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It wouldn’t be fair to use her like that.
God, I want to, though.
When she moves back and touches her fingers to my lips, I can see that she knows it.
“Just think about it,” she says.
I don’t have words to give her, so I say, “All right.”
After she leaves, I stay up thinking half the night.
Friday morning. Art class. A hundred bucks.
The stack of colored paper on the table in front of me cost a hundred bucks, and I’m supposed to “experiment” with it.
Try things, Rikki told the class.
Rikki’s my studio art professor. She’s dressed today like the world’s tiniest pirate—boots that go up to her thighs and then flare out and fold over at the top, a glittery sash across one shoulder. She’s from the Netherlands, married to Laurie, which means she’s my landlady in addition to my art teacher.
She’s also an art therapist, whatever the fuck that is.
“The idea,” Rikki is telling the student sitting in front of me, “is to play with how the colors are in a relationship. Work with large and small fields of color to create illusions of difference where there is similarity, illusions of similarity where there is difference.”
The package of paper contains a hundred and fifty sheets, none of them the same. Sixty-six cents a color. The girl at the next table is going crazy with her scissors, snipping chunks out of one sheet after another. Turning money into confetti.
I can’t bring myself to take scissors to a sixty-six-cent piece of paper unless I’ve got some reason to think it’s going to amount to something, so I just push the papers around, laying one on top of another, until Rikki chucks me on the shoulder as she walks past and says, “Play.”
I pick up the scissors and open and close the blades a few times.
Drop them and shuffle the colors around some more.
This is me in Studio Art.
I’ve never taken an art class before, and probably wouldn’t have, but it was so late when I registered that I had to take whatever I could get into, which was nothing I would have picked. In addition to art, I’ve got Modern Russian History, Intro to Spanish, and this bizarre African-American lit class where all we’ve done so far is read philosophy about music.
Back before I started my first year, Dr. T told me the point of Putnam isn’t to specialize or get ready for grad school, it’s to learn how to learn.
Try everything, he said. Keep trying things until you find something that clicks. Learn how to think, ask questions, decide for yourself.
I didn’t do that, because I wanted to be a doctor—although looking back, I wonder what the fuck ever made me think that would work out. Four years of undergrad, four years of med school, then residency, loans, studying, no chance even for part-time jobs—whoever’s life that was, it wasn’t ever going to be mine.
Now I’m trying things. Burning money. Feeling like an asshole most of the time, trying to wrap my tongue around rolling an R in Spanish, reading a memoir by this Russian woman
who was imprisoned under Stalin.
I’ve been doing this kind of shit for eight weeks now, but I’m not sure what any of it is contributing to my well-roundedness. I don’t know what cutting up colored bits of paper is going to do for me that I need, either, but I pick up a sheet of deep, dark red and snip a triangle off one corner.
Lay it against a bright blue.
Lay it against orange.
I find a lemony yellow and cut a corner off it. Try again.
“Play,” Rikki says to Raffe on the other side of the room.
Playing makes me feel like a dipshit.
And besides, this isn’t even art. It’s math. The textbook makes it sound mysterious, like colors have these properties, and Oh, hey, what do you know? That one looks this way next to that one and this other way next to that other one.
