The Gold Coast

36

Hurrying to his night class Jim stops at Burger King for a quick hamburgerfriesandcoke. He picks up the little free paper, the Register, and scans it briefly. Among the personals and real estate ads that constitute the bulk of the paper is a small OC news section; the headline reads, AEROJET NORTH LATEST VICTIM OF SABOTAGE. Yes, that’s Jim and Arthur’s work again. Jim reads the details with interest, because just as at Northrop and Parnell, they never got to see the effects of their action. Appears the ballistic missile defense software program has taken a serious blow, according to the Aerojet PR people. Fantastic, Jim thinks. He throws the paper in the trash on the way out, feeling that he is becoming a part of history. He is now an actor on the stage of the world.

Thus it’s difficult to concentrate on the grammatical problems of his little class. Tonight one of his students hands in a gem: “We can take it for granite that the red gorillas will destroy Western civilization if they can.” Jim shudders to think of the student’s conception of the wars in Indonesia and Burma: Marines being hunted down by giant crimson apes… And take it for granite! It’s perfect, really; the way the student has heard the phrase even makes sense, as metaphor. Solid as granite. Jim likes it. But it’s one more sign among many others that his students don’t read. Thus writing is completely foreign to them, a different language. And it’s impossible to teach a language in one short semester. They’ve all got an impossible task. Why even try?

Class over, Jim collects the papers on the table. Turns off the room’s light, walks into the hall. The door to the room across from his is open, which is unusual. Inside it a black-haired woman is lecturing vigorously.

Wild black frizzed-out mane, flying behind her.

She’s big: tall, bulky, big-boned.

Army fatigue pants, frumpy wool sweater rucked up over the arms.

Boots.

Working at an easel: ah. An artist. That explains it, right?

Wrong. Brake light. A poem is a list of

Things To Do.

Jim moves to one side of the doorway, to try and see what’s on the easel. Black lines. She sketches with careless boldness, sometimes looking at the class while she does it. “Try that,” she commands. Try drawing while looking the other way?

While they try she comes to the door. “You lost?”

“No! No, I just finished teaching across the hall here.” Though, still, I may be lost.… “I was just watching.”

“Come in if you’re going to watch.”

Jim hesitates, but she’s back at the easel, and just to disappear seems impolite. So he slips in and sits at a desk by the door. Why not?

The students are at tables, desks, easels, drawing away. The teacher’s sketch is a landscape, in an Oriental style: mountain peaks piled on each other, disappearing in cloudbanks and reappearing. At the bottom, tiny pine trees, a stream, a teahouse, a group of fat monks laughing at a bird. It’s like the illustrations in one of his books on Zen. He’s given up on Zen as hopelessly apolitical, but still, the art has something.… The teacher looks at the clock, says, “We’re going overtime. Time to stop.” While the students pack up, she says, “You practice the strokes until you can do them without thinking, so that it’s your head painting. That takes a long time. And all that time you’ve got to practice seeing too. It’s a matter of vision as much as technique. Using the white spaces, for instance. Once you’ve learned washes, it’s entirely a matter of vision.” She walks among them. “We sleepwalk our way through most of this life, and it won’t do. It won’t do. You’ve got to throw your mind into your eyes and see. Always be watching.” She takes her paintbox to a sink in the corner, where some others are washing brushes. “When it becomes a habit you begin to see the world as a great sequence of paintings, and the technique you know will help get some of them onto a surface. Tonight when you walk out the door, remember what I’ve said, and wake up! Okay, see you Thursday.”

The students leave, talking in small groups. Jim sits and watches her. She tosses her equipment into a large briefcase, almost a suitcase. Snaps it shut. “Well?” she says to Jim.

“I’m learning how to see.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Watch out you don’t break something.”

Jim hesitates. “Want to get something at the Coffee Hut?”

She looks away from him uncomfortably. He thinks she’s shy, and almost smiles; would her students believe it possible? “All right.” She pulls the suitcase off the table and barges out the door.

Jim follows. They exchange names. Hers is Hana Steentoft. She lives up in Mojeska Canyon, not all that far from the college. “And you’re an artist?” Jim asks.

“Yes.” She’s amused for some reason.

They enter Trabuco J.C.’s pathetic attempt at a coffee house in the Bohemian style: plastic wood ceiling beams, dimmed lighting, old posters of European castles, a wall of automatic food and drink dispensers. Nothing can hide the fact that Trabuco is a commuter’s junior college. The place is empty. They sit in the corner opposite the janitor washing the imitation wood floor.

“Do you paint in the style you were teaching tonight?”

“No. I mean it’s a tool, a stylistic resource. I love the look of some dynasties, and Ming Dynasty painting is perfect for some of what I do, but… you teach writing? It’s like if you taught a class in sonnet writing, and I asked you if you wrote sonnets. You probably don’t, but you might use what you learned from sonnets in other poems.”

Jim nods. “So you sell your paintings?”

“Sure. Can’t live on what they pay us here, can you.” She laughs.

Jim doesn’t reply to that one. “So who are your customers?”

“Individuals, mostly. A group in the canyons, and in Laguna. And then some banks. Murals for their offices.” She changes the subject. “And what do you write?”

“Ah—poetry, mostly. But I’m teaching bonehead English.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right.” He regrets calling it that.

She chugs down most of her beer. They talk about teaching. Then about painting. Jim knows the Impressionists, and the usual culturevulture selection of others. They share an enthusiasm for Pisarro. Hana talks about Cassatt, then about Bonnard, her special hero. “Even now we haven’t fully understood aspects of his work. That coloration that at first looks so bizarre, and then when you look closer at the real world you see it there, kind of underneath the surface of things.”

“Even those white shadows in that one painting?”

She laughs. “Cabinet de Toilette? Well—I don’t know. That was for the composition, I guess. Haven’t seen any white shadows, myself. But maybe Bonnard did, I wouldn’t doubt it. He was a genius.”

They talk about genius in art, what it consists of and how those without it can best learn from it. Jim, who will concede in an instant that he is no artistic genius, and only hope that he is not pressed further to concede that he is in fact no artist at all, notices that Hana never makes any of these concessions. She makes no claims, either. This is intriguing. They continue to share enthusiasms, they find themselves interrupting each other to elaborate on the other’s remarks. Jim is intrigued, attracted.

“But you can’t just mean that paying closer attention to what you see is all of it, can you?” Jim asks, referring to her lecture to her class. “I mean, that’s just like getting a good focus on a camera, or a telescope—”

“No no,” she says. “We don’t see like cameras at all. That’s part of what makes photographs so interesting. But focusing your eyesight and your vision aren’t the same thing, you see. Focusing your vision means a change in the way you pay attention to things. A clarification of your aesthetic sense, and of your moral sense as well.”

“Vision as moral act?”

She nods vigorously.

“Now that’s not postmodernism.”

“No, it isn’t. But now we’re leaving postmodernism, right? Changing it. It’s a good time for artists. You can take advantage of the open space left by the death of postmodernism, and the absence of any replacement. Help to shape what comes next, maybe. I like being a part of that.”

Jim laughs. “You’re ambitious!”

“Sure.” She looks at him briefly; mostly she watches the table when she talks. “Everyone’s ambitious, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“But you—aren’t you?”

“Ah.” Jim laughs again, uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess so.” Of course he is! But if he says so, doesn’t it underline his lack of accomplishment, his lack of effort? It isn’t something that he likes to talk about.

She nods, watching the table again. “Everyone is, I think. If they can’t admit it, they’re scared somehow.”

A bit of mind-reading, there! And Jim hears himself say, “Yeah, it scares me, actually.”

“Sure. But you admitted it anyway, didn’t you.”

“I guess so.” Jim grins. “I’d like to see some of your work.”

“Sure. And maybe I can read some of yours.”

Stab of fear. “It’s terrible.”

She smiles at the table. “That’s what they all say. Uh-oh, look. They’re closing the place.”

“Of course, it’s eleven!” They laugh.

They gather their things and leave. As they walk under the light in the entryway Jim notices how wild looking she is. Hair unbrushed, sweater poorly knitted, she really is strange looking. Couldn’t be more out of fashion if she tried. Jim supposes that’s the point, but still…

“We should do this again,” he says. She’s looking off at the ground, maybe checking out the way ground bulbs underlight the shrubbery edging the quad. It is a weird effect. Ha—here’s Jim seeing things, all of a sudden.

“Sure,” she says indifferently. “Our classes end the same time.”

He walks her to her car. “Thursday, then?”

“Sure. Or whenever.”

“Okay. See you.” Jim gets in his car and drives off, thinking of things they have talked about. Is he really ambitious? And if so, for what? You want to make a difference, he thinks. You want to change America! In the writing, in the resistance work, in the teaching, in everything you do! To change America, whoah—you can’t get much more grandiose than that. Remarkable, then, how lazy he is, and what a huge gap there is between his desires and his achievements! Big sigh. But there, look at that string of headlights snaking along the shore of Rattlesnake Reservoir, reflected in the black water as a whole curved sequence of squiggly S-blurs…

It’s a question of vision.