A Butterfly in Flame Read online

  “My questions continue,” Fred said evenly. “There was a time when Flower did not work here. Then he did. How did that change come about? What’s his prior history? I want the address of your predecessor, the director who was fired last fall. Also your director of admissions—you have one?”

  “Not presently.”

  “I’ll talk to the old one. Your receptionist…is all that business done by what you call work-study students?”

  “We had a disagreement with the former receptionist,” President Harmony said. “She had been here for many years, and the variety and intricacy of the position…old wood…you understand.”

  “No, but maybe I will when I talk with her. What else? I’ll take a look at the books.”

  “The library? We have no…”

  “The finances. What comes in, what goes out. I’ll let you know.”

  “This is unheard of,” Harmony protested. “Working for me you are in no position to make conditions.”

  Fred said, “Pushing on: you, as chairman of the board and acting director—president as you call it—what are the terms and conditions of your office? Are you paid? How much? What…”

  “This is outrageous!”

  “Yes,” Fred said. “My first class is about to start. I don’t want to be late. Bad way to start. I’ll stop back at lunch, whenever that is, and get started with your answers. You’ll think of other things, too, that will help.”

  He left the office before she could reply.

  ***

  The students gathered in Stillton B looked up at Fred with a hostility tempered only by indifference. Stillton Hall proved to be a long, low frame building, one story high, under a peaked roof high enough to contain a garret. A hallway running along the entire front of the building would seem a waste of space, except that it gave a place, this damp morning, for students to congregate around the lockers assigned to them there.

  Fred’s arrival had been at close to eight-thirty, the supposed start of class. At that hour a variety of students was still milling about the corridor, conversing in small groups, talking on cell phones, pulling material out of lockers or, just generally, putting off the moment of entering either Fred’s Stillton B, or Stillton A next to it, where Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was supposed to be meeting.

  The big room itself, Stillton B, was oddly unprepared for any exercise that carried the title Intro to Lit. Redolent of turpentine, paint thinner and mediums, and marked with streaks of paint on exposed sinks and surfaces, its furniture was notable for what wasn’t there—anything like a desk or chair. Sturdy metal easels were bunched together against one wall, to either side of the big sinks. A back wall, along the longest side, was all windows whose lower halves were masked with a material that would discourage and disappoint neighborhood boys. A third wall—more easels and some tall stools—had at its center closed sliding doors behind which, from the gabble and clatter of industry that issued from the far side, Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was in progress. At the center of Fred’s classroom a heavy square platform, a foot high, was festooned with stools and drapes in varied colors. A plastic bowl of discouraged fruit sat on an orange cloth there, and beside that a pinned paper notice “Do not move. MH.”

  In a more or less random circular pattern around this platform, Fred’s students began to sit on simple, squareish home-made looking contraptions like no other furniture in the known world. Each was basically a bench, not quite large enough for two people, and with the leg at one end extended upward to a height that made it seem a back rest, except that the students tended to be sitting astride and resting their arms across these uprights. There might be as many as twenty people, drifting in, getting settled, finishing their conversations, taking out pencils or charcoal with which to sketch on the tablets some carried—the only sign that anyone had come to class with paper, of any kind, for any purpose.

  Fred stood in front of the model stand—that was what it must be, but with the model absent—and started, “I guess we’ve all kind of been thrown to the wolves. Imagine if we had to use the bathrooms Emily Dickinson was used to.” A mild incredulity tinged the indifference that mitigated the general hostility. “Like anything else that started over a hundred years ago—plumbing, railroads—there’s lots of room for improvement. Where’s Missy Tutunjian?”

  The students stared and mumbled to themselves or to each other until a young man in ripped jeans and a streaked sweatshirt challenged, “Who are you?”

  “The guy noticing that nobody in this so-called lit class seems to be carrying a book,” Fred said. “What do you do with Morgan Flower, sing? I don’t care. I’m here. He’s not. I expected to see Marci. You all know her. Moonlights at the Stillton Café.”

  “Marci Patenaude,” two of the females agreed, but talking to each other in undertones. Everyone looked around the room the way that’s learned in high school, to establish a fictive communal ignorance and putative innocence.

  Fred said, “If it was my class, and it’s not, I’d say the way you understand a book, a novel, like Moby Dick, is by the end, figure out who’s left? Who’s missing. If this was a book we’d count three people missing anyway, and ask how come? Missy, Marci, Morgan Flower. Who hates them? Are they in China? Dead? Sick? Kidnapped? Lazy? Asleep? Do they think it’s Wednesday?

  “But pushing on, since it’s not my class—or we’d, if we really wanted to find out, talk to Missy Tutunjian’s roommate or—but I don’t have much time. Since Emily Dickinson’s day we’ve made the toilets better, we’ve improved the railroads, let’s see what we can do with Emily’s poems.

  “Here’s the assignment. While you work on it I’ll talk to you one at a time, see where we are. Here’s the assignment. Take any poem by Emily Dickinson. Find your books, share them, whatever. Copy the poem. Write it again making it better by subtracting six words. Write it again, making it better by adding six words. Write it again, making it better by removing twelve words and substituting twelve different words. For extra credit write an extra stanza of your own and stick it in somewhere. Make it so much like one of Emily’s that we can’t tell—A stanza is one of those blocks of lines, usually four lines in Emily’s poems—that we can’t tell which is the fake. Right.” He looked at his watch. “Get started.

  “At the same time we’ll begin getting acquainted.”

  He motioned to the woman who had flinched when he mentioned Missy Tutunjian’s roommate.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The young woman rose, gave a brief, inquiring look at the girl next to her, and pulled from the back pocket of her jeans the copy of Emily Dickinson that she had been sitting on. She looked to Fred the question whether she should also gather up her canvas bag. Fred shook his head and gestured, then led the way, to the corner farthest from the sounds of the neighboring classroom, and cleared a space amongst the easels, next to the sink.

  The student following him was tall and pink, with curly red hair both short and unkempt. She was pretty in a distracted way. As she approached, her colleagues were either finding their books among their belongings, or easing closer to people who had them or—a few of them—drifting toward the door that would lead them to their lockers or toward escape.

  “Let’s grab a couple of these things,” Fred suggested, laying hold of one of the unfamiliar objects of furniture. “What do you call them?”

  “Horses. I don’t know why,” she said. “The neck, maybe.” She stroked the high side.

  “Or it’s translated from French,” Fred suggested. “Easel is chevalet and a cheval is a horse. Come to think, easel means donkey in some language, maybe Dutch.

  “I’m Fred.”

  The horses were positioned with their high ends close to each other. “Susan,” she said, sitting astride her horse and crossing her arms on the high end. Her shirt was of a heavy green, almost military twill, and a black cotton vest with brass buttons bibbed the copious breasts.

  Fred sat and crossed his arms. “When you draw, I guess th
e drawing board is supported on the neck of the horse?”

  “One end. The other end goes here,” Susan said. She pointed toward the dark line across her thighs where a continual rain of particles of charcoal must fall while she was working, drawing.

  “What’s the hardest thing you’re doing? The hardest class this year?”

  “So far nothing’s been easy,” Susan said. “First you think, heck, it’s art, how hard can that be? Then it’s six hours drawing one thing and getting it wrong a hundred ways, after you get started. Then they grade you. Can you believe it? A grade on a drawing? Can you believe I flunked a drawing of a cube first term? I couldn’t believe it. A cube. Six sides but the most you can possibly see at one time is four of them and mostly it’s three unless it sits on one point. I couldn’t believe it. I flunked it.”

  “So that’s the hardest thing?”

  “No. Jesus, that was only the wakeup. No, the hardest thing is what she’s making us do now.”

  “She, meaning Meg Harrison?”

  “Right.” Susan nodded. She fiddled with her Laurel Poetry Series Emily Dickinson.

  “Yes?” Fred prompted.

  “You mean, the assignment? We all have to do it. The second semester’s life drawing, see. You come in, you draw from the model, Harrison sneaks around and tells you what’s wrong. But the hard thing’s the homework. We have two months. Each person has to draw a nude self-portrait, life size.”

  “It would be a problem just getting the paper,” Fred said.

  “There’s nothing about it that isn’t a problem,” Susan said. “Where do you do it, how do you do it, can you find a mirror that big? Some of the people, especially the guys, are shy about, you know. And also, too…”

  “Seems to me…is there any way you and Missy can help each other? Being roommates…”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Wild guess, but not really,” Fred said, “Since I happened to notice you when I…did you say two months? One drawing, two months?”

  “We started two weeks ago. It’s like one of the guys keeps saying, you feel like such an idiot when you’re only wearing a pencil.”

  “I can’t see Emily Dickinson doing it, that’s true,” Fred said. “So you got started already?”

  “Taking turns. We just have the one mirror, on the closet door. No way could we work at the same time. There’s no room. Then the paper’s so big, and the plywood it’s on, just it’s no picnic trying to see around it, or move it.”

  “So she’s serious,” Fred said.

  “Sure. Who? Don’t you want to talk to the next person?”

  “Meg Harrison,” Fred said. “I mean, she’s serious?”

  “Her and all the rest of the teachers,” Susan said. “The studio teachers.”

  “You mean Flower…”

  “How can you tell? English lit is bullshit. I mean, no offense…”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember, Susan. You’ll want to get started. Give me your last name so I can mark you present.”

  The intensity of labor being exhibited in the room was a good deal more serious than anything Fred’s initial impression had hinted at. These characters could work if they were engaged. Fred checked Susan Muller’s name on the list he had copied from Morgan Flower’s class record book, and called a name he chose at random, “Arthur Geekas.” When that produced a candidate, he proceeded.

  By nine-thirty, a reasonable picture of the place was forming. The students, though naïve, were serious and by no means cynical, as they might be if they found themselves in one of the elite schools. Generally speaking, they gave evidence of an eager optimism that made them seem unspoiled by the boundless trivia of urban semi-culture; as if they, too, despite whatever up-to-date gadgets they might carry, were stuck, like the town of Stillton, somewhere in the late nineteenth century. They had likes and dislikes among the faculty but none expressed doubt about the integrity of the program. Morgan Flower, though not admired, did not seem to be hated. If there was a thing going between him and his student, Missy Tutunjian, nobody would drop a hint of it—not surprising, anyway, on such brief acquaintance.

  At nine-thirty a student Fred now knew as Randy raised his hand and said, “There’s usually a break by now.”

  “Sure,” Fred agreed. Maybe coffee existed somewhere. “Fifteen minutes?”

  Fred joined the students strolling into the hall. “I’m taking orders,” Randy said.

  “I’ve got my bike. I’ll be back in five minutes.” He took Fred’s order, and his money.

  Fred wandered down the hall, giving his students some room. The double doors of Stillton A opened as he reached them. Meg Harrison, pushing through, yelled at Randy’s retreating back, “Large. Cream and sugar.” The studio behind her smelled of fresh earth.

  “Come on in,” she invited. “We don’t break for another ten minutes.”

  Within the big studio students were standing, each at a private raised stand two feet square, on which a metal armature—the room held a forest of them—had been shaped to repeat the structural core of the woman who stood on the model stand at the room’s center. She was twisted, with her arms clasped behind her head. She was no longer wearing the apron that said Stillton Café.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “That’s my student,” Fred said. “Marci belongs in my classroom.”

  A pinkness suffused the model. Without moving her head, she protested, “We didn’t think you’d show.”

  “We’ll talk when you break,” Fred said. He turned to Meg Harrison. “That setup you have in the middle of my classroom. It doesn’t bother Flower? I didn’t move it, but I can tell you it’s in the way.”

  “Most of them really need the money,” Meg Harrison said.

  “I don’t haul students out of your class to do something for me,” Fred continued.

  The students, looking from the model to their work, applied small gobs of clay with their fingers, studied the result, then added or subtracted, or scraped at their figures with a variety of tools. Without exception, they listened for Meg’s reply.

  “If you don’t give this girl some buttocks,” she told the nearest student, taking a brisk slap at the relevant portion of the form, “no way in the world can she twist her shoulders. It’s all connected. Feel it yourself. Twist the same way. Go up and look at Marci. Come back and feel it. Get some yeast in the dough.”

  The student wiped his hands on the towel at his waist and went to examine the model.

  “Let’s take it outside,” Meg Harrison suggested, turning and leading the way into the corridor and outside. She called back over her shoulder, “Five minutes, Marci.”

  Outside, the students smoking in the damp chill of the morning drew aside to give them room—but not so much room as to miss anything that might develop. “The regular model called in sick yesterday,” Meg said. “Marci is about the right size and shape to take her place. Who knew you were coming and, if you did, who knew you cared?”

  Randy appeared, on his bike, with an elaborate construction that allowed him to carry a couple dozen cups of coffee. He studied the labels on their lids and began to distribute them.

  “Meaning you assumed or knew Morgan Flower wouldn’t show this morning,” Fred said.

  “Meaning if Morgan Flower showed, he either wouldn’t know or wouldn’t give a shit. So Marci had a chance to earn some cash. She needs it. And she’s a good model. Thanks, Randy.” She and Fred accepted their coffee, and Meg paid for hers. “So when you told me last night that you were taking Flower’s classes, I gave her a call.”

  “And I’m not happy about it,” Fred said. “As long as she’s my student.”

  “I hear you. So mark her absent,” Meg said.

  Marci came outside, wrapped in a beaten-up red corduroy bathrobe, and wearing plastic thong slippers. Randy appeared and gave her the final cup. “I’ll get the assignment from someone,” Marci told Fred.

  “Fine. Except I’m talking with each of the students also,” Fred said.
“While the rest work on the assignment.”

  “Talk now,” Meg Harrison said. “I won’t get in your way.”

  “We’ll use the classroom. If Marci’s late, you’ll understand,” Fred said.

  Marci, following him, muttered, “Tug of war. My parents divorced. I know all about it.” She sat side-saddle on the horse Fred designated and started, “Last night, when we happened to talk, I hadn’t decided—thought I might call Harrison back again and say—but then—please don’t mark me absent.”

  “I thought Flower didn’t care.”

  “He doesn’t. But he still marks you absent. If he notices.”

  Fred pulled the class list he had made out of his shirt pocket and placed a check mark by her name. “You are present,” he assured her. “Or we couldn’t be talking. You’re holding a broom in yours?”

  “My what? Oh, you saw? How? No. Last night. You heard me. Talking. The big drawing. The nude. Obviously, and that’s so obvious. So I got a broom and I’m holding it like “present arms.” It’s harder than I thought. You have to try to remember what your arms and hands are doing. It was a mistake.”

  “So, then, is Missy Tutunjian doing a modeling gig for some other class?” Fred asked. “I called her name. She didn’t answer.”

  Students were trickling back into the room and settling into their places again. Marci checked the band of white skin on her left wrist. Fred pushed on, “Do you know? I’m trying to learn who’s who and who’s here.”

  “There’s some in the class, it seemed like, when Harrison made the assignment, the big self-portrait nude, seemed like they’d never been naked before. The guys especially, like in case we were going to come out with rulers, you know. It isn’t hard, really, I mean, there’s the psychology, but after that, and then, but, then, as I say, with some people it’s like they’ve never been that way and they’re, not even by themselves, and so, but, basically. Missy is one of those. If you were a prude when you started, by this time in the first year it’s not easy to still be one, but Missy is. She even tried to make Harrison make an exception, couldn’t she pay her roommate to model for her instead, but Harrison wouldn’t. ‘If there’s something funny about you, fudge it,’ Harrison said. ‘That’s what art means,’ is all she’d say. And so she pretty much had to. Missy.”