In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Boardwalk,” I said.

  “There’s no boardwalk at Lake George,” Sherry said. “You must be thinking of Coney Island or Atlantic City.” She lay down too, her leg against mine, and she took my hand. “Don’t be sad,” she said.

  “I hate that word,” Spence said. “It’s a little brown sack of sadness. I never use it in my work. I use sorrowful, dejected, downcast, depressed, melancholy. But I never use sad.”

  “I have to go home,” I said, without moving. “The children. Supper.”

  “This was bad stuff, Spence,” Richard said. “It didn’t do much for me.”

  “That’s your problem,” Spence said. “I feel good. I feel high.”

  Were they going to take a vote? I sat up and moved across the bed. “Excuse me,” I said to Spence, whose legs were in my way. I climbed over him and found the floor. I went to the bathroom, opened the toilet and sat down. The basin was a mess, all yellow stains and chips. Underneath was the cats’ litter box, filled with some pungent green crap. I urinated, listening carefully, expecting some terrific and edifying crescendo of sound, but it was only a modest, uneven trickle. I went back into the other room. “Well, I have to be going now.”

  “We were just getting started,” Sherry said. “But if you have to … We’ll do it again real soon. Okay?”

  “Copacetic,” I said.

  32

  “PUT YOUR CLOTHES ON the hook behind the screen, dear,” the instructor said, squinting through cigar smoke. “See if the last girl left the hanger in there.”

  I stepped behind the screen and I wondered about that last girl. I liked the anonymous reference. It seemed best to be unidentified in a situation like this. Then I wondered if my silhouette would show through as I undressed. The screen was made of some flimsy material, and I thought of old movie musicals where Betty Grable would take off her clothes behind the dressing room screen and fling out gorgeous undergarments while she spoke to Cesar Romero on the other side. A land of innocent sexuality we all fell for.

  I didn’t fling anything. The other girl had taken the hanger, and the hook was only a crooked nail. Instead I laid my things neatly on a folding chair, the way I did when I went to the doctor.

  But there was no clinician waiting on the other side with charts and scale and stethoscope. I could hear the sounds of chairs scraping and easels being moved into position, and the voices of men and women.

  The robe I had bought for the occasion looked all wrong now, in this last moment before my debut. Chenille, in a natural beige color, it had seemed practical and workaday in the store, but now I knew it had the air of someone’s bedroom about it, an intimacy not to be shared with all those strangers on the other side. I didn’t want to come out. What if they all whistled and shouted? Take it off, take it off, cried the boys in the rear. I could hear the stripper’s entry music, a drumroll and a screaming trumpet. Oh, if Howard could see me now!

  I came out slowly, peering around the screen first, curling my toes against the possibility of splinters from the wooden floor. No one cheered. No one whistled. There was a dusty little platform with a backless stool on it. An electric heater glowed on one side. The students and I looked at one another, me dropping my eyes first. Most of them were young, boys and girls almost neutered by their uniforms of paint-stained jeans and workshirts.

  There were a couple of slightly older people, one man and one woman who had positioned themselves on the outer corner of the group, like chaperons. I thought of my own mother and father and felt a thrill of deception. I had told them it was office work, part-time.

  Everyone was busy arranging large newsprint pads, making last adjustments to the angle of easels. The instructor’s name was Jim. “Okay,” he said, with an offhand gesture to me, and I stepped to the platform and disrobed in one continuous movement. Done! It was really me, naked in front of all these strangers. I had done it once as a child too, at a birthday party in a hot, noisy room. Nothing but a party hat and ruffled anklets. My mother had run after me with a throw rug, screaming as if I were on fire. It was a story Howard loved.

  The room had grown very quiet. The rustling of papers had stopped. Jim looked me over, narrowing his eyes in what I took to be professional approval. “We’ll start with a few standing poses,” he said. “We’ll do fast ones. Five minutes.” He held up a stopwatch. Then he faced the students and said something to them about working with bold, rapid strokes, about trying to capture the action of the pose and not concentrating on anatomical detail.

  The heater blazed near my legs, but the rest of me was frozen. Oh God, my nipples would get hard, the way they always did when I was cold. I stood, bending one knee slightly, curving one arm until my hand found my hip and rested there. Was it all right? Did it look like a normal pose? Or did I look like some lunatic waiting for a bus, who had forgotten to wear any clothes? I had prepared myself like a bride for this: shaved my legs with Howard’s old razor, scraped the dry skin off my feet with pumice, and clipped my toenails straight across. But I hoped I didn’t look prepared in that way. I wanted them to think of me casually as they would think of any other model, or not to think of me at all. Sherry had gotten me this job, through an artist friend. I said I had experience, never specifying what kind. It paid well and the hours were flexible.

  The charcoal scratched like whispers around the room. I could hear my own breath. Would they be able to detect my runaway heartbeat, that frog-pulse in my throat? I thought of the pictures Jason had begun to draw, those lovely, sexless stick people who dwarfed trees and buildings. I imagined my torso as a child’s drawing of a face, a bearded face with a single nostril and the bovine eyes of breasts.

  My leg was killing me, it was full of pins and needles. It had to be more than five minutes already. I wished I had worn my watch. But that would have looked strange, like a man wearing just his socks, or the socks and mask combination of those men in blue movies. Why didn’t the women wear masks?

  “Five minutes. Change!” Jim said, and I shifted position, resting my weight on the other leg, wondering idly what I’d do if I were menstruating. Were you supposed to go out there with that little telltale firecraker string sticking out? And what did male models do about erections? Did they have to think deadly thoughts to control them? I was sure all the wrong thoughts would occur to me. Perversely, I would think of sizzling sex goddesses throwing themselves into wildly erotic positions. Thank God I didn’t have to worry about that, too.

  Jesus, this was hard work, work for the head in assembling distraction against what the body was doing, and work for those poor undisciplined muscles that cramped and ached even in these so-called “easy” poses. And it seemed to go on forever.

  “Break!” the instructor said, and I put on my robe, feeling shy, even more conscious of this as a private act than when I removed it. Some eyes still followed me. The man in the back looked pensive and sad, his hand poised on the edge of his pad. I wondered what I was supposed to do now. Were there rules of protocol to be followed? Was I supposed to slip back behind the screen and wait to be summoned? That seemed so lonely. It would be as if I were being punished for naughty behavior, for that birthday party striptease.

  Instead I strolled among the easels to see what they had made of me. One or two of the drawings seemed remarkably good. There was a strong sense of life, of movement. The worst of them belonged to the sad-eyed man in the rear. I could see he had no aptitude for this. Despite the instructor’s early warning, he had used small careful lines. His drawings didn’t look like me at all, they didn’t look like anything human. Not those legs stuffed like Christmas stockings, not those bull’s-eye breasts. He had tried to cover up by adding details: veins and shadows and creases that appeared only as smudges or strange tattoos. I could see that he was terribly embarrassed, so I moved to the next easel quickly and without comment.

  By the end of the session I was exhausted, but I was surprised to realize that my own embarrassment had dissipated. What was a body among bodies? No o
ne had been lewd or suggestive. It was not anything like those awful dreams where you find yourself on a busy street without a stitch, without a voice. It was only a job, like other jobs.

  One student, a young girl, came up shyly after I was dressed, and thanked me. I was the most interesting model she had worked with that semester: the others had been stingily endowed, had the fleshless angles of a Giacometti. But I was worthy of Lachaise, she told me, and I had a natural ability to assume affecting poses.

  I felt proud. And pleased. Did you hear that, Howard? I had come out again in the world, and so far nothing too bad had happened to me. Jim removed his cigar and nodded. “See you on Friday,” he said.

  I was going to emerge even further. One of these days I would register at a Poetry Workshop at the New School. I would join a gym and slim down. I could do anything.

  Only at home again, among the artifacts of my real life, did that buoyant feeling of success begin to vanish.

  33

  TWO MEN CAME INTO my life through my modeling job. For a while I thought there might even be three, including the instructor Jim, but his interest in me stayed aesthetic and not sensual. He sucked on his cigar and called me dear, and I could imagine him referring to me as the “last girl” to the model who would follow. I didn’t mind, though. There was always Nathan and Douglas.

  Nathan was the man in the back row who couldn’t draw. He was a physician, an ear, nose, and throat specialist who professed a profound love for the human body. He wanted to express this in ways that were not clinical. He was in love with anatomy outside the books and off the charts.

  We went for coffee together after class, and for a while his melancholy eyes intrigued me. I’ve always been a sucker for eyes like his. He came to class on Wednesday, his day off, when all his colleagues were out on the golf courses or home with their families. Didn’t he have a family? Yes, of course: a wife, two sons, a housekeeper, a brace of spaniels. Jim gave Nathan special attention, tried to get him to see the bone and cartilage and muscle beneath the skin, to understand the perspective of form next to form. Jim played a spotlight on me, moving from one area to another, pointing at, but not quite touching my breasts, which were tilted, my neck, which was columnar, and my belly with its maternal slope. I thought of “The Anatomy Lesson” by Evan Connell, and I wished they would keep their distance.

  Nothing helped. Nathan’s drawings continued to be flat and distorted. Was that how he perceived me? Did he think anyone could walk on those poor boneless legs that could never have supported the gargantuan torso he drew? Poor Nathan. It wasn’t that his wife didn’t understand him, but that he didn’t understand the nature of form. Or that he couldn’t interpret it artistically. “I had hoped I could learn to do this,” he said once. “But I guess there are some things that can’t be taught.”

  “You’re getting better, I think,” I said, which wasn’t true, but Nathan smiled, obviously touched by my attempt.

  In a few weeks he began to reveal his intentions. He wanted to go to bed with me, he said, to make love to the body he already loved in his awareness, his sensibility. It was the only other creative idea that had occurred to him. We were sitting in a neighborhood luncheonette drinking coffee. Nathan shredded paper napkins until there was a small snowbank in front of him.

  Well, a proposition! Did you hear that, Howard? A perfectly decent man, an educated, sensitive man who knew the mysteries of the eustachian tubes and the semicircular canal, wanted to go to bed with me!

  But there was no answering rise of passion in my own body. Nathan wasn’t a bad-looking man, those nice eyes, and what seemed to be a trim, reasonable body. Would there be an antiseptic smell? Could an ear man do a safe abortion if necessary? Why didn’t I feel anything? All this time had passed, in which he had gained courage, had moved his chair and easel closer and closer to the front of the room, until I was afraid he might simply tear off his own clothes, jump on the platform and join me in the embrace of Rodin’s “Kiss.”

  I supposed I could work something up, given better circumstances and more time. This uneasy conversation in a booth, back to back with a group of bumping, squealing teenagers, could hardly pass for foreplay. I had been without sex for a while and I wondered now if something Sherry had once quoted was really true: “Use it or lose it.” Would I dry up, become a sealed impenetrable wall? I could have asked Nathan; he was a medical man. But it didn’t seem appropriate.

  Nathan, finished with the napkins, began on a book of matches. “I’d like to go to bed with you, Paulette,” he said. “I’m not in a position for courtship, but I respect you, you must know that.” Did men still say such things? “And I hope you’ll value my candor.” The matches were torn out one by one, and laid like accident victims across the table. I remembered that a boy I knew in high school would carefully tear open the bottoms of two paper matches into four strips each, to simulate arms and legs. One match would be placed on top of the other in an ashtray and then set afire. The strips would burn and curl, entwining the two match “people” into carnal position. Well, here was my chance if I wanted it. Here was unlicensed lust.

  “Nathan, I’ll have to think about it,” I said. “It’s not you,” I added quickly. “You’re sweet and I do value your candor. It’s just that I’ve been through a bad time recently. It’s hard for me to assess my feelings.” Whatever that meant. I hardly felt anything, only a free-floating anxiety and a desire just to get through each day. But Nathan accepted it, at least for the time being. His nervous fingers found my own and squeezed them.

  Douglas never said anything that direct. After a few days in the classroom, he began to stand out among the other young men wearing tight, faded jeans. He was taller for one thing, and he wore cowboy boots, which I found oddly appealing as if he were a small boy in costume. He had actually come from the West, from Montana where his family still lived on a ranch. He had come to New York to make his fortune through his “gift.” At least that’s what his teachers in Billings had called his facility to reproduce artistically what he saw in life. There was no genuine interpretation, no vision of himself and his own experience brought to his art. Of course he was a thousand times better than Nathan. But that wasn’t very difficult. I felt anyone could be better than Nathan. Douglas’s drawings almost resembled me, except they were idealized in the style of those ads that said, DRAW ME! AND WIN A FREE ART SCHOLARSHIP!

  I reasoned that it was only his youth, even though other young people in the class had done serious and exciting work.

  Douglas was quite beautiful, with dark golden curls and a wonderful smile. Once, when he laughed, I noticed that there wasn’t any silver in his mouth. He didn’t even have any cavities! He wore a braided leather wrist band and something on a long silver chain around his neck.

  Douglas didn’t proposition me. We walked in the park near the school and we held hands like adolescents, swinging them between us. He spoke earnestly about himself, using all the romantic language he had ever heard connected with art. It was mostly anachronistic: he was hoping to rent a garret, and he was eager to suffer for his work. Douglas had graduated from high school and then spent a year “looking for himself” in the West, and then two more in the Navy, before he came to New York. He confessed that he hardly ever read books, they made his eyes ache, but once he had read somewhere that art was long and life was short and he had been intensely moved. He was crazy about Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he said, but he seldom went to museums. I thought how much he would have liked La Bohème. I wondered vaguely if he was a homosexual.

  Not so. He had been in love with a girl named Bobbi Lynn since childhood. She had married his best friend while he was in the Navy, although she was still very much in love with Douglas. He believed he could send for her with a night letter, and she would drop everything and come.

  Douglas walked like a cowboy, a crooked, long-legged gait that I found amusing. He said, finally, that I had a terrific body. Rembrandt would have loved it too. He said the drawings he di
d in class were hardly representative of his work, of his true ability. Some day I could come up to his room after class if I wanted to look at his other things, at his paintings. He didn’t mention etchings, but I thought I knew his meaning.

  34

  DEAR HOWARD,

  I HAVE GOTTEN LAID. IT looks really strange written down like this, as if I’m a linoleum rug or a carpet. But it’s hard to think of another way of saying it. Making love is something else, and having sex sounds awkward, like something ordered in a restaurant. I’ll have the sex, what will you have? What I want to say is, it was not an act of vengeance, no biblical eye for an eye. I did it just to do it, and now it’s done. I won’t give you the details except to say my mother is wrong, all cats are not gray in the dark.

  Yesterday I couldn’t open a jar of peanut butter. It was one of those you grip and turn to open. There were other things we could have had for lunch, but the sandwich bread was spread on the plates, waiting for the peanut butter; the kids were sitting there like two truck drivers at a road stop, ready to eat and then roll. I tapped the lid with a table knife until it was dented all around, but not even slightly looser. I knocked it on the edge of the sink, chipping the enamel in two more places. The damn thing was sealed shut.

  Get some bologna instead, I told myself. There were eggs, cheese, other things. I could have gone downstairs to the super. You know how he opens rusted drainpipes with just a dirty look. If I stepped out into the hallway and waited a few minutes, somebody’s husband, some man, would have shown up by and by. A flip of the fists and then done! But I wanted to do it myself, that was the important thing. I’ll show him, I said to myself. I say that a lot lately. What kind of world is this where women have to have secretarial skills and wait for men to open jars of peanut butter?

  I ran the jar under hot water, even though it wasn’t stuck because of anything congealed. I knew it wouldn’t help even as I did it. Mighty Joe Young must be working for Skippy these days, tightening lids. I tried biting it, but there was no place to get a good grip. Teeth marks next to the knife dents. The kids were whining by then. I wedged the jar between my knees, turning myself into a human vise. I imagined all of us found a hundred years later, by anthropologists of the next civilization: Jason, a small resigned skeleton in a striped polo shirt, his skull resting on the plate where the bread had been, and Annie’s bones loose in the high chair where she had once fitted so plumply, and myself with teeth clenched from the effort of turning this lid, and the jar itself a receptacle of mysterious dust.