Triptych
Seven
“TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND?” I croaked. “I’ve never even seen that much money, let alone know where I can get it. How are we going to finance it?”
We were in our second favorite meeting place—the spa. The dining room where we held the board meeting? That’s like third or fourth on our list of meeting places, but we had Jack there. Now it was just the three of us, soaking in the tub. Melody still had her hair up and was wearing her glasses, which were fogged over. She’d proven to us that she was, indeed, wearing garters—and not much else—under her skirt, but we’d managed to get her out of them.
“Who do we know that we can borrow from?” Melody asked. “My dad probably has that money, but the chances that I could get it from him are between zero and none.”
“Not my folks,” I said. “I’m pretty sure they’ve got more than Social Security to live on when they retire, but Dad’s a school teacher and Mom makes dolls. I might be able to talk them out of some of my college funds since I’ve got a scholarship, but they just gave me a car.”
“I don’t think parents are a good funding resource,” Lissa said. “No more than I’d take the money from Jack, even though he’s already said he would front it. I just don’t think that’s a good idea. But we’ve got to come up with something.”
I reached over in front of Melody and drew hearts in the steam on her glasses. She had to take them off to see what I’d done, after which I got a big kiss. And then another. There was a lot of fumbling and groping that went on after that and… well… we never did get back to the issue of capitalization.
I walked into Carmine’s Cucina on Thursday at noon and a very reserved Wendy met me at the door.
“Usual, Mr. Ames?” she asked.
“Uh… Wendy?”
She pointed at Clarice’s booth and I saw there was another person in the booth with her. I nodded at Wendy.
“Okay.”
She smiled and I went over to join Clarice.
“Is this a good time, Clarice?” I asked. “I can come back later.”
“Tony. We were waiting for you. Here, sit with me.”
She slid over on the bench to make room and I sat face-to-face with a middle-aged woman. She had coal black hair with a streak of white through it that reminded me of that late-night horror movie lady on television. She was wearing way too much makeup for any normal person and her eyebrows had been plucked or waxed and then drawn back on with a pencil. She was dressed simply, but her blouse was unbuttoned one button too far—make that two buttons—so her bra and cleavage were exposed. I suppose that if I thought less critically, the look might have been sexy on a woman half her age. But it looked kind of sad on her.
“Sharon Reeves, I’d like to introduce you to Tony Ames. Tony, Sharon would like you to paint her portrait.”
I recognized the name before the woman. She had sent me a picture. I was pretty sure now that the picture wasn’t recent. The woman snaked her hand across the table and I took it. At least she had a firm handshake.
“Nice to meet you Mr. Ames.”
“Please, call me Tony,” I said. “The pleasure is mine.”
Sharon looked at me, then at Clarice. She shook her head slowly side-to-side and lowered her gaze to the table.
“What a stupid fuckup,” she sighed.
What did I do?
“I’m sorry, Ms. Reeves…”
“No, no. Not you, Tony. Me,” she said. “I must look like a complete tramp to you.” She immediately started fiddling with her buttons and pulling them together. “I am not a cougar. Somehow, I imagined you would see me like you painted those glorious young women I saw at the exhibition. I can tell by your eyes that you just see a trashy old woman. I should have known better.”
Clarice gave me a nudge which I assumed meant that I should reassure the woman. What could I say?
“Um… is that how you’d like to be seen?” I asked. “I find that sometimes we think of ourselves differently in our heads than in our mirrors. I had a model in class last fall who was a really old woman—I mean 80s at least—who loved the portrait one of my classmates did showing her with no wrinkles. She said it captured who she really was.”
“My god. Do you psychoanalyze all your clients? Yes, that’s how I want to think of myself. I want to see me as I was when I was twenty and fresh and had four fewer children and two fewer husbands. I need someone to Photoshop me, not paint me.”
“Well, let’s go back a bit,” I suggested. “Let’s say you’ve never seen me—in other words, like five minutes ago. How did you imagine me?”
“I imagined you had a beard,” she began. “I thought you would have long, narrow hands and an angular face. I thought you might have long hair, probably pulled back in a ponytail. You were taller.”
“Were you disappointed?”
“Perhaps. But not anymore. The artist I imagined was not very bright.” We laughed and the ice began to thaw. I reached into my pack and got a sketchbook. Sharon’s eyes grew wide as she realized I was going to sketch her right there at the table. “Oh no! Not looking like this. Please.”
“It’s not a camera,” I said. “Let me show you what I see.”
While I sketched, Clarice captured Sharon’s attention with contract details, explaining my working process. I didn’t know I had one, but Clarice told Sharon that I would always be accompanied by a chaperone, but that the chaperone did not need to be positioned where she could see my client if there were modesty issues. She said that the sitting would include reference photographs. We would work for a period of approximately two hours to do sketches. If Sharon did not see a pose that she liked, a second sitting of two hours would be scheduled. If we couldn’t agree on a pose, she would pay a cancellation fee that would cover my time and labor. If we agreed on a pose, I would take additional reference photos and then I would do the painting in my studio. The finished work would be delivered when completed and installed if desired, but the contract would specifically indicate that the painting would be used but not sold in the artist’s premier exhibition. Framing was at the client’s expense.
Sharon had become so attentive to what Clarice was explaining that she completely forgot I was drawing. And as her face relaxed, I began to see the woman she saw inside. I repositioned her eyebrows, emphasized the joy in her expressions while letting the frown lines disappear. I softened her lips and tried to imagine what they would be like in her husband’s or lover’s eyes. I dropped the white streak in her hair to just a highlight. As I drew, I felt myself begin to smile. I could paint this woman.
Clarice noticed when I’d stopped and re-directed the conversation.
“Now, Sharon, what remains is to see whether you believe Tony’s vision is compatible with what you would like to have in a portrait. Why don’t we take a look and see what you think?”
I handed Sharon the sketchbook and she looked at it intently. Her expression suggested to me that she was coolly receptive at best. But then it began to change. She traced parts of the drawing with her finger. She tilted her head to match the image. And as she laid the sketchbook down on the table, I saw a tear escape from her eye. She looked at me and simply nodded. Clarice filled in the blanks on a contract and pushed it over to Sharon. She signed it and then dug her checkbook out of her purse, quickly filling in the numbers and signing the check.
“We only require fifty percent at signing,” Clarice said.
“Oh well. I don’t mind paying up front,” Sharon answered.
We set a time on Monday to meet for our first posing session and Sharon excused herself. She shook my hand, then held it for an instant longer than was necessary as she nodded again. When she was out the door, my salad and Coke instantly appeared in front of me.
“Sorry it took so long, Tony,” Wendy said. “I didn’t want to disturb you while you were drawing.”
“Thanks Wendy. I really appreciate it,” I said. She beamed.
“Well, Tony? What do you think?” Clarice asked as she held out the check for me to see. Wow!
“Um…I thought we agreed on $2,000 as the price,” I said. “This is for $2,300.”
“Well…there’s really no reason for you to pay my commission if the client is willing to. You will get $2,070. Pretty close to what we agreed on.”
“But I can’t take it yet. I need to actually do the work.”
“Your name isn’t on the check, my dear boy. It will be held in escrow until the work is completed. Then the funds will be released to your bank account. You are now a working artist. If you don’t have a chaperone for Monday, by the way, I will arrange my schedule to accompany you. I wouldn’t mind being there for your first outing.”
Lissa and I cut our workout a little short on Friday and rushed home to help Melody get ready for dinner with the James family. The house smelled incredible but I think every pan and flat surface in the kitchen was a mess. I set about scrubbing up the dishes while Melody put the finishing touches on the salad and Lissa set the dining table for five adults and four children. This was going to be interesting. At least we outnumbered the rugrats.
Lissa answered the door promptly at 6:00 p.m. and the house was instant chaos. Damon and Drew had been keyed up all afternoon, according to Molly, who had dropped them off at five. They were so excited to have an evening play date with their school friends. Fortunately, dinner was ready to be served, so by 6:20 we were all sitting at the table dishing up the most spectacular meal I’d ever tasted.
“What is this, Lissa?” Noelle asked. “It’s delicious.”
“Melody cooked tonight,” Lissa said.
“It’s called pastitsio,” Melody said. “It’s Greek macaroni and cheese.”
“It should be called ‘dirty every dish in the kitchen’,” I moaned. “What was that stuff I was scrubbing out of the saucepan?”
“It’s a béchamel sauce,” Melody explained. “Sorry I left the pan on the stove after I poured the sauce over the top.”
“And I assume this has no calories and no fat,” Patrick said. He took a sip of the wine he’d brought. It was a nice gesture, but when Lissa and I declined because we’re in training and Melody pulled her ‘do I look old enough to drink?’ routine, Noelle decided to be the designated driver for her family. So Patrick was the only one with a glass.
“I hope that’s not an issue,” Melody said. “I’m not sure there’s a way to make a low-calorie, low-fat version of this. It has your entire month’s allotment of cholesterol, just in the egg-yolks.”
“Ah,” Patrick said, turning to Noelle, “so you have an accomplice in your plot to collect my life insurance.” We all laughed.
The kids, of course, raced through their meal so they could go play. To a one, they had scraped off the top béchamel layer and left the meat layer, having only eaten the macaroni and cheese part. They politely asked to be excused and all the parents gave their assent. I think when they disappeared back into the boys’ bedroom that we all breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well, now we can have adult conversation,” Noelle sighed. “What do you think? Twenty minutes?”
“If we’re lucky,” Lissa said.
“Then talk fast,” Noelle prompted “The secret.”
Lissa took a deep breath and looked at Melody and me.
“Tony and Melody are my partners,” Lissa said.
“What kind of business?” Patrick automatically asked.
“Oh. Well we have a new fashion line coming out this fall.”
“Lissa?” I raised an eyebrow at her.
“This was so much easier when it was your friends,” Lissa laughed. “We are business partners, but Tony and Melody are my life partners.”
Noelle squealed and bounced in her seat in a way that was reminiscent of Melody. There was a little more of Noelle that was bouncing, though, and I tore my eyes away from what I was seeing. Patrick, on the other hand, was staring at us with his mouth open. He took a huge gulp of wine and refilled his glass.
“You mean you both share Tony?” he asked.
“We all share each other,” I said.
“Oh.”
Noelle wanted to know all the details about when we’d met, how we fell in love, and even how we were going to manage the legal aspects of being a four-parent family. We told her as much as was appropriate. If she had prurient interests in what we did—and I could tell she did—she’d just have to let her imagination run wild. Patrick listened. He wasn’t critical, but I was sure he shared some of his wife’s interest in the intimate details we weren’t sharing. Gradually, he re-entered the conversation and, if anything, was more bemused than amazed.
“Sweetheart,” he said as he casually put his arm around his wife, “it strikes me that you’ve been negligent in our relationship. Why haven’t you brought a cute nineteen-year-old into our lives? We could have an expanded relationship.”
I held my breath for a moment. That kind of remark could be explosive and besides, it wasn’t what we were all about. I suppose that for most men, though, that was the way we’d be seen. Noelle didn’t miss a beat, though.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. She leaned in to talk to Lissa conspiratorially, but loudly enough for all of us to hear. “You know that new tennis pro at the club? I swear he doesn’t look like he’s out of high school, but he is so built! I got him to work with me on my backhand for nearly half an hour Wednesday. I had to shower twice.”
“Hey!” Patrick said. “Not a guy!”
“Oh, darling,” Noelle said sympathetically. “What good would bringing a girl into the family do? You know 19 would go into 31 a lot more times than 36 would ever go into 19.” Wine came out Patrick’s nose and we had a great laugh, which he joined enthusiastically.
“Well, it looks like I’ll have to polish up my bi-genes a bit,” Patrick laughed. “Want to give me a hand, Tony?”
“Uh… we don’t really share outside the family, Patrick,” I said. “I met a nice guy on campus last week who might be interested, though.”
“Don’t you dare,” Noelle said turning Patrick’s face to her. “We aren’t sharing outside the family anymore either.”
Well, that might have been too much information, but it piqued my curiosity. We definitely weren’t in Nebraska anymore. Sorry, Toto; I meant Kansas. Noelle deftly changed the conversation.
“Melody, I meant to ask you about your dress. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’m just enthralled. Where did you get it?”
Melody’s cobalt blue sundress set off her auburn hair perfectly. Spaghetti straps over her shoulders left acres of beautiful pale skin exposed. There was a ruffle of fabric at the bust line and the waist was cinched with a matching belt that tied in a cute bow. The skirt stopped several inches above her totally edible knees. What was most striking, though, were the little stars all over the dress. They were pale blue against the deeper blue background and appeared completely random.
“I made this,” Melody said. “It’s a standard pattern, but I did some modifications, including the fabric.”
“The fabric is beautiful. What is it?”
“Well, it’s a light cotton,” Melody began, “but it was solid blue when I bought it.”
“You dyed it?”
“Sort of. It’s a dye discharge technique. Instead of using colored dye, you use a bleaching agent and suck the color out of the fabric. It’s almost never done commercially. There’s about a million ways it could be messed up. I confess that it took me three yards of material to make a dress that only uses a yard and a quarter.”
“You should sell these. Lissa, were you serious that you have a new fashion line coming out this fall? Is this part of it?”
We all three looked at each other with our eyes getting wider. We were going to need another board meeting.
Before Patrick and Noelle bundled up their kids and took them home, Noelle had placed an order for three summer sundresses from Melody and agreed to pay for the extra fabric so Melody could experiment with different discharge designs.
“Could we do that?” I asked Lissa and Melody as I cuddled up with them in our favorite meeting place.
“It’s massive,” Melody said. “I’ve never even considered doing it with the quantity of material that we’re talking about. We’d have to set up our own manufacturing facility to prepare the fabric. I’ve got to talk to Professor DeWitt. It might not even be possible.”
“We’d never be able to make athletic wear out of cotton, though,” Lissa said. “It just isn’t sexy enough.”
“Rayon,” Melody said. “Dye discharge works well on any natural fabric like cotton, silk, or wool. Rayon is a sexy, durable, pseudo-natural fabric that will work, as well. We just can’t use microfibers or polys.”
“It could cut our start-up costs by nearly half and give us a product that simply couldn’t be replicated,” I said. I could see the possibility of some patents as well if we had to create any special equipment to do the work. Hell, dream big.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
