Free The Man in the Tree by Damon Knight Page B

figure-drawing class the model was a dark-haired young man with

broad shoulders and narrow hips; he wore a thing like a black jockstrap,

but much skimpier -- the side part was only a narrow ribbon. He never

spoke; between posing sessions he smoked in the little courtyard, and

when he was through for the day he left, sometimes with a woman student.

In this class the students were given hard black crayons and large sheets

of paper torn off a roll. They were instructed to hold the crayon like

a knife and use the arm and wrist in drawing, but Gene could not do

this; he sharpened his crayon to a fine point, held it like a pencil,

and made careful, minute drawings that occupied only a small part of

the sheet. He drew the head, then the shoulders .and chest, the arms and

hands, then the hips, thighs, calves, and feet. His drawings were careful

and accurate in outline, but there was always something wrong with them;

they were off balance, or out of proportion, and he tore them up.

When he looked at the other students' work, he could see that they were

doing something entirely different. They seemed not to care about accuracy

of detail; their drawings were large, cloudy sketches of bodies in the

same posture as the model's but otherwise having no resemblance to it, and

they were all different: some fat and shapeless, some angular and thin.

The instructor, an auburn-haired young woman called Miss Williams,

pointed out that everybody tended to draw bodies like their own: wide,

muscular people drew wide, muscular bodies, and so on. Gene held up one

of his tiny sketches, and she laughed. "Well, Stephen is an exception

to everything," she said.

With the other students, he felt the continual embarrassment of being

the wrong age; he was sure they all knew he was too young to be there,

and he sensed in them the unspoken conspiracy of being grown up. When

they spoke to him kindly, he felt they were being condescending, and

when they ignored him he felt excluded. The very shapes of their bodies,

their hairiness, their smells (unsuccessfully disguised by perfume)

proclaimed them a different kind of humanity; the hints they gave of

their pleasures outside the classroom were alien to him; they laughed

at different things, and with a different laughter. He felt himself an

intruder, in constant danger of being found out.

He took the ceramics class and tried to throw pots on the wheel, but

he could never center the lump of clay properly, and his pots came

out lopsided; they wobbled on the wheel, and no matter what he did he

could never make them straight. He liked them anyhow because of their

magical transformation in the kiln ("the kill," Miss Jacoby called it):

from dried, leathery clay the color of lead they had turned pale and

hard as stone, scritching under his fingernails. The glazes were equally

magical: you painted them on like pale mud, and when they came out they

were clear, brilliant orange or blue or purple. He experimented with

his most ambitious piece, a tall vase that was only a little lopsided:

he painted it first with green glaze, then with blue. When he saw it

after the weekend firing, it was covered with luminous streaks of blue

melting into peacock green, and all the other students admired it. "You

took a chance, but it worked," said Miss Jacoby.

In Mr. Berthelot's class he learned the mysteries of armatures and plaster

casting. The hollow shape inside the mold was tantalizingly strange; its

was recognizable -- there was the arm, here the head -- and yet absolutely

unfamiliar. When they lubricated the mold and poured plaster into it,

then chipped the mold away, the result was again a magical transformation:

the clay model had been turned first into a mere vacancy, an absence,

and then into hard, chalky plaster. In a way it seemed to him that the

change was for the worse: the clay model, now destroyed, had been alive,

and the plaster cast was dead.

The school did not teach