t the onset of her career, inspired by Gaugin’s Tahitian diary, Geneva Underwood had begun a journal which she kept open on a table next to her easel. When she needed to re-think her image, or when her painting felt insipid or vain, she could wipe her hands and indulge in a cleansing workout with a pencil. At the age of 58, she’d been keeping the journal almost 40 years.

Painting remained her first love and what she did best. It still felt like riding a horse or canoeing a river for the first time. Painting shaped life into manageable equations. It framed her needs.

Casal’s version of Bach’s Suites for Cello played on her stereo. Gonnesh incense burned on the windowsill. Her short-haired black cat, Siquieros, purred in a saucer of window light that stained the room’s braided oval rug.

Geneva paused to observe her cat. She put down her palette knife and checked to make sure her phone was unplugged. She wiped her hands clean and then sat in front of her journal.

She wrote: To be skeptical about one’s talent is a form of wisdom. Perfuming my workroom, sweating in it, I paint on, trusting that wisdom. My mother was a sculptor. She understood the sweat. Art is not an escape, nor a remedy. It’s work.

Geneva returned to her easel, dashed a few strokes of cyan into the depth of a sunlit wave. She backed up and hugged herself. More cyan was needed. She dashed, dotted and squiggled with various brushes.

It was more than a wave. It was the birth of love, at dawn. She reviewed her polaroids of the seacoast again. In her youth, she had written lovely poems about the sea. And she had waltzed with her mother, Edna. Indeed, this was a painting about she and Edna, arm in arm.

Back at her journal, she sat a few minutes, daydreaming. She then wrote: What could be more excting than making art? It’s a sojourn, a question, perpetual discovery. Edna understood this. It’s a poorer world without her.

Geneva had never known a father or husband. Her students were her children. She hated them. And she adored them. They could be selfish, indelicate. They could be inspired.

She continued to write: They are young. And when I was young, I didn’t know any better, either. We all want to be young forever. How tepid, really.

With a sigh, Geneva mixed cobalt with ivory and a smudge of violet. Sometimes, the more she shared an insight with her students, the more passion and understanding drained out of their eyes. Sometimes, a cloud of idiocy descended over her classroom. They were products of the computer and TV, two appliances Geneva refused to own.

Many of her students were out of touch with their monsters. They were obsessed with surfaces. They would produce no real art until their obsessions turned inward.

That’s my opinion, she thought. There’s nothing wrong with it, as such.

She returned to her journal and wrote: They represent a culture I no longer comprehend. Their incessant references to popular music and gadgetry is a bore. This culture is tiresome, mediocre, mechanical. What I seek is beauty and innocence and unfettered intellectual curiosity.

Returning to her painting, she noticed that her strokes were starting to relate in fragments. She didn’t want that. There wasn’t any sweep through the canvas. There was a touch of urgency, but it lacked cohesion.

Her head was ringing. She needed a drink.

She dropped into her armchair. Hours passed. She was finished painting for the day. She sipped a few gin and tonics, ate a simple dinner and was ready for bed.

Before turning in, she picked up her pencil and scribbled in the journal: Who will pay generously for my work? No one. It’s hopeless.

And yet it was not, because a part of her hoped that she would die in her sleep and that her journal would be found, open to that page. Word would spread of the great suffering of Geneva Underwood. Sympathy, along with her talent, would place her in the canon of modern masters of the abstract.

Oh Christ help me, she thought, lying in bed. She started to weep. Tears flowed for a while, though not as steadily as she’d wanted. She was a fading spinster who would teach art until she dropped dead. They’d reduce her class hours until she’d be forced to retire, without a pension. Art couldn’t save anyone from commerce.

Geneva had never bought a house or taken a trip overseas. After graduating from college, she’d rented cheap apartments, living hand to mouth by teaching. Her commitment to art was leading toward mastery. Of late, rather than calm or peace, it brought troubling depths of emotion, mostly tears.

Siquieros rubbed against her calves. She petted him, glad not to be crying.

With her books, memories, discount coupons and annual memberships to underfunded over-politicized museums, she still often felt like a spectator, disconnected and nomadic. She was a frumpish dame who couldn’t run a VCR.

There was a time when a Gainsborough waistline or a Titian robe carried her across seas to Europe. One day she’d take that tour, visit all those museums.

There was a time when capturing light within a grape launched her into rhapsody. A time of unmanageable exuberance, when it mattered whether she selected charcoal, oils, acrylic or ink. Morning dew on a windowpane. Steam behind a neon sign. Every moment a door. Every fleck of light a collage. And the most important thing in the world was to describe her mind in a picture.

All that time had gone into her paintings. Unframed, they littered her crowded apartment, leaning against the walls facing in so she wouldn’t have to see them.

That night Geneva lay in bed, eyes open through a dream where she lectured her students. One of them, a boy from India who spoke exquisite English, posed a question.

“In Michelangelo’s works, greatness is obvious. In Edward Hopper, I also see greatness, though Hopper creates it by carefully denying it exists. How can this be?”

Such a question silenced the classroom. As Geneva replied, the students hung on every word.

“Michelangelo painted human motion. Muscular fluidity. Conflict, tension, the struggle to accept God. With Hopper, though, I see a struggle to accept a flat modern one-dimensional plane.”

Geneva then hurried out of bed. Dressed in her nightgown, she fumbled in the dark toward her journal. She brought a candle to the kitchen table, heated water for tea. She wrote as if her words were guided by a supernatural energy.

Consider quantity. For Hopper, how blue is too much blue? For Michelangelo, how small is a small nose? Art is re-envisioned life. From Michelangelo I get a feeling of largeness, though he gives me a precise and actual human form. From Hopper, I see through a needle’s eye the constricting sense of the modern. There is no muscle, no arena small enough for Hopper. He knows the littered urban plain reduces our humanity. He didn’t fear how banal we’ve become.

Geneva stopped writing. Siquieros was sound asleep. An hour had passed and her tea had gone cold. So very quietly the night weighed down her eyelids.

She lay her head on the table and drifted off to sleep. She dreamed that her best student ever, Cindy Clay, was telling her, “You bowled me over, Ms. Underwood. You’re terrific. I just love you.”

Geneva sat up and gasped. She rose and entered her bedroom. Siquieros took one look at her, sprang off the bed and hid under a table.

She glanced around the room. What time was it? She thought of Cindy Clay. Cindy had talent; she was teaching and did a show usually once a year. Geneva had always been fond of her, even a trifle envious.

Siquieros returned to the bed and curled into a ball. It was a comfort to hear him purring, but Geneva still couldn’t sleep.

She rose late, missing precious early hours at the easel. This put her in a dour mood. After classes, she could salvage the day with an afternoon of painting. She was out of milk, didn’t drink her coffee black. She’d grab a cup on the way to school. Her car made all the right sounds, but wouldn’t start. She could open the hood. Beyond that, all cars were a mystery.

She phoned the college and told them she’d be late. Then she called Triple A. It was pathetic that she didn’t know anyone in her neighborhood to ask for advice. This was a price she paid for spending each day in front of her easel.

An hour passed before the Triple A mechanic arrived. He wore a crew cut that smacked of the fifties. He was brusque, wasted no time , sat behind the wheel, turned the key a few times and remarked, “Needs a jump.”

In minutes, Geneva’s engine was running. Before driving off, the mechanic advised, “Get the battery charged, and have ‘em look at the alternator belt.”

Now, she had that worry. She scribbled a note: battery charged/ alternator. She’d ask a fellow teacher to recommend a mechanic.

She disliked any beverage in a paper cup, so skipped her morning coffee and hurried along. Having missed her first class, she arrived ten minutes late for her second one. No one appeared to have noticed. The students who attended often had already set up their easels and were working. They whined when she told them to stop because she wanted to talk about motion in painting. She had expected a few blithe and witty comments, but nothing came.

Jarvis Branch entered the room. He was a lanky African-American, a history professor. He wore a cream-colored blazer, blue shirt, yellow tie. The only black male on the faculty, he was often defensive for good reasons. Geneva respected him thoroughly.

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Jarvis. He smiled, handed her a folded piece of paper. “These were in everyone’s mailbox. I’m making the rounds just to be sure. The meeting’s with Dean Rainey this afternoon. Three o’clock, third floor, admin building.”

“What meeting?”

“I know,” said Jarvis. “Short notice. But it’s mandatory.”

“I have plans, Mr. Branch. I have my work. Don’t they know that by now?”

“I’d be there if I were you. It’s Dean Rainey. She wants everyone in on the plan.”

“For what?”

“Ground-breaking ceremonies for the new business school.”

“Like I give a hoot.”

Jarvis chuckled. “I hear you.”

“By the way, do you know a good mechanic?”

Jarvis looked around the room. Students slept with their heads on their work tables. He replied, “Later, after the meeting.”

Then he left. Geneva watched her students work until it was time for their break.

When they returned, she took attendance. Half of the class was absent. This upset her less than having to attend a meeting with Dean Rainey. She didn’t want to be a snob, but none of the campus deans she’d met were very interesting, and she had her painting to do. Nothing was more important than that.

Her car wouldn’t be fixed and possibly wouldn’t start when she tried to go home. Nor would she get any painting done. This left her brimming with dread. She could erase that dread by teaching well. She taught because it kept her involved in what she loved: painting and art. She began her lecture.

“I’ve been dreaming Rodin, of late. You all know Rodin. It’s in his sculpture that I find paintings. What do I mean by that?”

Drew Minor, rashy-skinned, his hair dyed peroxide blond, two gold earrings in his upper right eyebrow and one in his tongue, replied, “Got no clue.”

This brought the usual titters. Geneva struggled not to appear angry or bored.

Students often fought her as if she were one of their under-appreciated parents. Or else they casually ignored her and daydreamed with their eyes open. She wasn’t sure which insult was worse.

“Well, Drew, let me explain, then.”

“Shoot to kill,” said Drew.

Geneva flinched at the comment. “Yes. But let us think of life, shall we? What is the shape of life?”

Drew Minor said, “My hand.”

A few students giggled.

“But only when it’s full of cash.”

“Very funny, Drew,” said Geneva. “Anybody else?”

One girl said, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Okay,” said Geneva. “Let me try it another way. Let’s think about an arc. Why an arc? So we can follow the movement in Rodin. Are you with me now?”

Nothing. Geneva sighed. If only once, they’d surprise her.

She decided to speak in a more imperious tone, with a slight edge. She didn’t care whether they liked her, or not. Perhaps if they listened, something would sink in. At the very least, she was doing her job.

“The arc in any painting or sculpture guides its viewer. Just like the arc in drama. In Rodin’s case, I think of of the female form. The eternal arc. Followed by another arc. Over and over again.”

Geneva waited for comment. Just maybe, one of them had gotten it.

Drew Minor was doodling. Two of the girls stared out the window. Jake Molina and TJ Carr looked as if they’d been blasted with an aerosol. Finally, gifted Essa Vincent asked, “What’s lesbianism got to do with Rodin?”

This jarred the class into brisk laughter. Were they mocking her? At that moment, Geneva hated Essa. Hate reddened her face and Geneva was sure the emotion hadn’t gone unnoticed.

She took out a pencil and scrawled on scrap paper as if she were writing in her journal: Swallow dignity, perverse private masochism. Why bother with these brats?

She looked up at her students. She could feel the bubble of conspiracy expanding. Then, like a wave, the drowsy after-effect of a sleepless night plunged her body into an anguished fatigue. “I can see I’m talking to myself,” she said.

To fail at teaching on a day when she’d gotten no painting done would only deepen her masochistic streak. A streak fostered by her lack of acclaim as an artist and teacher. Geneva changed her tone. “In the end, the most important thing is to do good work. But of what value is that in a debased society?”

She knew she had lost them. She recalled Cindy Clay from her dream. She looked around the room. Cindy, of course, was long gone.

She turned to her enemy, Essa Vincent, so self-involved and impatient. “Essa, I’m talking about lines and energy. Lesbianism is your word, not mine.”

Drew Minor blurted out, “Whoa, yeah, sexy.”

That loosened them up with laughter and seemed to blunt the edge enough for Geneva to continue. She kept looking at Essa, who kept looking away.

“Rodin’s essence is motion. The circle from the circle. And it makes me think of womanhood.”

“Now that I get,” said Essa. She snapped her bubblegum.

It was enough for Geneva. To surive the teaching profession meant lowering her standards. She held to a familiar tone. “I love Rodin,” she said. “His art gives me hope. Shaped like a curve.”

Had she struck a nerve or had she lost them again? Oh, hell, for what the college paid her it didn’t matter. Nonetheless, she felt better about her crummy day. Though not even Jake Molina, who was usually infatuated with her opinions, had been listening much. And Barbara Jewel had put her Walkman earphones on.

“So, when we look at The Kiss,” said Geneva, pausing to point at the poster of that sculpture which she had taped to the wall, “We see an arc that speaks of infinite motion in a charged universe. Energies move to distinguish themselves. They harmonize, too. Ask yourself. Upon which wave does the hope in your painting guide its viewer?”

“Hope is key,” said Drew Minor. “Hope is gonna save us.”

This brought a distinctly male groan from the back of the room. Geneva wanted to add one more point, but stopped when the same male groaner said, “Break time.”

She expected such behavior from high school students, but these were college undergrads, some of them art majors. After decades of teaching, their consistently dismal work continued to prove that attending a college had become, at best, a pedestrian measure of achievement.

What did that say about her as a teacher?

They painted during the last hour. She sat through the meeting. Her car wouldn’t start and a janitor helped her with a jump. He told her about the station on the corner of Union and Enfield, where Tug was employed and in ten minutes diagnosed the problem.

Tug was fat and hairy and frowning. Rodin would have loved him. “Needs a battery. Change them belts, too. That’s what run it down in the first place.”

She left the car overnight, took a cab home. She was exhausted, hadn’t done any painting. Her only solace was having the following day off.

She awoke early and painted all morning. At two o’clock, mouth dry and hinging open, she was unable to stand any longer. After dropping into her armchair, she clenched and unclenched her fists. Her easel and her journal were now far away. Part of another woman’s life, a woman she knew and still believed in. As the afternoon passed, she dozed without dreams while Siquieros rubbed against her legs.

It was five o’clock when Tug called to say her car was ready. The repair bill, including tax, came to $475 dollars. It seemed like she was overpaying.

 

[END]

© 2004 John Flynn - Contributor's Bio