The students are at tables, desks, easels, drawing away. The teacher’s sketch is a landscape, in an Oriental style: mountain peaks piled on each other, disappearing in cloudbanks and reappearing. At the bottom, tiny pine trees, a stream, a teahouse, a group of fat monks laughing at a bird. It’s like the illustrations in one of his books on Zen. He’s given up on Zen as hopelessly apolitical, but still, the art has something.… The teacher looks at the clock, says, “We’re going overtime. Time to stop.” While the students pack up, she says, “You practice the strokes until you can do them without thinking, so that it’s your head painting. That takes a long time. And all that time you’ve got to practice seeing too. It’s a matter of vision as much as technique. Using the white spaces, for instance. Once you’ve learned washes, it’s entirely a matter of vision.” She walks among them. “We sleepwalk our way through most of this life, and it won’t do. It won’t do. You’ve got to throw your mind into your eyes and see. Always be watching.” She takes her paintbox to a sink in the corner, where some others are washing brushes. “When it becomes a habit you begin to see the world as a great sequence of paintings, and the technique you know will help get some of them onto a surface. Tonight when you walk out the door, remember what I’ve said, and wake up! Okay, see you Thursday.”

The students leave, talking in small groups. Jim sits and watches her. She tosses her equipment into a large briefcase, almost a suitcase. Snaps it shut. “Well?” she says to Jim.

“I’m learning how to see.”

She wrinkles her nose. “Watch out you don’t break something.”

Jim hesitates. “Want to get something at the Coffee Hut?”

She looks away from him uncomfortably. He thinks she’s shy, and almost smiles; would her students believe it possible? “All right.” She pulls the suitcase off the table and barges out the door.

Jim follows. They exchange names. Hers is Hana Steentoft. She lives up in Mojeska Canyon, not all that far from the college. “And you’re an artist?” Jim asks.

“Yes.” She’s amused for some reason.

They enter Trabuco J.C.’s pathetic attempt at a coffee house in the Bohemian style: plastic wood ceiling beams, dimmed lighting, old posters of European castles, a wall of automatic food and drink dispensers. Nothing can hide the fact that Trabuco is a commuter’s junior college. The place is empty. They sit in the corner opposite the janitor washing the imitation wood floor.

“Do you paint in the style you were teaching tonight?”