“I can go with the second face, but I’ve got to have the eyes.”
She took another drink. “Here’s the sticky part, for me. I don’t want you to use the second face. I feel stupid about it, but I like the idea of being the inspiration for a comic book hero. And that is something I never thought I’d hear myself say.”
Inside, Ford did a little happy dance of his own. “So it’s not the results, it’s the process. You want something to eat? I want something to eat.” He turned, opened another cupboard and pulled out a bag of Doritos.
“That’s not actual food.”
“That’s what makes it good. All of my life,” he continued as he dug into the bag, “I’ve watched people. Drawn pictures-well, I drew pictures as soon as I could hold a crayon. I’ve observed-the way they move, gesture, the way their faces and bodies are put together. How they carry themselves. It’s like breathing. Something I have to do. I could promise not to watch you, but I’d be lying. I can promise to show you any sketching I do, and try to keep that promise.”
Because they were there, she ate a Dorito. “What if I hate them?”
“You won’t, if you have any taste, but if you do, that would be too bad.”
Contemplating, she ate another chip. His voice had stayed easy, she noted-over the rigid steel underlying it. “That’s a hard line.”
“I’m not what you’d call flexible about my work. I can pretzel about most anything else.”
“I know the type. What comes after the sketching?”
“You’ve got to have a story. Graphics is only half of a graphic novel. But you need to… Bring your wine. Come on upstairs.”
He retrieved his brush. “I was inking the last panel on Payback when you knocked,” he told her as he led her out of the kitchen and to the stairs.
“Are these stairs original?”
“I don’t know.” His forehead creased as he looked down at them. “Maybe. Why?”
“It’s beautiful work. The pickets, the banister, the finish. Someone took care of this place. It’s a major contrast with mine.”
“Well, you’re taking care now. And you hired Matt-pal of mine-to do some of the carpentry. I know he worked on this place before I bought it. And did some stuff for me after.” He turned into his studio.
Cilla saw the gorgeous wide-planked chestnut floor, the beautiful tall windows and the wide, glossy trim. “What a wonderful room.”
“Big. It was designed as the master bedroom, but I don’t need this much space to sleep.”
Cilla tuned into him again, and into the various workstations set up in the room. Five large, and very ugly, filing cabinets lined one wall. Shelves lined another with what seemed to be a ruthless organization of art supplies and tools. He’d devoted another section to action figures and accessories. She recognized a handful of the collection, and wondered why Darth Vader and Superman appeared so chummy.
A huge drawing board stood in the center of the room, currently holding what she assumed to be the panels he’d talked about. Spreading out from it on either side, counters and cubbies held a variety of tools, pencils, brushes, reams of paper. Photographs, sketches, pictures torn or cut out of magazines of people, places, buildings. Still another leg of the counter held a computer, printer, scanner-a Buffy the Vampire Slayer action figure.
Opposite that, to form a wide U, stood a full-length mirror.
“That’s a lot of stuff.”
“It takes a lot of stuff. But for the art, which is what you want to know, I’ll do a few million sketches, casting my people, costuming them, playing with background, foreground, settings-and somewhere in there I’ll write the script, breaking that into panels. Then I’ll do thumbnails- small, quick sketches to help me decide how I’m going to divide my space, how I want to compose them. Then I pencil the panels. Then I ink the art, which is exactly what it sounds like.”
She stepped over to the drawing board. “Black and white, light and shadow. But the book you gave me was done in color.”
“So will this be. I used to do the coloring and the lettering by hand. It’s fun,” he told her, leaning a hip on one leg of the U, “and really time-consuming. And if you go foreign, and I did, it’s problematic to change hand-drawn balloons to fit the translations. So I digitized there. I scan the inked panels into the computer and work with Photoshop for coloring.”
“The art’s awfully good,” Cilla stated. “It almost tells the story without the captions. That’s strong imaging.”
Ford waited a beat, then another. “I’m waiting for it.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “For what?”
“For you to ask why I’m wasting my talent with comic books instead of pursuing a legitimate career in art.”
“You’ll be waiting a long time. I don’t see waste when someone’s doing what they want to do, and something they excel at.”
“I knew I was going to like you.”
“Plus, you’re talking to someone who starred for eight seasons on a half-hour sitcom. It wasn’t Ibsen, but it sure as hell was legitimate. People will recognize me from your art. I’m not on the radar so much anymore, but I look enough like my grandmother, and she is. She always will be. People will make the connection.”
“Is that a problem for you?”
“I wish I knew.”
"You’ve got a couple days to think about it. Or…” He shifted, opened a drawer, drew out papers.
“You wrote up a release,” Cilla said after a glance at the papers.
“I figured you’d either come around or you wouldn’t. If you did, we’d get this out of the way.”
She stepped away, walked to the windows. The lights sparkled again, she thought. Little diamond glints in the dark. She watched them, and the dog currently chasing shadows in Ford’s backyard. She sipped her wine. Then she turned her head to look at him over her shoulder. “I’m not posing in a breastplate.”
Humor hit his eyes an instant before he grinned. “I can work around that.”
“No nudity.”
“Only for my personal collection.”
She let out a short laugh. “Got a pen?”
“A few hundred of them.” He chose a standard roller ball as she crossed the room.
“Here’s another condition. A personal, and petty, requirement. I want her to kick a lot more ass than Batgirl.”
“Guaranteed.”
After she’d signed the three copies, he handed her one. “For your files. How about we pour another glass of this wine, order a pizza and celebrate the deal?”
She eased back. He hadn’t stepped into her space; she’d stepped into his. But the tingle in her blood warned her to mark the distance. “No, thanks. You’ve got work and so do I.”
“Night’s young.” He walked out of the room with her. “Tomorrow’s long.”
“Not as young as it was, and tomorrow’s never long enough. Plus I need extra time to fantasize about putting in a Jacuzzi.”
“I’ve got one.”
She slid her eyes toward him as they came down the stairs. “I don’t suppose you have a massage therapist on tap, too.”
“No, but I’ve got really good hands.”
“I bet you do. Well, if you were Orlando Bloom, I’d consider this a sign from God and be sleeping with you in about ninety minutes. But since you’re not”-she opened the front door herself-“I’ll say good night.”
He stood, frowning after her, then stepped onto the veranda as she hiked toward the road. “Orlando Bloom?”
She simply lifted a hand in a kind of brushing-off wave, and kept walking.
FOUR
She had a couple of good, productive days. She’d lined up her plumber, her electrician, her head carpenter, and had the first of three projected estimates on replacement windows. But her luckiest find, to her way of thinking, had been connecting with an ancient little man named Dobby and his energetic grandson Jack, who would save and restore the original plaster walls.