Sure, I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t a vase of roses or modern-day version of Venus, but I was up for a challenge, I decided. I would let my inner artist guide me. I stood there for a moment, waiting for the coffee mug placed next to an antler and a tree seed pod to speak to me, to reveal some sort of hidden inspiration. However, they did not. This presented something of a problem for me, as in “I’ve seen a lot of things in my house, such as flying mice, a contractor having a nervous breakdown and crying like Nancy Kerrigan in my laundry room, and doors that open by themselves, but, oddly enough, a body part, a cup of decaf, and tree trimmings have never been coupled on my kitchen table, so I’m having a little trouble investing the necessary faith in this supposed still life, particularly because all of the elements in it are very much dead.”
I mean, really, had I known that I had just written out a check simply so I could paint somebody’s leftover garage-sale junk, I would have saved myself the money, stayed home, and painted the crap on my neighbor’s porch. It was equally as idiotic an assemblage, plus there would be a deformed cat or two thrown in for good measure, which is far more entertaining than, say, a dried-up tree pod. That wasn’t art, I argued to myself; it looked like a cover shoot for Guns and Ammo magazine. All that was missing was the Skoal and a flak jacket.
Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed in the subject matter, but I trudged on with “Antler and Coffee Mug,” hoping that somewhere down the line, genius would strike and I would wind up with a realistic representation that would amaze me. That did not happen, either, or at least did not happen insofar as what was on the pedestal was realistically represented in my painting. Instead, my painting would have been much more realistic and impressive if my instructor had drunk the coffee, gone number two on the pedestal, and then suddenly torn his lymph nodes right out of his neck and nestled them by the bottom of the mug.
I sucked. I have seriously met elephants that paint better. My nephew, who, at three, has as much hand-eye coordination as an adult who has fried his brain on crystal meth, had a better grasp on perspective and rendering than I did. I sucked even worse than I thought I would. I sucked so badly it was truly astounding that anyone could be so bad at painting, and had PAID to find out just how bad. That painting class was like going to analysis and having your therapist tell you, “Well, no wonder the world is against you. You are a terrible, horrible, disgusting person, that’s why. And you have no talent to speak of. Doy,” and then flick you on the head. I wasn’t relaxed in painting class, and I wasn’t having any fun, either. As if that wasn’t bad enough, when I was done with “Turds, Coffee Mug, and Glands,” the instructor announced that our paintings would be critiqued by himself and the class.
I bit my tongue, even when I heard the instructor say before the critique, “Now, which painting is the best-accomplished still life, and which painting went in the wrong direction?” I bit my tongue, even when I realized I was the third-suckiest in a class of eight, meaning that two others were even worse at art than I was. Thankfully, I was not crowned Suckiest Painter that day, but I saw the face of the girl who was, and she was no happy Picasso.
“Does anyone have any comments?” our instructor said, after successfully destroying the microscopic art self-esteem the Suckiest Painter had left.
“I stink as a painter,” I confessed to the group, figuring that it was just a matter of time before I was identified as the dunce and it was better to get it out in the open and understood immediately. “I know right now that in therapy this week I’m going to need at least forty minutes to talk about the damage that’s been done here, and my therapist is out-of-network, so we’re talking at least a hundred bucks. Sure it’s tax-deductible, but that’s almost as much as I paid for this class.”
Nobody said a thing.
“Any other comments?” the instructor finally said. “Aside from the negative one we just heard?”
I reluctantly talked myself into going to class the next week, hoping it would be better, but as soon as I arrived, I knew I would be starting on my suckipiece, “Three Ashtrays, a Goblet, and a Juicer—and More Tree Pods.”
Although I would, without a doubt, have more fun watching whiskers grow out of my chin than attempting to bring the soul of the juicer to my canvas, I painted it anyway. When critique time came, however, I raised my hand before my instructor could say anything.
“I have a suggestion,” I barreled loudly, completely unconcerned that I would be labeled class big mouth, since my outburst last week had clearly identified me as such. “I would really prefer if we renamed this segment of the class ‘Although Your Painting Is Already Incredibly Fabulous, Here Are Some Tips to Make It Even More Stunning.’ ”
“That’s a good idea,” the second-suckiest painter said quickly, realizing his debut as class loser was probably only moments away, being as his juicer looked more like a gas pump and his ashtrays resembled lumps of toxic waste. The girl who walked away with the Most Untalented honors from last week nodded in agreement.
“Well, if that’s what you want,” the instructor said with a frustrated sigh, and then continued in a flat voice, “Which of these paintings hit the mark, and which are Fabulous But Would Be Even More Stunning with Some Tips?”
Despite the ground the Sucky Contigent had gained with that modest little victory, success subsequently evaded me in my future works, “Plastic Ivy in Bowl, Sticks in a Jar, and Yet More Seed Pods,” “On Location: Air-Conditioning Unit and Gutters of Building Where Painting Class Is Held,” and my favorite, “Parking Lot, a Portrait in Black.”
My biggest challenge, however, came the day I arrived for class and a woman with long gray hair I had never seen before was helping our teacher move a futon/couch and a fake palm tree to the front of the room.
I set up my easel, palette, and paints and was wondering if maybe the strange lady with the gray hair was some famous artist and a guest speaker for the class. Those suspicions were duly unraveled, however, when I looked up at the same moment she stepped right out of her dress and sat down on the couch.
Naked.
Now, it’s a matter of public record that I do not traditionally do well with naked people, familiar or otherwise. It’s just not my thing. I grew up in a Catholic house where naked was a sin of equal proportion to taking a dollar out of the collection plate or thinking that I’d like to date my cousin. You could die for a sin like that, that’s why God made lightning, my mother said. But I was older now, I reasoned with myself; plus, after we painted the air-conditioning unit, most of the class called it a day and the survivors left were myself, the girl who was suckier than me, and Carlos, my only friend in the class, but that was mostly due to the fact that he really didn’t speak English very well and as a result would laugh at anything I said.
It didn’t help matters that the naked lady wasn’t exactly an example of God’s divine craftsmanship as far as the human body was concerned. She clearly was not Botticelli’s version of Venus. Rather, it would be far more accurate to say that if you were flipping through cable channels very late on a weekend night and happened upon a stomach-churning scene of four people getting it on in an above-ground pool during a swingers’ weekend in Arkansas on HBO’s Real Sex, chances are one of them would probably bear a reasonable resemblance to the Gray Lady, give or take a tooth. I have, in fact, seen that very scene, and it has done nothing but confirm the fact that the Real Sex series is simply a gruesome reminder that other people besides Paris Hilton are out there getting down, too. I’m talking about ugly people, a group from which I am not exempt, although, rest assured, you’re not going to see my bare fat ass moaning on a pool pump. Real Sex is like the Red Asphalt of erotica, it’s the part of sex we all know is there but only serves the purpose of shocking you into staying sober for a while to avoid the danger until the horror fades.
Now, believe me, I’m not the sort of person who believes that the female body is only beautiful in the airbrushed pages of Playboy, but what I saw before me was ast
onishing. My first instinct was to immediately run home and marinate myself in potent, skin-firming lotions as I stood there with paintbrush in hand, thinking to myself, Just how many kids did you have? I understand that the tug-of-war with gravity is always brutal, but this lady lost it all. There was no tug-of-war involved here, it was nothing short of a tractor pull. The stretch marks were actually stretch stripes, but they complemented the scar from an abdominal surgery rather nicely and subtracted a bit from its shock value. The scar was so huge that, personally, I didn’t think you could even get scars like that anymore, I mean, it was the kind of scar you would get defending a village against marauders with axes, a disfigurement acquired during a pirate fight, a sentence after being convicted of witchcraft, or something you’d get by living in Africa, but unless she had had frequent exposure to a turbine on this side of civilization, I didn’t even see how something of that magnitude could have happened. But she didn’t seem to mind at all, and I had to hand it to her. I’ve made twenty bucks in what I considered the hard way, and that only involved going out to lunch with my mom and keeping the change.
I painted her head first, then the outline of her shoulders and the contours of her body, and then it was time for our first break. The Gray Lady jumped up, threw on her robe, and headed over to Carlos’s easel.
“Very nice,” she said, looking at his rendering of her.
Carlos laughed. And then he clearly didn’t know what to say, because he just stood there, and she just stood there until finally he uttered a phrase I’m sure he had practiced only for going out on Friday and Saturday nights: “Do you work out?”
I choked on my own spit.
Work out? Work out? It probably takes half the day just to capture those slinkies into the cups of a bra! Damn you, Carlos! I thought to myself. You should be taking ESL and painting! Then you could have asked something good, like “Breast-feeding—was it worth it?” or “So, what did they take out of there? Sextuplets or a tire?”
“Nope,” the Gray Lady answered Carlos. “I just do housework, that’s how I stay in shape. Vacuuming and dusting, that’s my gym! I quit my job to become a model, you know.”
Carlos laughed again.
I was seriously doubting Carlos’s allegiance to me when the Gray Lady came to my easel and looked at what I was doing.
“My head isn’t THAT big!” she commented.
“Oh, I’m not good with heads,” I replied. “But if you had a pair of antlers growing out of yours or had seed pods for eyes, I could swing that part.”
“Well, you got most of it right,” she informed me with a hearty giggle. “Let’s see how you do the rest.”
She then moved on to the other girl’s painting, looked at it, and was still making comments when the instructor announced that the break was over.
The Gray Lady slipped off her robe, settled on the couch again, and we all went back to work. That was when I realized that the part I needed to work on next was the torso area, I began to paint that area as realistically as possible, and that’s when I understood I had a problem. I looked at the Gray Lady and looked back at my canvas, and looked at the Gray Lady again and looked at my canvas again, and I just decided that I really needed to do my own thing with the Gray Lady’s torso. Not only because it would have looked nicer, but because it was kind. If she came around on our next break as she did on our first, what was I going to say when she remarked, “Why do my boobs look like striped carrots?”
And what could I possibly say to that? “Because, clearly, you were never a Playtex 18-hour girl and you believe gravity to be only a scientific term and not your personal archenemy”?
I already had too much stress in this class, I didn’t need to begin offending people who were merely there to take their clothes off for money. If she had a problem with her HEAD, the boobs issue was sure to spark a fistfight.
I looked at the Gray Lady again, and that’s when she winked at me.
I decided right then and there that in my world, the Gray Lady was going to fight gravity like it was Tonya Harding with gloves on—and win.
You got it, sister, I thought to myself. I don’t care what the teacher says, you are getting a ten-thousand-dollar breast augmentation ON ME!
And boy did she. I traded in her swingin’, rock-in-a-sock yams for beautiful, pert apples, firm and round as if she was just plucked from the dawn of puberty. The Gray Lady was on her way to becoming Venus, or at least an employee of Christie’s Cabaret wearing a Cousin It wig.
I was working on the left apple when I sensed a presence behind me, and then a hand came out of nowhere.
“Oh this,” the hand said, making a circular motion over the more completed apple, “this area is off. It needs to be . . .”
And then the hand dropped six or seven inches, to the Gray Lady’s scar area.
“. . . down around here.”
It was my instructor, and I was caught. The room was drop-dead quiet, so I certainly couldn’t explain to him, “Listen, chief. As soon as you call a break, she’s going to skip over her to see this painting and that’s bad because she thinks she looks good. Got it? She thinks dusting is the same as the StairMaster, and, really, I am not here to pop bubbles, all right? If she thinks her boobs haven’t dropped like rotten fruit off a tree, I’m not going to be the one to tell her. Maybe she thinks it’s just her cat nestling in her lap when she sits down, but it’s not going to be me who gives her the newsflash that it’s the girls and that her melons now look like they went through a saltwater taffy pull.”
Instead, I looked at him and his rotating hand and simply said, “Okay.”
So I moved them down just a bit, a tiny little bit, enough to satisfy all three of us, I thought, and I fiddled around with the brush until he came back and shook his fingers in front of the “augmented” portion of the painting and said simply, “In this direction. Lower.”
I shook my head a little, and kept darting my eyes over to the Gray Lady, trying desperately to communicate to him, “This is the deal, Neal. You picked this lady, and if you want to paint sag on the nag, that is your option. Next time I suggest you take a peek at the twins beforehand and pick someone who’s paid attention to the Oil of Olay ads so I don’t have to go through this again, because I don’t think anyone in this room is going to gain anything by painting flapjacks. Now please let me paint my breasts the way I want to. Please. I have painted your turds, I have painted your glands, I have painted pavement. Can you just let me have this? I, frankly, would rather be painting daisies. What is wrong with a flower? They don’t come and peek at your paintings on break. They don’t comment, ‘Oh, my stem’s too long, my petals are too droopy.’ I never wanted to paint an old, floppy naked crone with an abundance of scar tissue, that’s not art, that means someone sold me a bad hit of acid and I still have an hour and half left on this trip!”
But he wasn’t getting my message as clearly as I would have liked and understood my communication to be a seizure or aneurism, so he called a break.
“Maybe you should drink some water,” he suggested gingerly.
Before I knew it, the Gray Lady had thrown on her robe and was wandering about, just as I had suspected. I stepped over to Carlos’s easel, where she was now stationed, and saw that he had chosen to paint the Gray Lady as if she were underwater, making everything rather blurry, particularly the boobage area.
I nodded my head at his painting as we looked at each other, to which he just shook his head, pointed to his chest, and shrugged.
“Genius!” I mouthed to him over her head.
The next student had clearly moved her easel once she figured out what she was up against, and on her canvas, behind and above a fake potted palm tree, floated the Gray Lady’s head. The rest of it was just the tree. Parts of it did, in fact, look like daisies.
When the Gray Lady arrived at my easel, she didn’t say anything at first. She stood there for a while, cocking her head to the left and to the right, taking it all in.
“My h
ead is still big,” she said blankly. “But the rest of it is . . . uncanny. It’s just amazing.”
I would have had to agree. It was, by far, the best critique I had ever had.
I nodded and she nodded as we stood in front of the painting.
“Okay, break over, let’s return to the pose,” the instructor called out.
“The painting is yours,” I said. “And keep up with that dusting!”
“Oh, I will,” she assured me. “Better than the gym!”
“I hope you come back next week,” I said, right before she returned to the couch and the robe slipped down to her feet.
Acknowledgments
Thank you:
Bruce Tracy, for always having time to talk me out of my tree, for being understanding, for being patient, for being honest, and for being an invaluable and incredible friend.
Jenny Bent, the toughest, most amazing girl I know. You are the best and I adore you.
The guy who hasn’t divorced me yet, who makes me laugh a million times a day, lets me be the jackass that I am, votes the same way I do, and promises not to commit me for at least another five good years.
Nana, who not only gives me a drawer when I visit, but also gives me “The Big Bed.” Never had a better roommate than my Nana, even though she makes me watch a lot of Court TV (new favorite channel). No one rocks like she does. No one. We love you, Nana, you crazy old woman.
My family, um, I live in Oregon now. I gave you back your Tupperware for a reason, because I still wasn’t done with it, to tell the truth. Thanks for the material, not writing your own books, and not changing your last name.
We Thought You Would Be Prettier Page 20