They're doing colored pencils in Pam's art class. Pam likes watercolors best. She's not feeling very confident about her art right now -- it's not honest enough, not confident enough, evidently. She doodles hands at work, but she has no idea what peasants' hands are supposed to look like, and Gil would probably still think they weren't honest enough. They're hands; it's not like they can lie.
Her teacher tells her to branch out from still lifes, try some figures. There's a nude model coming next week. Roy wants to know if it's a man or woman, and when she tells him it's a woman, he offers to drive her to class. Pam rolls her eyes.
The woman is actually her teacher's wife, and she's in her mid-forties and drooping. It presents a technical challenge a younger, more buoyant model wouldn't. Roy seems disappointed when they run into her in the hall, but he leaves quickly, and that's a relief. Art class is her time, and no one makes demands, like sex or when's dinner or update my online dating profile or make out with a blow up doll or love me.
Her teacher says her picture is "technically proficient, but lacking soul." Pam knows this is true, and it hurts. At home, after class, she stays up late to sketch her new living room, trying to capture its emptiness. She does an OK job, she thinks, but she knows she has not really captured the room, its shabby loneliness. She crumples the page up, throws it in the trash, where it joins attempts at the afghan her mom knitted her, thrown across the back of her Salvation Army couch; the mess in the back seat of her car; the view from her desk at work, and -- she can't believe she's still trying to draw them -- vases of flowers.
She draws a house with a terrace, with little vines creeping up the iron and brickwork, spreading out until they eclipse the facade.
She doesn't throw it away, but she does put it at the back of her closet. They don't even make houses like that in Scranton.
+ + +
They're doing conté crayons in Pam's art class. A standard pack of conté crayons has four colors: black, white, brown, and sanguine. Some of her classmates manage to produce an amazing array of shades with only those four colors, but Pam's drawings have only four colors: black, white, brown, and red the color of dried blood. They're not very pretty, they're hardly even technically proficient, and they're all kind of depressing.
She picks a fight with Roy, over something stupid, just for that old feeling of self-righteous indignation, but it doesn't work anymore. Roy's trying too hard, and not hard enough, for it to feel worth it anymore. Roy says she's bitchier than she used to be, and goes out and gets drunk with his brother. When she sees him at work the next day, he looks puffy and red-eyed and hungover, and in the old days, she would have been angry. She's mostly just tired, now.
She refuses to go home with him that night; she has class, she says, and she needs to sketch, practice. You can sketch at our place, Roy says, and she feels the same shiver of impatience that he still calls it "their" place. And she never sketches there -- she tried, once, to sketch the pyramid of beer cans Kenny's been building against the living room wall; the ping pong table that replaced the dining room table sometime after she moved out; the photo of them skiing, the frame of which has cracked glass and Roy doesn't remember when or how that happened. Those sketches are at the back of her closet, too.
She almost skips art class; she's just exhausted lately, in a bone-deep way no amount of sleep is going to cure. Art class only makes it worse -- art is supposed to be her refuge, but she's the worst in the class, and she doesn't feel like she has any soul left in herself, let alone enough to put some into her art. She goes anyway, and resolves that tonight, at least, she won't even bother to try.
They sketch another model: a guy this time, and he's ripped, and Pam enjoys the shading of his six pack on her paper. She leaves his face for last, and by the time class is over, she hasn't gotten to it. So it's a muscular figure, posed like The Thinker, with no face. "Interesting," her teacher says. "Disturbing. Nice shading."
Pam guesses "disturbing, nice shading" is a step up from "lacking soul." Still, it's a weird picture, and she doesn't want to think too much about it. She puts it in her portfolio, but she knows she'll never show it.
+ + +
They're doing soft pastels in Pam's art class. They're smudgy, and there's a rainbow of color across the side of Pam's hand and up her forearm. She can't scrub it all off before work, but she doesn't mind. She likes it, actually: it reminds her of college, when she always had smudges of color on her face and her hands and her clothes, and she felt like the paint caked in her hair was a badge of honor: she was an artist.
She tells Roy it's not going to work out, again, and she knows this is the last time she'll have to say it. He doesn't take it well, at all, but it's over and done and she can move forward. She goes on a few dates -- with her neighbor, with one of Ryan's business school friends, with Toby, even. They're fun, mostly, and it's easier to relax.
She and Jim manage to convince Dwight that Peter Jackson is in town, scouting locations for a film, and they heard he's coming by the business park to check it out, and Dwight ends up wearing a hobbit costume to work the next day. Pam can't remember the last time she laughed so hard, and she smiles at Jim and he smiles back, and it feels like it used to.
Her drawings are more vibrant, and now that it's spring, she spends a lot of time outside, sketching the trees coming back to life, the flowers pushing up through the dirt, the pale watery sunlight filtered through the clouds. Everything is new and hopeful and she has pastels in seven different shades of green; her fingertips are a blurry rainbow of all of them. Her favorite sweater is covered in pastel, and it doesn't wash all the way out, but she doesn't mind, and wears it to work. Her keyboard at work even has dots on it, a colorful path of typing. She can hardly sketch fast enough to keep up with her ideas; lots of her ideas aren't that great, and she can't always make them work, but it's good all the same. At work she sketches Kelly painting her nails. Her teacher says it's "good, Beesly. Nice use of color. But there's a lot of pink here."
It's a good picture, good enough to show, but she gives it to Kelly anyway. Kelly puts it up in her cubicle -- for Ryan to look at, she tells Pam -- and from her desk, Pam can just see the top corner of it.
+ + +
They're doing charcoal in Pam's art class. Charcoal is tricky, because shading is everything. The side of her hand is covered with dark gray all the way up her pinky, and she's drawing hands. Hands are actually really hard to draw, hard to make a pair even. Her teacher suggests she try something else, but Pam is determined to make the hands work. She can draw things now, with technical profiency and soul, and she thinks even Gil would not call her still lifes dishonest. But she cannot draw people, yet. And so she draws hands. She can see them in her mind, and she is determined to see them on paper.
It takes two weeks, sketching every day, before she draws them just right. And then she realizes she has drawn Jim's hands.
+ + +
They're doing watercolors in Pam's art class, and this time, she paints smooth, sure strokes, and the colors are brighter, more alive. Three of her paintings hang in the lobby of her art studio, and she's getting a bigger, better spot for the next art show. She draws Jim, over and over, and she draws her mom and dad and she even gets out the sketch of the house with the terraces, makes a painting of it. Her teacher offers her a job, teaching art to junior high kids, and she likes it better than she thought she would. She ends up supervising the art direction for the local junior high's production of The Wizard of Oz, and it's a blast. She stays up at school until ten or eleven every night, painting giant rolls of canvas -- black-and-white farm scenes of Kansas, lurid colored scenes of Oz -- and pieces of carboard for the Tin Man's costume and even a few sketches for the makeup. There are papier-mache trees and painted wooden mushrooms and billowing strips of muslin hanging from the rafters for clouds. There are staple guns and cotton wads and paint brushes meant for houses.
It reminds her of her own time in junior high, when she wore all black and hung out in the art room, painting murals with the other art club girls until the janitor kicked them out. She'd done scenery for the theater club back then, too, only this time she doesn't feel compelled to take up smoking cloves like the other kids do, and she doesn't worry about how she's going to get all her homework done before her curfew. She'd never wanted to relive junior high (like any sane person), but when you do it as an adult, it's actually not so bad.
Jim comes to opening night of the show, and barely fits into the auditorium seats. He looks so out of place, knees up above the chair in front of him, sweater over his button-down and tie, and Pam can't help but roll her eyes at the way all the eighth-graders giggle at him, when she introduces him around before the show.
After they take their seats, Jim nudges her, points out her name in the program -- "The cast & crew would like to thank Miss Pamela Beesly for her help with the scenery, Mrs. Judy Green for her help with the costumes, and Bob's Chicken Hut for their financial support. Go Wildcats!"
"It's like you're famous," Jim whispers in mock excitement. Pam shushes him, and smiles, and when he takes her hand, she squeezes back.
"You're not going to click your heels or anything, are you?" Jim asks.
Pam looks around as the lights start to dim, looks at the scenery she painted, the Kansas sky and rolling waves of grain painted in shades of grey. "I think I'm good."
Story Notes:
Dedicated to Kate, who wanted fic about Pam drawing Jim. She was also instrumental in making this sound like I know anything at all about art, and in writing the ending. <3. Also, lianhanshee's essay about Pam and Michael really helped me think about Pam and her art in a new way, and this fic has been improved by my reading that essay.
Also, disclaimer: none of this is mine.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Also, disclaimer: none of this is mine.
sundancekid is the author of 12 other stories.
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