He ate prodigiously and with a pleasure that went beyond the simple satisfaction of hunger: satiny scrambled eggs, toast covered with jam or marmalade, rubbery cheese that broke in conchoidal fractures when he pulled it apart, soda crackers with their mineral incrustations, each one a pure glittering crystal. Every day for lunch and dinner he had roast beef or ham, mashed potatoes hollowed by the chef's ladle and filled with gravy, pale translucent slices of tomato on a bed of lettuce, and for dessert a piece of cream pie, banana or chocolate, that seemed to coat him inside with luxury.
His experiments in painting on canvas were not turning out well. No one had told him about using a medium; he was putting the paint on as it came from the tube, and his paintings seemed thick and lifeless.
On a side street, tucked in between two grimy office buildings, one day he found an art schooclass="underline" it was called the Porgorny Institute of Fine Arts, and a sign in the window said, "Register for Fall Classes." He opened the double doors and found himself in a wide hall. The office was on the right. "Fill out this application," said the mousy-blonde woman behind the counter. Gene wrote down "Stephen Miller," and his address. Under "Age" he put "15," and under "Education" he wrote "High school."
"Now you've checked four classes," said the woman, "and there's only three periods a day, so we'll have to work out a schedule for you. The best thing would be to take two of these classes every day, and then, the third period, you would go back and forth between the other two."
"I don't understand," Gene said.
"Well, for instance, suppose you want to take Figure Drawing and Oil Painting every day. That's your first two periods. Then; you could take Sculpture on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays -- "
A large, heavy woman came in from the hall carrying a sheaf of papers. She had an imposing bosom under a purple blouse, and a black ribbon hung from her eyeglasses; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was piled on her head in a haphazard fashion. "What is it?" she asked in a deep voice. "What is the matter?"
"This young man is applying for classes -- "
"So." She looked him over. "You are how old?"
Her accent was so strange that he could hardly understand her. "Fifteen," he said.
"Perhaps." She was thinking. No pimples. Tall, but not more than twelve. "And you think you can become artist?"
"I like to draw," Gene said.
"He likes to draw. So many like to draw. But why not? It is better than murdering people in the streets." She turned to the woman behind the counter. "Well, then, Miss Olney, what is problem?"
"It's just his schedule, Madame Porgorny -- he wants to take four classes -- "
"Work it out! Work it out! Do not bother me with these details." Madame Porgorny swept around the counter and into the inner office, where, presently, they could hear her shouting on the telephone.
"Does she teach any of the classes?" Gene asked.
"Only China Painting, Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Did you want to -- ?"
"Oh, no," Gene said hastily. He paid the application fee and got his schedule. "When do the classes start?"
"September fourth."
The Porgorny Institute was not like any other school he had known. Down behind the reception room and office was a row of large studios whose individual smells were at first strange, then loved and familiar: smells of oil and turpentine, charcoal dust, plaster dust.
Madame Porgorny's booming voice could be heard at intervals all day long in the corridors. She seemed to live in a state of constant exasperation; Gene heard her shouting at the instructors, at Miss Olney the receptionist, at electricians and plumbers.
In the figure-drawing class the model was a dark-haired young man with broad shoulders and narrow hips; he wore a thing like a black jockstrap, but much skimpier -- the side part was only a narrow ribbon. He never spoke; between posing sessions he smoked in the little courtyard, and when he was through for the day he left, sometimes with a woman student.
In this class the students were given hard black crayons and large sheets of paper torn off a roll. They were instructed to hold the crayon like a knife and use the arm and wrist in drawing, but Gene could not do this; he sharpened his crayon to a fine point, held it like a pencil, and made careful, minute drawings that occupied only a small part of the sheet. He drew the head, then the shoulders .and chest, the arms and hands, then the hips, thighs, calves, and feet. His drawings were careful and accurate in outline, but there was always something wrong with them; they were off balance, or out of proportion, and he tore them up.
When he looked at the other students' work, he could see that they were doing something entirely different. They seemed not to care about accuracy of detail; their drawings were large, cloudy sketches of bodies in the same posture as the model's but otherwise having no resemblance to it, and they were all different: some fat and shapeless, some angular and thin.
The instructor, an auburn-haired young woman called Miss Williams, pointed out that everybody tended to draw bodies like their own: wide, muscular people drew wide, muscular bodies, and so on. Gene held up one of his tiny sketches, and she laughed. "Well, Stephen is an exception to everything," she said.
With the other students, he felt the continual embarrassment of being the wrong age; he was sure they all knew he was too young to be there, and he sensed in them the unspoken conspiracy of being grown up. When they spoke to him kindly, he felt they were being condescending, and when they ignored him he felt excluded. The very shapes of their bodies, their hairiness, their smells (unsuccessfully disguised by perfume) proclaimed them a different kind of humanity; the hints they gave of their pleasures outside the classroom were alien to him; they laughed at different things, and with a different laughter. He felt himself an intruder, in constant danger of being found out.
He took the ceramics class and tried to throw pots on the wheel, but he could never center the lump of clay properly, and his pots came out lopsided; they wobbled on the wheel, and no matter what he did he could never make them straight. He liked them anyhow because of their magical transformation in the kiln ("the kill," Miss Jacoby called it): from dried, leathery clay the color of lead they had turned pale and hard as stone, scritching under his fingernails. The glazes were equally magicaclass="underline" you painted them on like pale mud, and when they came out they were clear, brilliant orange or blue or purple. He experimented with his most ambitious piece, a tall vase that was only a little lopsided: he painted it first with green glaze, then with blue. When he saw it after the weekend firing, it was covered with luminous streaks of blue melting into peacock green, and all the other students admired it. "You took a chance, but it worked," said Miss Jacoby.
In Mr. Berthelot's class he learned the mysteries of armatures and plaster casting. The hollow shape inside the mold was tantalizingly strange; its was recognizable -- there was the arm, here the head -- and yet absolutely unfamiliar. When they lubricated the mold and poured plaster into it, then chipped the mold away, the result was again a magical transformation: the clay model had been turned first into a mere vacancy, an absence, and then into hard, chalky plaster. In a way it seemed to him that the change was for the worse: the clay model, now destroyed, had been alive, and the plaster cast was dead.
The school did not teach wood carving. "Old Lady says it's too dangerous," Mr. Berthelot told him. "Some student cuts his finger off, the insurance wouldn't cover it. I don't know too much about it myself, tell you the truth, and the students we got here, they just want to play with clay."
In an an store he saw a beautiful set of wood carving tools with wooden handles all alike, shaped to fit the palm. He bought them, and some blocks of hardwood, and took them home. He bungled his first attempts, but then he got the hang of the tools, how the mallet drove the sweet cutting edge through the surface of the wood, curling off a precise shaving. He smoothed his sculptures with a broad blade, then with sandpaper, until the wood was as round and slick as stone, but later he began to like the texture of the worked surface, the trace of the tools, as if patient worms had gone around and around the wood eating it away to leave a beautiful shape.