Chapter 5
Sloane
“Can we light stage left with the spot instead?” I yell to Bill, the lighting designer who is currently situated in the small booth at the top of the theatre.
I stick the end of a paint brush in my mouth, considering the lighting on the colors I chose for the backdrop.
If you told me a few months ago I’d be living in the northeast, designing sets, I’d have laughed in your face.
“Serious artists don’t settle into predictable fields,” Elliot’s voice practically screams at me anytime I find myself enjoying the work I’m doing here. But it’s temporary. That's the mantra I’ve stuck, with at least. I’m here for mom’s treatment and then I’m gone.
But in the meantime, the Boston Conservatory for the Arts seems like the perfect little side quest. Gen floated the idea to me a few weeks ago when I met her at the bar and honestly I thought maybe it was a drunken promise made in the line to the bathroom, but when she texted a few days later giving me the details and stating the job was mine if I wanted it it was an easy decision.
I’m hoping it'll quiet my mind. Give me something to do between hospital visits with Mom. Spark inspiration in my finger tips that haven’t seemed to work since I left California.
I thought whatever was blocking me from creating would dissipate, the way it’s come and gone so many times over the course of my life.
This time it feels like I’m stuck in cement, even the paint brush feels wrong in my hands.
That’s why this is good for me: a prompt, the setting of the nutcracker, a ballet I’ve seen countless times with millions of references. It’s mindless but just involved enough to make me feel like I’m still pursuing whatever it is I once wished to pursue.
“Her hair is like Rapunzel," I hear one of the little voices behind me squeak. A small redhead with curls pulled up into a ridiculously tight top knot. I smile to myself, letting the child’s comment momentarily stroke my ego before an even tinier raven haired girl chimes in.
“Sure, if Rapunzel was like seven feet tall.” I glance over and watch the red head and another little girl frantically shhh her but she doesn’t shy away. Instead she meets my gaze, raises an eyebrow like someone twice her age as if to say your move.
“I’m five ten. Not seven feet.” I cross my arms, raising my eyebrows back.
“Cool?” Her voice is bored and her friends are looking at her in sheer horror, but the audacity of this child has me laughing.
“You're pretty vicious for a toddler,” I note and her eyes narrow.
“I’m eleven.”
“Cool?” I smile because I know I’ve won and sure, I shouldn’t find pleasure in arguing with a child but I’ll take a win where I can get it. I turn back, fixating on the wood grain in front of me, letting myself get lost in the gliding movement of the brush.
Rehearsal has been brutal today for the dancers.
Gen very briefly introduced me to the stage manager before running off and has barely stopped to hydrate.
I’m playing around with the half painted backdrop left behind by the artist I’m apparently replacing, making sure each snow flake has a glazed sheen so it glimmers against the warm hues the backlights are creating when the choreographer whose name I can’t pronounce claps her hands, signaling the end of rehearsal for the day.
The dancers scatter like flies, and Gen nods at me to follow her, the art director in tow as we trek toward backstage.
She’s a goddess, and watching her lithe arms waft around as she tries to translate the art director’s vision for the set piece is mesmerizing.
I think this girl’s incapable of moving without grace; every move she makes is loaded with a soft sensuality that I’m convinced she doesn’t even recognize.
I saw it the moment she walked into that bar, and I see it now.
“And I know you said you paint watercolors, but he really—” the art director interrupts Gen, a flurry of French flying out of his pursed lips, “—oui. Je suis s?r qu'elle peut,” she tells him, brows furrowed. “Can you do oil? He’s insisting,” she addresses me, rolling her eyes.
“Of course!” I lie, a fist sized knot forming in my throat. I’ve avoided painting with oils since I fled the art studio my adoptive mother, Evie, designed for the both of us. “I’m a little out of practice, but yes.”
The gallery wall in the west wing library of my childhood home explodes in my mind’s eye, and all I can see are Evie’s bright, effusive oil paintings, blindingly contrasting my numerous attempts at capturing dawn and dusk.
I wonder if it looks the same now, or if Evie boxed up that part of me like she stowed away all the others that didn’t fit into her conception of the perfect daughter.
“Do you believe in fate?” Gen’s question comes out of left field as we march up the stairs to the cat walk, a supposed short cut to the workshop I’ll be spending most of my time in.
“One thousand percent,” I tell her, peeking over the railing into the darkened audience seating below. “Do you?”
“Sometimes,” she says, faintly. “I think it’s fate that I met you, since we desperately needed a set painter. But then, other things…”
“Like meetin’ my brother?” I quip, and I can feel the heat of her embarrassment. I stay quiet though, letting her sift through the feeling.
“Well, we didn’t just meet,” she starts to say.
“But somehow the stars have aligned, and the timin’ is just right?” I grin through the dimness, knowing she can hear it.
“That’s just the thing. I don’t really know if the timing’s right. It sort of feels like it’s never been on my side.” There’s a quiet defeat in her voice, so at odds with the way she was moving just minutes before.
“It’s not just fate, though,” I tell her as we hop off the platform, confronted with one too many corridors to choose from.
I follow her to the right, immediately at home when I see a feral looking woman in a tattered, paint smeared smock, her mass of mahogany hair piled high on her head.
She gives us a small smile, briefly nodding as she hurries past us.
“There’s fate, and then there’s waitin’ around for something to happen to you.
Sometimes, the universe needs a little nudge. ”
Gen wrenches open a pine door and it gives way to a beautifully bright studio.
Canvas and massive wooden cutouts lean against the walls, a shelf of color coordinated paints separated by medium on the wall nearest the door.
The light, I realize when I gaze up, comes from the multiple skylights above, like the sky is bleeding its way into the room.
“So I think these have shades…” Gen fumbles with some buttons and the room plummets into darkness as electric shades shield the daylight from entering. She flicks on the softest, haziest lights I’ve ever seen in my life. “Obviously, you can mess with the lighting.”
“I’m obsessed,” I laugh, turning toward her. “Thank you. You have no idea how much I needed something like this.”
“Glad to be the nudge in your universe,” she grins, offering me her hand, but I take it and yank her into me. She’s quiet strength wrapped in a strawberry and vanilla scented package of beauty, and I know it’s premature, but I love her already.
“Gen,” a voice calls from the hallway, and suddenly our little cavern is being invaded by the smell of expensive soap and sage. “What the fuck are you doing in here with the lights off?”
The shades above zip away, and the heavens shine down on a dark-haired angel, the tattoos that pepper his forearms only a slight distraction from his angular face, his pouty mouth, the creamy skin that is the most perfect canvas I’ve seen in my life.
“Oh,” he says, blinking at me. “Jean.” He offers me his hand and I grasp it, shocked by its roughness.
“Sloane,” I grin, finding something kindred in his smokey, gray blue eyes.
“She’s painting sets for us. She’s, uh, Grant’s sister.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Gen shifting her weight.
“I knew you looked familiar. You’re like, glamazon him,” he says, cocking his head as he whips it toward Gen, his eyes flying wide as his lips curl into a gleeful smile.
“Yeah, well, we’re twins,” I chuckle. “Oh my god, wait. Jean, as in, Gen’s friend Jean at the bonfire…” I squint, looking between the two as my new friend hides her beautiful face in her hands, but Jean just steps forward.
“So you’re familiar with my work?” he quips, looking at me through his inky black lashes with a furious little flutter that pulls an obnoxious laugh out of me.
Grant filled me in on the night he saw Jean and Gen giggling by a tree just moments before he called my brother over.
Before that bonfire, she and my brother pretty much steered clear of each other.
One thing led to another, including me inviting her to the bar, and now we’re here, watching Gen blush at his mention.
Jean stands a few feet back, arms crossed as he leans against a wall, openly perceiving me in his baggy black cargo pants and intentionally tattered, olive sweater with a mischievous glint in his stare.
“Okay…” she laughs, turning to leave. “If you’re riding with me, I gotta go,” she says pointedly at Jean. “I’ll see you later?”
I nod, grinning as she disappears.
“I see you, new girl,” he says, lifting his chin. “Little match maker, are we?”
“I prefer the Lord’s work.”
“Religious?” His brows furrow.
I shrug. “Spiritual. And southern.”
His eyes shine with mirth, and a throaty rumble filters out of him as he pushes off the wall.
“Jean!” Gen yells, and he winces.
“Get my number from Gen,” he throws back, following Gen’s trail, and I make my way back into the main atrium to keep picking away at the unfinished piece, heart burning with the prospect of new friendship.