The orthopedic catalog called it a Thoracolumbosacral Orthosis. That would be a TLSO for those of us who aren’t fluent in Latin. For anyone actually strapped into one of these contraptions, it is simply a Schandmantel — a medieval device meant to shame someone who’s done a bad thing. You know, like driving their oxen-drawn cart into a utility pole. Or their Honda Civic. Those thirty square inches of ugly, rigid polyethylene and foam were designed by a panel of sadistic orthopedic spine surgeons hellbent on preventing a person from bending, twisting, or moving side-to-side, sleeping, tying their shoes, or eating a bowl of soup without spilling half of it into their lap. It was perfect, however, if you were going for the shambling gait of Frankenstein.
The TLSO clamped around Isabelle’s torso from the base of her throat down past her pelvic crest, and was buckled with three wide nylon straps that sounded precisely like sailcloth ripping in a gale-force wind every time she took the device off to change her clothing or take a shower. Removing it required Isabelle to lie flat on her back, then cautiously peel her shoulders and arms from the device like the leaves from a steamed artichoke. Putting the device on was not unlike that scene from Gone With the Wind where Mammy aggressively tightens Scarlett’s corset. The Velcro had to be pulled until Isabelle’s ribs were practically creaking, locking the two fractured thoracic vertebrae into place so bone chips couldn’t sever her spinal cord. The whole get-up smelled of isopropyl alcohol and skin powder, with the slightly sour smell of sweat — the unavoidable result from a lack of breathability caused by that huge expanse of plastic. The totality of these smells comprised what I jokingly called Eau de Panic. It was pungent. All of us were feeling the panic, especially that twenty-four-year-old woman who had gone from running four miles a day to needing an old-lady reacher-grabber to get a can of cat food from the top shelf.
By the fourth week of October, Isabelle’s garage space smelled like a cage. Or maybe a horse barn.
Isabelle hadn’t set foot outside the family complex in twenty-two days. Her entire life was contained in the twelve hundred square feet of poured concrete that was my garage, her ecosystem defined by the hum of John’s perimeter cameras and the smell of linseed oil competing with turpentine. She painted voraciously, but was stuck on a theme and variations, which she repeated ad nauseam — detailed studies of the industrial-inspired walls and casement windows offset by colorful boho-style patterns. In essence, expressions of an artfully decorated prison cell.
Isabelle also took to painting the mundane and experimenting with classical painting styles — impressionism, cubism, abstract expressionism. She did austere studies of the grain and knots of the workbench, the texture and rhythm of the cement floors, and then there were the dreamy Renoir-inspired portraits of her cat lounging in various settings — on the chintz couch and in the herb garden in the backyard. Those were somewhat comical. She’d even painted her steel-toed surplus boots, the ones from Basti that sat in the corner like two lead anchors. Isabelle hadn’t had an occasion to wear those since the accident. They were so heavy they made her back ache. Plus she couldn’t reach down to tie the laces.
On Tuesday morning, I brought out a thermos of French press with steamed milk and a huge plate of scrambled eggs with veg and goat cheese that had a fine dusting of fresh herbs. I suck at cooking; this Isabelle knew well. Adam had obviously stopped by.
There she was, standing in the center of the garage, holding a palette knife in her right hand, staring at a blank six-by-four-foot linen canvas, her jaw clenched so hard that her cheek muscles were twitching. Her short auburn hair — still foreign to me — was sweaty and clinging to the pale curve of her neck, then sticking up in damp points on the top of her head. It was an odd look.
“Eat,” I said, setting the plate on the drafting table. She wouldn’t even look at the plate of beautiful food, turning her nose up, regardless. And she wouldn’t look at me either.
“If I spend another forty-eight hours in this room, Mom, I’m going to fucking lose my mind.” Her voice was level. That was the scary part. That low-pitched, resonant voice she was using was easily understood, every consonant hitting like a carpet tack. When she spoke like that, it invariably meant a decision had already been made. She was just waiting for me to clear some bandwidth to receive her message.
“The doctor said it was six weeks minimum before he could evaluate the fusion,” she said. “But there is no way I can stay here, doing what I’m doing, which is bullshit artwork. Not even for another week.” She leaned against the doorframe, one arm stretched upward, her left hand buried deep in her jeans pocket. I suddenly had the urge I had to wrap her in a quilt. “You have two weeks left,” I said in a near whisper. “Don’t you think you can stick it out until then?”
“No,” she said. “And I’m not talking about the brace. Just want to be clear on that.”
She turned to look at me directly, the stiff plastic creaking under her oversized work shirt; her now-hazel eyes, behind mock-tortoise frames, were expressing deep resentment. “The brace is just physics. I can handle physics. That punishment is finite. What I can’t handle is this bunker that you, Adam, and Laura have built. It’s safe, it’s clean, I can appreciate that. But this is not a life. I’m trapped here while Caden drinks craft beer at Dinky’s, contemplating his next turn at the pool table. And Lichter — he sits in his mid-century office in the arts building, reading academic journals, sipping a latté from his Nespresso machine as he gazes out at the female zoomers eating their sad beige salads in the courtyard. This so pisses me off. Those fuckers didn’t just break my back. They took everything.”
“They didn’t take your work,” I said gently, thinking to myself how stupid that sounded after it came out of my mouth.
“My work requires an audience,” she said, her voice rising up, scratching at the top of her range. “Art isn’t some handwritten sonnet that gets folded up and put under a pile of plates in the sideboard. It’s a conversation I’m having with the outside world. Like right now. Fuck… Mom! Do you get this?”
She continued: “I haven’t talked to an artist in six weeks. I haven’t seen anything except my own paintings since the night of the crash, and now I’m trapped in this pattern of creating derivative work — stuff I loathe. If I stay here one more day, my brain is going to rot. I feel like my work is slipping away and I’m losing my chops.”
I stood there, looking at my daughter — at the rigid plastic holding her upright, her fake dark hair, at the fierce drive burning through her exhaustion — and I realized this fortress was suffocating her as much as it was protecting her. She could feel herself withering away, like some plant that will never be revivable after so many weeks of being kept in a shady corner. She was right. This could not continue. This was not a solution. We were no longer protecting Isabelle.
“Get your boots on,” I said. “I’ll lace them up for you.”
She stared at me. “Why?”
“Just get them on. I’m calling Laura. We’re going to see Sloane.”
Vance Contemporary was an art gallery that was perched on the north branch of Birch Street, nestled between an architectural salvage warehouse and an old factory that had been converted into live-work loft spaces.
Sloane Vance was a gifted artist who, at some point, decided her real purpose in life was in helping other artists find their voices. At age 37, she took a huge chunk of her trust fund, bought an entire downtown office building, cleaned up the spaces, and installed massive windows. She then built out an art gallery on the ground floor.
The spaces above were rented to fellow artists who needed room to work; smaller units went to local writers. And fuck, it was her building. She could do whatever she wanted with it, charge whatever she liked for rent, which sometimes was zip. Over the last fourteen years, Vance Contemporary had become the epicenter for the regional art market. Sloane had survived the equivalent of three consecutive tours of duty in a combat zone and to date had not lost a limb. She was tough as fucking nails, and fifty-one — she’d just stepped into the realm all women aspire to, though they don’t know it when they’re still in ovulation mode: Menopause. Sloane had close-cropped silver hair — shaved on the sides. Her uniform: an asymmetrical silk-and-linen pants ensemble that cost more than an entry-level stainless steel Rolex. She had an entire closet of these togs, in a variety of colors, with matching titanium reading glasses that she wore every day on a stylish leather strap in lieu of a necklace. Sloane was a Gen X dyke supreme, who’d cut her teeth in the Chicago gallery scene in the nineties. She had zero patience for interior designers, art consultants, aesthetes, and art critics, and she had a deep skepticism of men with manicured beards wearing Charvet Vicuña shirts. She sprinkled the word fuck throughout her conversations like fresh ground pepper.
Sloane had been Laura’s friend for more than a decade, since they served on the municipal arts commission in 2008, in fact, and where together they successfully campaigned against a sixty-thousand-dollar bronze of a local timber baron whose claim to fame had been his burning down a Coast Miwok encampment. What fun that had been bringing down a bevy of misogynist Republican bigots. They’d proceeded with getting the statue made, then they had nowhere to put it. Rumor had it that it had ended up at the local scrap yard.
As we walked toward the loading dock behind the gallery at two that afternoon, there sat Sloane on a packing crate, smoking an American Spirit, legs splayed out like the Marlboro Man. She held a clipboard in one hand, adorned with what looked like a dozen polished silver rings; the other hand struggled to balance a gel pen and her cigarette. She was clearly trying to do too many things at once, as evidenced by the long drag she just took on her gel pen. Now that was funny.
“The front door was locked,” Laura said, stepping onto the concrete receiving bay.
“Well, yeah, Captain Obvious. That’s why it says ‘Gallery closed on Tuesdays’ — it’s right there on the main entrance. Tuesdays are typically when we do our new installations.”
Sloane turned her head to the side and exhaled a thin stream of gray smoke, which floated down the alley. She then crushed her cigarette butt into a sardine tin on the windowsill, and held open the fire door so we could all file in. Once inside and the door clicked shut, Sloane turned around, took off her reading glasses, and let her gaze settle on Isabelle, whom she’d not seen since she was a tweener. Back then, Isabelle had long blond tresses, which she often pulled back with a silk flower clip from Claire’s Boutique. They were her trademark in 6th grade. The Isabelle now in front of Sloane was nearly unrecognizable.
Sloane didn’t gasp. Nor did she offer a motherly pat. She sized up the severely short auburn hair and oversized work shirt, Isabelle’s rigid silhouette in her TLSO brace, and the heavy black frames.
“My god,” Sloane said with a Chicago accent not unlike John Belushi’s in the Billy Goat Tavern skit. She shook her head from side to side, her voice like gravel tossed into a blender. “That haircut is aggressive, girl. I love it.” It was pretty clear that Sloane was misreading part of the situation, but what the hell — Isabelle took the compliment for what it was worth, especially as she was in complete agreement with her. The hair was aggressive. It was gnarly, and Isabelle was pretty sure she never wanted to go back to being a Disney princess blonde.
“It’s a disguise,” Isabelle said bluntly, to be clear.
“Nah, sweetie pie, a fedora is a disguise. That haircut is a statement of intent.” Sloane was impressed. Big time.
She then stepped forward, kissed Laura on both cheeks, gave my shoulder a brief, iron-fingered squeeze, then turned her full attention to Isabelle. “Laura gave me the broad strokes. You’re currently living underground, your ex-boyfriend is a violent little freak who belongs to a “brotherhood” of sociopaths, and you’re losing your mind living in your mother’s garage. Did I get that right?”
“That about covers it. Oh, yeah, and now I’m Izzy, and I think everyone in this room had better start calling me that or there are going to be beaucoup problems,” Izzy said.
Sloane led us through her inventory room — an industrial cathedral with 18 ft. ceilings, buttressed on both sides by floor-to-ceiling toast racks which housed hundreds of paintings. Broad work tables ran down the center of the room and were used for cleaning and repairing canvases, as well as packing and labeling artwork. Under the tables was shelving for double-corrugated cardboard, archival bubble wrap, jugs of solvent, rags and brushes. Sloane took us out to the main gallery, where a new set of printed-to-canvas digital art was being installed. The space was gorgeous: polished concrete floors the color of wet slate, exposed fir beams, with sunlight pouring into the space through north-facing windows. On the walls hung massive, muted color-field abstracts by a painter from Santa Fe who commanded 30K for eight square feet of what amounted to raw umber. Yeah, you heard that right.
“Here’s the setup,” Sloane said, walking us toward a pair of heavy swinging doors at the rear of the main floor that led to the private workshop annex. “Every autumn, I bring in Julian Thorne for a three-week figure and structural masterclass. Julian’s seventy-two, and studied with Richard Diebenkorn; he hates the art market almost as much as I do. But he loves to teach, and I do mean teach, as opposed to whatever you call it that our friend, Lichter, does. He’s willing to take on six students per masterclass, but nobody just off the street. They’ve got to have some connection to me. The class is going to be four afternoons a week, three hours an afternoon, closed-door sessions. No public observing.”
“So, who are the other five students you’ve lined up?” Laura asked, pulling out her top-bound spiral notepad. Laura never went anywhere without one of these; it was her version of a sidearm — and it was more than a wee bit outdated. You couldn’t even find these at Office Depot anymore. Come to think of it, you’d also be hard-pressed to find an Office Depot that’s open these days. Reporters now use their phones to record conversations and take dictation, and then they use apps like Otter to transcribe. Not Laura, however. She was old school.
“I’ve got three second-year MFA kids from UC Davis, all of whom are on fellowships,” Sloane said, checking off fingers. “One retired pediatric surgeon from Seattle who paints horrific watercolor landscapes, but writes very large checks to the gallery’s not-for-profit foundation. And then there’s Milo Ross.”
I paused, the name snagging on my memory like a burr. “Ross? As in Arthur Ross? The guy who owns half the commercial real estate downtown?”
“Yep. He’s Arthur’s grandson,” Sloane said, rolling her eyes with enough torque to generate electricity. “He’s Eleanor Ross’s golden boy. He graduated from Rhode Island School of Design two years ago — or maybe I should say, Eleanor paid for a new wing in the school’s student union, and then, voilà! Milo suddenly had a BFA. Milo comes to the gallery every two weeks like clockwork, his mother in tow. They park his Ford Transit out front and make a pretense of dragging samples of his four by six-foot canvases into the gallery — this in the middle of gallery hours. It’s incredibly disruptive and confusing for my guests. And rude. His stuff: derivative, pseudo-neoclassical crap. And every time they swing by, the two of them beg me to give him a solo show. It is so hard to be nice. So very hard. His stuff sucks.”
“Why let him in the class?” I asked.
“Ah… Because Eleanor cut a $100K check to the foundation last month, and when she heard Julian was going to be in town, the gig was up. She had heard he only comes to town to do masterclasses. So she paid Julian’s entire three-week honorarium up front— this before I even told her about the class or invited Milo to be a part of it. She must have milked one of the other students for details.”
Sloane spoke with the unashamed pragmatism that has been her key to success. “Milo’s check pays for the three other students to attend for free, and it covers all of Julian’s expenses — housing, food, and transportation. Yes, Milo is an arrogant little narcissist who thinks he’s the second coming of Pablo Picasso — who I’d like to go on the record as saying I dislike intensely. But I’m pretty sure Milo’s harmless.”
Isabelle walked past us, her eyes locked on the workshop space. The annex was set up with seven heavy oak easels arranged in a semi-circle around a raised model platform. Natural light flooded in from a wall of frosted industrial glass, which would have looked out onto the alley and the backsides of the buildings on Spanos Avenue had one been able to see through it.
“Our service entrance opens right onto the alley,” Sloane said to me, lowering her voice. “Eric, my handyman, just dropped off a remote fob for the lock this morning. Isabelle can pull her car into the alley and park it next to the loading dock. It’s just five steps to the door, then she’s in. Nobody on Birch Street will see her enter. If she leaves her keys on Eric’s desk, he can then pull the vehicle right into the receiving area and out of view. There’s plenty of room. Isabelle will be registered under the name Izzy Tétreau and will be introduced to Julian as such. If anyone asks, she’s an independent artist from Portland.”
Isabelle reached out, her finger lightly grazing the crank handle of the nearest easel. The smell of oil paint and cold stone hung in the air, and for the first time since the accident, that defensive line between her eyebrows relaxed. It smoothed right out. My eyebrows did the same, in sympathy.
“Julian’s class starts tomorrow at one,” Sloane said, looking at Isabelle. “Do you think you can stand at an easel for three hours in that armor? Or do I need to get you a stool?”
Isabelle turned around. “I can do more hours than that. Don’t worry about me.”
“Good,” Sloane said. “Wear old clothes. Julian has a habit of throwing wet brushes around when he’s frustrated.”
The next afternoon I sent Isabelle off in the newish “Meteorite Gray” Honda Civic, a vehicle we’d been given by the car insurance company to replace the car totaled in the crash. The gravel in the alley crunched under its tires as Isabelle headed off to class. Only after she reached the end of the alley and turned right did I follow.
When we got to Sloane’s gallery’s back entrance, I sat in my idling car, the rearview mirror adjusted to watch traffic coming and going from the alley. Isabelle unbuckled her seatbelt, then slowly got out, using both arms outstretched to push herself upward, like a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. The brace made getting out of bucket seats quite awkward. She was wearing an olive-drab chore coat that completely disguised the sharp edges of the TLSO brace, dark denim work pants, steel-toed boots, and those glasses. They were hilarious. And they broadcast: “I am a lesbian. Leave me the fuck alone!” Izzy was sporting a near fade on her temples, the hair on top tweaked into a crunchy spike, all of which showed off the clean, distinctive line of her jaw. Even in this incarnation, Izzy was beautiful.
“You’ve got three hours, girl,” I said as I drove past with the passenger window rolled down. “I’ll be at Laura’s. Adam’s keeping a four-top open for us for dinner. If anything feels off — anything at all — text me on your burner. John’s at work — he’s just five minutes away.”
“Mom,” she said, her hand on the door handle. “I’m going to an art class. Chill.”
“No can do, baby girl. Chilling would be shirking my duties. You have fun and go paint something brilliant,” I said.
I watched her walk through the security door on the loading dock. She didn’t hurry. She didn’t look over her shoulder. She walked deliberately, with that mid-distance focus she’d been practicing — head up, shoulders back and level, in spite of the brace. A woman who knew exactly where she was going. The door clicked shut behind her.
I waited two minutes, then shifted into drive and pulled out onto Birch Street.
As I reached the corner and stopped, I turned my head to the right, and there I saw it — a pearl-white Lexus SUV with tinted windows idling in the red zone directly in front of the gallery’s main entrance. The passenger door opened, and a young man stepped out onto the sidewalk. Yeah, that had to be Milo Ross. As advertised.
Even from fifty yards away through my rain-streaked windshield, I could see that he was almost offensively good-looking — like an advertisement for an exclusive European boarding school. He was tall and lean, with thick, semi-curly honey-brown hair cut in an intentional disheveled sweep not unlike Benson Boone. Make no mistake: this simple, farm-boy haircut cost three hundred dollars a month to maintain. And his skin had that radiant, poreless quality of someone who’d never worked a day in the sun or eaten a meal that came out of a compostable take-out box.
Milo’s mother, Eleanor Ross — coiffed within an inch of her life and dripping in cream-colored cashmere — I could see her leaning over, adjusting the collar on Milo’s jacket through the passenger-side window.
Milo’s clothes weren’t just expensive; they were curated. A midnight-blue “chore jacket” in boiled Italian wool, raw-edge selvage denim turned up precisely one inch over pristine leather sneakers, a vintage Rolex on his left wrist with a distressed leather strap. He didn’t quite have the look of a working painter, but perhaps this was the best his mummy could muster, considering her background.
Milo laughed at something his mother said — an easy, melodic laugh — then kissed his fingertips and tapped them on the roof of the Lexus twice — the signal that she needed to vamoosh. He swung an expensive leather portfolio case over his shoulder and headed into Vance Contemporary.
Milo didn’t so much as walk into the gallery as he entered it. Now the air could begin circulating, and patrons could resume their milling about.
As I sat in my car at that intersection, watching Milo disappear into Sloane’s gallery, I felt a cold, familiar prickle on the back of my neck. This was not good. Not even remotely. How the fuck was I going to fix this? Who would even believe there was a problem here? This was pure, unadulterated intuition. Most people didn’t believe in it. Hell, I didn’t believe in it.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of men in my over forty years of journalism. The golden boys are a special lot — the sons of local oligarchs who grew up in immaculate houses, with servants. If you asked them who scrubbed the toilets in their house, they would be hard-pressed to tell you. They’d never seen anyone do such a thing. And any transgression a person in this sort of family might make could and would be scrubbed away by an attorney on retainer before the sun set. These people didn’t have to learn how to work the system; they were the system. They could simply exist. We were just there to do their bidding. It was that basic.
I drove to Laura’s, but could not get the image of Milo’s midnight-blue wool jacket and his faux disheveled curls out of my head. I prayed that Izzy, in her capacity as super dyke, would be like a bucket of ice water on this self-aroused, unneutered male.
I came back to the gallery at three-fifteen. Sloane had texted me from her personal phone: Come through the back. Julian’s doing his first critique. You’re gonna want to see this.
I parked my CRV two blocks away, walked down the alley in the damp October drizzle, then let myself in through the utility door. The gallery annex was quiet except for the low, rhythmic scraping sounds of charcoal on gritty Strathmore paper, with the occasional dry cough from Julian Thorne.
I stood discreetly in the shadows by the art supply racks, a spot the light from the workshop didn’t reach. Everyone except Julian Thorne had their back to me. It was fantastic watching all that creative work being done in real time.
Though almost everyone was working in charcoal, minus Izzy, the room reeked of turpentine, raw linen, and sweat. In the center of the semi-circle of artists, on a low wooden dais, was a life model — a middle-aged woman with a muscular, unyielding build. She sat in a dynamic three-quarters pose, illuminated by a diffused light reflecting off a photographer’s umbrella.
The easels were spaced ten feet apart. The three fellowship students — two young women and what looked to be a kid in an oversized cardigan — worked furiously, though in silent concentration, their hands smudged with vine charcoal. The retired pediatric surgeon sat squinting through bifocals at his creation, which had the look of an anatomical drawing, one straight out of the Netter Atlas of Human Anatomy. But the picture appeared to be that of a bruised eggplant rather than the human form. His drawing was an unintentional insult to our middle-aged model, whose body did follow the shape of an eggplant, though it was not lumpy and deformed as Dr. Prescott’s drawing would lead one to believe.
And then there was Milo Ross. He stood at the center easel — of course — positioning himself directly in the instructor’s line of sight. He was the only one in class not using an apron. He’d pushed the sleeves of his expensive jacket up to his forearms, revealing wrists adorned with subtle botanical tattoos. He held his charcoal mahlstick with a theatrical flourish, stepping back every few minutes to examine and consider his work, cocking his head, squinting his eyes, and re-evaluating where to place subsequent strokes with the charcoal. All of this was performative and agonizing to watch.
As I would discover, Milo’s pieces were, as a rule, huge and ambitious. But they were hollow. The piece he worked on today was being done on an especially large sheet of Canson Mi-Teintes using the honeycomb side of the paper. He’d drawn a figure with elongated limbs and a face like an El Greco, creating a dramatic chiaroscuro that looked suspiciously like the Caravaggio postcard he had tucked not so discreetly into his back pocket. The technique was there — Milo had clearly had expensive private tutors in his early days — but there was nothing genuine or meaningful in this piece. Nothing noteworthy was being expressed. The drawing was pure vanity. Technique without aesthetic import. The page filled, yet empty.
Izzy was noticing none of this. She sat at the far-left easel, tucked near the wall of frosted glass, completely engrossed in her work. Due to the angle, I couldn’t see anything she was doing. She’d set her stool aside as the TLSO brace didn’t allow her to sit comfortably in front of the easel. She was rooted to the concrete floor in her heavy boots, her palette resting on a small rolling cart beside her. She had chosen not to use charcoal, instead working in burnt umber, zinc white, and bone black oils, using a stiff, flat bristle brush to lay down large, strong, structural planes of tone.
Izzy wasn’t painting the model per se; she was painting the model’s skeletal tension, capturing the way the shoulder blade was locked against the ribcage and the feeling of the heavy, unyielding lumbar spine under strain. She was revealing the dark, brutal architecture of a body that had learned to carry weight without breaking. A woman’s body.
Izzy’s piece was fierce and raw, undeniably, shockingly good. And unexpected.
Julian Thorne walked out from behind his small table and made the rounds. He was a compact, olive-skinned man in his seventies, with paint-stained corduroys, a crown of silver hair morphing into a luscious expanse of thick white, short-cropped beard with a matching mustache. Though dressed casually, Thorne was elegant. This affect came through in his hands — long, smooth fingers with bright white nails, which knowingly crafted images in any medium: charcoal, pastels, or oils. Thorne made his first stop in front of Milo’s easel.
Milo, sensing his presence, straightened himself and offered a dazzling, self-deprecating smile meant to convey deference to his teacher, a renowned master painter.
But instead of keeping his mouth shut and listening, Milo immediately filled the blank space, which he mistook for a loss of words on his teacher’s part. He began extemporizing: “I’m working within the liminal space between the classical ideal and the postmodern gaze.” His voice was convincingly smooth and resonant, not one iota of self-doubt. It was as if Jared Kushner were here, in person, taking Thorne’s drawing class. More meaningless jibberish followed: “I wanted to explore the hegemonic structure of the pose by leaning into the model’s Caravaggio-style tension. I’m doing an exploration of masculine alienation.” Our model was a career waitress at the local Greek diner. WTF. Well, perhaps there was some “masculine alienation” going on there.
Julian Thorne stared at Milo’s piece for all of thirty seconds. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose with a loud honk, then shoved the handkerchief back into his trousers. “That left arm is nearly three inches too long,” he said flatly. “And your rendering of the highlight on the clavicle is awkward, as you’ve not established where the light source is emanating from.” Turning to face Milo head-on, he continued sternly: “Quit trying to impress me and look at that woman’s shoulder. She’s showing you she’s exhausted and overworked. Can you capture that?” he said sarcastically.
Milo’s smile calcified. He was pissed. Though the edges of his mouth remained turned up, his nostrils flared, and tiny pale spots appeared on either side of his little Scandinavian nose.
“Of course,” Milo said stiffly with a forced chuckle, as if he and Thorne were sharing an inside joke that everyone else was too provincial to comprehend. “I see her anatomy as deliberately destabilized to reflect some sort of psychological fragmentation, but I hear your point on the light source. Totally valid.” Now it was Thorne’s turn to be pissed. What was this pathetic 20-some-year-old doing telling him his comment was “totally valid”? Damn straight it was valid. Along with all of his other comments.
Thorne shook his head once and hard, then turned his back on Milo without saying a word. Not one. He sneered in disgust, then shuffled toward the easel farthest from Milo’s — Isabelle’s.
Thorne stopped in front of her painting, immediately mesmerized. The room suddenly went silent. Even Milo stopped his incessant scratching and assessed his surroundings. Their instructor stood in front of Izzy’s easel for what seemed an hour, his hands jammed hard into his back pockets, white eyebrows drawn down into a single horizontal line. Isabelle didn’t move. She held her brush at her side and focused on keeping her back straight, head upright.
“Where did you learn to lay down a shadow like that?” Thorne asked. His voice was no longer flat; it had that sharp, vibrating curiosity of an old dog discovering a fresh scent. “My mother, who’s not an artist, encouraged me to draw what’s right in front of me, whatever I saw,” Isabelle said, her voice steady. “And she said not to create something I wished was there. Only what was real.” This technique seemed to work. Izzy was in sync with the subject, the subject in sync with her. Their communication was on a deep level, and yet neither had said even one word to the other.
Thorne stepped closer to Izzy’s canvas, his face just inches from her wet brushstrokes. With his charcoal-stained thumb, he pointed, without touching, the juncture at which the model’s neck met the trapezius. “Look at this,” he barked at the room, not turning around. “All of you. Come here.” He summoned them with his right forefinger.
The three fellowship students came over immediately, as did the doctor. Milo, on the other hand, lingered at his easel, considering whether to follow his instructor’s directive or ignore his command. It was Milo’s choice, as always, to decide what he did or did not want to do. He contemplated his options, then casually wiped his hands on a damp linen rag, then strolled over to Izzy’s easel, his hands tucked in his deep back pockets, his face radiating an aura of indulgent amusement. As if.
“This isn’t illustration,” Thorne postulated, gesturing at Izzy’s figure on the canvas. “This is compression, an understanding that the figure is an engine under pressure, not just a physical form with skin tones and shadows. Her paint is thick where the load is heavy, and disappears where the light breaks. And look: the whole damn ribcage is breathing.” He turned his faded blue eyes on Isabelle. “What’s your name again?”
“Izzy,” she said. “Izzy Tétreau.”
“Keep going, Tétreau,” Thorne said, giving her easel an approving double rap with his knuckles. “And don’t touch up the face or create more detail there. You’ll ruin it. Spend your time working on the hips. That’s where this woman’s story lies. In her hips.”
He shuffled back to his table and poured himself a cup of lukewarm tea from his ancient thermos.
The workshop students drifted back to their stations, murmuring in low, impressed tones, the skinny kid giving Isabelle an awed, conspiratorial grin before picking up his charcoal and resuming his picture.
Milo Ross didn’t return to his station. He stayed right where he was, just three feet from Izzy’s elbow. Intimidating. Now there’s a word.
I watched him from the shadows. Up close, his physical beauty was almost aggressive— the symmetrical planes of his face, the amber flecks in his dark eyes, the effortless way his wool jacket hung from his broad shoulders. But his eyes. They were not looking at Izzy’s canvas with the considered curiosity of a colleague. He was raging, his eyes shifting back and forth from Izzy’s portrait to her profile. These microexpressions were nearly imperceptible, as Milo’s head didn’t move.
Then suddenly, as he was gazing at Izzy, a look of recognition spread across his face. I was the only person who saw it. Following that was a look of disbelief and a whispered, “fuck me.” He recognized Isabelle. Then, as quickly as this revelation had come to him, he shoved it down. No one must see his reaction.
Milo stood back. He looked at Izzy’s heavy glasses, at the thick, blunt cut of her auburn hair. He looked down at the unnatural stiffness of her posture, then scanned the outline of her torso beneath the oversized work shirt. His artist’s eye was analyzing, assessing. This was pure predation.
Then, in that polished tone of voice at which Milo was so practiced, he quietly stated: “This hits. You’ve figured this out, Izzy.” His words could not have been more insincere, and yet she hadn’t detected the lie. That soft, rubbery timbre of Milo’s voice conveyed that what he had to say was intimate, meant only for the two of them. Yet others, myself included, could hear every syllable he spoke. And all of our reactions were different. Mine manifested itself as nausea.
Oblivious, preoccupied, Isabelle dipped her brush into the mineral spirits. She kept her reply short: “Thanks.”
“No, really,” he said, stepping even closer, right into her personal space. She could feel his breath on her neck; she could smell him: cedarwood, bergamot — expensive laundry detergent. “Your work is visceral,” he said, caressing her with his tenor voice. “It has that raw, wounded quality a lot of collectors seem to respond to. Good job.” Izzy’s thought bubble was about to burst: “This guy is a first-rate asshole.” This she knew: Milo was not a dealer, nor a buyer. He was not an art professor or critic. In fact, he was barely a painter. He was, however, a 24-year-old kid working on applications for grad school, and he happened to have an impressive vocabulary and was trilingual. Who the fuck cares? Certainly not Izzy.
Isabelle paused, her brush hovering over the glass jar of turpentine. She turned her head and looked at Milo through her Henry Kissinger glasses. “Wounded?” She laughed, and we could all feel his balls retracting into his pelvis. I think they call that the cremasteric reflex.
“Oh, yeah,” Milo asserted, smiling that radiant, perfect smile that gave the impression we were so very lucky to be sharing his oxygen. “I can see you’re working through some heavy somatic stuff. The tension is decidedly defensive — those thick layers of paint are just a structural wall you’ve built around the subject. It’s fascinating psychologically.” The arrogance. This kid was vile.
In a matter of minutes, Milo had taken the instructor’s pure, technical praise and retrofitted it into a psychological pathology. He’d turned Izzy’s strength into a symptom, her precision into fear, and then he’d framed his unsolicited, amateur psychoanalysis as an act of artistic generosity.
This was negging as a high art form — and Milo was so very practiced at it. And to what end? Why would a handsome young man in his 20s need to act like this? Who did he imagine he was fooling with this song and dance?
I took half a step out of the shadows, white-knuckling my fists inside my coat pockets, my maternal instincts screaming at me to walk out onto that polished concrete and tell Arthur Ross’s grandson that if he didn’t back away from my daughter, I would shove that antique mahlstick up his ass. A charcoal prostate massager.
Then I saw Isabelle’s gesture. She didn’t shrink or look down. She was not helpless. She was not swayed by his arrogant banter. She set her palette knife on the glass with a sharp, clear clink, one that echoed off the high rafters.
“Our model’s name is Martha,” she said to Milo, her voice dropping into the contralto of a luna wolf. The effect registered? That violence was right around the corner, and should Milo take even one more step forward, either literally or metaphorically, there would be a wholly unpleasant consequence. “Martha works forty hours a week as a waitress, and has severe bursitis in her left hip, which causes her to lean two degrees into her right heel. This is not ‘somatic stuff,’ Milo. I’m painting Martha’s bursitis, her physical pain. If you’d spent less time diagnosing my subconscious actions and put your energy toward actually looking at our subject, that Caravaggio wanna be you’re drawing wouldn’t look like an airbrushed velvet painting from Enrico’s Taqueria.”
That skinny kid from UC Davis let out a spontaneous, choked snort. He was trying to stifle the uncontrollable laughter that was bubbling up, and was working as hard as he could to disguise it as a coughing fit. In this, he failed. The laughter was contagious — soon the whole class had a case of the snorts, chuckling and throat-clearing. It was enough to make one consider putting on an N95 mask.
Milo didn’t flinch through any of this. His smile widened, eyes brightening with a sudden, electric intensity. He didn’t look insulted; he looked aroused. The laughing hadn’t driven him off; it wasn’t making him angry, at least it didn’t appear that way. The other students’ reactions had simply opened a door — the door behind which was his justification for doing his damnedest. To inflict injury. To ruin someone’s life. To settle a score. To take what he wanted, what was his.
No one talked to Milo the way Izzy had just done. She would pay a price for this.
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