Brushwork

I was fifty-four years old and I had hired a woman off the internet to teach me how to hold a paintbrush, which is the kind of thing you do when you retire from dating but not from wanting.

The ad had said private lessons, beginner friendly, cash or check. Her name was Cate, she said she was thirty-two, and her portfolio had a self-portrait in it that I had looked at for maybe twenty minutes one night in March. I told myself I was interested in the brushwork. I was, partly.

She knocked at nine on a Tuesday. I opened the door and there she was, taller than I expected, brown coat, paint under the nails of her right hand already, like she'd touched up something in the cab on the way over.

"You must be Benji." She stuck her hand out. "Cate. I brought my own brushes because God only knows what a therapist buys at the art store."

"Fair question." I shook her hand. Her grip was firm and her palm was warm. "Come on up. It's four flights, I should have warned you."

"I saw the building from outside. Old warehouse?" She stepped past me into the stairwell and looked back over her shoulder. "Those always have insane ceilings."

"They do." I followed her up, watching her take the stairs two at a time like she'd done manual labor her whole life, which maybe she had. "I converted it about ten years ago. Well, I paid people to convert it. I supervised badly."

She got to the top and stopped in the middle of the loft, and I watched her do the flat once-over that people do. The wall of north-facing windows. The fourteen-foot ceiling. The Murphy bed folded up against the far wall with one corner of a sheet hanging out of it like a tongue.

"Nice space," she said. "Terrible walls."

"What?"

"Your walls. You've got nothing on them. Not one picture, not one diploma, nothing." She turned around slowly. "You're a therapist, right? Where are the degrees?"

"In a drawer." I went to the kitchen counter and started moving mugs around for no reason. My hands wanted something to do and that was the honest reason, though I'd never have said so. "I never liked looking at them. Felt like hanging up my own reviews."

"Huh." She set her bag down by the window. "Well. Good light, at least. North light is the whole ballgame for a beginner, you don't have to fight the sun moving around on you."

I made coffee while she unpacked. She had a folding aluminum easel in her bag, an actual easel that collapsed down to nothing, and she set it up near the windows without asking me where. I decided I liked that. Then I decided I should be careful about deciding I liked things that fast.

"So what's the deal with you?" she asked, pouring herself coffee without being offered, which also felt correct. "You paint before? Or is this a midlife thing? No offense. Midlife things pay my rent."

"Never painted a day in my life." I sat down on the stool across from her. "I'm fifty-four, I transitioned in my thirties, I've been single by choice for a long time, I work too much, and I watched a video about painting and couldn't sleep afterward. That's the whole medical history."

"That's not a medical history, that's a dating profile." She grinned at me. "Do you cook? Everybody in these lofts cooks."

"I burn eggs."

"Oh my God." She laughed, and I noticed her laugh came all the way up from her chest, no filter on it. "Okay. Fifty-four, single by choice, burns eggs, hires a strange woman off the internet. You're going to be a fun student."

She put a canvas on the easel and laid out her brushes on the counter in a row, biggest to smallest, and explained what each one was for. Flat, filbert, round, bright, rigger. I wrote the words down on a legal pad like they were going to be on a test.

"First thing is grip," she said. "Everybody grips a brush like a pencil and then wonders why their lines look like a pencil made them. You hold it further back, looser, like this."

She stood and showed me, brush in her right hand, wrist relaxed, and she held it up so I could see the angle. The collar of her shirt sat open and her throat was right there at my eye level, long and smooth, and there was a small hollow at the base of it, and I looked at it for what I would estimate was three full seconds too long.

"Benji."

"Yeah?"

"You're staring at my neck."

My face went hot in a way I hadn't experienced since I was in my twenties. "I was watching your wrist. The grip. That's where the, the mechanics are."

"Uh huh." She lowered the brush and looked at me, one eyebrow up, not angry, not embarrassed, just reading me the way she'd read a canvas. "The mechanics are in the wrist. The wrist is down here. My neck is not holding the brush."

"I know where the neck is."

"Clearly you do." She set the brush down on the counter and crossed her arms, and for a second I thought she was going to pack up and leave, and I thought about what the ad had cost me and what this hour was going to cost me and how I'd explain a refund request to myself.

But she didn't leave. She tipped her head a little, the way she'd looked at the empty walls, taking inventory.

"Look," she said. "I do this for a living. Private lessons, mostly men your age, some of them are lonely and some of them are creeps and most of them are just lonely creeps, no offense. I can tell within ten minutes which one is which, and I charge a loneliness surcharge."

"You do not."

"I absolutely do. It's on my rate card." She picked the brush back up. "You're not a creep. You're just rusty. There's a difference. Creeps don't look away when they get caught."

I didn't have anything smart to say to that, so I said, "Sorry. It won't happen again."

"It'll happen again." She shrugged. "You're a person, I'm a person, I've got a very nice neck, I've heard this before. Just be normal about it and we're fine. Paint."

So I painted. Or I made marks on a canvas that the paint industry would not recognize as painting, a gray rectangle that was supposed to be the window and came out looking like a door. Cate walked a slow circle around me and corrected my elbow, my thumb pressure, the amount of paint I was loading, and each time she reached in and moved my arm I was aware of her fingers and then made myself not be, which worked about sixty percent of the time.

"Looser," she kept saying. "You're strangling it. The brush is not your enemy."

"Everything I own is strangled," I said. "It's a character trait. Ask my last houseplant."

"Dead?"

"Survived. Barely. We don't discuss it."

She laughed again, that chest laugh, and something in my chest answered it, and I filed that something away in the drawer where I kept things I didn't want to look at. I was good at that drawer. Thirty years of practice.

Near the end of the hour she checked her phone and made a face.

"Okay, that's time. Same time Saturday?" She was already packing her brushes into their roll, each one wrapped in its little cloth sleeve. "And I'm raising your rate."

"You just said creeps pay extra and I'm not a creep."

"You're not. But you made me work today, you kept drifting off, and drifters need reminders." She zipped the roll. "Also your gray is horrible and I have to fix that Saturday and fixing is extra."

"Is any of this on the rate card?"

"Most of it." She shouldered her bag and stopped at the door, and looked back at me standing there with my horrible gray door-window painting. "Hey. For what it's worth. You've got decent hands. They just need somebody to tell them what to do."

She was gone down the stairs before I thought of a single thing to say back to that, which was probably for the best, because every reply I drafted in my head was a confession wearing a joke's clothes.

I washed the brushes wrong, I found out later. I sat in the loft for a while after with the coffee gone cold, looking at the empty walls, thinking about a throat and a laugh and a roll of brushes, and I did what I tell my clients not to do, which is to rehearse a future instead of living a Tuesday.

Saturday was four days away. It felt like four months.

I spent the three days between Tuesday and Saturday doing things I would bill a client for if I caught them doing it. I cleaned the loft. I moved the easel three times. I bought two clip lamps at the hardware store and told the guy there I was working on a project, which was technically true if you counted the project happening in my own head.

I also burned eggs Thursday morning, which I mention only because Cate was going to find out anyway.

Saturday, 9 AM, she knocked twice and let herself up. Same brown coat. Coffee in one hand, brush roll under her arm.

"You look terrible," she said, taking the coat off.

"Good morning to you too."

"You look like a man who slept in his studio. Did you sleep in your studio?"

"I don't want to answer that on the grounds that you'll bill me for it."

"Correct answer." She looked at the two clip lamps I'd clamped to a shelf and started laughing before I even explained them. "What is this, an interrogation?"

"It's lighting. North light shifts. I read that."

"You read that." She set her coffee down and walked over, and I watched her decide not to make fun of me, or rather she made fun of me with her whole face and then moved on. "Okay, they're ugly, but they're not wrong. Where's your palette?"

On the counter, and my gray was still on it, dried up like something that had died a week ago. She looked at it and made a sound.

"Benji. What did we say about your gray?"

"That it's horrible."

"That it's horrible, and that fixing it costs extra. So this is me fixing it, and this is you paying extra." She squeezed out fresh paint while she talked, ultramarine, a burnt red I didn't know the name of, white. "You don't make gray with black. Black is a hole. Gray is a color, it leans warm or it leans cool, and yours leaned dead."

"You should put that on the rate card."

"Everything goes on the rate card eventually." She handed me the brush. "Mix. Slow. Watch what happens when you add the red, just a touch, watch it come alive. There. See? That's a wall in shadow. Your thing was a wall in a morgue."

I mixed for a while and she stood next to me, arms crossed, supervising. It was going fine. It was going so fine that I got greedy, and I opened my mouth.

"Can I ask you something off lesson plan."

"Off lesson plan is a hundred an hour more. Ask."

"How do I learn to paint a person? Like, the actual person. The planes of a face. A jaw."

She didn't answer right away. She drank her coffee.

"You want to paint a portrait."

"I want to understand one. There's a shadow under the jaw that tells you where the light is, and I can't figure it out from a book. The book just says shadow. Books are cowards."

"And you need a jaw."

"I need a jaw."

She set the cup down. "Benji."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to charge you double for this and you're going to pay it, and we're both going to be adults about what's happening here. Are we clear?"

"Crystal."

"Because here's the deal. A pose is a professional service. I've modeled since I was in my twenties, I know every trick, I can hold still longer than a statue. What I don't do is pretend I don't know why you're asking. You've been staring at my neck since Tuesday."

"That is... a fair reading of the situation."

"Thank you." She pulled a kitchen chair to the middle of the floor and dragged the other lamp over and clamped it low, angled up, and the whole time she talked like a surgeon dictating. "Sit there first. Show me where you want me."

I sat. She looked at me from across the room, then came over and stood very close, turning my chair a few degrees, then my head with two fingers on my temple, light as anything.

"Light hits you here," she said, tapping her own jaw. "Shadow pools there. The line between them is everything. If I sit where you're sitting, the light comes from the window, right side. You'd see the shadow on the left of my throat, under the hinge of the jaw. Yes?"

"Yes. That. Exactly that."

"Then that's where I sit. But I paint too, so here's my fee schedule. Double rate, cash, and I pick the pose, and you paint what I say you paint. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Then get your canvas ready, professor."

I want to point out, since you're wondering, that nothing about this felt sneaky. She set the price. She set the terms. She sat down in that chair like she was clocking in, and I was the one who felt like a burglar in my own apartment.

She sat with her back straight, chin slightly up, turned toward the window. Brown sweater. Hair pushed back behind one ear. She'd picked the pose the way she'd picked the easel spot on Tuesday, without asking, certain the room would agree with her.

"Hold that," she said. "And stop talking. Talking moves the jaw."

So I painted. Or I tried to. The shadow under her jaw was exactly where she said it would be, a soft dark wedge running down into the throat, and I kept loading my brush and lifting it and losing my nerve and loading it again.

"You're hovering," she said, eyes forward.

"I'm planning."

"You're hovering with a brush. Commit. Paint the edge, then soften it. Edge first, always."

I painted the edge. My breath was loud in that room, fourteen foot ceilings, nothing to soak up sound, and I could hear every exhale of mine bounce back off the windows. She didn't move. Not a flicker. Her hands lay in her lap, palm down, and her chest rose and fell slow and even, like she'd slowed her breathing on purpose, and maybe she had, professionals do that, she'd told me she could outlast a statue and apparently the statue was the amateur in the room.