I told Rhonda the job involved a free trip to the Cayman Islands and she showed as much enthusiasm as if I had said Long Island. She did brighten a little when I described the setting. She was working on her law degree and could study while she sat. That also helped to distance me from her, since I am not a great admirer of the profession.
I called my banker in George Town and described the office that I needed. She knew of a small law firm that was closing for a February vacation, and would inquire.
It had been a few years since I’d painted nudes, and I’d done only two photo-realist studies ever. I didn’t want to work with Rhonda any more than I had to, or pay her any more than I had to, so I had a friend with a figure similar to Rhonda’s come over and sit. For two days I did sketches and photographs, experimenting with postures and lightings. I took them to Segura and we agreed on the pose—the woman looking up coldly from her papers, as if interrupted, strong light from the desk lamp putting half of her face in shadow. Making the desk lamp the only source of light also isolated the figure from the details of the office, which would be rendered in photorealist detail, but darkly, making for a sinister background.
Then I spent three days doing a careful portrait of the model, head and upper body, solving some technical problems about rendering the glossy hair and the small breasts. I wanted them to look hard, unfeminine, yet realistic.
I took the portrait up to Segura’s office and he approved. His only reservations were about himself. “You’re sure I’ll be able to produce something with this kind of control? I literally can’t draw a face that looks like a face.”
“No problem. Your hands will be stiff from using undeveloped muscles, but while you’re in the skinsuit your movements will be precisely the same as mine. Have I told you about the time I hired a facilitator myself?” He shook his head. “I was curious about how it felt on the other end. I hired a guitarist-composer, and we spent two days writing a short fugue in the style of Bach. We started with the four letters of my last name—which, coincidentally, form an A-minor-seventh chord—and made up a marvelously complicated little piece that was unequivocally mine. Even though I can’t play it.”
“You could play it in the skinsuit, though.”
“Beautifully. I have a tape of it, the facilitator sitting beside me playing a silent solid-body guitar while I roam around the frets with brilliant sensitivity.” I laughed. “At the end of each day my hands were so weak I couldn’t pick up a fork, let alone a brush. My fingers were stiff for a week.” I wriggled them. “Your experience will be less extreme. Using a brush doesn’t involve the unnatural stretching that playing a guitar does.”
Segura was willing to part with an extra hundred grand for a one-day demonstration. A predictable course, given hindsight, knowing him to be a man boxed in by distrust and driven, or at least directed, by what I would call paranoia.
He suggested a self-portrait. I told him it would have to be done from photographs, since the skinsuit distorts your face almost as much as a bank-robber’s pantyhose disguise. That interested him. He was going to spend three weeks in the skinsuit; why not have a record of what it was like? I pretended that nobody had come up with the idea before and said sure, sounds interesting.
In fact, I’d done it twice, but both times the collaborators produced impasto abstractions that didn’t resemble anything. Segura would be different.
By law, a doctor has to be present when you begin the facilitation. After it gets under way, any kind of nurse or medic is adequate for standing guard. A few collaborators have had blood-pressure spikes or panic attacks. The nurse can terminate the process instantly if the biosensors show something happening. He pushes a button that releases a trank into my bloodstream, which breaks the connection. It also puts me into a Valium haze the rest of the day. A good reason to have people pay in advance.
There’s a doctor in my building who’s always willing to pop up and earn a hundred dollars for five minutes’ work. I always use the same nurse, too, a careful and alert man with the unlikely name of Marion Marion. He calls himself M&M, since he’s brown and round.
I soaked and taped down four half-sheets of heavy D’Arches cold-press, allowing for three disasters, and prepared my standard portrait palette. I set up the session to begin at 9:30 sharp. M&M came over early, as usual, to have tea and joke around with Allison and me. He’s a natural comic and I think also a natural psychologist. Whatever, he puts me at ease before facing what can be a rather trying experience.
(I should point out here that it’s not always bad. If the collaborator has talent and training and a pleasant disposition, it can be as refreshing as dancing with a skilled partner.)
The others showed up on time and we got down to business. An anteroom off my studio has two parallel examining tables. Segura and I stripped and lay down and were injected with six hours’ worth of buffer. M&M glued the induction electrodes to the proper places on our shaven heads. The doctor looked at them, signed a piece of paper and left. Then M&M, with Allison’s assistance, rolled the loose skinsuits over us, sealed them and pumped the air out.
Segura and I woke up at the same instant M&M turned on the microcurrent that initiated the process. It’s like being puppet and puppeteer simultaneously. I saw through Segura’s eyes. His body sat me up, slid me to the floor and walked me into the studio. He perched me on a stool in front of the nearly horizontal easel and the mirror. Then I took over.
If you were watching us work, you would see two men sitting side by side, engaged in what looks like a painstakingly overpracticed mime routine. If one of us scratches his ear, the other one does. But from the inside it is more complicated: We exchange control second by second. This is why not every good artist can be a good facilitator. You have to have an instinct for when to assert your judgment, your skills, and let the client be in control otherwise. It is literally a thousand decisions per hour for six hours. It’s exhausting. I earn my fee.
My initial idea was, in compositional terms, similar to what our nude would be—a realistic face in harsh light glowing in front of an indistinct background. There wouldn’t be time to paint in background details, of course.
I made a light drawing of the head and shoulders, taking most of an hour. Then I took a chisel brush and carefully painted in the outlines of the drawing with frisket, a compound like rubber cement. You can paint over it and, when the paint dries, rub it off with an eraser or your fingertip, exposing the paper and the drawing underneath.
When the frisket was dry, I mopped the entire painting with clear water and then made an inky wash out of burnt umber and French ultramarine. I worked the wash over the whole painting and, while it was still damp, floated in diffuse shapes of umber and ultramarine that would hint at shadowy background. Then I buzzed Allison in to dry it while I/we walked around, loosening up. She came in with a hair dryer and worked over the wet paper carefully, uniformly, while I didn’t watch. Sometimes a dramatic background wash just doesn’t work when it dries—looks obvious or cheesy or dull—and there is never any way to fix it. (Maybe you could soak the paper overnight, removing most of the pigment. Better to just start over, though.)
I walked Segura across to the bay window and looked out over the city. The snow that remained on the shaded part of rooftops was gray or black. Traffic crawled in the thin bright light. Pedestrians hurried through the wind and slush.
Segura’s body wanted a cigarette and I allowed him to walk me over to his clothes and light one up. The narcotic rush was disorienting. I had to lean us against a wall to keep from staggering. It was not unpleasant, though, once I surrendered control to him. No need for me to dominate motor responses until we had brush in hand.
Allison said the wash was ready and looked good. It did—vague, gloomy shapes suggesting a prison or asylum cell. I rolled up a kneaded eraser and carefully rubbed away the frisket. The light pencil drawing floated over the darkness like a disembodied thought.
I had to apply frisket again, this time in a h
alo around the drawing, and there was a minor setback: I’d neglected to put the frisket brush into solvent, and the bristles had dried into a solid, useless block. I surprised myself by throwing it across the room. That was Segura acting.
I found another square brush and carefully worked a thin frisket mask around the head and shoulders, to keep the dark background from bleeding in, but had to stop several times and lift up the brush because my hand was trembling with Segura’s suppressed anger at the mistake. Relax, it was a cheap brush. You must be hell on wheels to work for.
First a dilute yellow wash, new gamboge, over the entire face. I picked up the hair dryer and used it for six or seven minutes, making sure the wash was bone-dry, meanwhile planning the next couple of stages.
This technique—glazing—consists of building up a picture with layer upon layer of dilute paint. It takes patience and precision and judgment: Sometimes you want the previous layer to be completely dry, and sometimes you want it damp, to diffuse the lines between the two colors. If it’s too damp, you risk muddying the colors, which can be irreversible and fatal. But that’s one thing that attracts me to the technique—the challenge of gambling everything on the timing of one stroke of the brush.
Segura obviously felt otherwise. Odd for a man who essentially gambled for a living, albeit with other people’s money. He wanted each layer safely dry before proceeding with the next, once he understood what I was doing. That’s a technique, but it’s not my technique, which is what he was paying for. It would also turn this portrait, distorted as it was, into a clown’s mask.
So I pushed back a little, establishing my authority, so to speak. I didn’t want this to become a contest of wills. I just wanted control over the hair dryer, actually, not over Juan Carlos Segura.
There was a slight battle, lasting only seconds. It’s hard to describe the sensation to someone who hasn’t used a facilitator. It’s something like being annoyed at yourself for not being able to make up your mind, but rather intensified—“being of two minds,” literally.
Of course, I won the contest, having about ten thousand times more experience at it than Segura. I set down the hair dryer, and the next layer, defining the hollows of the face visible through the skinsuit, went on with soft edges. I checked the mirror and automatically noted the places I would come back to later when the paper was dry, to make actual lines, defining the bottom of the goggle ridges, the top of the lip, the forward part of the ear mass.
* * *
The portrait was finished in two hours, but the background still needed something. Pursuing a vague memory from a week before, I flipped through a book of Matthew Brady photographs, visions of the Civil War’s hell. Our face in the skinsuit resembled those of some corpses, open-mouthed, staring. I found the background I wanted, a ruined tumble of brick wall, and took the book back to the easel. I worked an intimation of the wall into the background, dry-brushing umber and ultramarine with speckles and threads of clotted blood color, alizarin muted with raw umber. Then I dropped the brushes into water and looked away, buzzing M&M. I didn’t want to see the painting again until I saw it with my own eyes.
Coming out of the facilitation state takes longer than going in, especially if you don’t go the full six hours. The remaining buffer has to be neutralized with a series of timed shots. Otherwise, Segura and I would hardly have been able to walk, expecting the collaboration of another brain that was no longer there.
I was up and around a few minutes before Segura. Allison had set out some cheese and fruit and an ice bucket with a bottle of white burgundy. I was hungry, as always, but only nibbled a bit, waiting for lunch.
Segura attacked the food like a starved animal. “What do you think?” he said between bites. “Is it any good?”
“Always hard to tell while you’re working. Let’s take a look.” I buzzed Allison and she brought the painting in. She’d done a good job, as usual, the painting set off in a double mat of brick red and forest green inside a black metal frame.
“It does look good,” he said, as if surprised.
I nodded and sipped wine, studying it. The painting was technically good, but it would probably hang in a gallery for years, gathering nervous compliments, before anybody bought it. It was profoundly ugly, a portrait of brutality. The skinsuit seemed to be straining to contain a mask of rage. Something truly sick burned behind the eyes.
He propped it up on the couch and walked back and forth, admiring it from various angles. For a moment I hoped he would say, “This will do fine; forget about the nude.” I didn’t look forward to three weeks of his intimate company.
“It captures something,” he said, grinning. “I could use it to intimidate clients.”
“The style suits you?”
“Yes. Yes, indeed.” He looked at me with a sort of squint. “I vaguely remember fighting over some aspect of it.”
“Technical matter. I prevailed, of course—that’s what you pay me for.”
He nodded slowly. “Well. I’ll see you in George Town, then.” He offered his hand, dry and hot.
“Friday morning. I’ll be at the Hilton.” Allison put the painting into a leather portfolio and ushered him out.
She came back in with a color photocopy of it. “Sick puppy.”
I examined the picture, nodding. “There’s some talent here, though. A lot of artists are sick puppies.”
“Present company excluded. Lunch?”
“Not today. Got a date.”
“Harry?”
“He’s out of town. Guy I met at the gym.”
She arched an eyebrow at me. “Young and cute.”
“Younger than you,” I said. “Big nose, though.”
“Yeah, nose.” She poured herself a glass and refilled mine. “So you won’t be back after lunch?”
“Depends.”
“Well, I’ll be back around two, if you need anything.” She headed for her office. “Happy hose.”
“Nose, damn it!” She laughed and whispered the door shut behind her.
I carried my wine over to the window. The icy wind was audible through the double-pane glass. The people on the sidewalk hurried, hunched over against the gale. Tomorrow I’d be lying on snow-white sand, swimming in blood-warm water. A few days of sunshine before Segura showed up. I drank the wine and shivered.
* * *
In the 18th century, George III was sailing in the Caribbean when a sudden storm, probably a hurricane, smashed his ship to pieces. Fishermen from one of the Caymans braved the storm to go out and pick up survivors. Saved from what he’d thought would be certain death, King George expressed his royal gratitude by declaring that no resident of the islands would ever have to pay taxes to the British crown for the rest of eternity.
So where other Caribbean islands have craft shops and laid-back bars, George Town has high-rise banks and insurance buildings. A lot of expatriate Brits and Americans live and work there, doing business by satellite bounce.
I have a bank account in George Town myself, and may retire there someday. For this time of my life, it’s too peaceful, except for the odd hurricane. I need Manhattan’s garish excitement, the constant input, the dangerous edge.
But it’s good to get away. The beach is an ideal place for quick figure sketches, so I loosened up for the commission by filling a notebook with pictures of women as they walked by or played in the sand and water. Drawing forces you to see, so for the first time I was aware that the beauty of the native black women was fundamentally different from that of the tourists, white or black. It was mainly a matter of posture and expression, dignified and detached. The tourist women were always to some extent posing, even at their most casual. Which I think was the nature of the place, rather than some characteristic female vanity. I normally pay much closer attention to men, and believe me, we corner the market on that small vice.
My staff came down on Thursday. M&M tore off into town to find out whether either of his girlfriends had learned about the other. Allison joined me on t
he beach.
Impressive as she is in office clothes, Allison is spectacular out of them. She has never tanned; her skin is like ivory. Thousands of hours in the gym have given her the sharply defined musculature of a classical statue. She wore a black leather string bikini that revealed everything not absolutely necessary for reproduction or lactation. But I don’t think most straight men would characterize her as sexy. She was too formidable. That was all right with Allison, since she almost never was physically attracted to any man shorter or less well built than she. That dismissed all but a tenth of one percent of the male race. She had yet to find an Einstein, or even a Schwarzenegger, among the qualifiers. They usually turned out to be gentle but self-absorbed, predictably, and sometimes more interested in me than her. The message light was on when we got back to the hotel; both Rhonda Speck and Segura had arrived. It wasn’t quite ten, but we agreed it was too late to return their calls, and retired.
* * *
I set up the pose and lighting before we went under, explaining to Rhonda exactly what we were after. Segura was silent, watching. I took longer than necessary, messing with the blinds and the rheostats I’d put on the two light sources. I wanted Segura to get used to Rhonda’s nudity. He was obviously as straight as a plank, and we didn’t want the painting to reveal any sexual curiosity or desire. Rhonda was only slightly more sexy than a mackerel, but you could never tell.
For the same reason, I didn’t want to start the actual painting the first day. We’d start with a series of charcoal roughs. I explained to Segura about negative spaces and how important it was to establish balance between the light and dark. That was something I’d already worked out, of course. I just wanted him to stare at Rhonda long enough to become bored with the idea.
The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Page 76
