Odalisque
Five
“I’M GLAD YOU’RE UP,” Kate said. They got back from the Aquarium at one o’clock and the boys were bouncing off the walls. Lissa and I had awakened at noon got up to have our coffee. I wasn’t feeling too bad, but I knew that after my three o’clock study session with Rio, I’d probably be bushed. At least, I would have company in a nice warm bed tonight. I had a little pang of sorrow for the folks who would continue to spend every night alone in a tent.
“Come here, Kitten,” I said, standing up from the table. I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her soundly. “I love you.”
“Ooo. You gave me goosebumps. Look at my arm!” Indeed, blowing in her ear as I whispered to her had raised little bumps all down her arm. “Just stay here and… No. Go into the living room and I’ll be right back!” She was off to the garage.
“What was that about?” I asked as Melody flowed into my arms.
“I don’t know, but she’s been giddy all day,” Melody said.
“In fact, it started yesterday, but you two were otherwise engaged,” Lissa answered. “What on earth is she up to?” We moved into the living room and sat down to wait.
“Damon? Drew?” Kate called. “Come help me, please.” The rest of us waited with odd expressions on our faces.
At last, Kate and the boys tugged and lugged a large box into the living room. It was nearly three feet wide and cube-shaped. They dragged the thing over to me at my chair.
“This came Friday for you,” Kate said. “Well, it came to me to give to you. I got a letter, too. It’s a birthday present from my family for us.”
“What on earth did they send us?” I asked, looking at the label. It was addressed to Kate with a message under the address label that said, “Do not open. Read the letter.”
“Okay,” Kate said. She was out of breath from dragging the thing in. “According to the letter, I have to go out of the room while you open the present. You have to follow the instructions inside and then I’ll come back out. Okay?” I nodded dumbly and Kate ran to the bedroom.
I looked at Melody, Lissa, and the boys and shrugged my shoulders.
“Well, should we find out what’s in here?” I asked. The boys were beside themselves with excitement. Lissa and Melody nodded. I tore into the packing material. On the top inside the box was a big sheet of paper that that said DON’T HIT IT YET! Underneath was an envelope that said OPEN ME FIRST!
“What is it?” Melody asked. Drew and Damon had their heads almost all the way inside the box.
“It’s a drum,” I answered. This wasn’t a little drum. It was almost as big as the one the guys were beating the night we were at Kate’s parents. Tucked down beside it were two big mallets. “Here’s what the letter says. ‘Tony, Happy birthday! Sorry this is late, but it takes time to build one this size. I know you are going to say you don’t know how to play it, but Kate says you pay a lot of attention to music. So here is what you do. Set it on the wooden blocks that are at the bottom of the box. Then think of your favorite song. You don’t have to sing it, just think the melody. When you’ve got it in your mind, just tap out the words on the drum head with the mallets. It’s like Professor Hill’s Think Method. Only you won’t reproduce the melody, you’ll have a great rhythm going instead. Once you start, don’t stop. The second part of the present only comes when you’ve got the rhythm going.’ Wow!” I said.
We pulled the drum the rest of the way out of the box and found the blocks to set it on.
“Oh, I see,” Melody said. “The blocks will let the sound out the bottom. Otherwise it would be muffled against the carpet!”
“Smart!” I said. “But what song?”
“Something you know, obviously,” Lissa said.
“I’ve got an idea.” I reached for my music player and headset. I scrolled through my music list and let the song run once in the headset.
“What is it?” Lissa asked.
“It’s not important. I’m going to lay in a drum track that was never in the piece and you don’t need to know what the music is. You just need to hear the rhythm. Damn! This is fun! Ready?”
Everyone nodded. Melody and Lissa each had one of the boys in her lap. I started the music through my earphones and hit the drum with the mallet. Man! It made a big sound. The whole house seemed to shake. The boys put their hands over their ears in shock. I moderated exactly how hard I hit the drum.
I’d followed the tempo for only about thirty seconds when I heard a chime from nearby. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Kate entering the room to my beat, clinking together finger cymbals. I almost dropped the mallet. God, she’s gorgeous. Especially when she’s dressed in a gypsy outfit like I saw at her home. As I continued to play the rhythm, she began to dance around the living room. With Kate’s movement and the cymbals, I didn’t need the music in my ears to keep the cadence and rhythm going. I shook my headset off and just kept drumming. I was blown away by how easy it was once I had a tempo and rhythm firmly in mind. Mostly, Kate was following my lead, but then she’d claim the lead with the cymbals and her dance and I’d just follow along. Melody and Lissa were rocking back and forth to the rhythm and the boys started clapping their hands. Kate faced the four of them on the sofa and beckoned to them with her hands. Soon all three women and the two boys were dancing in a circle. Melody and Lissa quickly started to follow Kate’s moves. The boys were just shaking their booties to the music and seemed lost in their own world.
While Kate led the dancing, I kept up the rhythm. We shifted subtly from one pattern to another, and I just matched what she was doing to a song in my head. It was wild; it was carefree. Our whole family was dancing. We kept it up for about fifteen minutes when I began to lose the rhythm. No matter how enthusiastic you are, you have to build up some endurance. The girls collapsed onto each other on the floor and the boys spun themselves silly and fell on top. We were all laughing like crazy.
“That was so fun!” Melody said. “I didn’t know you could dance!”
“We never told you that part of the story,” I said, “but you saw the picture I drew of Kate and her mom dancing.”
“I thought they just posed that!” Lissa laughed. “Oh, Kate, darling, you are wonderful!”
“Back home we dance almost every weekend,” Kate said. “It’s one of the things I’ve missed. But it’s not the same without the big drums. Grandpa Ken said he was going to make sure that Tony knew the secret to making me dance.”
“Now that I know it, you’ll never get any rest!” I said.
“You are going to be sore,” Lissa said. “I bet drumming will improve your forehand in the game.”
“Oh man! Just what I need is another style to toss in to the mix.”
“You know, it’s not dumb, though,” Kate said. “You saw what it was like with three men beating the drum. The rhythms are incredible. I’ll bet you and Lissa would make a great pair. And I know there’s a smaller box still in my room with at least one more pair of mallets.”
“You didn’t bring them over?” I asked.
“Well, the instructions in my letter were pretty explicit. Grandpa said that we could learn the rhythm of life together by playing together, but we’d learn just as much when I danced to your playing. Oh, I’m so happy he sent you a drum!”
“I’m not very good at it, but I’ll get better. I promise.”
My study session with Rio went all right, though we had completely different opinions about what was fact and what was opinion. How do you find out what is real and what is bias?
I was happy to get home, but sad to find Kate had already returned to her dorm. There was a point where I wanted to drop the mallets and let my fingers strum the tune on her body earlier. The boys, of course, were enthralled with having a big drum in the house, but we decided that the mallets would live on the mantel and not on the drum. I showed them how they could play it with their hands, and joined them as we drummed a little before bedtime.
“I haven’t decided yet if I like this Grandpa Ken because he brought sensual dance into our home, or to hate him because he brought a drum into a home with a six- and an eight-year-old boy,” Lissa laughed.
That was the last thing I heard before I crashed into deep sleep.
Doc Henredon’s class on Tuesday was torturous. It wasn’t the project so much as the anxiety I was feeling over asking him his opinion of my newest work. Of all the people at PCAD, I’d learned the most from Doc. I guess I had a little hero worship. Lissa pressed me to bring the two new drawings to him. Kate stayed with me after class.
“Okay. Let’s see it,” he said abruptly as the class filed out. There was a legitimate reason for me to want to show him this. I wasn’t just looking for praise. I was wondering about how the pattern from focal point to focal point shifted with such a simple thing as the eyes and how to draw the attention back from the artist to the stack of unopened mail.
He looked at the two paintings intently. I hadn’t asked him a question yet. I just wanted his opinion first. Kate reached over and took my hand to stop me from fidgeting.
“This,” Doc said, pointing to the stack of mail. “You need to get back to this.”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. He looked up. “Sorry,” I continued. “That’s what I thought needed to happen, but I can’t figure out how to get there.”
“It’s tricky,” he said. “You’ve done a good job with these, by the way. I’m not denigrating what you’ve accomplished. This one follows a classic pattern and the eye is immediately caught by the first focal point and passed from point to point smoothly until you see the insouciance of the model in her deliberate ignoring of the unopened mail. Now this second piece requires more subtlety. You are passing the focus to the viewer and there needs to be a way to move it back into the picture. You can handle this any way you see fit, but I would suggest a slight change in the expression on your model’s face.”
“How would that affect the pattern?” I asked. “I really want the model to look up in the second painting.”
“Yes, but the expression is one of pleasure and love. You follow the line and there she is, looking at you with love. No one wants to leave that point. You bring them to a halt. If it were a solo piece, it would be fine. Warm feelings wash over the viewer. But as a companion piece, you don’t want viewers to stop here. You want them to search further. Harden the expression as if the model had just heard some criticism, and the viewer will throw himself back into the painting to find the cause of the censure. Then your previous pattern is picked up and we are led inexorably to the pile of mail. Do you see?”
“Wow!” Kate and I exclaimed together.
“Yes, I see,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out how to throw the viewer back into the painting, but that would work.”
“Try it in some sketches before you paint, Tony,” Doc advised. “Not because you can’t paint the expression and achieve that, but because you should test the knowledge to see if that is what you want to do. You might prefer to leave the painting with her looking lovingly at you and sell them separately, or simply hide one until far in the future.”
It was too late to meet Melody for coffee, but Kate and I went out for a light dinner before I headed for practice. I was a little confused when Kate took my portfolio and art supplies from me.
“I’ll just keep these until you finish practice,” she said. “They’ll be in my room with me if you want them back.” She grinned and I watched her head to her dorm as I turned toward the club.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
