The Prodigal
Fifty-three
MORGAN AND ADOLFO were fully committed to working with me every day instead of leaving school for spring break. We invited them to stay with us, but Adolfo was using the time to shack up with his girlfriend. Morgan was more than willing to join us. That shouldn’t be interpreted as anything more than staying at our house at night—not our bedroom. Kate, Morgan, and I left early every morning that week and met Adolfo at the chapel. Kate applied tiles to the twelfth mosaic and we managed to do five full panels.
I planned to crash Saturday and totally veg out. But Friday a sign had been added in our yard. Our home was officially for sale. We spent Saturday touring open houses on Queen Anne, Magnolia, Fremont, and Wallingford. By the time we were finished, we were ready to tear down the sign in our yard and think again about remodeling.
The next weekend, Melody and Lissa had a huge opening at Nordstrom featuring their new line of summer fashions and maternity sportswear. It was fun to watch Lissa ‘work the dress’ with her six-month baby-bump. God! She is so beautiful. All the manufacturing and warehousing was being done off-site now, so Melody had doubled her design efforts and Lissa upped the promotion a level. Nordstrom had an exclusive on the season. Penny worked her tail off with the Ice Queen accounting but still found time to help with our partnership accounts and to explain my royalty reports to me.
“Tell us the story, Tony,” Andy said when I came down off the lift. I looked around. My whole family was there. Doc, Clarice, Bob, Morgan, and Adolfo had joined us. My review committee, Coach Jacobson and Prof. Strait were joined by Doctor Bychkova. Father Michel joined the crowd. More people than I’d told a story too since I started work.
It was April Fool’s Day and I’d just finished the fortieth panel.
“This is a story about dreams and obsession,” I began. “This sweet girl—well, she’s a young woman now—has always dreamed big. From the time she was tiny, she always said, ‘I’m going to be a beauty queen.’ Of course, you could substitute your favorite dream here. Astronaut, rock star, artist, corporate executive, mommy, movie star, firefighter, cowboy. For her, it was beauty queen. She dressed in tutus and tiaras and convinced her parents to enter her in beauty contests when she was five. She walked the walk and talked the talk. She worked hard at her talent and took care of her body. But never quite won the big one. It was just possible that she could have won the prize for ‘Best Second Place Beauty Queen Ever.’ And she was unhappy.”
I’d talked to Andy for hours about this painting. We’d rehearsed the story a dozen times to make sure I didn’t implicate an individual. But I wanted to make sure the archbishop got the message. The woman in the painting was a prostitute. Giving up everything she believed in to become the one thing that was beyond her grasp.
The trickiest part was getting models for the piece. A man mounting a woman thrown down on her back with her head turned aside, her eyes glistening, but tears resolutely held back by her determination. I needed a model who couldn’t be recognized. And I had to carefully pose the couple so contact was implied, but no genitalia was visible.
Wendy had taken me shopping for a model. After our experience at the strip club in Las Vegas, she took me to a local strip club and as each dancer went to the stage or approached us for a dance, I shook my head. I just couldn’t get the right look and I wasn’t comfortable approaching one of them to pose for me. It was a disappointing evening until we got home and Wendy put on her own dance for me.
I finally went with the most beautiful queen I knew. Drag queen. Kevin and Eric were still dating and Eric agreed to come up for a long weekend while I sketched the couple. Kevin in his full makeup is beautiful. It wasn’t difficult to give a little swell to his breasts. Eric with a day’s growth of beard was a suitable dominating man that was her price for success. I hadn’t told Andy that the beauty queen in the picture was a gay man with his lover.
“In the end, becoming Miss Galaxy wasn’t as thrilling as she thought it would be. Selling herself made the victory hollow. As she thought of the people she had trampled, the lovers she had used, the lies she had told, the honor she achieved was a dark hole in her heart. But there was no going back. She would always be what she had become.”
Andy snapped the recorder off and said, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
We cleaned the chapel, making sure there were no plaster or paint splatters, and set up for Erika’s return. Art history papers had been turned in on Wednesday and I had lots of reading to do as I moved into the next phase of the project—writing and publishing.
Kate and I decided to drive around Queen Anne on the way home to look at the neighborhood. We hadn’t found anything suitable in this area, so we’d reluctantly started moving our search farther north. We stopped as we turned down Comstock just to look out over the Sound and the cruise ship terminal. It was a great view.
“I’ll miss living up here,” I said as we turned to head home.
“Why not there,” Kate said, pointing. There was a for sale sign in front of what looked like a modest entry. It was a nicely landscaped Tudor with high hedges blocking the view from the street.
“Sure. Let’s just buy it and surprise the family,” I joked. I stopped the car and Kate jumped out to get the literature. “Remember, we’re supposed to find something bigger than our place,” I laughed as she buckled in. Kate started reading the glossy four-page brochure.
“Yeah. Listen to this. Six bedrooms, five and three-quarter baths, master suite with dressing room and full bath, nursery and nanny’s quarters. Master suite includes marble spa, shower system, elegant fixtures, fireplace, and French doors opening to a private deck.”
“Holy shit!”
Kate and I announced our find to the family and we arranged a viewing on Friday. We had to clean house first. Our agent was bringing prospects through Friday at noon. Wendy organized the cleaning and staging. She went so far as to put cookies in the oven and leave them on the kitchen counter when we left. Our house smelled delicious.
The house we went to see left us all breathless.
The master suite occupied the entire third floor. The dressing room wasn’t an alcove, it was an entire room the size of one of our bedrooms. Two smaller rooms adjoining the bedroom were set up as a nursery/playroom. Even the nanny had a connected bath. The master bath was huge. We found out what a shower system was. There were sprayers at every conceivable location—some high overhead, some pointing out of the wall, and some that looked almost normal, including detachable sprayers at each end. I looked at the family crowding into the shower. Yep. We would all fit. The fireplace between the bedroom and sitting room was a nice touch and the view from the deck was spectacular.
The boys picked out their rooms on the second floor. They were a matched pair at one end of the hall on the second floor with a Jack and Jill bath between them. One of the other three bedrooms had an en suite bath and there was a full bath with hall access between the other two. The kitchen was huge with a restaurant-style eight burner stove and unbelievable double oven. This was a house made for entertaining.
We didn’t realize how true that was until we went to the lower level family room that opened out onto a Japanese garden complete with a Teahouse and a hot tub gazebo. Behind the wet bar in the rec room was a laundry room, full bath, and a good-sized room that was listed as a storage room, though it was as big as a bedroom.
Well, it was great to dream, but two mill? We’re kids. We can’t afford that much. We went home and found our agent waiting for us.
“You have an offer at the asking price of $1.3 million,” she explained. “But we have two other parties interested who want to submit bids. I think we’ll get $1.45 million.”
“How much of that do we get?” Melody asked.
“Well there is a six percent commission, but you have no mortgage and no outstanding taxes. With closing costs, that should net you about $1.35 million. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can either accept this bid and call it done, or wait until the others have made their offers. We’re in a good position to require a no-contingencies offer.”
We were stunned. We told her to go ahead and get the other bids. Then we sat around the living room and stared at each other.
“Can we have cookies now?” Drew asked plaintively.
We let our breath out as one person and started laughing.
All five members of the partnership filed into John Macdonald’s office and an hour later our lawyer had made an official offer on our behalf. It was accepted later that afternoon. We’d signed an offer of $1.85 million. Using money from the sale of our house, we’d only owe $500,000 and we qualified easily for the jumbo loan, even though we had to pay a higher interest rate because we were a partnership.
Kate sold the last of her first run prints from Gerhardt except the artist’s proofs and two full sets held in reserve in the vault. Erika brought news that her patent with Kate on a stochastic screening method that had progressive sized dots had met preliminary approval. Kate’s next set of prints would be done with the new process. Not only did the random pattern get denser as a color was denser, but the dots got smaller the closer they came to the focal point of Kate’s painting. It was like the resolution increased in the important areas.
Erika and Jade worked together photographing the last twenty panels and getting them ready for printing, posters, and the book. The Jesuits ordered a thousand posters of the first panel, The Prodigal, with the date of the dedication service and the two parables printed side-by-side. We hired Amy to do the poster and souvenir postcards of the first twenty panels from Jade’s digital photos. She sent the layout and artwork to a printer in Columbus, Georgia and Gerhardt went to his former employer to do all the press checks. Erika had already printed the first ten prints of the frescoes and five of Kate’s prints. Gerhardt continued the work on my prints, but said Kate’s prints had to wait for Erika. We’d have a month to visit Georgia to check and sign prints. We’d each have at least ten prints in the gallery exhibit. It would be my first joint showing with Kate since our debut two years ago. The crucifix sculptor, Jerome, would also be involved in the show.
The book schedule was tighter. Bob Bowers reviewed the commentary for the pieces and Doctor Bychkova critically edited my writing. I’d written the stories before I painted and Andy had recorded each story as I told it, but I had to synthesize the two versions. He supplied an interesting translation of each Bible story and parable associated with the piece. We ordered 2,500 books, printed in Hong Kong, which I estimated would last for the rest of my life. Five hundred of the books would be leatherbound on art paper. They were our limited edition and all three artists would sign the numbered copies and share in the revenue. Clarice assured us the books would sell each time any of us had an exhibition. Jerome hardly talked to anyone, but Clarice negotiated a fee to use his photo and interview in the book. Apparently, he was happy.
I’d lost track of how much was being invested by whom and resolved to corner Penny. She’d coordinated the budget and I noticed Clarice was becoming more and more dependent on our accountant.
Allison came back from LA and Chicago with stellar reviews for her one-woman show and the sale of another hundred posters and a dozen prints. It looked like we’d be reordering the Diva poster for her New York debut in the fall. I received a dozen requests via Clarice to do show posters for new plays. I didn’t outright turn any of them down, but when Clarice priced out a new original oil painting, poster art, and limited edition prints, none of the people who requested posters got back to us. We subtly passed on the leads to Amy who landed six Off-Broadway show posters in three months. Clarice was also fielding requests for both Kate and me to do church art. Those were long-term projects, though, and I wasn’t rushing to become a religious artist.
Our offer on the house was accepted, we accepted the offer on our house, we got financing, and set the end of May for our move.
And then it was time for the PCAD gala.
It felt like I’d scarcely breathed in the past four months. When I sat in Donna’s chair at QuickCuts and she started washing my hair, I fell asleep. I don’t know how long she kept washing my hair or exactly what happened next, but when I woke up, I had clean hair and a smooth face. Howard had been at work, too. Donna prodded me toward the barber chair where she could cut my hair.
“Whoa! I was out of it. Howard’s finished?”
“Yes, sleeping beauty. But I still need to cut this ragged mop. When did you last get a haircut?”
“Geez, Donna. I’m sorry. Christmas, I think. It’s been so busy I haven’t had time to think.”
“Are you going to make it through the party tonight?”
“God, I hope so!”
“Who is she? You act like that, there must be a new girlfriend.”
“Oh. Did I tell you Kate and I are getting married?”
“We got an invitation. Two months is a little early for an invitation.”
“We’re graduating this year. Nothing’s going to be the same. We’re supposed to move at the end of May and I still have so much to do.”
“Some things don’t change. Now tell me about the new girl.”
“Well. I suppose. Blonde. 5'2". Cute as a button. Kate’s girlfriend.”
“I assume Kate is going to help you with this.”
Wendy, Kate, and Erika came to collect me. They took my breath away. Wendy kissed me first and I deliberately slid down her chin and placed a kiss on her throat just above the tiger eye gem. I could hear the rumble of a growl—or a purr—deep in her throat. Then Kate. I just wanted to bathe in her smile. Kate gave Erika a poke in the ribs, then she started in on a kiss that I thought might get us arrested.
“Donna, honey, let’s take the rest of the afternoon off,” Howard moaned. “You know. To get ready for the party.”
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