Free The Art Student's War by Brad Leithauser

happening to the world? If she hadn’t seen the newspaper photographs, Bea wouldn’t have believed it. Rioters turning over cars right on Woodward Avenue! It was a true battle—a battle inside a city already at war. The War had been going on forever, but thousands of miles away. Now? Now? Dozens of corpses on the streets of Detroit …
    She needed to talk to Uncle Dennis or Aunt Grace, of course, but they weren’t much around. Uncle Dennis had dropped in a couple times, Aunt Grace a couple times—but the Paradisos and the Poppletons hadn’t gotten together for one of their Saturdays in five weeks. When would things return to normal? When would that calendar over Mamma’s head, with its dozen new homes constructed by O’Reilly and Fein, brighten at last?
    Even away from home, Bea felt the oppressiveness. She’d gone to visit Maggie, who had a reliable knack for cheering her up, but on the long streetcar ride home Bea had felt bluer than ever. Poor Maggie, living way up Grand River with a woman she’d nicknamed the Jailer. Mrs. Hamm made no effort to conceal her distrust of her new daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, George—depending on Maggie’s mood—was either doomed soon to die in treacherous Pearl Harbor or living the life of Riley.
    No, Bea’s mood lifted only in Ronny’s company. These days, he alone had the gift of making her laugh. Quickly—remarkably quickly—they’d developed a string of little jokes, as if they’d known each other not for weeks but for years. They often addressed each other by surname. “You know, Paradiso,” he might say, “drawing birch bark turns out to be harder than it looks.” “I tell you, Olsson,” she might reply, “I’d rather draw birch bark than a sponge.” And they would exchange looks, and laugh.
    She had a taste for irreverence—why else make Maggie your best friend?—but she didn’t approve when boys were coarse. Ronny was never coarse, but he could be a trifle risqué; he had the sort of sophistication that lifts prurience into repartee. One day at Herk’s Snack Shack they were discussing their classmates and Bea mentioned Tatiana, the Russian girl with the yellow hair. “But tell me the truth, Bianca,” Ronny interrupted. “Aren’t you just so tired of Miss Bogoljubov’s breasts?” And Bea gaped in amazement, then exploded in grateful giggles, for indeed she was, yes, just so tired of those big pale breasts—the cleavage as much a part of Tatiana’s daily wardrobe as shoes or a purse.
    Standing in front of Brueghel’s amazing Wedding Dance , with its earthy peasants and their unignorably engorged codpieces, Ronny was capable of dissecting, with perfect equanimity, the distributions of color: “Isn’t it something? The reds, the greens—even the colors are dancing.” But, in closing, he was also one to remark, of the most flagrantly lusty of the men, “I wonder what’s on his mind …”
    Later, seated together in the Kresge Court, Bea had her own observation about distributions of color: “Do you know you have unpaintable eyes?”
    “Unpaintable?”
    “What color are they?”
    “They’re green.”
    “But there’s gold in them, too, isn’t there?”
    And Ronny looked just delighted. “You know what? You’re right! Though maybe only a real painter would notice …”
    Just the sort of talk she’d always imagined having with a dashing young artist! It was as though their remarks were gifts to each other—conversation as an exercise in gift giving. She loved listening to Ronny formulate those all-inclusive, magnificent pronouncements he adored: assertions that initially might sound facetious, or just plain silly, but which subsequently struck her as thought-provoking, and often astute, and sometimes profound. He was frightfully bright. “Facts are tedious,” Ronny declared one day. She’d been asking about his high school years, which fascinated her because he was the only young man she’d ever met, outside of a book, who had