The Art of Romance (3 page)

He entered the outbuilding through the side door. He supposed he didn’t mind having his grandparents’ Mercedes and Lexus as his downstairs neighbors. He crossed the garage and stepped up into the workroom—the workroom that was now his art studio.

The canvas on the easel taunted him, as if it knew what he’d just been through.

Blue. Gray. Green. No. All wrong.

He grabbed the tubes of lemon yellow and cadmium red, streaked them together on his palette, and slashed yellow-orange-red across the boring fades of blues and grays. He stepped back, dipped into the puddle of swirled brightness, and went a little Jackson Pollock on the canvas, enjoying the stark droplets of brightness against the somber background as he flicked and flung his brush to splatter and drip the paint onto the image.

Of course, the composition happening on the canvas bore absolutely no resemblance to the image he’d carried around in his head all morning. But he’d promised himself he’d never paint anything like that ever again. For now, he’d stick with the abstract, ambivalent dreck that had garnered him so much praise at the three gallery showings he’d had in Philadelphia over the past five years.
Three
gallery showings in
Philadelphia
. Friends from college had yet to land one showing anywhere.

He mashed the brush into the black paint and daubed it in lopsided polka dots across the surface, leaving plenty of texture. Rhonda had always liked the texture he created in his paintings.
Dimensionality
, she’d called it.

Child’s finger painting, he’d thought it looked like. Not something he would be adding to his portfolio.

Speaking of his portfolio…

He grabbed the rag hanging from the top of the easel and wiped his hands while crossing to the giant-sized, economy worktable that filled the end of the room. Finished canvases of all shapes and sizes sat seven or eight deep, leaning up against the wall. He hadn’t updated his portfolio since before the faculty art show back in October. He hadn’t painted anything he liked since then, but he hadn’t painted anything he’d liked in the last two years, so what did that matter? Rhonda said—

He supposed it didn’t really matter anymore what his former department head and secret partner—she’d hated the term
girlfriend—
had said about his work. She’d been the one to make him completely change his style after hiring him as a full-time assistant professor of art.

After flipping through most of the couple of dozen canvases, he felt like throwing them all away instead of taking digital pictures of them to print and add to his portfolio.

He crouched down and pulled out one of the big cardboard boxes from under the table, the one with the address of his apartment in Brooklyn written in black magic marker across the face of it. Ah, the Brooklyn years. The years when painting and drawing actually made him happy—and money. The years when art—doing, learning, and teaching it—had been about his own expression of ideas, thoughts, innovation, and creativity, not about trying to bamboozle some wealthy fat cat in Philadelphia into buying one of his paintings because it was a “conversation piece.” Or to give some bored socialite high on prescription drugs the feeling that she had one-upped her rich, snotty friends by buying a one-of-a-kind, original, unique, one-and-only, exclusive, one-off work by somebody who actually looked like an artist should look: curly black hair stylishly unkempt, three days’ worth of stubble, an earring, a large silver signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand, and a couple of tattoos. At least Rhonda had not put up too much of a fight over his own designs for the tattoos she insisted he get.

He pulled his watch out of his pocket. Not quite eleven o’clock in the morning. If he got cleaned up now, he could make it out to the college campus before noon. He was pretty sure this was the week before finals, so most of the professors and deans should still be on campus, even on a Friday.

And just in case his grandmother asked, he would go ahead and pop his head into the friend’s granddaughter’s office, just so he wouldn’t have to lie about meeting her.

It wasn’t as if he’d ever have to see her again.

D
ylan pulled his Ford Escape into a parking space right beside another Escape. He’d wanted to get the small, hybrid SUV in white, but not a single dealer in Philly had one with the options he wanted, so he took it in blue instead. He sure did like the way it looked in white, though.

The parking tag hanging from the rearview mirror announced this SUV belonged to a member of the faculty. And the I
MPROVE
Y
OUR
F
UTURE—
R
EAD A
B
OOK
T
ODAY
bumper sticker made him suspect that faculty member was one of the English professors.

He took out his phone and used its web feature to pull up the map of the college campus again. This building should be where he would find Perty’s friend’s granddaughter, as long as she wasn’t in class. He let himself in a side door of the stone building that looked like it had been a house, albeit a large one, in a previous life. A musty smell—one he usually associated with old people’s houses—permeated the building. Not surprising, given that every window had an AC unit hanging out of it, covered with tarps to try to hold out the chilly weather.

The quiet that filled the hall pressed on Dylan’s ears. The few offices on this floor were all closed up. He found the stairs. According to the school’s website, Dr. Caylor Evans’s office was on the second floor of Davidson Hall. He reached the top of the stairs and turned left. Yep, there it was. Room 203. But the door was closed.

She could have a student in there—or she could be in class, or even gone for the day.

He knocked.

No response.

Oh well. He could tell Perty he tried.

She had all kinds of stuff taped to her door. Quotes from Byron and Elizabeth Browning and Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. A final-exam schedule—and her exams were all scheduled for next week. And—

He lifted the corner of the exam schedule:

O
PEN
A
UDITIONS

Auditions for the spring production of
Much Ado about Nothing
will be held in Rutherford Auditorium January 10 & 11 from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. Open casting call for the following roles…

What followed was a list of the secondary characters and bit players in what was the only Shakespeare play Dylan knew well—and then only because Rhonda had loved the movie version of it so much.

He really needed to stop relating everything in his life to Rhonda. But truth be told, she’d exposed him to many things he otherwise would still be ignorant of. He wished he could get some of that innocence back. Culturally speaking, she had enriched his life.

But anyway…

He released the exam schedule and let it fall back over the audition announcement, then started back down the stairs. At the halfway landing, he almost ran into someone coming up.

“Sorry,” they both said at the same time.

The woman he’d almost bowled over steadied herself with one hand on the railing, the other arm wrapped around a pile of books. He reached out to assist, just in case, but she regained her balance quickly. She blinked at him a couple of times.

“I know you, don’t I?”

No—he was pretty sure he’d remember a gorgeous redhead who was probably the tallest woman he’d ever met—almost as tall as his own six foot three. “I don’t think so.”

“You look so familiar to me.” She shook her head and laughed, showing slightly crooked front teeth that only made her cuter. “I’m getting to an age where I’ve met so many people that I’m starting to get that sensation no matter where I go—you know, the sensation that you’ve met the people there before?”

He couldn’t really identify. And besides, she couldn’t be much older than he, if at all.

“Well…is there someone or something I can help you find? You look a little lost.”

“I…” He searched his pockets for the slip of paper with the name he needed. “I need to see Dr. Holtz in the art department.”

“Oh, you’re in the wrong building. You need to go out the front door and across the quad to Sumner Hall. That’s where the art department is.” The woman’s blue-green eyes scrutinized him as if trying to figure out who he was and where she might know him from. “Are you a student here?”

“No. I haven’t been a student for several years now.”

“Oh—you’re an adjunct?”

“I hope to be.” He returned the note to the coin pocket of his jeans.

She shifted the pile of books into her left arm and extended her right hand. “Well, if you ever need anything, feel free to ask. I’m Dr. Caylor Evans.”

Really?
She
was Caylor Evans—the woman he’d wanted to avoid? He took her outstretched hand. “Dylan Bradley.”

“Brad…” Her eyes widened, and she held on to his hand. “You’re not related to Perty—Helen—Bradley, are you?”

“She’s my grandmother.” He pulled away from her grasp.

“That’s why you look familiar. I met your brother—oh, what was his name—the physicist?”

“Paxton?”

She snapped her fingers. “Yes Paxton. I met him at a family cookout back in October. He looks a lot like you. I hope that theoretical physics stuff is going well for him.”

He liked her crooked grin, the way the right corner of her mouth came up just a little higher than the other when she smiled. “I guess it is.”

He avoided getting into any kind of conversation with Pax—a candidate for a PhD in medical physics from Vanderbilt University, though with as often as the oldest of Dylan’s three younger brothers used the word
theoretically
when talking about his research, it was no surprise Caylor had misinterpreted what he did was theoretical physics.

“I couldn’t understand a word of it when I met him.”

She had perfectly shaped lips. He could almost feel the sweep of his pencil as he outlined them and then shaded to show their fullness.

But no. He didn’t do art like that anymore.

Her smile started to falter. Probably because he hadn’t said anything yet, and it was his turn. “Out the front door and across the quad to Sumner Hall?”

“What—? Oh yes. I believe Dr. Holtz’s office is on the third floor.” Her short hair danced in asymmetric layers and waves around her head. He would need oranges and reds and umbers and golds—

No. He did not paint people anymore. Just abstracts. That was his style. Not beautiful women he ran into, whether by design or accident.

He backed away. “Thanks.”

She shifted her stack of books again. “You’re welcome. It was nice to meet you.”

“You, too.” He went down a few steps then turned around. “Merry Christmas.”

She looked down from several steps up, and the lopsided grin had returned. “Merry Christmas to you, too, Dylan.”

He ran the rest of the way downstairs and hurried out the front door and down the steps from the building’s porch.

There. He’d met her. She would tell her grandmother, and her grandmother would tell Perty. And everyone would be happy.

He stopped in the middle of the quad. Everyone would be happy but him. The memory of her face, her hair, her lips, the curve of her neck between her almost-square jaw and the collar of the white blouse she wore under her purple sweater—her image would haunt him. Would drive him to the brink of cracking until he gave in and drew her.

He’d met hundreds, maybe even thousands, of gorgeous women in his life. Before he met Rhonda, he’d sketched many of them. Since Rhonda had convinced him to change his form to abstract, he’d given fleeting thoughts to drawing a beautiful specimen. But none of their images had urged him to put pencil to paper once more the way Dr. Caylor Evans’s did.

No.

Trying to brush the annoyance from his mind, he started walking toward Sumner Hall again. He would not draw Caylor Evans. He would not give her one more thought. He’d done what his grandmother wanted. Now it was time to see about doing what he wanted, and that was teaching art. Dr. Evans was a passing distraction.

And as long as they never passed each other again, he might get over this urge to draw every feature he could remember—from her slightly crooked front teeth to the way her right eye squinted up just a little more than the left one when she smiled.