We continue up Raymond past the Metro stop and the trendy restaurant in the converted train station. The scent of hot pizza wafts out, reminding me I didn’t eat lunch, and it’s too late to get something. But at least now I’ve got an apple.
“So how’s it going with Krell?” Adam asks.
Even though today was mostly my fault, that doesn’t stop me from saying, “Krell’s a pig. I don’t even want to tell you what he said to me in class, it was so awful.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
I soak in the only sympathy I’ve been offered today.
“Let me guess,” Adam says. “He made an example out of you.”
“How did you know?”
“When I was a first-year, he cut people down all the time.”
I feel both relieved and pissed to be one of a long line of Krell’s victims.
“It blows when the person you worshipped turns out to be a dick,” Adam says.
“Right? I dreamed about studying with Collin Krell. I thought it would be amazing, learning from one of America’s top contemporary portrait painters.” I catch myself before I blurt out how I’d secretly hoped Krell would mentor me. “How did you survive him?”
“I kept my head down, studied Krell’s paintings for clues to what he wanted to see in my work, and asked Hautmann to be my adviser instead.”
Hautmann’s work is all abstract. He’s the last person I’d want as an adviser. I sigh. “I’ve never seen Krell’s work, just photos of it, and you know how a photo tells you almost nothing about a painting.”
“You didn’t see his show at the Ankarian Gallery last February?”
I shake my head and force out a smile. Tears burble up in my eyes as I remember that day, and I blink them back. “I was supposed to, but something happened, so I never got there.”
We walk in silence past the outdoor-furniture store. Adam pitches his apple core in a nearby trash can, and then he says, “Would you like to see the painting Krell’s working on now?”
I brake in the middle of the sidewalk. “You’re joking. The one that just sold for over a million without the buyer seeing it?”
“His dealer hasn’t seen it either, but I have.”
“You have?”
He pulls out a set of keys and dangles them in my face. “One of the perks of cleaning his studio. I get to see the master’s work up close.”
I don’t expect the rush of envy that floods me.
Adam grins and pockets his keys. “Yeah, you want to see it.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You’re not that hard to read.”
I study the sidewalk, avoiding his eyes. I can’t deny it, so I don’t even try.
“What time are you off?” he says.
“Seven?”
“I’ll meet you in the CALINVA parking lot near the back at seven fifteen.”
“Wait. You’re serious about letting me into Krell’s studio?”
“You deserve to have someone do something nice for you today.”
He holds my gaze and I sense he isn’t offering to do this only because he pities me. “But what if Krell catches us?”
“Krell’s got a new baby. He’s always gone by six thirty. Come on. When’s the next chance you’ll get to see a Collin Krell up close?”
All his work in LA is in private collections, and even though the painting will be unveiled at a reception in November, the party will be so packed I’ll be lucky to get within ten feet of it.
And now Adam’s offering to help me get a handle on Krell and I’m turning him down? Who am I kidding? “Okay, I’m in. See you at seven fifteen.”
I meet Adam at a back door near the loading dock. “You came,” he says, and the delight in his voice makes me smile.
“I said I would.”
The door lets us in by the main hall. Evening classes are in session, so Adam leads me to a service elevator in a back corridor. We ride up to the second floor and Adam doesn’t take his eyes off my face and I’m trying to play it cool, but the skin on my arms feels like it’s sparking.
“Krell’s got the biggest studio at CALINVA,” Adam says. “The board was so hot to snag the art world’s rising star away from UCLA, they forced out two other instructors to pay him what he wanted.”
I imagine Krell gloating about his salary the same way Iona Taylor did when she heard hers was twice what the other actors were getting for the reality show she’s in.
The elevator opens and we tiptoe into the hall. Most of the studios are quiet as we go by, but loud African music pours out from one of them. “That’s Ofelo,” Adam says. “Around midnight the drums really start pounding.”
We’re outside Krell’s door, and everything feels a little surreal. I can’t believe we’re stealing into Krell’s studio. I’m hit with the same rush I’d get when Hayley and I used to sneak into friends’ yards and party in their pools while they were away.
Adam goes to unlock the door. “You cannot tell anyone you’ve been in here,” he says, his voice stern.
“My lips are sealed.” I mime locking them and throwing away the key.
Adam doesn’t smile. “I’m serious. Not even your friend with the purple hair.”
The smile falls off my face, and for a moment I wonder how Adam knows Taysha and I are friends, but I realize he’s probably seen us hanging out in the common areas while he works around CALINVA. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.” From what I remember from the student handbook, CALINVA doesn’t have an explicit rule about going into a faculty member’s studio without permission, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get in trouble if Krell finds out.
“Good.” Adam opens the door and I scurry inside. He hits a switch and the fluorescents slowly brighten. The room smells of warm beeswax and oil paint.
My fingers start to itch as I take in the orderly disarray of the room. Couch, worktable, easels, sink, canvases stacked against the walls. Krell’s inner sanctum.
Krell would shit himself if he knew I was in here. In the interview I read, he called his studio “an extension of [his] inner self,” a private, closed-off space where he could express himself freely.
I brush my hand along the velvety back of a paint-speckled couch as I walk over to the huge worktable that anchors the middle of the room.
The top of the table is half covered with mason jars. Paintbrushes fan from their mouths like flower bouquets, and I run my fingers over the bristles. Krell has every type, size, and shape of brush from synthetic to natural hair bristles. “Must be nice.”
“What?” Adam’s across the room, standing by an easel with a large wood panel on it.
“There’s at least two grand worth of brushes just on this table.”
From here all I see is the back of the wood panel, but I can tell it’s linden over a basswood frame. It’s expensive, but the painting technique Krell uses requires a surface that doesn’t warp.
As I walk over to Adam, I see dozens of photographs taped to the wall by the easel, headshots of a man I’m guessing is the one whose portrait Krell’s working on. I come around the easel, and gasp, taking in the unfinished painting.