Watchers

world was rapidly broadening, but she was not yet that free. Instead, she insisted that Travis and Einstein sit on one of the big sofas in the furniture-stuffed living room, where she would bring some of her canvases for viewing. She turned on all the lights, drew the drapes away from the windows, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
    But upstairs she dithered over the ten paintings in her bedroom, unable to decide which two she should take to him first. Finally she settled on four pieces, though it was a bit awkward carrying that many at once. Halfway down the stairs, she halted, trembling, and decided to take the paintings back and select others. But she retreated only four steps before she realized that she could spend the entire day in vacillation. Reminding herself that nothing could be gained without risk, she took a deep breath and went quickly downstairs with the four paintings that she had originally chosen.
    Travis liked them. More than liked them. He raved about them. “My God, Nora, this is no hobby painting. This is the real thing. This is art.”
    She propped the paintings on four chairs, and he was not content to study them from the sofa. He got up for a closer look, moved from one canvas to another and back again.
    “You’re a superb photorealist,” he said. “Okay, so I’m no art critic, but by God you’re as skilled as Wyeth. But this other thing . . . this eerie quality in two of these . .
    His compliments had left her blushing furiously, and she had to swallow hard to find her voice. “A touch of surrealism.”
    She had brought two landscapes and two still lifes. One of each was, indeed, strictly a photorealist work. But the other two were photorealism with a strong element of surrealism. In the still life, for example, several water glasses, a pitcher, spoons, and a sliced lemon were on a table, portrayed in excruciating
    detail, and at first glance the scene looked very realistic; but at second glance you noticed that one of the glasses was melting into the surface on which it stood, and that one slice of lemon was penetrating the side of a glass as if the glass had been formed around it.
    “They’re brilliant, they really are,” he said. “Do you have others?”
    Did she have others!
    She made two additional trips to her bedroom, returning with six more paintings.
    With each new canvas, Travis’s excitement grew. His delight and enthusiasm were genuine, too. Initially she thought that he might be humoring her, but soon she was certain he was not disguising his true reaction.
    Moving from canvas to canvas and back again, he said, “Your sense of color is excellent.”
    Einstein accompanied Travis around the room, adding a soft woof after each of his master’s statements and vigorously wagging his tail, as if expressing agreement with the assessment.
    “There’s such mood in these pieces,” Travis said.
    “Woof.”
    “Your control of the medium is astonishing. I’ve no sense that I’m looking at thousands of brush strokes. Instead, it seems as if the picture just appeared on the canvas magically.”
    “Woof.”
    “It’s hard to believe you’ve had no formal schooling.”
    “Woof.”
    “Nora, these are easily good enough to sell. Any gallery would take these
    in a minute.”-
    “Woof.”
    “You could not only make a living at this . . . I think you could build one hell of a reputation.”
    Because she had not dared to admit how seriously she had always taken her work, Nora had often painted one picture over another, using a canvas again and again. As a consequence, many of her pieces were gone forever. But in the attic she had stored more than eighty of her best paintings. Now, because Travis insisted, they brought down more than a score of those wrapped canvases, tore off the brown paper, and propped them on the living-room furniture. For the first time in Nora’s memory, that dark chamber looked bright and welcoming.
    “Any gallery would be delighted to do a show of these,” Travis said. “In fact, tomorrow, let’s load some of them into the truck and take them around to a few galleries, hear what they say.”
    “Oh no, no.”
    “I promise you, Nora, you won’t be disappointed.”
    She was suddenly in the clutches of anxiety. Although thrilled by the prospect of a career in art, she was also frightened by the big step she would be taking. Like walking off the edge of a cliff.
    She said, “Not yet. In a week . . . or a month . . . we’ll load them in