Pug Hill - Alison Pace [57]
“Hi, Elliot,” I say, as I walk to my station and begin sorting immediately through my can of brushes, looking for the one I was using at the end of yesterday; it was working so well.
“Hey, Hope,” Elliot says, he even looks up halfway and smiles, which of course makes my stomach flip over.
Patsy Cline isn’t playing in the background anymore. Suddenly, the song has changed. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are singing now, singing the first lines of the song, “Otherside.” How long? How long? I’ve always liked to believe that the music that always plays in my mind has a point, and I think: How long, indeed. I mean, really, how long can this go on? And worse than that, with me being single and all, how long, if it doesn’t get better, until it just gets worse? How long until I’m not just staring across the room at Elliot, how long until I’m more desperate, brazen even? How long until I am up and off my stool, charging across the Conservation Studio and lunging at his penis? My, God. I shake my head, it is the only way I can think of to make the Red Hot Chili Peppers song stop playing. It works. The music stops. I angle my easel and my stool away, and find the brush that I want.
Thankfully an hour, maybe longer goes by, and I’m able to concentrate only on the picking, the tiny painting of red dots onto the red section of the Rothko.
“Hello, Elliot, and hello, Hope.” Sergei’s deep voice bounces off the ceiling, off the walls, as he strides purposefully into the room, past us, and over to the canvas stretchers. Why is Sergei here? Is Sergei here all the time on Saturdays with Elliot? Am
I the only one who generally does not come in on the weekends? I always thought no one ever came in on the weekends; well, I guess I assumed Elliot did, because on top of being the object of my endless fascination, he also does seem to have a bit of an obsessive-compulsive disorder lately when it comes to whipping through his Old Master landscapes. Landscapes, though, they are so much easier to restore. You can hide so much among trees and leaves and blades of grass. You can’t hide anything on a Rothko. With a Rothko, with the broad areas of color, everything you do is out there for the world to see. You can’t make any mistakes; you can’t hide anything at all.
I remind myself that Paintings Conservation is very much not a race, and that it doesn’t matter one bit that Elliot must have finished three Old Master landscapes in the time that I’ve been laboring over the red section of my Rothko. Unless of course, it does? How sad really would it be if one of the great prides of my life, that I am diligent and studious and hardworking in my career, turns out not to be true?
They can’t be here all the time; there must be something special going on. I put down my brush. Then I pick it up and decide to carry it with me. Perhaps I’m just going to wash my brush and not really on a stealth fact-finding mission. I walk over to Sergei. He’s much farther away than Elliot, but he is safer. If any of my fears in fact turn out to be true, there isn’t any chance at all I will lunge and grab at Sergei’s penis. My God, I think again. Has it really come to this?
“Sergei?” I say, sidling over. Generally, just so you know, I don’t usually sidle.
“Yes?” he says looking up from the back of a canvas he has just laid out across the large table.
“Why is everyone here?” It sounds stupid as I say it, and I am glad I chose Sergei rather than Elliot as an informational source. “I mean, I know why I’m here. I’m having trouble with the Rothko, but are you and Elliot always here on Saturdays?”
“Elliot,” he says with a nod in Elliot’s direction, “who knows about him? That one loves to work. No, I am not usually here on Saturday. I’m here,” he says a little sheepishly, “because