All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

by Saundra Mitchell

  * * *

  By the end of February, the girls have become more ordinary—we can all draw hips and breasts in a creative array of positions now, most of us without exciting ourselves. We still draw the plasters, now interspersed with models once or twice during the week. When we’re not sketching, van der Loos has Augustus and me glazing his undercoats for a new series of domestic scenes while the rest of the boys mix his pigments and prepare the pallets, so we spend most mornings shoulder to shoulder, our hands sticky with glaze. Augustus sometimes hums under his breath while we work, his usual twitchy hands still and steady on the brushes.

  A snowstorm buries Amsterdam and we’re out of the studio for three days, all of us trapped in our homes, and when we return, we’re all buzzy and talkative, so the shout of someone entering doesn’t register with me straight away as out of the ordinary. I’m stretching parchment on my board, trying not to smudge my charcoaled fingers over the edges, but then I hear Braam say, “What are you doing here?” And I look up just as Joost Hendrickszoon steps out from the studio doorway, his wool cap crushed between his hands.

  I drop into a nonsensical crouch beside my easel, an action born purely from the panic of seeing him out of context and so unexpectedly, then fumble around for something to do so my sudden drop to the ground looks even remotely motivated. I thrust my hand into my satchel, just to look like I’m doing something, and I nick my thumb on the knife I use to sharpen pencils.

  “Constantijn!”

  I stand up, thumb in my mouth, so fast I knock my head on the edge of my easel. The whole thing teeters, parchment board tilting at a dangerous angle, but Joost catches it before it falls in earnest and tips it back into place for me. The charcoal falls off the edge and breaks against the floor. When Joost casts his gaze down to it, I can see the red-gold freckles sprinkled over his eyelids and, when he bends, the spot behind his ear where his hair doesn’t lie flat. He’s sheared it off since he started his dock work, and the short curls feather against the back of his neck.

  He tries to scoop up a few salvageable pieces, and when he hands them to me, it takes a full minute to remember how to make my fingers work to take it from him. Another to recall language and form the shape of it with my tongue.

  “Joost. Good evening. Morning. It’s morning.”

  He wipes the charcoal off his palms, leaving black smears on his cassock. “How are you faring? I saw you at the docks last week.”

  “Did you?”

  “You looked occupied or I would have come over.”

  “Oh. I was fetching the plasters.”

  “The what?”

  “We were doing a study...” Halfway through this sentence I realize I had been at the docks retrieving the plaster casts van der Loos had made of naked male torsos and I go so light-headed with embarrassment I think I might faint.

  Joost raises an eyebrow. “A study?”

  “For painting.”

  “Ah.”

  His eyes drift over my shoulder, like he’s tiring of this conversation and looking for someone else to speak to, and my mind becomes so overwhelmed by desperation to keep him here that it latches on to the word I have been so careful to skirt for this entire conversation and spits it out. “Penises.”

  Which gets his attention back on me, but at what cost!? “What?”

  “We were painting... We’ve been talking about the musculature of...” I do a mime of something oblong shaped with the unfortunate placement of right in front of my crotch. “It was just for the painting. We didn’t do anything with them. Not the penises. The casts. The plasters.”

  “Oh. Well. I suppose you have to start somewhere.”

  A wild little giggle escapes me. Joost raises his eyebrows, and I look around for some sort of pallet knife on which I could fall on and impale myself. “Are you making a delivery?”

  “No, not many ships of late—the snow’s kept them from docking. Hard to make a living.”

  “Yes, hard.”

  “What?”

  Don’t say it again, I think, but of course I do. “Hard,” I repeat, louder, and, Jesus, take me now. Scoop me from this earth; I shall never recover. I tug at the front of my smock, which I have somehow sweat through, and force myself to keep my eyes on Joost’s face and not the pale dip of skin visible between his kerchief and collar, sprinkled in freckles the same color as his hair. “So are you, um... What are you doing here?”

  “Take your seats, please,” van der Loos calls. “Hendrickszoon, if you’ll come with me.” Joost ducks out from between the easels to follow van der Loos, and I collapse into a swoon upon my stool, so light-headed I almost tip backward. I plant my feet on the floor and try to breathe and not look around for Joost, though just knowing he’s near makes me feel set aflame. I hear the scrape as van der Loos drags the sofa into the center of our circle. All I catch of his words is “return to life drawing today.” I peer out from behind my easel just as he slaps the sofa cushion once, raising a mushroom of dust. “Hendrickszoon,” he calls. “If you’re ready.”

  And then Joost steps out from behind the partition, wearing the thin dressing gown, same as every woman we’ve drawn. My heart starts to pound its fists against my rib cage like it’s trying to burst out and lay itself dramatically at Joost’s feet.

  Van der Loos presents the couch with an extended hand. “If you please.”

  It seems to take a thousand years for the robe to come off. It slides like slick oil off his shoulders, and if I thought they were a thing of beauty beneath a shirt, they’re miraculous unsheathed, whorls of thick muscle coiled beneath his skin. His whole body is taut as he unfastens the sash, the studied concentration of a beautiful man who knows he’s being watched but chooses to pretend he’s unaware because it makes for better planes of his face. As the robe falls open, I wonder if it will be possible for me to complete this entire study without once looking any lower than the dip of his hip bones, so sharp and precise they look as though someone chiseled them.

  This, I think, as I keep my eyes determinedly focused on his face while the robes thumps softly to the floor, is entirely not my fault, and entirely his, for being so pretty.

  Joost nudges the robe beneath the sofa, then gives van der Loos a smile. His hands twitch at his sides, like he’s trying not to cover himself. “Shall I...?”

  “Prone, please, to begin. And your boots.”

  “Oh.” Joost laughs as he looks down at his feet. “I forgot.” He kicks off his boots, and they bounce across the floor, landing in a rumpled heap before Augustus.

  I duck behind my easel, close my eyes, try to take a breath, fail, try to take another, nearly pass out, give my cheeks a stern talking to about being a little less red or they’re going to give us both away. Another breath, another failure. Peer out from behind the easel.

  Joost stretches out on the sofa slowly, like a thing unthawing. Braam whistles, and there are a few laughs, though of an entirely different variety of those that accompanied the bare-breasted women who have previously draped themselves over this sofa.

  “Quiet please,” van der Loos says, then, to Joost, “You might begin with your arms above your head please.” Joost obliges, stretching himself out to his full length. He’s so tall that his feet hang off the edge of the sofa, and the muscles in his chest coil, his skin gilded by the sunlight curling in through the windows, brighter than usual as it reflects off the new snow piled along the sills.

  Van der Loos adjusts the drapes, letting in more light, then turns to us. “Gentlemen, observe particularly the musculature here, in the torso, how it connects differently than on the female form.”

  Look somewhere else, I think, as van der Loos strokes a hand through the air over the ladder of Joost’s abdominal muscles. Look at his boots.

  I stare at the material in a muddy heap on the floor, the way the folds drape, the leather sole, the hole along the heel where th
e stitching has come loose and he hasn’t yet taken it to the cobbler.

  “Constantijn, are you paying attention?”

  I raise my eyes from their determined study of the boots. Van der Loos is staring at me with a frown. So is Joost, less frowny. So are all the other apprentices. Braam’s mouth is quivering with trying not to laugh.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are we discussing?”

  “His...torso, sir.”

  “We’ve moved lower.” He points straight between Joost’s legs. “Follow along, please.”

  And, because everyone is watching me, I look.

  As Joost lounges upon the sofa like some god ripped from mythology, the entirety of his front side on display, I have a stern talking to with my own bits about calming down and they staunchly refuse to listen.

  I try threats. If you don’t go soft, you’ll have no supper, though my body seems far more interested in sex than food.

  BUT LOOK AT HIS CHEST, it seems to scream in response.

  I try bargaining. If you go soft, I’ll give you a good workout tonight.

  BUT LOOK AT HIS BARE THIGHS.

  I try pleading. If you do not settle, all of these boys are going to see me go stiff over Joost and I will get more than a handful of snow to the back of the head.

  BUT LOOK AT HIS—

  Think of the least arousing things possible. Gutted herring in the market. Spilled sewage in the greasy snow outside the Wolf’s Head. The old woman who begs outside the church with a mouth full of rotted teeth she sometimes spits at my sister and me like melon seeds.

  “If you would change, please, Hendrickszoon,” van der Loos calls, and I start, nearly crushing my charcoal between my fingers—I hadn’t realized we had started to sketch. Joost sits up, letting one leg dangle off the sofa and giving me another eyeful of his crotch that sends all the blood fleeing my head.

  Maybe if I faint, van der Loos will let me go home. Maybe if I throw up, he’ll let me leave early. Maybe if I keel over dead they’ll bury me in the churchyard with “Here lies Constantijn, slain by the first penis he saw that wasn’t his own.”

  I look at my parchment. I completed nothing from his first pose. I start to scribble frantically, tracing out the arch of his back just to get something on the page. My heartbeat is sitting in my hands—the few strokes I manage are palsied. I look around at the other apprentices, hoping at least one of them will look as uncomfortable as I am and my own fumbling can be passed off as something other than unholy lust. They all seem focused, and the room is quiet but for the soft shush of charcoal on parchment. Beside me, Augustus bends so close to his sketch that his nose seems likely to smudge the charcoal.

  “Constantijn, what are you doing?”

  I start so spectacularly my charcoal skates across the page, leaving a long black smudge. Van der Loos is standing over me, frowning at my board.

  “Sketching, sir.”

  “You have yet to finish a figure.”

  “It’s difficult.”

  “How so?”

  “Different. Than the women. The anatomy,” I tack on hastily.

  Van der Loos’s frown deepens. “Constantijn, are you well?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You look feverish.”

  “It’s very hot in here, sir.”

  “Perhaps you’d prefer to sit by the window.”

  “Oh, God, no,” I say, too quickly, and van der Loos frowns at me. “It would disrupt my angles,” I say, instead of explaining that sitting by the window would give me a view that is far more full frontal than my current.

  Van der Loos scowls at me again, then at my parchment. “Your progress has been exceptional lately,” he says. “Be certain you don’t stagnate.”

  I bow my head and van der Loos moves on. I have to do something. And that something is not trying to swallow down staring at Joost naked and not nursing the sinful desires that I have heard over and over from my ministers are a sign of being damned. I look down at my board. A few half-hearted shapes. The tip of a chin, the curled hunch of a shoulder. Maybe I am damned.

  Instead of his frame, I draw his face. The shape of his cheekbones beneath his skin, the freckles on his eyelids, the shadow his lashes cast against his cheeks. The thin bow of his lips, the wide spot on the bridge of his nose from when it was once broken when Merik Engel accidentally knocked him with an oar when they were punting. Thick brows, the way his hair curls behind his ears. I draw him more from memory, even though he’s in front of me, until van der Loos calls time and the class ends.

  I pack up my charcoal and stow the easel, careful to look away as Joost redresses himself. I hear him laughing over something with Braam and Johannes, so it’s a shock when I turn back from washing my hands in the basin and he’s standing at my easel, waiting for me. The collar of his shirt has gotten tucked under the seam, and I almost reach up to fix it. I curl my hands into fists around the edges of my smock to stop myself.

  “How did I do?” he asks.

  “Well.” My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “You did very well. Very still.”

  “Was I good to draw?”

  Oh, God, if ever there was a question more weighted than that—it’s like I can hear grapeshot clicking within the words. “Yes.”

  “May I see it?”

  “See what?”

  “Your sketches.”

  “Of you?” The word mortifying was certainly invented to describe showing the boy whose broad shoulders you have been admiring from afar since you were young the nude sketches you have just attempted to do of him while trying desperately, desperately not to think about the nights you have kept yourself company with fantasizing about him. My first instinct is to rip the paper to shreds just for an excuse to say no.

  But Joost is standing, expectant, one hand extended, so I pass over the parchment. He studies it, a small crease appearing between his eyes when he looks from the few half-hearted studies of his frame to the rendering of his face. “I thought you were only meant to be drawing my body.”

  “I, ah, thought I’d try something else.”

  “Look, you got my hair there, where it flips up.” He laughed, running a finger along his bottom lip. “And my eyes are exactly right.”

  “They’re not. The shape is off.”

  “The lashes, then—you’ve drawn the shadow of them.” He scrubs one hand under his eye. “They’re longer than most.”

  “They’re not. I mean, they are. But they’re so nice.” I nearly jam a paintbrush through my own eye in hopes that a quick death might end this now.

  Joost smiles, one cheek dimpled deep and the other smooth as porcelain. I expect thanks for the accidental compliment but it must make him too uncomfortable to acknowledge for all he says is “You’ll be a great artist someday.”

  “So will you.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, I thought... I thought you were going to say... Nothing.”

  When I look up, he’s still examining my sketch. “May I keep this?”

  “No, I need it.”

  “Oh.”

  “For my portfolio.”

  “Of course.” He stares at it for a moment longer, rubbing his hand along his chin, admiring his own beauty, which is what I was doing a few moments ago, but somehow it’s less endearing when it’s him staring at himself with an approving eye. He hands it back, and I shove it into my satchel.

  Joost gives me his easy smile again, pushing a strand of hair off his forehead and back under his knit cap. There’s a clatter behind us, and we both turn. Augustus has leaned too close to the washbasin mirror in an attempt to wash the charcoal off his nose and rattled it. Joost snorts. “I didn’t know Augustus Rikszoon was apprenticed here.”

  “Oh. Yes. Is that...surprising?”

  “I’m surprised he found anyone to take him on a
s an apprentice—he’s such an odd creature, I thought he’d be slopping hogs somewhere.” He laughs. “Do you remember, when we were young, he was so frightened of having to walk up to the altar at church he pissed himself?” He laughs again.

  “Augustus is a good artist,” I say before I can stop myself. In truth, I’ve never really noticed Augustus’s drawings more than anyone else’s, and similarly have no idea where this compulsion to defend him is coming from. I’d certainly be more endearing to Joost if I simply nodded and agreed, and what does Augustus mean to me? He is an odd thing—I’ve thought it myself before. Maybe because we’ve walked together almost every night since Braam and Johannes mocked me on the way home, and because I like the way he blushes when he laughs, no matter the joke, and the cant of his head when he listens, sometimes so far it seems he’s resting his cheek upon his own shoulder. The way he remembers the things I tell him.

  And who didn’t piss themselves at least once when they were young?

  Joost pulls his cap lower over his ears with a shrug. “He should at least be a clergyman or something that gives him an excuse to be awkward and stay away from women.”

  “I have to go,” I blurt.

  “Oh. Of course.” Joost takes a step back from me, his coat sleeve drifting over an open jar of saffron pigment and leaving a smudge the color of fresh pollen along the patched elbow. “Would you like to walk with me? I’m going to Westerpark for a drink with some of the East India men. You could come, if you like.”

  “I need to be home. My mother holds dinner for me.”

  “Oh. All right, then.” His face creases, like being turned down is a new experience for him. “I’ll see you soon, I think. For more sessions. You can draw my face again.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me, and I have to work hard to muster a smile that reaches my eyes. “Have a good night, Constantijn.”

  I watch him go, then take the sketch out of my satchel and examine it again, his long eyelashes, the careful strokes—I’ve never drawn anything so lovingly, like a constellation map of the points of his face I admired. But now the cheekbones look too prominent. The eyes too warm, the bones too shapely. I drew him finer than he is.