The Art of Romance (17 page)

Dylan’s throat squeezed nearly shut with the desire to unburden himself and the fear of their reaction to the truth. He looked each of his brothers in the eyes then took a deep breath. “It started…in New York. I had that good scholarship but no money to live on. So I started looking for freelance work, thinking I could make money and expand my portfolio. I got requests for samples at a couple of places; then, through someone at school, I got hooked up with an agent. She took a look at all of my work, even my sketchbooks.”

Mortification boiled up his neck and across his face. “Y’all don’t know this, but one of the reasons Mother and Dad didn’t want me pursuing art is because of some of the drawings in those sketchbooks. Mother liked to read steamy romance novels. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I found some of them hidden around the house. I became obsessed with the artwork on the front. That was before they started using photos, like so many of them do now.”

Tyler’s mouth hung open. “You were drawing.…
porn
?”

“No Tyler, that’s not what he’s saying.” Spencer’s face went blank after his immediate defense of his big brother. “That’s not what you were saying, was it, D?”

Pax got up and went into the kitchen.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. One of the things that drew me to them is that they had some similarity to the artwork from the Renaissance era—the castles and landscapes, the realistic renderings of the people, the characters.”

Pax returned and handed Dylan a glass of water. “Guys, I think the problem was less about the fact Dylan had done drawings like that and more because Mother was horrified that Dylan had discovered her dirty little secret—that she liked reading raunchy romance novels and that she was afraid somehow, from his imitating the covers in his artwork, the whole world would find out.”

Dylan stared, open-mouthed, at his brother.

“We shared a room, bro. And I spent a lot of time sitting in the hallway outside our room. Those doors weren’t all that thick.” Bright red patches illuminated his cheeks. “And what you and Mother never knew, and I’ll deny it with my last breath, is that while you just liked the covers, I liked reading them myself.”

Spencer and Tyler guffawed—but Dylan gave Pax a sympathetic squeeze on the shoulder. His admission would draw all kinds of harassment from their two younger brothers for years to come.

To take the heat off Pax, Dylan continued his story. “The agent who picked me up in college got me a chance to pitch cover ideas to one of the big romance novel publishers in New York. When I saw how much they would pay, I knew I had to do whatever it took to get that job. I have a pretty good imagination, but like most portrait artists, it’s better to have a real world image to create from. I couldn’t afford to pay any models, but one of my roommates had a girlfriend who shared our post office box. But she only came by once a week to get her mail. So her clothing catalogs would sit around on the coffee table all week. That gave me the perfect—free—resource for female images. For the men—”

Dylan grabbed the glass of water and took a big swig. Other than Rhonda, he’d never shared this with anyone. “For the men, I used…I used myself as the model.”

S
urprisingly, the peanut gallery remained silent after Dylan’s revelations, but looks of shock and—was that respect?—came from all three. “I disguised myself—more heavily muscled, different hair color or eye color—but it’s me on the front of six romance novels that hit the bestseller list. I used a pseudonym, so except for the agent and whoever paid the bills at the publisher, no one knows I did them.”

“But that’s not what made you pull away from the family, is it?” Pax asked.

Dylan sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound. “No. The last cover I did was after I got the assistant professor position at Watts-Maxwell. My thesis adviser in graduate school thought it was funny that I’d been doing romance novel covers in the style of the Venetian master artist I’d been studying. So I didn’t think anything of renting studio space at Watts to work on it. The chair of my department saw me working on it one night and warned me never to tell anyone else there about it because I could be in danger of losing my job—said they wouldn’t want any of their professors to be involved in anything like that.”

Here came the hard part. “Dr. Kramer, the department chair, decided that the work I’d done—the work I’d been encouraged to do as a student—was hindering my growth as an artist. She had me take several of her modern and postmodern classes—yes, even though I was already a professor—and insisted I work only in that style, closely supervised by her. She took me to all of the gala events in the Philadelphia art community—and even to New York a few times for gallery and exhibit openings.”

His hands shook, remembering not the fun he’d had in the beginning, experiencing things someone of that age rarely got to experience, but how things ended. “She convinced me I didn’t know as much about art as I thought, and she took a systematic approach to reteaching me everything—about art and about myself.”

How—why had he fallen for her? He could see it so clearly now: she’d fed him a meal of lies, and he’d licked the plate clean.

“When did it turn into a relationship?” Tyler asked.

“Wait—what?” Spencer’s heavy brows met over his nose. “You had a relationship with the chair of your department? Don’t most schools have rules about instructors or professors and department chairs and deans? In businesses, it falls under the nepotism rules.”

“It does in academia, too,” Pax said.

“She had me so convinced that she knew best, that anything she did was okay, I didn’t worry about it. She told me that I needed to stay in Philadelphia during all my school breaks—made sure I had showings scheduled or that there were events for us to attend during the summers or over the holidays—so that I wouldn’t be able to come home.” He rubbed the inside of his right elbow, where he’d gotten his first tattoo. “She played on my desire to have someone, anyone in a position of authority over me, approve of what I was doing, and she used it to her advantage.”

Just saying the words aloud flooded him with new understanding of her and of himself. “She had me living a lifestyle that was far beyond my financial means—and after a couple of years of that, I was on the verge of losing everything. Until she suggested I move in with her.”

“Were you in love with her?” Tyler pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and leaned forward.

“I don’t know. I thought so. But at the same time, my conscience kept bothering me, telling me it was wrong, that I shouldn’t be sleeping with a woman I wasn’t married to.” A grim chuckle bubbled in his chest. No matter how many times he’d heard at church that God wanted him to save himself sexually for marriage, whenever he’d had misgivings about living with Rhonda, the remonstrances always came in Perty’s voice.

“When I told her at Thanksgiving that I wanted to come home for Christmas, that it had been five years since I’d had Christmas with my family, she told me that she was my family and she was the only one who mattered. It was like something snapped inside of me. The next day, I called a buddy—the guy I’d bought my truck from, as a matter of fact—and asked him if I could crash at his place. I told Rhonda I was moving out. And then she snapped. Started screaming at me, crying, telling me how ungrateful I was, how she’d made me, how I would be nothing if it weren’t for her. Then she went to the human resources department and told them that we’d been having a relationship. She’s the chair of a department. I was an assistant professor without tenure. So…here I am. Jobless. Homeless. And feeling pretty stupid.”

He downed the rest of his water. Speaking that much for the first time in a month strained his vocal cords. Admitting to his weakness, his stupidity, and his sordid choices left him completely drained.

“Well, you’re not homeless, because Gramps and Perty will let you live there however long you want to—you’ve always been Perty’s favorite.” Spencer softened his accusation with a grin.

“And Perty said something at lunch last Sunday about the possibility of you picking up a couple of classes at Robertson in the spring, so it doesn’t sound like you’re completely jobless,” Pax said.

“As to stupidity…” Tyler started, then grinned, still looking like the eleven-year-old he’d been when Dylan left for college. If anyone in the family had the right to call Dylan stupid, it was the certified genius. “You know what they say about those of us in the higher IQ brackets—to pack in all that extra intelligence, God had to leave something out. He had to make the
common sense
choice.”

And to prove the point about his limited common sense, Dylan had actually considered
not
telling his brothers anything.

“There’s one more thing we want to talk to you about.” From the grim set of Pax’s mouth, Dylan steeled himself for something even more unpleasant than what he’d just been through. “Even though we weren’t sure what had happened while you were away, we were pretty sure it was bad—just from what Tyler shared with us about how you’d changed whenever y’all got together. I have a really good friend from church who’ll be doing his practicum this spring for his master’s in marriage and family therapy over at Trevecca. He has to carry a client load of something like eight people that he’s counseling over the semester. It’s a win-win situation—he rounds out the number of clients he needs; you get free therapy.” Pax ended with a nervous laugh.

The canvases with images of doors, windows, and gateways scrolled through Dylan’s mind—along with the few things he remembered from the art therapy course he’d taken as an undergrad. It couldn’t hurt—and it would probably help. “That sounds like a good idea.”

As one, his three brothers let out relieved breaths.

“Now, I thought we were supposed to be talking about gifts for Mother and Dad and the grands.” The gamut of emotions he’d just run left him as limp as the filaments of a squirrel-hair paintbrush.

Pax clapped him on the shoulder. “We got their gifts when Spencer and Tyler were here at Thanksgiving. Don’t worry. I brought the cards with me for you to sign, and I’ll tell you how much you owe.”

Spencer looked away from his computer and spoke to someone off camera. “Hey, guys, if we’re done, I’ve got some serious snowboarding to get to.”

“And I’ve got plans to go into the city this afternoon with some of the guys.” Tyler started typing something on his computer.

“See you two next week.” Pax pulled the laptop closer to him.

Dylan raised his hand in farewell before his brothers each severed the connection. Pax shut down and closed the laptop.

“I heard that Mrs. Evans is over here using Perty’s kitchen.” Pax brushed his unruly curls back from his eyes. “Let’s go see if there’s anything we can sample.”

“Okay.” Dylan grabbed his leather jacket off the arm of the oversized easy chair that demarcated the beginning of the living room area of the apartment. “And hey, Pax?”

His brother stopped at the head of the stairs. “Yeah?”

“Thanks. I know this”—Dylan jerked his head toward the table—”couldn’t have been easy on you, especially.”

“You’re my big brother. What else could I do?” Pax shrugged then tromped down the stairs.

Dylan looked up at the ceiling, but his heart looked even higher. After so many years of systematically cutting himself off from his family, his brothers had been willing to stage an intervention to drag him, kicking and screaming if necessary, back into the fold. Maybe it was time for him to see if God was willing to do the same thing.

Caylor sang along with a 1950s stage performance sound track from
Oklahoma!
, the musical she’d been begging Bridget to choose as their fall musical next school year. Of course, Bridget had seen through her request—Caylor wanted to play the role of Aunt Eller so she could be on stage instead of behind the scenes. In high school and college performances, she’d played Ado Annie.

And just like the girl who couldn’t say no when a man started talking “purty” to her, that was how Caylor had ended up with her first—and last—broken heart. No, she much preferred the role of Aunt Eller, the stalwart spinster aunt of the musical’s female lead. She’d save the starry-eyed dreams of falling in love for the heroines of her romance novels.