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Author's Chapter Notes:
Who doesn't love a good art show?

One of the major positives of dating Pam—besides the baseline positive, of course, that he was dating Pam—was that Jim got to get a quick look at her art before she showed anyone else. Not that she showed a lot of other people. But she was in this art class at the community college, so she did end up showing her classmates, or at least her teacher, a lot of the pieces she was working on. Of course, they got to see the finished works. He got to see the drafts she did in what he called her studio and she called “my studio, well, not really a studio, more of a…” before he nudged her and she smiled and said “my studio” (this had happened three times already). She was protective of the more finished versions, which she always made sure to do when he was at the Y playing ball, telling him repeatedly that he’d have to wait to see them. But the drafts she either didn’t care about or had accepted that he did, so he got to see them.

 

They were good.

 

But today was the day he got to graduate from seeing drafts to seeing final pieces, because Pam was in the class art show, in “the real studio” as she called it, and he was very excited. Pam had to go early to set up, and she had absolutely barred him from coming to help (“you don’t get to see my finished pieces any earlier than the show, buster” was the way she put it). So he and Karen and Mark were getting dinner at Cugino’s (including a take-out box for Pam) and then heading over to the show as soon as it opened.

 

He wasn’t sure who else from the office would be coming. Pam had put up some flyers, and he had particularly recommended it to Toby and Oscar, the only ones in the office who seemed into the kind of art Pam’s class did (or really, any art beyond the pop music Kelly was into or The Police). But regardless of who showed up, he was looking forward to the chance to see Pam’s work for real and to get to watch her watch other people see it too.

 

**

 

Pam was nervous. Not pants-shittingly nervous or anything, not even breaking-up-with-Roy nervous or telling-Roy-about-Jim nervous. Just nervous. She was chewing a thumbnail, specifically, something she had tried to kick as a habit.

 

She’d gotten her pieces up early, because Jim had had the bright idea of pre-attaching the wires on the back so that all she had to do was find a hook or drive a nail. But that meant she had nothing to do but help others get their stuff up and then wait. It was three minutes before the show opened, no one was there yet, and she was nervous.

 

What if no one liked her work? She had a mix of pieces, because they’d done a mix of art styles this semester: a landscape of the office building, a still life (stapler-in-jello), and a series of increasingly complex scenes with movement and (she thought) emotion. It was all representational, because the class was (wait for it) Representational Art, so there were no Pollocks or Rothkos (or, she admitted, more likely sad imitations of those) but she had been confident twenty minutes ago that there was good art.

 

Now she was less so.

 

The clock ticked over and their teacher went and unlocked the door. A small group shuffled in, mostly family of other students, she thought, and then she caught sight of four figures making a beeline for her.

 

“Hey.” Jim grinned at her as she hastily pulled her thumb out of her mouth and tried to pretend she hadn’t just been gnawing on it.

 

“Hi.” She smiled at him, Karen, and Mark, and she explained the concept of the show to Mark, who had apparently not heard all of it from Karen—or who was kindly letting her get her jitters out by explaining it. Karen then dragged Mark away to go look at one of her classmates’ sculptures (Representational Art could be in any medium) and Jim handed her a nondescript box.

 

“Contraband.” He grinned. “A Cugino’s calzone, so you can eat while you stand.”

 

“Thank you.” She suddenly realized she was ravenous—she hadn’t had a full meal at lunch because she was so nervous.

 

“Anything for you, Beesly.” He lowered his voice and looked around. “Listen—you know I’m dying to see your pieces, but I also know you’re worried about what I’m going to say about them, so I’m going to go check out everyone else’s and let you eat your calzone without worrying about what I’m going to say.” He kissed her on the forehead. “And then I’m going to come back and we’re going to talk about their stuff and then I’m going to look at yours. Deal?”

 

“Deal.” She smiled up at him. “Start with Jeremy’s. It’s really good.”

 

“Orders received and accepted.” He saluted. “Which one is Jeremy again?”

 

“There.” She pointed with the calzone at the short, squat man standing in front of a gigantic watercolor of a squid.

 

“Gotcha.” He winked, kissed her quickly, and headed over towards Jeremy. She could hear a “hey! Pam says you’re pretty good” as he greeted her classmate before the buzz of the room overtook him. She ate the calzone as calmly as she could, but it was still gone before she expected.

 

Apparently the calzone had been more engrossing than she’d thought, though, since she’d apparently missed Oscar and his boyfriend Gil slipping into the space and coming up to her pieces. She was behind a pillar to them, so she stood stock still and overheard them talking about her art. They were standing in front of a particularly complex piece modeled off of how it had felt to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge and look out over the skyline—it was intended as a representation of the city imbued with the mingled triumph and exhaustion of reaching the viewpoint: a light touch on the details of the skyline mixed with the strong bold strokes of the details that popped out.

 

“I like it,” Gil was saying. “That is motel art. No courage, no honesty.” He gestured back at the painting of the office building. “But this? There’s really something here.” He sauntered over to the next piece, a koala where she had tried her best to fully express the vapidity and idiocy of the species. “And this? This is a judgment on the human soul.”

 

Maybe Dwight’s, she thought, remembering Jim’s souvenir koala that was currently sitting on top of the mantelpiece at home and smothering a laugh. She decided to step out from behind the pillar before they said anything else—nice or hurtful—about her art.

 

“Hey, Oscar. Hey, Gil. Thanks so much for coming.”

 

Twenty minutes later, Karen and Mark came up and made their excuses, which Pam suspected had more to do with the 76ers game coming on at 8 than anything else. They said some nice things about the koala, punctuated by Karen pulling her half-aside and asking in all seriousness “is that Dwight?” and breaking into a sharp laugh that surprised them both. But then they were gone, and it was just her and her art.

 

Well, and Jim, who slipped up next to her as soon as Karen and Mark departed.

 

“So, Beesly, it looks like my ride left. Any chance I could bum one off of you?”

 

“I don’t know…what will you give me in exchange?”

 

“A serious consideration of your art?”

 

“Deal.”

 

They spent the next half hour, though, not talking about her art but about her classmates’. Jim had fulfilled his promise and looked at each and every one of their pieces, and she was surprised by how much he’d absorbed.

 

“Wait, you’re saying that Laney’s landscape conveys sadness to you? I thought of it as a carefree, open space.”

 

“There is that element in it, but I think if you look at the edges, you see a darkness, an almost emptiness, that implies that this is maybe the one happy place surrounded by…”

 

“Oh I see! Yes.” The piece in question was about 10x10 and in place on the far wall, so they could both see what they were commenting on. “Almost as if it were a dream, or at least unreal somehow.”

 

“Exactly.” They traded smiles. “You ready to talk about yours?”

 

“I…” she was, but then Michael intervened. She hadn’t seen him come up, but she could definitely not ignore him now.

 

“Pam-casso! Jimbo!” He gave them both big hugs. “So, our resident artiste. And her big hunk of man. Let’s see what we have here!” He walked up to the painting of the stapler in jello, which she was beginning to realize was her weakest work—it was the first one of these she’d done, and it showed. “Wow! You did these… freehand?”

 

She and Jim exchanged a glance. “Yep.”

 

“My God, these could be tracings!” He nudged Jim. “Remember when you used to prank Dwight, like all the time with this sort of stuff?”

 

“Uh, yeah. Used to.” Jim rubbed the back of his neck, but Michael was already on to the painting of the office—her simplest and most purely representational piece, representing a particular moment, with a few improvements.

 

“Ohh! Look at this one. Wow! You nailed it.” He sighed. “How much?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I don’t see a… price.”

 

She looked at Jim for confirmation that she was hearing this correctly. “Um… you wanna buy it?”

 

Michael bounced on his toes. “Well, yeah. Yeah, we have to have it for the office. I mean, there’s my… window, and there’s my car! That your car?”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“And that’s…is that you and Jim?” He peered at the paper. “Jimster! You made it onto the art!” He punched Jim in the arm. “That is our building… and we sell paper. … I am really proud of you.” He reached out to punch Pam in the arm but stopped himself before completing the motion.

 

But there was something about his sheer exuberance, his joy, that made her take advantage of his motion to turn it into a hug.

 

“Thank you, Michael.”

 

“You’re welcome.” One of the best things about Michael was that he unlikely to refuse thanks even if he had no idea why he was getting them.

 

After selling the art to Michael—a strange experience but not an unpleasant one—it was time for the show to end. She and Jim finally had time to talk about her pieces as they took them down and stowed them in her trunk, but the conversation continued on through the night until they looked up at the clock and realized it was well after any reasonable bedtime if they were going into work the next day. Which, unfortunately, they were.

 

Jim leaned over and kissed her.

 

“Pam, I just wanted to say—your art is amazing, and I’m really proud of you.” He paused. “Probably not in the same way Michael is, but still.” He grinned. “I enjoyed your show. And would you mind terribly if I told you your art was the prettiest of all the art?”

 

She cocked her head. “That depends. What do you mean by pretty?”

 

“I mean that there’s no one else’s art I wanted to see hanging from the walls of our house.”

 

“That’s a shame, because I already bought Jeremy’s giant squid…”

 

The rest of her joke was smothered by the throw pillow whose name Jim took rather too literally.

Chapter End Notes:
I hope that worked for you! Thank you to all who've been reading and reviewing. It really does give me strength to read what you have to say (even criticisms)!

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