A man walks by and tosses his cigarette butt into the fountain. It fizzles out with an angry hiss. I stare at it as it floats on the surface, bobs for a moment, and then disappears. I gulp, feeling like my own head is sinking under murky water. I don’t know what to do! How do you even hold a paintbrush? Is there some “official” way to do that? I try to keep from hyperventilating. My lie is about to catch up with me and beat me to a pulp. Sylvie chatters about Monet and Cézanne, Impressionist artists, while my legs threaten to dissolve. My bones must be melting in the hot sun. What was I thinking? I was so sure that Sylvie would ease me into this whole “artist-thing,” not hand me a brush and expect me to turn into a mini-Monet.
Sylvie seats herself a few feet away from me on the edge of the fountain. She takes a sip from a water bottle and smiles at me. Her eyes gleam, and excitement shines in her face. She has another artist to mentor, like Ansel. Except I’m not like Ansel. I don’t have a single artistic molecule in my body.
I look around in desperation. I have to do something. What do I paint? The square, the pink buildings, the silver tram whirring by? My eyes fall on a pole not far away, near the tram stop. At the top is what looks like a carved man kneeling down on a tiny platform, like he’s meditating or something. There are several more of them, lining the edge of the checkerboard pavement along either side of the metal tracks. Pole guys. Should I paint them?
Sylvie notices where my gaze falls and her face glows. She points and chatters in an explosion of French like a cloudburst of sound and I do not understand a single word. Not one. And then she waits, and I’m supposed to answer. Great. I smile and duck my head toward my canvas, placing my chin in my hand like I’m deep in concentration. Sylvie laughs and stops talking. And I still have to paint. Do it, Ro! Paint something! Anything!
Forgetting the metal pole guys, I take a deep breath, dip my brush into a color that looks a bit like the color of the sky, and smear it across the top of the canvas. The blue is too dark, so I mix in a dab of white, and it turns milky gray. That doesn’t work for the sky, so I decide to paint the base of another fountain I see nearby. I move the brush in a circle as I try to create the fountain’s round shape and end up with something that looks like a large toilet. I dip the brush into more paint, but the brush accidentally touches another color, and suddenly my toilet fountain turns a muddy brown. I toy with the idea of “accidentally” pushing my easel into the fountain.
And then a dog barks, and a shrill woman’s voice shouts, and I glance up to see a short, blonde woman guiding a greyhound that’s almost as tall as she is on a leash. The woman wears a white dress with horizontal black stripes, and white leggings with vertical red stripes. Her white-blonde hair is braided, much like Sylvie’s, but the braids are uneven and lumpy, bundled up into a tangle on the top of her head, like a pile of frayed rope.
The woman lets her dog off its leash and it bounds into the toilet/fountain I’d been trying to recreate, joyfully leaping and splashing in the water. Then the woman sits at the edge of the fountain, tosses a cigarette into the water, and lights another. I watch the light glint on the water as it splashes, and the haze of smoke that circles the woman’s head, and then I notice that the woman is made up of shapes. She’s a striped watermelon on red licorice legs. I’m so desperate at this point that I figure she’s as good a subject as any for my painting. I dip my brush into more paint.
I start with the round bundle of rope that’s her braided hair, and then try to paint her cantaloupe-shaped head. I paint her watermelon-stripey middle, and add two long red licorice ropes for skinny legs. While the woman lights a third cigarette I paint a chocolate-dog dancing in the fountain.
The woman’s dog jumps out of the water and gets her all wet, and her screams can probably be heard all across town. I look over at Sylvie. She’s enjoying the show. She glances at me and winks. I try to smile back, but I’m so terrified of what Sylvie will think when she sees my painting that I can’t.
Instead, I look down and rummage in the box to find a smaller brush so I can paint tiny stripes on the watermelon-shaped dress. The figure is so flat, with no depth at all. I have no idea how to make her seem round. Everything on the canvas is flat. I dab more paint onto my fountain, and try to make it less toilet-like. I dab dots of white to make splashes of water that spray up in the air around the dancing chocolate-dog. Then I paint a tiny cigarette in the woman’s hand.
I step back to survey my work. My stomach squeezes into a tiny ball. The painting is terrible. It’s a joke. A watermelon with a cantaloupe for a head and a pile of ropes on top for hair, and red licorice for legs. Smoking a cigarette. This doesn’t look anything like what Impressionists painted. Is it Modern Art?
“Ah,” Sylvie sighs. I jump. I didn’t know she was right behind me.
Something in her voice makes me look at her. She’s studying my painting intently, holding her hand to her chin. I start to breathe funny. She knows. What was I thinking? I can’t fool her, she’s a real artist!
Then Sylvie throws her head back and laughs. “Ah, Rosie! What a wonderful way to see the world!” She switches to her halting English, “Your Impressionists would be . . . impressed!” She laughs at her little joke.