Odalisque
Forty-seven
WE MANAGED TO GET ALMOST HALF the wall sketched on Sunday.
I was thankful I wasn’t doing this alone. Five of us working and we managed to get half the wall sketched in a weekend. We weren’t slow. We didn’t have all that much time to work. We didn’t have decent light until eight or eight-thirty. With the canvas awning over us and on both ends, the daylight was even more limited. We had to quit by four. At least we were getting four or five minutes more daylight every day, so by the next weekend, there would be half an hour more light.
Doc called me aside and calmed me down when I was about to panic and declare the whole project a loss.
“Remember, Tony, we’re only working weekends and short hours until you have your quarter break,” he said. “We’ve got weather, daylight, and volunteer hours to contend with—not to mention the temperature.” Top temperature this week had been forty-five degrees. We were all working in layers to keep warm. “Without heavy-duty work lights on the wall here, we can only get seven hours of work on a good day. If we get a lot of rain in April, we’ll have to consider getting lighting in under the tarp. I’ve got some ideas on how to light the wall. Just hang in there. You’re doing a good job so far.”
I needed those words of encouragement. I still went from being pleased and proud when I finished a square foot of wall sketching to being totally panicked when I looked at the thirty-two hundred square feet of the total. Fortunately, there wouldn’t be much sketching to be done on the bottom six or seven feet of the wall. Since we were treating the wall like it was a mirror tilted forward, the first few feet, up to the top of the doors would reflect the narrow strip of pavement and the track. I was going to delegate that portion to Sandra and Melody since they were so good with textures.
The week was a blur of study, write, and beat a little blue ball against a wall. I had some catch-up to do for my classes and that included a massive amount of reading and a paper that Professor Strait gave me an extra week to complete. We had a killer section exam in Human Physiology and I had to meet with Clarice between that and Literary Criticism.
But all week long, it was beat the little blue ball.
I’d been negligent in my training while I was trying to get the wall project launched. We needed a name for that, too. I didn’t know what to call the thing. I figured something would come to me. But starting Monday afternoon, Lissa had me on the court and reminded me that I was now just four weeks from National Intercollegiate Championships. We’d competed in local tournaments, but they were all club tournaments. There just aren’t enough teams locally for an intercollegiate tournament and the school wasn’t funding long trips, not that we had time to leave for five days to go to California anyway.
I played every team we could field. Walt frequently got the brunt of my attention as the only other guy on the team who was playing singles. Brent and Franklin took their turns and when that wasn’t enough, I played the two of them. When Tonya was able to practice, I played against her and Whitney, but Tonya’s schedule was just beginning to loosen up as the SCU women’s basketball team had just been eliminated from the playoffs. Something weird, though, was that the eliminated teams continued to play each other, even though they were no longer competing for a title. She was at least making our two team practices a week now. Of course, Whitney was ramping up to leave racquetball and hit the spring track meets. She was hoping for a berth on the Olympic team, but admitted that she was still a foot short of Olympic competition in the long jump and probably needed to shave two seconds off her hurdles time in order to keep from being humiliated on the track.
Both Bree and Rachel were driving each other on the court. Both were small and had been cheerleaders. Rachel still was a cheerleader, but football and basketball were the only sports the cheerleaders really worked. When I looked at them on the court, I kept thinking we need a peewee league for women who weigh less than a hundred pounds. At five-two and one-ten, Bree looked like an Amazon next to tiny Rachel. They could both hide behind Whitney or Tonya.
Since Whitney joined Lissa and me last week on our play day, she was much more relaxed. It was like she got over some big hurdle. Lissa had the two of us do some doubles work. Lissa couldn’t compete in the Intercollegiate, but Whitney and I could become a mixed doubles team. It was John who came up to Lissa and told her that unlike opens, there was no mixed doubles division at Intercollegiates. As far as I could tell, the entire team was planning to travel to Tempe.
Racquetball is a club sport, not an NCAA sanctioned game, so tournaments are a little different. First off, any collegiate player can enter the Intercollegiate Championships. We all had to be tested and ranked for what division we would play in. I was already ranked as an elite player and would play in Division One. Franklin and Brent were ranked at our tournament before Christmas and would play in Division Two. It looked like Whitney and Tonya were going to be in Division Three, and Bree and Rachel would be in Division Six. We really didn’t know where Walt would be placed. It looked like it could be Division four, but he was such an athletic player that the judges might move him into Division Three. We had to get a USAR official to give final blessing on our divisions.
The Intercollegiates are also different in that even though it is a national championship, it is a qualifying event for National Singles. Sam had already given approval for anyone on the podium at NIC to go to National Singles, even though that’s not actually an Intercollegiate event. Anyone who entered the Intercollegiate was eligible to go to National Singles. The college would pay for their trip to Fullerton, California if they placed in the top three in their division. The big prize, of course, was that the winner of the Men’s and Women’s Division One Gold Singles would be named to the U.S. Adult National Team. That was a huge deal and would include international competitions. Lissa was on the U.S. Adult National Team last year, but she declined the appointment because she just can’t travel that much with the boys. She did a lot of travel to competitions before we got together in her first year as an Opens champion and was pushing me to get there.
More of our team showed up for the unofficial practices on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tonya couldn’t make Wednesday and Friday because of basketball. Others had sporadic commitments that kept them away, but everyone was getting at least three or four practices a week. I still practiced five days a week, spent four hours doing PK, and had Pilates on Saturday morning until we started painting. John tried to get my Pilates schedule changed, but it looked like now that the wall was underway, I’d have to wait until after spring break to continue. I still made time for my weekly massage from Bree.
“Um… Bree?” She was rocking on my pelvis and was getting the expected result. We were in the sports therapy massage room at SCU, so I was properly draped and she was properly clothed.
“Yeah?” She sounded far away.
“You know, when you do that it always gets me… aroused.”
“But I’m not doing anything wrong or illegal,” she said. “I’m not touching you inappropriately.”
“Right. It always makes me wish you were,” I confessed.
“I should start doing the Friday massage at your place,” she said. “I just… don’t want help with it.”
“What’s happening with you and Melody?” I asked.
“I’m her… personal masseuse. I massage her. Personally. And she returns the favor.” Bree was definitely panting and I was definitely tenting the sheet.
“It was nice having you with us last week. I don’t think I got a chance to tell you that,” I said softly. If she kept this up, I’d explode.
“Thank you… for teaching me… how to satisfy her,” Bree said. “And for satisfying me.” She groaned. “Oh hell!” I heard a squirt of oil and her hand snaked under the sheet and grabbed my cock. I turned my head enough to see her other hand snake into her pants and that was all she wrote. I came. So did Bree.
We froze, panting, both of us biting our lips so we wouldn’t make any noise. I lifted my hand to her cheek and pulled her face down to where I could kiss her.
“We definitely can’t have massages here any longer,” she said. “I’ll call Melody tonight.”
Saturday, the weather cooperated and my team was on the scaffold drawing at eight-thirty. We worked hard. It was obvious to me that we each had different styles as we sketched in the drawing, square-by-square. Amy tended to make big, bold, simple strokes to delineate the color areas. Jim, Maggie, and I had the most similar styles. I guess we’d all had pretty much the same classes. That gave me pause. How much was my education at PCAD influencing my style? I noticed, though, that Kate and Doc had a style that was more similar to each other than to the rest of us. That surprised me because Kate was much more detailed and I expected that Doc would not be that way. I didn’t remember that his mural sketch was that detailed last spring.
I stepped back to look at what we had accomplished and almost fell off the scaffold.
“Damn! I hate this,” I said.
“What is it, Tony?” Doc asked. He put down his sheaf of drawings and climbed down a level on the scaffold to where I was working.
“I can’t see what we’re doing,” I complained. I led Doc out into the field. We looked back at the wall. “Even if I remember not to step back too far and fall off the scaffold, when I come out here to look at it, I can’t see what we’re doing because the damn scaffold is in the way.”
“This could be a problem, Tony,” Doc said. “We’ve been focused on seeing just the square, but when you start painting, you will need to see at least what you are working on. If we follow the strategy we laid out, we’d have people painting relatively small sections all over the wall and we’d never be able to see what they all look like.”
“Did Michelangelo have this problem?” I asked. Doc laughed.
“Probably, but he didn’t have any alternatives to using scaffolding. We might. I’ll go make some calls.” Doc left and the rest of us kept plodding along sketching things in. By Sunday night, most of the sketching was done. Next weekend, we would be ready to paint.
It didn’t go that smoothly. I ran through an examination of the blocks on Saturday afternoon. This was supposed to be routine. I would just verify that every grid block on the wall—all 3,200 of them—had the right sketch in it. It should match seamlessly with the eight blocks surrounding it. Of course, they didn’t.
Almost dead center in the wall, the numbering in the thirty tier was screwed up. Who knows how? I must have miscounted the grids when I was numbering the upper left corner of the major blocks. One block only had nine units across. There wasn’t much on the edges, so there was no ready indication that something wasn’t matching the border. If I’d been able to stand back and look at the damned thing from the field, it would have been obvious. All six of us sat down under the scaffold and had a pity party for half an hour, bitching about not being able to see what we were working on.
Sunday my crew came out and nobly used fifty hard red erasers to obliterate the content of five hundred grid units and then redraw them.
I was beginning to dread the next three months.
The week before finals week at SCU was spring break at PCAD, so all the volunteers from PCAD were gone. That weekend, absolutely nothing was done on the wall because we were cramming for SCU finals. It was two weeks of dead time in which hidden behind the scaffold was a finished sketch and about three grid units with test splashes of paint.
All I wanted to do was get out there.
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