“If you’re nervous, will more people come?”
“Cut it out, you cynic…”
“I assume most of the students will come – at least the older ones.”
“I also don’t know if we have enough chairs.”
“Stop worrying – Eilat’s residents know how to sit on the floor, even when it’s cold.”
“I hope Dan took care of the projector.”
“Enough…”
At dinner, Dylan Rhodes was completely absorbed in Lily. He followed her artistic development, quizzed her about her university studies, about the Avni Institute, and about the move to Eilat.
“This place is wonderful, and the possibilities here are endless,” Lily concluded her past and future in art.
Like Lily, Dylan Rhodes was amazed by the size of the audience that turned up. Some sat on the cold tiles and listened to his captivating lecture on American pop. It was riveting, full of examples and illustrations. No one moved. The two hours easilybecame three or more. Many crowded around him afterward, hungry to hear more and more.
“I want to see your works,” Dylan Rhodes asked Lily the next afternoon as we walked with him along the northern beach.
“I’m not sure I’m ready enough.”
“But I’d like to,” he insisted.
“All right – before you fly back to Tel-Aviv, we’ll stop by the apartment. It’s not so tidy.”
“That’s fine.”
“We live on the fourth floor.”
She thought the height and the stairs would persuade him to postpone.
“Then we’ll climb slowly. I assume you don’t run up the stairs either.”
Did he know something about her illness? There was no way.
“Usually,” she answered.
We both wanted to avoid a visit to our place, but Dylan Rhodes wouldn’t relent. He apparently had his reasons.
When we arrived, I parked the jeep and ran up quickly. I opened the shutters to let in natural light, straightened the living room and Lily’s studio, and had just finished shoving the mess into drawers when they walked in.
Shortly before Dylan Rhodes’s visit, Lily had finished a series of three huge abstract paintings centered on a bleeding heart. The desert colors she’d absorbed during our relatively short time in the city formed the background. The works hung in the living room, and I loved all three.
Other pieces were hung as well: the faces,Ma’alot, the abstract that got her into Avni,The Prostitutes, and several black-on-white sketches of Eilat’s wild landscape.
Whenever I looked at the sketches, I was surprised anew by how they changed. You could always find some detail you hadn’t noticed before. Though two-dimensional, a third dimension –and perhaps a fourth – seemed to spring from them like a spring that never runs dry, each time in a different pattern. They were so impressive. Marisa Vale Shavit, one of the leaders of the environmental group, loved Lily’s sketches. The two even exchanged drawings. We framed Marisa’s dedication to Lily and hung it in a place of honor.
“You can sit here,” I said to Dylan Rohdes, pointing to an armchair.
He ignored me, drawn to the paintings – the bleeding hearts, the prostitutes, the faces, and the abstracts, on which he lingered longest. The apartment fell silent, broken only when he asked Lily about a technique or the materials she’d used. Dylan Rhodes made us feel as if we were in a museum, and Lily felt she was being examined. He ended the circuit with a look at the black-on-white landscapes. He even studied Marisa Vale’s dedicated drawing carefully – he knew her well.
“What are your plans for this year? And next?” he asked after finishing his review, without offering any opinion on what he’d seen. We were surprised by the question.
“I’m busy teaching at the workshop,” Lily answered.
“Could you rearrange your schedule?”
