14. Rome, September
ROME, SEPTEMBER
It was our fourth sitting. The other students had finished for the day and sloped off to the bar, leaving Mary and me alone.
She had placed me in a little leather chair that was balanced on a stack of pallets.
Her idea was to raise my body and face so that it was level with her eye as she painted.
I lowered my gaze when she leaned over and maneuvered me, her jewelry clinking as she smoothed the hair by my ears.
It was hard to know where to look. The smell of her up close, of cigarettes and the blackberry tang of her perfume, made my face feel hot.
“You’re so pale,” Mary said, stepping back, like a hairdresser admiring her creation. “It’s beautiful.”
I smiled. I’d heard those words often enough, but never before as a compliment.
I tried to relax my shoulders and settle into my seat, but it felt precarious to me, to be sitting up on those pallets with my ankles crossed.
I fidgeted constantly, clasping and unclasping my hands, even though they were supposed to rest effortlessly in my lap.
Again and again, Mary would bid me to just let them fall.
“Can I have some of that?” I said, my eyes flitting to the carton of red wine next to Mary’s bare foot.
“No wine yet,” she said firmly.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you need to concentrate.”
“On what?”
“Looking ethereal.”
We laughed.
“Seriously.” Mary pointed to the back of the room. “Stop looking at me. Over there, please.”
A smile appeared again at the corners of her stained lips.
In her right hand, she held her brush in a cramped gesture.
She was wearing denim shorts and an oversized pink shirt rolled at the sleeves.
Her beautiful blond hair was pulled up, but scruffily.
Thick strands of it were tangled in the gold chains of all the delicate necklaces she wore.
I straightened in my chair and bit on my tongue, tried to do as I was told.
As soon as I started sitting for her, it was clear that Mary struggled with portrait painting.
I’d watched the way her peers eyed her canvas, observed their faces after they’d packed their own work up, betraying mixed expressions of encouragement and pity.
The weak, sisterly smiles were reserved, uniquely, for Mary.
Between themselves, they were more furtive.
They glanced enviously at each other’s paintings, never lingering much longer over it beyond a quick, competitive eye.
I hated to see Mary frustrated, but I also liked that she was lagging behind.
It gave us opportunities to be together.
Left alone in that semicircular classroom, we talked freely.
“You know, I had this paranoid thought before our first sitting,” I said, interrupting, as Mary ran her brush along the canvas in a fussy swipe. “What if I’m supposed to be naked?”
“That’s in the summer term.” Mischievously, she looked up. “Would you still have done it?”
“Would you still have chosen me?”
Mary rolled her eyes. “I told you before. I wasn’t ignoring you at that casting. I was concentrating on not being sick.” Our eyes met momentarily, and we smiled at each other. “You were always my first choice.”
“Over that other woman?”
“Over all of them.”
Her words caused a swimming feeling in my stomach. I had to look away, over toward the window. The light was paler now. It had shifted from the butter yellow of late afternoon toward evening. I could see swarms of birds—hundreds of them, starlings—moving across the sky like a flat spinning disc.
We were quiet for a few moments. My gaze returned to Mary as she walked backward to her vantage point, which was marked by a little cross on the floor. From that distance, her eyes darted prettily between the canvas and me.
“I don’t like it when you go so far away,” I said, teasing. “I feel like such an object. What would happen if you stood still at the easel instead of moving back there all the time?”
“I can’t do that,” Mary said quietly.
“Why?”
“That’s how we do it here. And we have to follow the rules.”
“It’s painting.” I laughed. “How can there be rules? It isn’t grammar.”
Mary’s expression fell. She put down her brush and bent to drink more wine, the muscles in her neck vibrating as she swallowed. I tried not to look at her tanned, flattish chest as her shirt fell open, revealing the two soft, lace triangles of her bra.
“According to Law, I need strict containment,” she said, straightening and wiping her mouth.
“Law’s an old man,” I countered, “clinging to a family name.” Mary smirked uneasily. “You could always leave here, you know. Do something else. You could rent your own studio. Just experiment.” I often played this role with her, suggesting a rebelliousness I hadn’t achieved in my own life.
Mary shrugged. “In the future, maybe, but I still don’t have the right foundations.”
“Says who?”
“Lawrence. And besides, I can’t just leave. Mum and Dad would turn the tap off.”
It took a moment to work out that the tap meant money . When I suggested she could get a job, she laughed. The only money she’d ever earned for herself, she said, was from modeling.
“Even then, my mother put a stop to all that. She was jealous. It was mental.”
“Ignore me, then,” I said. “I never went to art school, so I’m probably bitter.”
“Don’t,” Mary said, in mock despair. “I’ve seen your work. That means you’ve raw talent, which actually makes me feel worse.”
I felt myself glow, but Mary’s smile had faded, and I was surprised to find myself pitying her. We hadn’t known each other long, but I’d noticed how quickly her mood often shrank from boisterous to insecure.
Eventually, she said, in a flat voice, “Mum and Dad have paid extra for me to be here.” We locked eyes. Hers had hardened. “A lot extra.”
“Seriously?”
Mary trained her eyes on the canvas, though her skin was flushed. “And I’m pretty sure everyone knows. Or has guessed it. He’s a friend of the family.”
I looked away, not wanting Mary to see that I’d already discovered this personal connection to her tutor.
After the casting, I’d stayed up late online, searching her name.
In seconds, Mary’s whole existence was arranged in photographic thumbnails, not in any kind of dated order but randomly and chaotically, like panels on a patchwork quilt.
Every stage of her life had been documented, and that’s where I discovered Lawrence, in a holiday photo.
Mary was aged about eleven and pictured somewhere tropical, chlorine-bleached frizz escaping all around her like a halo.
Her face was tilted up toward her mother’s.
Lawrence was in the background, dressed in a black polo shirt.
He was slimmer and tanned, but it was him, unmistakably.
“You’ve moved,” said Mary, bringing my attention back to the room.
She came over to adjust my position, bringing the wine against my lips.
The liquid was warm, like bathwater, so I grimaced and dribbled.
She laughed, put it down, then directed the tilt of my chin, the angle of my shoulders.
She fiddled with the strap of my top, which was loose and had floated down my arm.
“Actually, let’s leave it down,” Mary said, brushing my shoulder to lower the other strap, too. She stepped back. “It’s very pretty like that. The shadows are interesting.” Again, we locked eyes. “There’s this darkness falling around you.”
A couple of days after that sitting, I was working in the basement studios of Creta in the Monti neighborhood of Rome.
Compared to the Melrose classrooms, my residency was dusty and cramped.
It was below ground and shared with four other ceramicists.
We competed for everything: time on the wheel, drying areas by the window, shelf space in the kiln out the back.
So, it was a relief, on that occasion, to be working there alone.
Sitting at the wheel with my foot pressed down, I was lulled by the sound of its humming and the miraculous way—I have never lost my awe of it—my hands transformed a rough, spherical ball of clay into the graceful cylinder that would become a vase. Something of use and beauty.
When I looked up, there, by the doorway, was the woman from the model casting. My heart skipped.
“Can I help you?” I said.
She beamed widely at me. “I was looking for Thea,” she said. Her voice was soft, a neutral British accent.
I lifted my foot from the pedal. “She just left.”
“Oh,” the woman said, clasping her hands together in thought.
Unlike the day at the painting school, she now wore glasses: delicate gold frames which complemented her navy shirt and pleated cream trousers.
On her fingers were brightly colored enamel rings that looked like miniature abstract sculptures, and she carried a tote bag from a recent exhibition at MACRO that had recently ended.
“She literally just left,” I said. “Should I ask her to come back?”
“No,” the woman interrupted hastily. “Not to worry. I’ll see her later tonight.”
Thea was the head of the residency. She was Italian, gay, and a successful ceramicist in her own right.
I worshipped her. She had emailed me personally, to congratulate me for getting on the program, then she set about finding me my room.
The notion that these two women knew each other alerted my interest. I wondered, excitedly, if the woman facing me was a collector.
I let the clay vase I had been throwing weaken in my hands, then went over to the workbench, nearer where she stood, hoping to draw her attention to the other pieces I was developing. The woman kept surveying me closely.
“That’s it,” she said, with a little gasp, bringing her hand lightly to her forehead. “What a funny coincidence. I knew I recognized you. You were at the portrait school, weren’t you? A couple of weeks ago?”
“Yes!”
“You were picked at the end by that lovely girl!”