out yet.”
“Will you take it to the same publisher that’s doing the paperback edition?” Izzy asked.
Kathy shook her head. “I’m letting Alan publish it first and then he’ll offer it to them. It’s a chance for his press to really establish itself and after all he’s done for me, I figure it’s the least I can do to repay him.”
“But if he gets fifty percent of the next paperback sale as well,” Izzy began. “He won’t. He didn’t even take that for Angels.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s earmarked forty percent of what would go to him as an ongoing donation to the Foundation.”
“Wow. I can’t believe he’s giving up all that money.”
“Some people would say the same thing about the painting you gave us to auction.”
“That’s different,” Izzy began, but then she shook her head. “No, I guess it’s not.”
“I couldn’t ask for better friends,” Kathy told her. She tried to stifle a huge yawn, but wasn’t successful. “I have to go to bed,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Kathy’d been losing weight, Izzy realized, taking a good look at her roommate. It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because of the baggy clothes she usually wore. But she was thinner, and there were rings under her eyes from lack of sleep.
“Don’t overdo things,” Izzy warned.
“I won’t,” Kathy said as she stumbled off to bed. “I’m just so happy that everything’s actually going to happen.” She paused at the doorway to her bedroom to look back at Izzy. “You know, that maybe I can save some kids having to go through the shit I had to.”
But you don’t look happy, Izzy thought as Kathy continued on into the bedroom. You look dead on your feet.