The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  And that was how she came to be standing, at eight o’clock on a cold April night, in a sixth-floor studio in the Waterman Building, naked.

  |

  Artists’ models didn’t need Social Security cards, green cards, or any other kind of cards. Groups of artists like the one Mel belonged to chipped in to hire a model for weekly sessions. It was all done under the table, “Na levo,” Val noted approvingly. “It’s a crazy idea,” Nan said; but even as she spoke she saw that it wasn’t. It was either this, or cleaning houses. Even babysitting jobs, given her New Look, were going to be few; in any case, they’d never pay the twenty dollars an hour that modeling paid.

  Mel had spent that morning, while Jane was at Mikki’s, coaching Nan. It turned out to be far more complicated to lounge around in the buff than Nan would ever have imagined. “First off,” Mel said, “it’s not about sex.” Then, teasingly, “So don’t even let Walker cross your mind. Modeling is an art form in itself.” A good model designed her pose, mindful of negative space (“the place where you aren’t”) and foreshortening and intersecting masses. Mel showed Nan how to assume a position—standing or reclining, mostly—that looked interesting but distributed her weight evenly, so that she could maintain it. They did one-minute and five-minute poses, working their (Nan’s) way up to twenty. Mel demonstrated stretches to do between poses for the stiffening in her muscles, and a way of massaging arms or legs that had fallen asleep. Think apples, melons, pears, Mel advised. Be sensuous and flowing. They leafed through Art through the Ages and Twentieth-Century Nudes for ideas. (Nan drew the line at Egon Schiele’s women, legs sprawling. “No way. I’m not showing anyone my clitoris.”) By the end of the afternoon she had lost all sense of awkwardness in front of Mel. Her body seemed to her, at least at moments, more itself without clothes than with. When Mel said, “Good thing you don’t shave your pubic hair. They hate that,” Nan had nodded, as if it were the hair on her head they were discussing.

  Now, though, standing in the third of a set of one-minute poses—this one with one foot perpendicular to the other, like fifth position in ballet, hands clasped behind her back to support her lower spine—Nan felt not merely naked but flayed. As if in taking off her clothing she’d removed her skin as well. Under the flicking scrutiny of twelve pairs of eyes, the stark of stark naked took on real meaning. Standing up here, utterly without defenses, waiting to be liked. The old familiar first-time feeling—only with a dozen lovers at once. The humiliation of adolescent dreams in which you find yourself naked in homeroom, with all your classmates looking at you. Nan made herself look back, eyes skimming over the sketchers. Mel, head poking around her easel in the far corner, mouthed, Pears! Pears! She heard the collective rasp of charcoal on paper. She was sweating, but her nipples (Don’t look down!) pricked with cold.

  Some five-minute poses, still standing. One was a sort of lunge, in which Nan had to allow her limbs to be arranged by a rodent-faced woman who seemed to be the group’s unofficial leader. Her elbow grazed Nan’s pubis; the impersonality of this touch made Nan feel inanimate. She might as well have been one of the wooden easels, or the clock on the wall at the back of the room. It was better that way: she stayed where she was put, like any inanimate object, unseeing, unhearing, simply there.

  Then, during a thirty-minute pose seated backward on a chilly metal chair, she made the mistake of looking down. There, despite the regular visits to Mel’s gym, were her thighs: jellied consommé trembling on a plate. She thought of the pleasure, the reassurance, she had once received from this body—not only from using it, but from beholding it. Entering a room full of strangers in its company, knowing she could count on it, this body, not to abandon her. It had not made life simpler, of course. The punishment for being a beautiful woman is the same as the reward. She thought of all the people who had helped themselves to this body. The old Italian tailor on South Street who’d made her school uniform when she was thirteen, squeezing her tender new breasts through the hot gabardine while she watched, desperately, a pigeon’s progress along the dusty windowsill. The eye doctor scooting around on his little stool and pressing his crotch to her bare knees. The crackpot pinching dermatologist who’d treated her for shingles in sophomore year. Staring, that time, at the sign above the examining table—«A beautiful young body is an accident of Nature, a beautiful old body is a work of art»—words she couldn’t imagine ever applying to her.

  Rain tapped on the skylight. The floodlights beaming down from the high ceiling warmed Nan’s back. She regarded her feet, slender, still shapely. Good legs, except for the pale ladder along one thigh, where they’d taken the artery for her bypass.

  She remembered browsing through the Old Testament with Deenie on one of their many afternoons in detention, where only morally uplifting reading matter was allowed. Deenie, who wasn’t beautiful but had the luckier gift of looking like exactly who she was, had lingered over the image of Judith holding up the head of Holofernes. Nan had been more taken with unblemished Esther. So beautiful she’d captured a living king; so beautiful she could afford to take prisoners. The lavatory mirror had revealed twenty-six moles, uncounted freckles, and a coffee-colored birthmark in the shape of a teapot; nevertheless, it was Esther Nan longed to be.

  A twenty-minute pose, mercifully reclining: elbows resting on a pillow, head on one hand. Then a break.

  The difference between naked and nude—maybe no more than a state of mind, but essential—made itself clear. The minute everyone laid down their charcoal, Nan went from nude to naked. Too embarrassed to look at any of the drawings, she pulled on the embroidered apple green kimono lent to her by Mel and padded out to phone home. The dim brown reaches of the corridor smelled of turpentine and oil paint, the scent of childhood failure: cows that looked like Pekingese, dull little lollipop flowers. Nan’s left knee ached, and her arm, reaching up to fit two quarters into the slot, felt as if it had been twisted. Assured that Jane was asleep, no need to worry (“Console! Console!” Val advised), she limped back down the hall and stood outside the studio and lit a cigarette. Mel found her leaning against the rough plaster wall.

  “Hey! Why’re you looking so down? You’re great!”

  “They hated me.” Nan heard herself sounding absurdly like an actress on opening night. “You couldn’t see their faces. Frowning. Gnashing their teeth.”

  Mel laughed. “It was their drawings they were frowning at. Not you. We’re never satisfied with the first couple of things we do working from a new body. It takes a while to warm up. To, like, learn a model.”

  Nan dragged on her cigarette and felt her lungs widen, her head begin to clear.

  The second half was easier. Her aches receded for minutes at a time. She was able to look around, when her pose permitted, and take in the artists. The woman with the bright little rodent face, who shifted a wad of gum from cheek to cheek as she drew. A younger woman who looked like Nixon, right down to the caterpillar eyebrows; a man whose skin was very pink, giving him a sort of newborn, scalded look; a large girl whose body got larger as it descended, in tiers like a wedding cake, from her neck to her thighs. Balloon Butt, Mel had called her. Most drew silently, listening to jazz from the public radio station, except for Rat Woman, who seemed to double as a self-appointed lecturer. Go easier, less detail—she advised Balloon Butt, who didn’t look particularly grateful—the human eye completes an incomplete line. At the end of the session, when each person in the class displayed his or her best drawing, Nan in her kimono walked from easel to easel. The images—all in charcoal, dark masses and sinuous sweeping lines, depending on the artist’s skill—weren’t her, Nan. At most she was, she saw, a sort of medium, a go-between who linked the artists with the physical world. She was surprised to receive congratulatory smiles from one or two as they snapped their paint boxes shut and dragged their easels against the wall.

  A good drawing, Mel explained in the echoey tiled ladies’ room while Nan put on her clothes, was always to some degree a gift from the model. Nan p
ulled Mel’s red velvet beret over her turquoise hair. Greeting her image in the freckled mirror, she saw a cross between an exotic dancer and a teacher’s aide. Mel’s image appeared beside it, hands on her breast and eyes crossed, miming delighted vanity. Nan stuck her tongue out at her in the mirror, feeling suddenly fifteen again, in the girls’ lavatory with Deenie. Her heart rose. She’d done it! She was a bona fide—or at least, a paid—artists’ model.

  “You can go ahead and think about Walker now,” Mel said, and smirked.

  |

  The best, the most beautiful, of surprises was how little she’d forgotten. Everything was new, was old: the sweet shock of alien flesh along the length of her whole body; the salted-almond smell of sex; the sensation, when she came (and she did come, but quietly, because surely—the first time, at her age, and three years without a partner—she shouldn’t have been able to?) of light flung down.

  “Beautiful!” Walker murmured into her ear. He didn’t seem to care that he’d been unable to come himself. “We’re golden.”

  Afterward, in the luxury of lying skin to skin, she returned, bones slowly settling, to specific things. Walker’s smell, different now—a vegetable smell, like deer-tongue grass; the way his remaining hair was curlier at the temples than anywhere else. Deenie’s sagging mattress tipped them toward each other. The bright sounds of the parakeets came clearly from the living room; out in the street a truck trundled by.

  Walker’s hand traced the renegade pubic hairs on Nan’s thighs, the rosy flush, like measles, fading from her breasts, her neck. He didn’t seem to notice her scars. No stroking of her lumpy breastbone with a tender finger, for which she was deeply grateful. Yellow light from the bedside lamp showed her a hand freckled with brown, knuckles over which the shiny mottled skin stretched tight. It didn’t look old so much as finished, complete. He stroked the Chinese symbol tattooed on her shoulder. “Happiness,” he noted. He laid his head, smooth as polished wood, on the soft inner flesh of her arm. She could feel the pulse ticking in his temple. His fingers had her smell, their smell; it was on the skin around his mouth when he kissed her. He did not speak; he did not need to. Their bodies (Wise bodies! thought Nan) had left nothing to be said. That was not old, not familiar—had not happened to her in many years. Not since Jack. Chemistry, they said. Physical attraction. Cold, dry words that let the reality slip right through. The words mere and passing, generally (in Nan’s memory) attached to them, seemed equally wrong. This felt as weighty and enduring as mountains.

  It had been so long.

  Dressing, she met her body differently. The shape of it felt graceful; her muscles chimed. Walker watched her pull on her underpants, fasten her bra. She didn’t mind being looked at, felt, not the blinkered unself-consciousness she’d learned from modeling for Mel’s group, but true ease. Light spilled onto the bed, onto the shuffled white sheets where their bodies had been. Walker’s back when he bent to look for his pants was broad, creased at the waist like ruching on a dress, the chained knobs of his spine visible through freckled flesh. He was as matter-of-fact about dressing as he’d been about undressing, about leading her by the hand (after they’d been necking on the sofa for an hour, like teenagers) into Deenie’s bedroom. Friendly: a friendly lover. His underwear wasn’t what she’d expected: blue boxers printed with snowmen. He looked up to find her watching, and grinned. The loose halves of his belt buckle applauded. He shrugged into a red-checked shirt and strode out exuberantly, buttoning, into the hall.

  Midnight. Peaceful flesh. Time for a beer and a snack. (Mel was with Jane. She’d brought over her income tax records to sort through, along with a box of designer condoms that resembled sea anemones—neon colors, waving fronds—for Nan.) Walker’s contentment showed itself freely, radiating from him as he moved in and out of the kitchen. Nan remembered other times afterward, when sex had been especially good: the man’s withdrawal, sometimes drawn-out and wintry, sometimes abrupt, bright, back-to-business. Half waiting for it now, she wandered around Deenie’s living room, looked at Walker’s books in the bookcase, at the photographs propped on the mantel. A pleasant, round-faced woman slowly getting older; Walker beside her, ditto; no children. There was a large black-and-white photo of Walker thirty or so years younger, dancing with cranes. They were nearly as tall as he was, their long question-mark necks ending in tiny heads crested like Nan’s. From the kitchen came sounds of cracking and scraping and the smell of eggs being cooked in butter. Quietly, Nan slid open the drawers of Deenie’s desk. They were empty. No sign of the will. Deenie’s black-and-white checkerboard floor was piled with cartons and austere objects that Nan didn’t recognize. Camera parts? Too big, surely; and Walker hadn’t ever mentioned photography. Some kind of ham radio setup? But why would he have such a thing? He’d never mentioned radios, either. A black leather briefcase tucked behind the largest carton caught her eye. She could hear Walker in the kitchen, whistling, shuffling plates and silverware. She walked over to the briefcase and grasped its handle, meaning to pull it out of its hiding place. As she lifted it up, she felt her palm press down on a button of some kind. A small oblong plate in the side of the briefcase slid back to reveal a hole about the size of a calling card. There was a click, like a camera shutter closing; then the plate slid back into place. Hastily Nan let go of the briefcase.

  Walker came up behind her. She pretended to be examining an open carton of books. His arms circled her waist. He pulled her away.

  “Come and sit,” he said.

  Nan arranged her face in a look of bland incuriosity. Walker led her across the room to the sofa. Two glasses of beer and two plates of scrambled eggs were arranged on the coffee table. They sat down, and he handed her a glass. She closed her eyes and inhaled the yeasty smell.

  “Butterflies have their sense of smell in their feet,” Walker told her. “How about that?”

  His way of saying, I know who you are. You don’t know the half of it, thought Nan; but she was comforted, nevertheless.

  He began to talk about cranes. Siberian cranes, African crested cranes (the ones dancing with him in the photograph, in Zimbabwe), demoiselle cranes (looked like Bartleby the Scrivener), sandhill cranes. Dozens of species, ancient, unchanged since the age of the dinosaurs. Nan, rolling her glass between her palms, thought, You don’t really know this man. You don’t know his profession, or what he was really doing in all those exotic places, or why he would own a briefcase that contains a hidden camera. Yet there it was again, unshakeable: that deep, mysterious familiarity. That sintonia. They sat for half an hour eating eggs and drinking beer, looking out at the bright little knob of a moon that hung just above the State House, Walker with one finger hooked companionably under Nan’s bra strap. Then he walked her home through the cold, clear, tingly night.

  |

  Time doesn’t pass; time grows. This was the one thing Nan had learned from loss. Time doesn’t slip docilely behind you, vanishing like the wake of a boat, water into water. It accumulates. Piles up somewhere, and waits for you to find it again. Nan sometimes thought death might be simply that: being reunited with the whole of one’s experience.

  In what sense, then, did you ever get over anything?

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  Of course he was younger. The Last Lover.

  They met at a weekend workshop on Loss and Grief. In her first year as a widow, Nan, who hadn’t had time to make friends in Seattle before Tod began dying, hardly saw anyone except her increasingly worried daughter. She hardly spoke to anyone except Deenie, who phoned three or four times a week and made Nan stay on the line. Tod had been dead eleven months—long enough for his clothes in the closet to lose their frank male smell, but not long enough for Nan to feel ready to part with them. There was a sports jacket she’d particularly loved—silvery-blue tweed with bone buttons—and when, one slovenly dark winter day, Alex found Nan drawing her tongue along its roughness, she announced that things had to change. Nan, ground down not so much by grief as by remorse, agreed. Alex signed her up f
or what Deenie referred to as the Dead Ducks Convention.

  They met laughing—she and the Last Lover. Never, in the nearly two years they lasted, did they laugh longer or harder than in those moments before they knew each other’s names. It was the pompously pious lecturer—a young man who looked like Robin Williams—that set them off. Both of them had to leave the conference hall precipitously, coughing to disguise their laughter. Hands up to shield their mouths, like errant children, they collided at the drinking fountain in the glass-walled corridor. He looked like a black Lenin: bony, ascetic face; neat mustache; pointed beard. They exchanged apologies.

  Laurence (“with a ‘u’”) Meagher. A volcanologist. Lived in Vancouver, Washington, just north of the Oregon border. Pinpoints of water glittered in his curly beard as he told her all this. His mother had died in November. Nan introduced herself, traded Tod’s death for Mrs. Meagher’s. This exchange should have sobered them; but “Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Grief, Acceptance,” he murmured, and that set them off all over again. They stood, quaking, and looked out the streaming glass walls at the drenched fronds of hemlock and cedar, the green hills of Tacoma blurred as if with tears. Time to plant tears popped into Nan’s mind, a line from a long-forgotten poem. It made her feel preposterously cheerful.

  Alarm. Delight. She’d never expected to fall in love again, much less to be fallen in love with.

  Because Vancouver (handily near Mount Saint Helens) was two hundred miles from Seattle, they saw each other, from the first, at planned intervals—a stately pavane of meeting and parting. As often as Nan reminded herself that desire, like irony, occurs in the gap between beholder and beheld, she never quite accepted the arrangement. Laurence thrived on it. He was best at the middle distance: his graduate students loved him. Involvement in worthy causes had the advantage of requiring him to travel constantly. Committees on behalf of his black brothers, the Third World, the environment; boards of trustees of charitable foundations; lectures on the imperiled ecosystem to student audiences wreathed in the fragrance of marijuana. He was as busy, as scheduled, as the CEO of General Motors—except that (Deenie pointed out) he would have had a secretary who sent Nan flowers. When they were together—for a weekend at most, usually just a night or even an afternoon—Nan found herself doing things like scrubbing Laurence’s back in the bathtub or kneading the tight muscles in his neck and shoulders. Acts of light, Pop used to call them: things you did for others that really you longed to have done to you. Things you did so that at least they would be happening somewhere, to someone.