The Cheap Studio

The rent was two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month and the reason it was two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month was that nobody else wanted it, and Jess Reinholt understood that, and she signed the lease anyway, on the hood of the landlord’s truck, in the gravel lot behind a cinderblock building south of downtown that had been a plumbing supply and then a sign shop and then, for a long time, nothing.

She was twenty-two. She had graduated from the university up the hill in the spring with a degree in painting, which her mother had asked her, kindly, what she intended to do with, and Jess had not had a good answer then and did not have one now except this, the lease on the hood of the truck, the one thing she was sure of, which was that she needed a room she could make a mess in and afford, and that this was it. The building was cheap because the whole part of town was cheap. This was not the downtown of the casinos and the arch. This was south of the tracks, the old strip, the long stretch of South Virginia and the streets off it that had been a highway once, her father said, back before they built the freeway around it, and had been going quietly to seed ever since. There were still a few motels renting by the week. There was a muffler place and a tattoo shop and, two blocks over, the kind of business with no windows and a sign that just said BOOKS in a way that meant it was not books. Nobody had a name for the neighborhood. It was just south of downtown, the part you drove through to get somewhere else.

Which was exactly why she could have it. That was the whole logic of it and she had worked it out for herself before her grandfather ever said a word.

Dennis came to help her move in on a Saturday. He was fifty-seven and his knees were bad but he could still carry a box, and he carried them, the flat-file she had bought used, the crates of stretched canvas, the coffee cans of brushes, up the one step and through the big steel door into the empty room, and he set them down and stood in the middle of the concrete floor and turned around once, slowly, looking at it, the high ceiling and the painted-over windows and the water stain in the corner shaped like a country nobody had named yet.

“It’s got good light,” he said. “Or it would, if you scraped the paint off those windows.”

“That’s the first job. Monday.”

“It’s a good room.” He said it like a man who knew good rooms. “You know your great-grandmother had a shop about a mile north of here. On Virginia, up by the courthouse. Clara. She came out for a divorce in 1920 and stayed and opened a dress shop with money everybody told her not to risk, and she ran it forty years.” He looked at Jess. “And I opened my store down the street from here in sixty-eight, when this end of town was already the wrong end, because it was what I could afford and it was where the rent let me do the thing I wanted. Records. Everybody told me the same thing they told her. Wrong street. Nobody comes down here.”

“And did they come.”

“Some of them. Enough, for a while.” He smiled a little. “She told me once, when I opened, she said, my shop was downtown where the people already were, that cost, you’re going to have to make them come to you instead, and that’s harder. And she was right. It was harder. It was harder my whole life.” He put his hand flat on the cool concrete wall the way she had seen him do in old photographs of the record store, a man taking the measure of a room with his palm. “But I’ll tell you the thing she didn’t tell me, that I figured out. The rent being cheap is not the enemy. The rent being cheap is the door. When a street is worth a lot, they don’t let people like us in. It’s when a street’s forgotten that a person with nothing can walk in and make something. That’s the only time the door’s open. You just have to walk through it before somebody remembers the street is there.”

Jess looked around the room, at the boxes on the floor, at the water stain, at the big steel door standing open to the gravel lot and the gray afternoon.

“You think somebody’s going to remember this street’s here?”

“Somebody always does, eventually,” Dennis said. “That’s what happened to me. You spend twenty years making a forgotten street into something, and then one day it’s not forgotten, and the rent goes up, and they thank you for the trouble by pricing you out of it.” He said it without much bitterness, the way you say a thing that has already happened and cannot be helped. “So do the work now, while it’s cheap. Fill the room up. Make the thing you came here to make. Don’t wait for the neighborhood to be ready, because by the time it’s ready it won’t be yours anymore.”

He stayed and helped her assemble the flat-file and hang a clamp light off a nail, and then his knees had had enough, and he took himself off home, and Jess was alone in the room she had signed for on the hood of a truck.

It was quiet. Out on South Virginia a truck went by, and somewhere down the block somebody was playing music too loud, one of the house shows the kids put on because no real place would have them, and the sound of it came faint across the lots. The light was going. She had not scraped the windows yet so the room was dim, but she found she did not want to wait for Monday and the good light. She did not want to wait for anything.

She took a canvas out of a crate, one of the big ones, four feet by five, primed white, and she stood it against the water-stained wall. She dragged a coffee can of brushes over with her foot. She had not decided what she was going to paint. She had not decided anything except the lease. But her great-grandmother Clara had walked into a shop nobody thought she should take, and her father had walked into a store on the wrong end of a forgotten street, and Jess Reinholt was the third of them to stand in a cheap room on this long street and decide to make something out of it before anybody said she could.

She opened a tube of paint. The big steel door was still standing open behind her, the last of the daylight coming in low across the concrete floor and reaching almost to the canvas, and she did not get up to close it. She loaded the brush, and she raised it, and she made the first mark.

---