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“And what about Amy?” Russell was kissing his way down her chest as he pushed her against the old bed that was still in the house. It was too big to remove. He ignored the squeaks of whatever creatures they disturbed when he pushed her onto the bed.
“Amy?” Zoë asked, as she arched her back. “She’s a dark horse. I can’t figure her out. I could believe that she doesn’t touch that hunk Tristan or she’s in the bed with him half of every day. She could go either way.”
“What’s a ‘hunk’?” he asked.
“You,” she said, then kissed him back.
After three days of lovemaking, their second love took over and they began to draw and paint. It was Russell who started it. “Lie there,” he said as he picked up his pad and pencil. “Just like that. I want to capture you in that exact position.”
It had taken only half a day before they were in competition as to who was going to pose and who was going to draw.
It was on the fifth day that Russell had grown serious and pulled out the oil paints. Zoë had used oils before but she didn’t favor them. She preferred watercolors, and pencils and chalk. Her portraits were done in these media and her clients had loved the sweetness of them.
“I want to have something of you,” Russell said.
Zoë started to reply, but she didn’t. Somehow, he knew that she was going to leave. And she knew he sensed that she was going to leave as abruptly as she’d appeared, and he wanted some piece of her to keep forever.
Zoë had done her best to keep it light between the two of them. She felt that not going to bed with him for a full twenty-four hours after they met had been a giant strength of will. She’d never been a promiscuous woman. She’d had two intense flings with men her age while living in the houses of her clients, but when the job was over, she’d had no problem leaving them.
She liked to tell herself she was going to feel the same about Russell, but she knew it was a lie. She liked him. She liked his sense of humor, the earthiness of him, and she loved his talent. She especially loved that his life was driven by a passion for art. He was a kindred soul.
One of the things she liked most about him was where his passion took him. While he stayed with a family for at least a year, ostensibly to make portraits of all of the family members—just as Zoë did—the truth was that he spent several hours each day drawing the people who worked in the fields and in the house. The ordinary people. “The people who make the world function,” he said.
She was impressed at how fast he could draw. He told her he’d had to learn speed to keep his old master from whacking him on the knuckles with a sanding board. Whatever the reason, Zoë said he was the original camera—then she’d had to make up an explanation of what she meant. He’d never shown his quick sketches to anyone before Zoë. “People would not like them,” he mumbled, and she saw that he was pretending that her opinion didn’t matter to him—but it did.
As she looked at his drawings she could understand why people in his time didn’t care for them. They were the forerunners of Impressionist paintings and she loved them. She took the paintbrush away from him and did her best to show him how, in a hundred years, Monet would paint a pond.
“But it’s not finished,” he said. “It’s not clear what you’re seeing.”
“That’s the point,” she said. “It’s an impression of what you’re seeing. You have the real thing to look at, but this is paint. It’s not a real pond, not real lily pads, so you have a lot of freedom with how you reproduce it in paint.”
It was a simple concept and easily understandable to her twenty-first-century brain, but it was revolutionary to him. “A good likeness” was paramount to him. But then, he didn’t have photographs to compare with.
After Russell started with oils, Zoë quit competing with him. She knew she’d not be able to take anything back with her when she left, so she rather liked the idea that maybe she’d someday see a portrait of herself on the wall of a museum. For days now, she’d posed while he painted. It had taken only his asking to get her to pose nude.
Each day they went somewhere different and Russell began a new painting of her. They didn’t speak of it but she knew that his idea was to get as much on canvas as he could before she left him forever. She wondered when he slept because each morning he’d show her what he’d done during the night.
“Faith was here yesterday, with Beth,” Russell said.
“Did she give you the key?”
“Faith? No.”
“Very funny,” Zoë said. “If you want me to stay still, tell me what you know.”
“Every family has secrets and this one is no exception,” he said.
Zoë looked at the plants. “What are these plants?” If they were marijuana she’d understand, or maybe not as they weren’t outlawe
d yet.
Russell glanced up at her. “I do not know what they are. Beth takes care of them. Her brother never comes here and her uncle has been too ill.”
“Faith did a good job on the uncle, didn’t she?”
“More of your enlightened practices from your young country? For a people so young, you have certainly learned a lot in a short time.”
She started to reply, but instead just looked at him. He was a good listener and, more than that, he was intelligent. He seemed to take tiny pieces of whatever she said and put them together to make a whole.
