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There were no monsters at first, only “Arthur Dufresne Crispin,” who met me on the front steps of his apartment in the Village: towheaded, tall, and lean, with long spidery fingers that closed mine in a strangler’s handshake. He had an accent that would have told someone from Boston or Providence a lot about his parents and the pedigree of his dog, but told me jack-all, except that he was the kind of guy who introduced himself with his middle name. He wore a green Brooks Brothers shirt, and men that pale should be careful wearing green. It seeps into the skin.
“I’m Deliah Dane,” I said, and followed him up three flights of stairs to his studio. “Good light in here.” Crispin kept the place neat. A few still life setups in corners, a shelf of sketchbooks and anatomy texts and older leatherbound tomes. A folio of Dali prints, another of Bosch, and one of a Swedish painter whose name I don’t remember. Canvases draped with light silk leaned against walls and doors and furniture. Through the silk I could see the canvases were painted, but not much more. The floor was strewn with lights: lamps, reflectors, mirrors, even a kerosene lantern. “Bet your landlord doesn’t like you having this.” I nudged the lantern with my shoe.
“I have no landlord,” Crispin said, which told me more than the accent. “Ms. Dane, we should discuss the nature of my work. Previous models have expressed reluctance to operate under the conditions I require, and if this will be the case, I would rather find out now before we waste our time. Don’t you agree?”
I’d been afraid of this when I couldn’t find pictures of his recent work. My hand tightened around the cell phone in my jacket pocket. “I don’t know what conditions you require, but I won’t take any drugs for you, and no pegs go in any holes. I show up on time, I sit still. You paint, and you pay me.”
“In terms of your responsibilities, our visions align. No drugs will be involved. Reality interests me, not psilocybin abstractions. As for”—and there it was, the dust of blush that meant maybe even Arthur Dufresne Crispin was human—”as for the rest, I will require no more of you than any other artist, insofar as poses are concerned.”
A gorgeous red leather divan lay upon on the stage, with a scrolled wood headrest and a fringe of trailing beads like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. I stroked the leather. “Why the conditions, then?”
“I do not converse with my models. Your form interests me. Personal connection distorts perspective.”
“I doubt I’ll want to talk with you much, either.”
A ghost smile at that, faint as the blush. “I require exact duplication of poses from session to session. I may touch you, to restore a finger or an elbow to its proper place.”
“Ask my permission first.”
“Fair. And the last: You will not view our work while it proceeds. You may never see the pieces for which you pose. Should you happen to do so, you may not recognize yourself.”
That rang alarms I didn’t know I had. “What do you mean?”
“I paint the noumenal—that which lies beneath appearance. Some models take offence at my depiction, but no offense is meant.”
“So, what, you paint me as subhuman and I don’t get to call you racist afterward? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That is not my intent.”
“I want to see an example.”
“I have no finished model work,” he said, “and if I show you a still life, I will be unable to sell it.”
No sense asking artists why. They’re a weird breed. “Show me, and I’ll decide whether to sit for you.” The power had shifted in the room, as it always does when you learn someone needs you.
His eyes were gray and cold as fish scales. At last, he turned to a canvas propped near a setup of a bowl and rose. He peeled back the silk as if peeling off his skin. Beneath—
It wasn’t a bowl and rose. It wasn’t not a bowl and rose, either. Take the bowl, and take the rose, and shatter them, cubist-like, through time as well as space, so in one facet the rose blooms and in another it’s rotten, the bowl here tarnished and there radioactive gleaming. But that doesn’t capture the twisted, callous distance of the effect. There was more time than time in that painting, and more space than space.
There’s this Chinese story about a bird called p’eng, really big damn bird, flies so high the earth below fades to blue for it just like the sky does for us. To that bird, we’re motes in a sunbeam, sparks kicked up by a campfire, insignificant painful specks that vanish back into the burn. And that was what he’d done with a bowl and a rose.
What would he do with me?
It was disgusting. Exciting too.
“Let’s go,” I said, and unbuttoned my pants.
* * *
You have the wrong idea about me already.
I moved up from Savannah to be on stage. I write. I act. I love the way an audience looks when you have them stuck, I mean skewered, to their seats. When they’d stay for at least a second even if someone did shout fire. And yes it isn’t practical, and yes Mama writes letters every week and each one holds some allusion to this cousin or that who’s doing whatever with herself. Mama’s plumbed Michael Baysian depths of subtlety. I’m workshopping a one-woman show. I sent spec scripts around. An agent wants to see my next.
None of which counts for much rent-wise, in this city.
So, modeling.
Not the clothes kind, which work I doubt anyone would give me anyway on account of my having a body. But painters pay, and they like bodies, or at least they don’t seem to care whether you stop eating after the first half of the M&M.
Yes, painters. They still exist. I mean the ones who paint people who look sort of like people, or at least paintings that involve people, not the squares-of-solid-blue shit.
Here’s what you need to be an artist’s model:
1. Body.
Here are some things that help:
2. Pride (If you get embarrassed when folk stare, this isn’t the line for you.)
3. Honesty (Good artists draw what they see, so you might as well get to love that belly.)
4. Active imagination (You’ll spend four hours at a time holding still.)
5. Bathrobe (To wear on break.)
6. Wristwatch with alarm.
The last is so important it should be first. Artists aren’t timely people as a rule, but if they’re paying for you, they expect you to be. A painter takes forty-five minutes to set up her easel, get the light just so, mix the paints—she expects you right at two, clothes off and in position, not at three thirty complaining about the subway. Get a watch. Or use that fancy phone for something other than taking pictures of your banh mi.
Some folks model to commune with an artist’s tortured soul, to be the fulcrum
between created and increate. All that mystery goes out the door the first time they get off a four-hour sit and can’t feel their left butt cheek. For me, this was Something That Paid Twice as Much an Hour as the Restaurant. Each four-hour sit gave me a day to audition, to write, to please Ms. Agent.
That was what I told my friends. This other part I didn’t realize myself at first, and later it felt too private to share: my time modeling, standing or leaning naked in front of some desperate kid with an easel and a nose ring, belonged to me. It didn’t slip off like time does in your apartment where there’s always some damn thing out of place, or out in the world where fear’s a phone tap away. In those thirty minutes of pain and brush scratch, thoughts stretched long, and memories ran like rivers. I remembered being five, keeping time and singing on the back porch while Daddy played guitar. I remembered running when the grade school kids came for me, and how it felt to fight and lose and win. I remembered strawberries firm and rich as kisses. Hell, I remembered things that never happened. I climbed mountains on planets orbiting a distant star, with a purple sky overhead and a long fall below. Memories like that make you want like you have to, to do any kind of real work: you want from the bones out. After those sessions I’d write and write, and some of what I wrote I’d see the next day and think, good.
To those of you out there who think I could have earned more stripping:
1. Fuck
2. You
I started modeling for Steve, who my roommate Rache knew, and I showed up on time for his sits, and he told his friends and I showed up on time for theirs, and though I couldn’t quit the restaurant I did take fewer shifts. The play took shape. I sent what I had to Ms. Agent, who sent back a sticky note with a smiley face that I took to mean, keep going.
But I never thought about the increate, or holes in worlds, until I met Crispin.
* * *
Crispin wasn’t like the others. Even that first time, I could tell.
There was no music, only the hush of his apartment. Neither of us spoke. His work was an exercise in stillness, a pressure of knife against skin. Into that stillness came the brushstroke, a rasp that ran goosebumps up my shoulders and back, like sandpaper drawn lightly over a nipple.
Stare at your own face in a mirror in halflight and it will warp to something hideous. Staring at his that first afternoon I saw his skin bubble off the bone, his forehead bulge and birth curving horns, his jaw distend like a snake’s about to devour the world. And then he looked up, and his face was a face again.
His brush left trails of poison paint—lead in the whites, mercury in the reds, fumes of alcohol and turpentine.
Sitting always hurts, but sitting for him hurt more. He’d asked for perfect stillness, so I had to show him. My heart beat against my will. People aren’t made to freeze like that. Our ancestors hunted by jogging, chasing prey over open grassland until it died. We live by movement, and when you stop us, we hurt. Even that first pose, simple, seated, felt like pincers piercing the muscles of my butt, back, shoulder, neck, and spreading.
And then his gaze. The stress of her regard, the poet wrote. His whole body leaned into me through the points of his eyes. I didn’t feel seen. I felt peered through, like the near lens of a telescope.
My watch chimed the end of our last period. It felt as if I’d sat forever, and for no time at all. I guess no time at all is forever, because no time means no time passing, and if time doesn’t pass then the moment just goes.
“Thank you, Ms. Dane,” he said, and passed me a cash envelope containing—yes, I looked—twice what I’d made on any other four-hour sit.
“Thank you, Crispin,” I said, and we set our next date.
I’d reached the street and made it halfway to the corner when I heard a crash behind me, of broken wood and torn cloth. I turned back, curious. The painting of bowl and rose Crispin had showed me lay broken on the sidewalk. Several floors up, his window closed.
* * *
We saw each other often that summer: I saw him behind the easel, and he saw me on the divan. We painted even through swampy August. He painted. I endured.
Crispin was slow. The first portrait, head and shoulders alone, a face made large as canvas, took twelve hours, three times longer than Steve needed for a whole-body nude. As we neared the end, he was soaked in sweat, eyes bloodshot. Done, he turned the canvas to the corner of the room so I couldn’t see myself. I thought the painting cast light into that bare cobwebbed corner.
We started the nudes next. He wanted a pair, three-quarter sized, my leg up on a block, one hand resting on my thigh. By the end of the first day the hip of my raised leg hurt like I was sixty. The whole time he stared through me. I might have been a piece of tissue paper held to a halogen bulb, smoking, almost aflame. After those sessions I rode the subway home gazing blank faced as a junkie at the wall, staggered back to my apartment, drew a steaming bath in spite of the heat, and waited for my body to return. I floated like a fetus in the womb.
My memory didn’t work while I posed for him. I don’t just mean the way I talked about remembering before. I couldn’t remember how it felt for time to pass. I couldn’t remember ever speaking. Sometimes I forgot my own name.
Air hung still in the studio while he worked. He wanted, and reached, as if diving into deep water after a receding light. I dived beside him, though I could not see the light he chased. Maybe he couldn’t, either.
“He’ll chop you up when this is done,” Rache joked. Good roomie, always looking out for me. “Store you in the freezer. Some Craigslist killer shit.”
At least, I hoped she was joking.
The money let me take fewer shifts. Acting dropped off the ambitions list, for the moment—I didn’t need more people watching me. I paced the apartment like pacing a cage. I wrote compulsively, but where before I’d shaped my bones to words, now my work felt like the words had always been there, waiting for me to sift white off the page and reveal them glistening black. My play’s last act skewed weird, full of silences and dread. The windows in my head through which light came were shut, and I’d opened others to let in the dark.
I studied Crispin, but learned less than you’d expect to learn about someone you spent a summer with naked. He mixed his own paints, ground his own pigment. Steve had known him in art school, said he was weird even then, old-money weird, and he got weirder after his mother’s illness, a cancer of the mind that warped her first, made her suffer, turned her inside out before it let her die. There were rumors that they cut it out of her and he kept it after; there were rumors that he watched them do it, that he sat with the growth and asked it questions as it floated in green. Mean rumors. But I could see where they came from.
Crispin made his name young, and his fame grew as his work got strange. He hadn’t shown in years. The auction price for his last painting, Still Life with Wriggling No. 9, was a four with so many zeroes after it I thought there must have been a typo—until I checked the price for Still Life with Wriggling No. 8.
With that kind of money, he could afford to pay me double.
He used last names exclusively, and knew everyone’s—the mailman’s even. He rotated between three shirts and two pairs of ratty khakis. He kept a fiddle in his apartment, though he never played that I saw. He skipped meals often; we ordered sandwiches once, and he said that was his first food of the week, this being Wednesday. Once I arrived to find a large man crying on the stairs outside Crispin’s apartment; Crispin gave no explanation. I didn’t ask for one.
Sometimes, in his eyes, I thought I saw worms turning.
We made four paintings that summer. I saw none of them. After the final session, he passed me two envelopes instead of one. The envelope with the cash was cheap, unmarked, and extra fat; the other was of textured paper and addressed in spidery calligraphy to Ms. Deliah Dane.
“An invitation,” he said.
“You’re getting married? You should have told me.”
He didn’t hear the joke. “We are putting on a s
how.”
* * *
I had, as who doesn’t, a nice black dress for formal events, and on the night of the opening I for once made it all the way to midtown without a single catcall. So it was a good day, at least until I reached the gallery.
The galleries where my friends showed were ripped-jeans joints for the most part, dresses on a strict irony-only basis. That wasn’t the deal at the 512. Cloth-of-gold, labels, gossamer, yes. My nice black dress looked bargain basement in this crowd. Some of the men wore tuxedoes, which I didn’t think you were allowed to wear except to weddings, funerals, and inaugurations. Then again, the gentlemen—and I use that term loosely, based on where their eyes went when they thought no one else was looking—the gentlemen at the 512 for Crispin’s opening seemed like they went to a lot of those.
Tonight the 512 was a white box, walls the color of one of those old fifties asylums where men used to check in their wives for “rest.” Aside from the buffet table, the gallerist had set up four black velvet booths, and lines of patrons waited outside them. Black tripods near each booth displayed a cream paper card, typed, actually typed, on Crispin’s Underwood. To the left, Face. To the right, Back . To the rear, Nude 1 and Nude 2.
That was all.
Of course Crispin would show the paintings, but I’d expected still lifes too, the flower bowl, a broken dead thing, some relief from me. All these so-called gentlemen in their tuxedoes had come to see pieces of me naked. I felt scared, and a little flattered, and a lot angry that I felt either.
Crispin wasn’t hard to find. The room had four corners, and the front two were too near the door for his comfort. My first guess was wrong—the crowd there surrounded a woman I took for the gallerist, an elegant scarecrow laughing at a joke I doubt I would have found funny. I wormed through the crowd again, past the lines outside each NUDE and the buffet table. Crispin leaned into the far corner, staring at his glass of white as if wishing he could make it darker. In this sea of evening dress, he wore rumpled wool slacks, that same green shirt, and a blazer with a loose thread in the left shoulder. His shoes had never felt the touch of shine.
Crispin's Model Page 1