The Electives

          In the final semester of an English major that had seemed nothing but endless afternoon discussions of character, or fate, or motivation, I signed up for two art classes to fill out my hours.
          Literary criticism had refused to tell me how, insisting always on the moral or psychological—upon what. Looking at the syllabus for the painting class, my yearning for technique pounced on the kabbalistic vocabulary of required equipment: cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, Rose madder, Mars yellow, Titanium white, phthalo blue, linseed oil, Dammar varnish, hog hair brushes, gesso. 
          The only familiar thing on the list was Saran wrap, which had to be the inexpensive type that clung to everything.
          The large, dirty studio had the carelessness and potential of an empty stage during rehearsal—windowless, overheated. Bus carts, splattered with paint, idled like robots around the room but the easels were grouped—with something of the ghosts of their previous masters still palpable. 
          The acrid smell of turpentine quickly became a favorite of mine.

          As in any discipline, self-indulgence was not tolerated, and anything pretty or literal was scolded in the crit, the upper arms of the instructor jiggling as she whipped a canvas upside down to see if the values worked when deprived of their subject.
          As we worked, she made her rounds. She had me for both drawing and painting that semester, becoming parent and therapist and somewhat amazed coach as I roughed in my peach-colored angles and planes, translating the nude into a balanced, luminous mosaic. 
          I tasted ambition for the first time. It warmed me like a pilot flame, getting me out of bed earlier, making me listen harder, nudging me to speak up. In the group at the sink, I pushed my brushes into the Ivory soap, scrubbing with hauteur.
          Even my mother, for whom I had been invisible since 10, softened her tone when she saw the canvases, reaching well beyond her budget to frame several. She hung them around her tiny dining room like trophies.
          Back in my student room at the top of an old converted house I made teapots and oranges appear as if by magic. My shadows had color, and my surfaces were modulated thoughtfully. Now I looked at everything—squinting to simplify—wondering how I would paint it—if I could paint it.
          My gritty realism—a sort of pessimistic but accurate, depressive but note-perfect attitude that had been mine since childhood—came swimming to the surface of drawing paper and stretched, primed cotton duck as elegantly descriptive lines, bright colors, and gentle, scumbled shadows. My cross-hatching comforted me.
          That fall the model who sat for nearly all the university's life study classes came to the apartment I shared with my girlfriend to purchase one of my paintings of her as a gift for her mother. When she had phoned to inquire about the painting, my girlfriend proudly took over the business end—even as she was making plans to leave me—and wrote the name on the flip side of a small tablet: Ariel. I still have the piece of cardboard.
          Family and friends who had had some reason for worry as I turned the corner toward an unremarkable 30—or who, perhaps, were merely irritated—saw me safely into a colorful productivity. 
          My mother's apartment walls swelled into a gallery of fruit. 
          In successive jobs I surprised or entertained my office mates with witty sketches, easily and rapidly done. Scores of years later they resurface on Facebook, so much less marked by the interval than myself.
          Now a pencil feels odd in the hand. My tubes of paint are calcified like old saltwater taffy. A blue vinyl pencil case sits in my top desk drawer, untouched, just as it had been packed for a weekend at my mother's 20 years ago, the graphite dust maintaining the shine of the bronze sharpener.
          But the piles of sketchbooks and the framed things around the house tell of a youthful, happy intensity, as pretty a picture of myself at 25 as I could want, I guess. 
          I think about picking it up again and wonder whether my observation has grown surer.
          I squint my eyes to picture it.