by Alice Sebold
"Since when do you care? How's Jake?"
And so I told Natalie that he currently lived in Santa Barbara on the estate of a software mogul whom he had never met. That he was doing some sort of installation there. That he had a female dog-sitter for his dogs, Milo and Grace, and that he planned to travel to Portland soon to see Emily and the children. I realized, as I said the few things I knew, that I didn't know very much.
"But why did he come to see you?"
It rang in my head: I never wanted the divorce.
"I'm not sure yet," I said. I held the cup of hot coffee in my hands and pretended I was warming them up. When Natalie looked at me, a certain lifelong look that said "You're not telling me the whole story," I could feel the shakes start where my elbows met the table. A second later, I had spilled the full and scalding cup.
Natalie stood up from the booth. The coffee had gotten on the sleeve of her dress, but most lay pooling on the table or seeping into my jeans. I did not move. I felt the hot water burning my thighs. It felt right to me. I saw the clock across the room. It was 9:55.
"Time to go to class," I said. I heard it in my voice. It was suddenly flat. I had always told Natalie everything, and now, within twenty-four hours, I had done more, I saw, than it might be possible to repair between even the oldest of friends.
Briefly I thought about what it would be like if I asked Natalie to come with me somewhere, to go away together, move to another city, maybe open the clothing store she had always dreamed of. She was adjusting her dress and daubing off the coffee from where it had splashed onto the outside of her purse. "Remember riding bikes together?" I wanted to ask. "Remember that nerdy guy who lived on your corner and had a bell on his handlebars? How he used to ring it all the time?" I thought of having seen Mr. Forrest that morning. And suddenly saw Mrs. Castle talking to the police, her arms arching in the air as she spoke. Had I seen that? Or had she been calmly talking to them? Were they taking notes? Or just listening to her talk? I tried to remember the number of police cars that had been there. Two on my mother's side of the street and one around the corner. The coroner's van and the ambulance that had pulled up to Mrs. Leverton's. I could call the hospital to find out what was wrong with her, but Jake wouldn't approve of that. It would tip my hand.
"He's really gotten to you," I heard Natalie say.
I looked up at her. My vision was fuzzy around the edges, and her voice suddenly seemed a long way off.
"Well, it's time to go get nude," she said. She was reaching for my hand. We had said this phrase to each other for fifteen years.
"Yes," I said.
"I'm leading you, woman," she said, "and we are going to sit down after this and talk men. I've got some news of my own."
This helped. It made me feel good that Natalie planned to tell me about the contractor. It was what I used--that still-to-come confidence of my friend--to make my legs work and stand up.
We walked from the student union, down the sloping asphalt pathway that led from it to what was commonly called the Art Hut. I had never understood this nickname because, more than anything else, the building itself looked like a failed attempt at an industrial office complex. One that had never gotten past the first two floors and then had been cruelly sheared off and roofed with a patchwork of composite and tar. Inside, however, were the huts. Dark, warm corners in the large studios, where many of the art adjuncts would spend the night, as the conditions in the art building were often better than the places they rented in the surrounding neighborhoods--especially as winter came on. In the Art Hut, you could crank up the heat, and the bill went to the university. As we were walking through the doors and up the three stairs to the first-floor hallway, I thought that maybe I would come and live in the art building. Surely there had to be a blanketed warren to spare. What I hadn't quite put together yet was that I was already churning. Half of my mind had now begun to plan an escape.
I saw Natalie retreat with a wave into Room 230--the Warm Room. I thought it was unfair that Natalie so often lucked out and got assigned to it, and had wondered if there was a silent favoritism shown toward my friend on the part of the room assigners at the start of every semester. I could see why. Neither Gerald, the other model, nor I brought muffins or wine over to the administrative offices. We never put Halloween pencils, with erasers shaped like counts or pumpkins or ghosts, in the secretary's mailbox.
Gerald, I suddenly thought, was someone I did not want to see. He had lost his mother in a fire the previous year. She had gone to bed and left a cigarette lit, and the next thing Gerald knew he was falling to the floor and gasping for air. He barely got out alive, and his mother, they said, was dead from the smoke before she burned. Since then, when I ran into him, he would say, "My mother died," in the middle of talking about the weather or about what poses we were doing for various classes. Natalie had always thought he was a little dim-witted, and this new habit seemed finally to have confirmed it, but as I walked down the hall to my own classroom, all I could think of was his genius. How did the firemen know it was her cigarette left burning on the bedside table?
"Hi, Helen. You look great!" one of the students greeted me. She was a girl named Dorothy, the best student in the class even if also an insufferable suck-up.
I could feel one or two other students take note of me then. They were adjusting their easels, which were battered and stained from years of undergraduate use.
I made my way to the three-panel screen, behind which I dressed or undressed. I noted only vaguely what was set out on the platform or pinned to the curtain that lay to its rear. There was a basin. There was a washcloth and comb. And on the curtain there was a large picture of an old-fashioned bathtub. It barely made an impact. I thought, Bathtub, and then I stepped behind the screen and sat down on the painted black wooden chair to take off my shoes and find my bamboo flip-flops to place on the floor.
Just as I had clung to the idea that Natalie was planning to tell me about the contractor, I now was helped along by the sharp scent of bleach coming off the former hospital gown hanging from a metal hanger on the back of the screen. The woman who did the laundry for the art building was afraid, Natalie and I both thought, of live-model disease. As a result, she used so much bleach that it quickly ate through the gowns we used and left them as thin as tissue paper after a very short time. But the scent of her fear, made palpable in the bleach, served to startle me to my task. I heard Tanner Haku, a Japanese printmaker who had ended up in Pennsylvania after twenty years of teaching around the globe, enter the room and greet his students. He began talking to them about individual style in the depiction of the nude.
I took my sweater off over my head and shoved it in the small hutch beneath the window beside me. I placed my shoes in the hutch below. I sat in the chair in my mother's slip and my black jeans. On the other side of the screen, I heard Tanner Haku quoting Degas: "Drawing is not form; it is the way we see form."
But he did not credit Degas. If he credited Degas, he would have to explain who Degas was and what Degas meant to him personally. It would be that much more of his soul he would have to sacrifice to the classroom.
I unbuttoned my jeans and stood to take them off.
"That doesn't make sense," I heard the reed-thin voice of a boy say.
I could feel the thud to Haku's chest. After this many years, even though I was only the model, I could usually feel the thud to mine. But this boy's confident assertion in the face of a hundred years of history made no impact on me now. In a way it made me see that no matter what happened, things would go on just as they had been, with or without me. Gerald would come, and he would say, "My mother died," and the students would nod uncomfortably, but he would stand on the platform, and they would do slightly altered assignments--Man on a Pedestal instead of Woman at the Bath--and then they would turn them in and Tanner would listlessly grade them as he blasted opera and drank gin.
"And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet," he said.
; I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.
As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, "Helen, we're ready for you." But I stood in my mother's slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie's living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.
Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.
I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless mini-lecture. I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.
"Helen, we're ready for you."
I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry in horror, but I didn't. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother's slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.
I walked out from behind the platform, holding the hospital robe closed at the waist, my flip-flops and the shifting of the students the only sounds. I climbed the two stairs up to the carpeted platform, and Tanner handed me a little book. It was one with which Natalie and I were very familiar. Not much larger than my palm, it was part of a series of small art books from the late 1950s and had been kicking around the classroom for years. This one featured fifteen color plates of Degas and was titled simply Women Dressing.
"I'm good," I said, keeping the book held out so Haku would take it away again.
"We'll cycle then," he said. "Give them a three-minute pose. Ten, Nine, Seven, Four, and ending on Two, which you can hold a bit longer if you like. You know the plates?"
"I do," I said. Ordinarily I would have shot back their names in the order he'd asked me to do them, but I was not paying attention to him anymore. Instead, I set my energy toward Dorothy, the best student in the room. I decided that for Dorothy, I would wear my mother's murder on my skin.
For my first pose, my back would be turned almost all the way to the classroom, so I pivoted around as Tanner stepped away from the platform. I saw the picture of the tub pinned to the curtain behind me, peeled back my robe and placed it in my right hand to pretend it was the towel in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself. I leaned, as she did, to the side and tilted my head down to a half profile. Immediately the room was filled with the sound of furious undergraduate sketching, as if they were cameras and I a subject to be caught in flight. Very few, like Dorothy, had the skill of consideration.
Three minutes was a concession to the students. Eventually, by the end of the semester, they would be working in two. But I was fine with much longer poses, and always had been. Staying completely still was something I'd taken to from the start.
"It's like you were born to do this," Jake once said.
He was my teacher then. He was my Tanner Haku, and for all I knew, I was his Dorothy. But I did not have Dorothy's talent.
"You have such lovely skin," Jake had said.
And I clung to it. Almost as if, if he said it again, something would break inside me. And he did. He said it when he noticed I had grown so cold that I was almost shivering. He'd come over to me--I had been lying down and had a cramp in my side--and had stood, watching me. I worried every moment that he was going to say, "You know, I was wrong. You're hideous. This was all a mistake."
"You're turning blue with cold," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said, keeping the chatter out of my teeth as best I could. I was eighteen and had never seen a man nude, much less been nude in front of one.
"Relax," he said.
He went behind the screen in the studio and threw a blanket over the top of it. It landed on me. The scratchy wool was like an assault, but I was too cold to complain.
"I've turned the kettle on," he said. "I'll make tea. I've got some ramen noodles if you want."
Ramen noodles as aphrodisiac. I had asked Jake later if he had known he would make love to me.
"I had no idea. When you walked in in that silly pink suit, I almost laughed at you."
"It was coral," I corrected him. It had taken all the money I had.
"When you took it off," he said, "I fell in love."
"So it was a good outfit?"
"When it hit the floor," he said.
I was huddled in the scratchy blanket when he returned with two mugs of tea.
"Thank you, Helen," he said, and placed the mug by me. I remember I was still too cold to even reach for it. "You did an extraordinary job today."
I was silent.
"And your skin," he said. "It's lovely, really."
I started crying. Something about how cold I was and how much snow there was piling up outside and how far away I was from home and from my mother. He put down his tea and asked if he could hold me.
"Um-hmm," I said.
He wrapped his arms around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I was still crying.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
How could I say what seemed ludicrous even to me? After having dreamed of getting away from her, I missed my mother. It haunted me during that first semester like an ache.
"I'm just so cold," I said.
"Change!" Haku barked.
The students put their final touches to what was most obvious in After the Bath, Woman Drying Herself but not to what many of them were still too self-conscious to sketch--my ass. Whenever I looked at the drawings from freshman classes, the attention to detail was always focused on the props. On the one occasion I modeled for the Senior Center, there was no such fear. Both the women and the men dove right in, knowing time was limited.
"Woman at Her Toilet!" Tanner announced proudly. There was no laughter now. The students were serious, and I, dropping the towel nee robe onto the platform, leaned over the metal basin that had been left upon a chair and took the sea sponge in my right hand. I pivoted now toward the classroom and cupped my breasts in my right arm as I reached the sponge up under my left armpit, as if I were washing myself.
I had always found this pose awkward. It forced me to look toward my armpit and made me all too aware of my own body. As the years went by, I could see more sunspots on my chest and shoulders, and the resilient skin with which I had been blessed had slackened no matter what inverted poses I was able to do in yoga. Flexibility did not, in the end, trump gravity. I lived on the borderline between a Venus just holding it together and Whist
ler's mother in the buff. I thought suddenly, as the dry sea sponge scraped against the tender skin of my armpit, that if I were less flexible, less in shape, I would not have been able to commit either of the crimes of which I now stood guilty. Lifting and hauling my mother would not have been possible. Being attractive to Hamish, unthinkable.
"Helen?" I heard Tanner say. He stood close to the platform. I could smell the garlic capsules he took every day.
"Yes?" I did not break my pose.
"You seem to be shaking. Are you cold?"
"No."
"Focus," he said. "Two more on this one," he announced to the class.
Five years ago and very late at night, Tanner had wanted to draw the skeleton of a rabbit he'd seen in a dusty showcase of the old Krause Biology Building. He had taken me to an art opening, and the evening had ended with us stumbling around without a flashlight in a building that had yet to be renovated. We found many a display case but not the right one, and we had frozen like misbehaving children when we heard the creak of the exit door below us, and Cecil, the elderly security guard, calling into the darkness, "Is anyone there?"
During the renovation of Krause the following year, I walked by and saw bones sticking up out of a Dumpster. Not caring who might see me, I hiked my skirt up and climbed onto some cinder blocks that had been lowered by crane and were still bundled in steel ribbons, so I could see inside the Dumpster. There lay the rabbit skeleton on its side.
It sat now, as pristine as I could have hoped, as the centerpiece of a collection of found objects that Tanner had placed on the long, high windowsill that ran the length of the room. It was the first thing I saw sometimes when I entered the space--the delicate bones of the rabbit next to rocks of various shapes and sizes, a God's eye made by a student's child, and an endless collection of sea glass he picked up on his solo journeys to the Jersey Shore.
Now I felt the menacing bones of this rabbit behind me and could not strike the image of my mother rotting in layers until she too was bone. There was something in the idea of it, this slow molting toward yellowed calcium that must be pinned together to prevent collapse, that I found both frightening and comforting. The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one's whole life. Had I thought it would be simple? That her substance, demolished, would equal myself avenged? I had made her laugh by playing the fool. I told her stories. I paraded around as a fool at the mercy of other fools, and by doing this I guaranteed that she did not miss anything by choosing to turn her back on the outside world.