That was what I told my friends. This other part I didn’t realize myself at first, and later it felt too private to share: my time modeling, standing or leaning naked in front of some desperate kid with an easel and a nose ring, belonged to me. It didn’t slip off like time does in your apartment where there’s always some damn thing out of place, or out in the world where fear’s a phone tap away. In those thirty minutes of pain and brush scratch, thoughts stretched long, and memories ran like rivers. I remembered being five, keeping time and singing on the back porch while Daddy played guitar. I remembered running when the grade school kids came for me, and how it felt to fight and lose and win. I remembered strawberries firm and rich as kisses. Hell, I remembered things that never happened. I climbed mountains on planets orbiting a distant star, with a purple sky overhead and a long fall below. Memories like that make you want like you have to, to do any kind of real work: you want from the bones out. After those sessions I’d write and write, and some of what I wrote I’d see the next day and think, good.
To those of you out there who think I could have earned more stripping:
1. Fuck
2. You
I started modeling for Steve, who my roommate Rache knew, and I showed up on time for his sits, and he told his friends and I showed up on time for theirs, and though I couldn’t quit the restaurant I did take fewer shifts. The play took shape. I sent what I had to Ms. Agent, who sent back a sticky note with a smiley face that I took to mean, keep going.
But I never thought about the increate, or holes in worlds, until I met Crispin.
• • • •
Crispin wasn’t like the others. Even that first time, I could tell.
There was no music, only the hush of his apartment. Neither of us spoke. His work was an exercise in stillness, a pressure of knife against skin. Into that stillness came the brushstroke, a rasp that ran goosebumps up my shoulders and back, like sandpaper drawn lightly over a nipple.
Stare at your own face in a mirror in halflight and it will warp to something hideous. Staring at his that first afternoon I saw his skin bubble off the bone, his forehead bulge and birth curving horns, his jaw distend like a snake’s about to devour the world. And then he looked up, and his face was a face again.
His brush left trails of poison paint—lead in the whites, mercury in the reds, fumes of alcohol and turpentine.
Sitting always hurts, but sitting for him hurt more. He’d asked for perfect stillness, so I had to show him. My heart beat against my will. People aren’t made to freeze like that. Our ancestors hunted by jogging, chasing prey over open grassland until it died. We live by movement, and when you stop us, we hurt. Even that first pose, simple, seated, felt like pincers piercing the muscles of my butt, back, shoulder, neck, and spreading.
And then his gaze. The stress of her regard, the poet wrote. His whole body leaned into me through the points of his eyes. I didn’t feel seen. I felt peered through, like the near lens of a telescope.
My watch chimed the end of our last period. It felt as if I’d sat forever, and for no time at all. I guess no time at all is forever, because no time means no time passing, and if time doesn’t pass then the moment just goes.
“Thank you, Ms. Dane,” he said, and passed me a cash envelope containing—yes, I looked—twice what I’d made on any other four-hour sit.
“Thank you, Crispin,” I said, and we set our next date.
I’d reached the street and made it halfway to the corner when I heard a crash behind me, of broken wood and torn cloth. I turned back, curious. The painting of bowl and rose Crispin had showed me lay broken on the sidewalk. Several floors up, his window closed.
• • • •
We saw each other often that summer: I saw him behind the easel, and he saw me on the divan. We painted even through swampy August. He painted. I endured.
Crispin was slow. The first portrait, head and shoulders alone, a face made large as canvas, took twelve hours, three times longer than Steve needed for a whole-body nude. As we neared the end, he was soaked in sweat, eyes bloodshot. Done, he turned the canvas to the corner of the room so I couldn’t see myself. I thought the painting cast light into that bare cobwebbed corner.
We started the nudes next. He wanted a pair, three-quarter sized, my leg up on a block, one hand resting on my thigh. By the end of the first day the hip of my raised leg hurt like I was sixty. The whole time he stared through me. I might have been a piece of tissue paper held to a halogen bulb, smoking, almost aflame. After those sessions I rode the subway home gazing blank faced as a junkie at the wall, staggered back to my apartment, drew a steaming bath in spite of the heat, and waited for my body to return. I floated like a fetus in the womb.
My memory didn’t work while I posed for him. I don’t just mean the way I talked about remembering before. I couldn’t remember how it felt for time to pass. I couldn’t remember ever speaking. Sometimes I forgot my own name.
Air hung still in the studio while he worked. He wanted, and reached, as if diving into deep water after a receding light. I dived beside him, though I could not see the light he chased. Maybe he couldn’t, either.
“He’ll chop you up when this is done,” Rache joked. Good roomie, always looking out for me. “Store you in the freezer. Some Craigslist killer shit.”
At least, I hoped she was joking.
The money let me take fewer shifts. Acting dropped off the ambitions list, for the moment—I didn’t need more people watching me. I paced the apartment like pacing a cage. I wrote compulsively, but where before I’d shaped my bones to words, now my work felt like the words had always been there, waiting for me to sift white off the page and reveal them glistening black. My play’s last act skewed weird, full of silences and dread. The windows in my head through which light came were shut, and I’d opened others to let in the dark.
I studied Crispin, but learned less than you’d expect to learn about someone you spent a summer with naked. He mixed his own paints, ground his own pigment. Steve had known him in art school, said he was weird even then, old-money weird, and he got weirder after his mother’s illness, a cancer of the mind that warped her first, made her suffer, turned her inside out before it let her die. There were rumors that they cut it out of her and he kept it after; there were rumors that he watched them do it, that he sat with the growth and asked it questions as it floated in green. Mean rumors. But I could see where they came from.
Crispin made his name young, and his fame grew as his work got strange. He hadn’t shown in years. The auction price for his last painting, Still Life with Wriggling No. 9, was a four with so many zeroes after it I thought there must have been a typo—until I checked the price for Still Life with Wriggling No. 8.
With that kind of money, he could afford to pay me double.
He used last names exclusively, and knew everyone’s—the mailman’s even. He rotated between three shirts and two pairs of ratty khakis. He kept a fiddle in his apartment, though he never played that I saw. He skipped meals often; we ordered sandwiches once, and he said that was his first food of the week, this being Wednesday. Once I arrived to find a large man crying on the stairs outside Crispin’s apartment; Crispin gave no explanation. I didn’t ask for one.
Sometimes, in his eyes, I thought I saw worms turning.
We made four paintings that summer. I saw none of them. After the final session, he passed me two envelopes instead of one. The envelope with the cash was cheap, unmarked, and extra fat; the other was of textured paper and addressed in spidery calligraphy to Ms. Deliah Dane.
“An invitation,” he said.
“You’re getting married? You should have told me.”
He didn’t hear the joke. “We are putting on a show.”
• • • •
I had, as who doesn’t, a nice black dress for formal events, and on the night of the opening I for once made it all the way to midtown without a single catcall. So it was a good day, at least until I reached the gallery.
The galleries where my friends showed were ripped-jeans joints for the most part, dresses on a strict irony-only basis. That wasn’t the deal at the 512. Cloth-of-gold, labels, gossamer, yes. My nice black dress looked bargain basement in this crowd. Some of the men wore tuxedoes, which I didn’t think you were allowed to wear except to weddings, funerals, and inaugurations. Then again, the gentlemen—and I use that term loosely, based on where their eyes went when they thought no one else was looking—the gentlemen at the 512 for Crispin’s opening seemed like they went to a lot of those.
Tonight the 512 was a white box, walls the color of one of those old fifties asylums where men used to check in their wives for “rest.” Aside from the buffet table, the gallerist had set up four black velvet booths, and lines of patrons waited outside them. Black tripods near each booth displayed a cream paper card, typed, actually typed, on Crispin’s Underwood. To the left, Face. To the right, Back. To the rear, Nude 1 and Nude 2.
That was all.
Of course Crispin would show the paintings, but I’d expected still lifes too, the flower bowl, a broken dead thing, some relief from me. All these so-called gentlemen in their tuxedoes had come to see pieces of me naked. I felt scared, and a little flattered, and a lot angry that I felt either.
Crispin wasn’t hard to find. The room had four corners, and the front two were too near the door for his comfort. My first guess was wrong—the crowd there surrounded a woman I took for the gallerist, an elegant scarecrow laughing at a joke I doubt I would have found funny. I wormed through the crowd again, past the lines outside each nude and the buffet table. Crispin leaned into the far corner, staring at his glass of white as if wishing he could make it darker. In this sea of evening dress, he wore rumpled wool slacks, that same green shirt, and a blazer with a loose thread in the left shoulder. His shoes had never felt the touch of shine.
“Just me?” I said.
Wine slopped over the rim of his glass, and he looked up; his smile seemed warm at first before he remembered to turn it cruel. “You came.” But I’d seen enough. The coldness was a mask, though he wore it well.
“No flowers. No still lifes.”
He shrugged, that first slip covered now. “Those weren’t good enough. You are.”
I wanted to shout, but didn’t. The chatter and the drifting atonal music and the clink of glasses against teeth forbid me that. I realized I was alone—there was an empty circle of floor around Crispin even here, all these people watching him as if he were a tiger or a shit-throwing ape. What did that make me? His target, or prey, and I wasn’t about to let these inauguration-goers cast me in either role.
“Look at them if you want,” he said.
“What’s with the curtains?”
“I will allow indirect light only, under these circumstances. No one but a buyer gets to see them unveiled.”
It’s hard to storm away in heels, but practice makes perfect.
“Deliah!” I heard while forcing my way through the crowd to the door. At first I mistook the voice for Crispin’s, though it was all wrong—female, for one thing, and happy, and using my first name. I turned and saw—
“Ms. Agent!” Shannon Carmichael, to be exact—I realize I haven’t given her name before. A full woman, billowing out of the mass of blacks and grays in a bright orange dress, arms wide and one hand wined; she reminded me charmingly of an octopus rising through ocean murk. If you can’t see how an octopus might be charming, don’t blame me for your lack of imagination. If I’d been caught in anything so simple as a bear trap I would have chewed my arm off to get away, because oh my god my agent had seen me naked. “What are you doing here?”
“Crispin’s show, of course,” she said. “His new project! Have you seen them yet?”
“You know Crispin?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“I didn’t realize he was such a thing. I just—” But if she’d seen the pictures and didn’t recognize me, why clue her in? “I know him from around.”
“I wish you and I got to the same around. He’s a recluse, you know, never comes to anything. You must see this Face!”
She grabbed my wrist and pulled. That woman has better traction in heels on hardwood than most semis I’ve known on open interstates. By this point the lines had died down, replaced by clots of chatting socialites near each booth, and Shannon pulled me past those with an apologetic smile and no drop in speed. I heard snatches of conversation:
—cold like space, only the colors—
—imagine what it would look like on a wall / can’t imagine a wall to hold—
—conversation starter, or, you know, ender—
—those eyes, deeper than wells, and all the world inside—
—audio component, maybe, in the frames, I heard pipes—
And something about “jog” and “Sabbath” from a young Chinese woman leaning against her date, drunk or faint. Sweat beaded through her makeup. Her hands twisted, fingers twining, locking, gripping as if to break.
Shannon shoved me through the velvet, and I tripped, my only thought that I would tumble somehow through the painting and ruin what, fifty grand at least of Crispin’s opening, if not more—
But I caught my balance, and looked up, and stared into an unfamiliar face.
I couldn’t see it all. They’d covered the booth with cloth, so inside everything should have been shades of gray, but wasn’t. The face on the canvas shone. She pulsed in a rhythm exactly out of time with my own heartbeat.
No wonder Shannon hadn’t recognized me. Crispin broke my face, or peeled it apart. I was fissured and fused and melted and monolithic, distorted into something more real, full, there than I had ever felt. My painted eyes were pits you could tumble down and fall for a million years into blackness charged with sick galaxies of staring, slitted orbs, space filled with the piping of a mindless master whose music was a scream.
Craquelure legions danced in the fissures of my skin. The red muscle of a peeled-back cheek was a field that grew unholy thorns, and corpses twisted in my hair, pecked by carrion birds. Yet they were only shadows, brushstrokes, suggestions my mind added to a canvas face that did not resemble me at all.
Or did it? And were those in fact suggestions, or was something moving beneath the paint?
I can’t write what I saw, and I call myself a writer. But saying you can’t say something, that’s one of the old tricks, right? And—hell.
I looked at me. I mean, the canvas I looked at fleshy me with my eyes that were doors, and something behind pressed out, against, through those doors. I reached to touch my cheek, trembling, and as I did I remembered museum field trips and Miss Alva saying “Deliah, don’t touch,” and of all the damn things that saved me. I drew back my hand and the painting was paint again.
I stumbled out, glazed, sweating. The lights and walls and shirt fronts were too white. I held out a hand, but no one steadied me. I saw a blur of faces—and a spark of sympathy in that Chinese girl’s eyes, before her date guided her off toward the wine.
Something grabbed my hand, and I barely contained a scream. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Shannon, her smile still plastered on.
“That’s a word,” I said.
“A different world, seen through the intermediary of the model. Morrison wants to buy the lot.” She introduced me to the man behind her, a thickset robber baron type with white hair and bushy mustache and the tuxediest of tuxedoes. “Morrison, this is my client, Deliah Dane. She knows Crispin.” With a conspiratorial edge on Crispin’s name and the word knows. Morrison took my hand and said something vacant and polite, and Shannon added, “You absolutely must see the Nudes.”
I wanted nothing less. “How long was I in there?”
“Five minutes,” she said with a glance at her watch. “Or so.”
That felt too short, and too long.
Morrison cleared his throat—did he recognize me?—but before he could speak or I could recoil, the scarecrow clinked her glass. All eyes turned upon her,
and she effused—for a scarecrow—about Crispin and how glad she was “all of you” had come, meaning everyone with money to spend, and she asked Crispin to say a few words.
“I have to go,” I told Shannon, and as I slid through the crowd toward the door Crispin read from notes typed on index cards.
“—to portray a deeper world than the one we see. Vision is a kind of—exploration, frontier seeking: each sensory impression is a sheet disguising a universe of processes, not all—amenable to human understanding. And in that dialectic between our naïve comprehension and the vast and pitiless truth, we find—”
The door closed, and rain and the buzz saw of taxi tires through puddles replaced him.
• • • •
I tore up the doom-ending of my play that night, but I couldn’t think of anything to write in its place other than “and monsters ate them all,” so I stopped. I lay awake listening to Rache and her boyfriend have messy sex on the other side of my bedroom’s thin walls. Even that sounded wrong.
But I am a professional, and I keep my word, so even though I barely slept that night I was still on time for my next session with Crispin.
• • • •
He met me at the door with a glass of scotch, a bonus envelope, and a bouquet of star lilies. “They sold,” I said, and set the lilies down, and he said, “Yes,” and “All to the same buyer.”
“Morrison.”
“Morrison Bellkleft, yes,” he said. “For a considerable sum.” He sat, silent, and waited. I drank.
Whiskey warmth eased the next bit: “Those portraits don’t look anything like me.”
“Don’t they?”
“No. Hell, your roses don’t even look like roses. Not like normal roses.”
You don’t say that kind of thing to a client who’s paid you better than you’ve ever been paid before, but I was done not knowing. Knuckle on temple, he considered. He had a silence like glass.
“Have you ever watched someone you love die?” He spoke flat. “Not just known they were dying, but sat beside them, felt their pulse, watched their eyes as they failed, again and again, to understand what was happening—then the horror when they finally got the joke? Only to forget it all, and minutes later remember once again.” He stood and walked to the window. “There comes a moment when the doctors stop giving them water, you know.”
The Long List Anthology Volume 4 Page 22
