“Just for the record,” she said, doing a slow runway turn for him as if she were a model, “technically I’m afflicted with Scheuermann’s disease, or kyphosis dorsalis juvenilis, or, simply, kyphosis: ‘humpback’ in Greek. A severe example of it. And here”—she put her pretty hands on either side of her hips, the right one of which was canted maybe twenty degrees higher than the left—“I have something for which there is no official name. At least, no medical syndrome name. My sacrum is mushed on the left side. Not enough to affect my gait, if I pay attention to it. And if I stand just right when I’m dressed you can’t tell. About the hump, of course”—she turned in profile again and looked at him, an upright buffalo woman—“nothing can be done at all.”
In profile like this, her appearance was shocking. He was surprised by his own reaction, and though he knew he could hide his feelings, he was nonetheless disturbed by them.
She squared around to him again. “Everything works just fine, thank you. Except childbearing is problematic. That is, it would be if conception itself weren’t problematic. There’s the sexual-aesthetic issue. Not a lot of young men clamoring to get naked with a hunchback.”
It was a cruel remark.
She stood still in front of him. Her hips and pelvis were quite beautiful, as were her legs. Her buttocks did not suffer from the misalignment in the pelvis, though one or the other of them was always more taut depending on her stance. He guessed that this “normal” look would change relatively quickly. Much of her anatomy was attractive by virtue of her youth—her breasts, for instance—but would suffer rapidly from the stress that her disability would naturally cause as muscle groups were constantly called upon to compensate.
He was surprised that she wasn’t bent forward in a more pronounced way. The curvature of her spine was high, however, so that she carried the hump higher behind her shoulders rather than in the center of her back, thereby avoiding the crone’s stoop. She stood more or less upright. But that would change with time, too.
“In your mind’s eye,” he said, standing up from his bench and starting to walk around her, “how do you imagine yourself posed for this sculpture?”
“Naked,” she said. “Beyond that I don’t give a damn. I want to smoke.”
“Go ahead.”
He watched her as she went to her purse and bent over to fish out her cigarettes. She lighted one with her back to him, but he saw her hand trembling. Her posterior view was not distorted, the hump being within the width of her shoulders, and the small tilt of her hips easily disguised by the ageless stance so natural to humans of putting one’s weight primarily on one leg, causing the opposite hip to dip and creating an arc line of the higher hip to sweep up toward the breast. The leg, relieved of its weight, is slightly cocked, creating a graceful swing of the hip. Déhanchement, the French called it. Leda was obviously well aware of this artifice. He suspected that she had spent a great deal of time in front of mirrors.
She turned around and put one hand on her hip and stood there letting him look at her, smoking.
She said, “Altogether, my back and neck aren’t that bad. I look in the mirrors and I think: If I could just slice off the damn hump, just follow the line of the normal back, it would be done. I could deal with the sacrum.”
He didn’t say anything to this but continued moving around her. As he moved out of her peripheral vision, he saw her tense ever so slightly. He had expected that. It was easier for her if she could see him looking at her. If she was looking at him, she could be defiant: Go ahead, I give you permission, look at me all you want, I don’t give a damn. It was her own brazen decision to let him stare.
But when he moved out of her eyesight, she lost all control. What was he looking at now? The sag of a buttock? The taut cartilage of the hump? The odd juncture of the armpit and the declension of the down side of the hump?
He stayed behind her for a moment to see how she would react. She smoked, her hand still on her hip. She tilted her head back slightly and looked upward, the wrist of her other hand cocked, holding the cigarette between her first two fingers. But she was tough. She didn’t give way—beyond the slight trembling of her hand—to any nervous ticks or lose control and snap something about why he didn’t hurry up or was he getting enough of a look at her to satisfy his curiosity. She let him look.
He stepped around in front of her again and straddled the bench.
“Okay, let’s get started,” he said.
Chapter 13
He didn’t try to pose her at all. He just told her to relax and try to hold her positions for a couple of minutes while he did a series of quick sketches. It would be a good beginning.
He took his sketchpad off the easel on his bench and circled the model’s platform while Leda began holding various postures. She was quite good at it, and after a while she began to settle down. It made a difference in her choice of poses, and much sooner than he had expected she seemed quite at ease without her clothes. Toward the end of the session he thought she seemed not only at ease, but even to be enjoying it.
For his part, the quick sketches were not as easy as he’d expected. Just when he thought he was beginning to understand the relationship between the volume of the hump on her shoulders and the skewed angles of her pelvis in regard to her center of gravity, he’d move to another angle and realize that he’d misjudged. At times Leda’s deformities appeared more severe than he had first thought, even, at some angles, terribly grotesque. At other times they seemed hardly to matter at all.
Her legs were shapely, very attractive, long beneath a high waist. Her stomach was flat and not malformed, so that in some positions the compression of her left iliac fossa was not even discernible. Despite the acute angle of the hump, her chest and breasts were unaffected, so that when viewed from the front at an angle that hid the protrusion, she was stunning.
But that required careful positioning. Most of the time there was no way to look at her without having the hump influence the way you saw her. From some angles, in fact, when the pelvis and hump were at their worst vantage and her face was turned away, she had a numbingly freakish appearance. At those moments he realized what courage it took for her to endure this. She knew that sooner or later he would see her in this way, repellent by most standards. And if this project went on to its intended conclusion, it was inevitable that the completed sculpture would make that angle available to every viewer as well. Regardless of what she had said her reasons were for wanting to do this, he knew that she must have glossed over its true importance to her. The whys of what she wanted to do were surely entangled, if not inscrutable, even to her.
“That’s it,” he said after nearly an hour, tossing his sketchpad on the platform. “A good start for the first day.”
Leda was reclining on the bed on her side, propped on one elbow, her left leg drawn up so that her foot rested against the inside of her knee of the outstretched leg. She reached out to the chair, but instead of getting her clothes she took another cigarette out of her purse and lighted it. He realized this position was comfortable for her, the hump serving as a kind of built-in pillow against which she could lean.
Noticing this made him feel odd. Somehow it dehumanized her. There was something of the creature about this accommodation to her deformity. He thought of the massive gray body of the Brahman cow, reclining on its side, its hummock riding above its shoulders, its heavy body comfortable with the oddness of its bizarre shape because that was the only kind of body that it had ever known.
“How was it?” she asked, propped on one elbow, smiling at the sexual double entendre.
“I think I got some good stuff,” he said, coming around in front of her. When they stopped he had been at her feet, looking up the length of her body, studying the effect of foreshortening.
“I mean, how was it looking at me? What did you think?”
“I found it hard to locate your center of balance. . . .”
“No, emotionally . . . what was your reaction?”
He looked at her. He could tell there was no way of getting around this. She wanted to know sooner or later if he could find her attractive. This was either going to work or not, and she was probably right about getting all this kind of thing out of the way right up front, at the beginning. He came around and sat on the edge of the platform. She was an arm’s reach from him.
“Do I find you physically attractive?” he asked. “Of course I do.” As he said this, trying to sound honest and nonchalant, he realized that he wasn’t, in fact, lying. She was physically attractive. And she wasn’t. And this, he knew, was the truth that drove her crazy: the paradoxical effect on others of the sum of her odd parts.
“You do,” she said, “and you don’t.”
She moved her legs around and dropped them off the side of the bed and, struggling a little, sat upright facing him, her feet on the floor. She smoked, and gradually, pretending an indifference she could not possibly have felt, she let her legs loll open. He had seen professional models sit in this way all of his life, the frankness of seasoned women who had repeatedly shown him everything they had and no longer cared. He was invisible to them, a cipher, modesty was no longer necessary.
But Leda was doing it for other reasons, operating from a psychology that he couldn’t even begin to understand.
“How many naked people have you seen?” he asked.
She shrugged and dragged on her cigarette.
“I’ve seen hundreds,” he said. “I’ve studied them in minute detail, from every conceivable angle. Close. Heads, breasts, thighs, buttocks, armpits, stomachs, elbows, necks, knees. I try to figure them out . . . the mathematics of them. Everyone has her own physical equation. I’ve done it for thirty years. Let me assure you, everyone—even the ‘pretty people’—are unattractive somewhere. That’s the real truth about the human body: imperfection first, before anything else.”
“Really?” Sarcasm. She knew a thing or two about imperfection.
“There’s something unusual about your face,” he said, and for just a flicker of a second he saw fear in her eyes. Her face was something about herself that she valued without reservation, a part of her anatomy about which she felt justified in being proud, even vain. She didn’t want to hear anything negative about it.
“You know it’s beautiful,” he went on. “You said so. But there’s something else you may not have noticed . . . it’s symmetrical.”
She swallowed, but she didn’t answer.
He explained to her the unusual phenomenon of a perfectly balanced face. She showed no reaction, looking at him blankly.
“Well, that’s marvelous,” she said flatly. “I feel . . . excited.”
They regarded each other in silence.
“Look,” he said after a moment, “I won’t insult you with pop psychology, if you’ll spare me the ‘bitter victim’ routine. I don’t understand what your life is like, but I don’t think sarcasm is going to enlighten me, either.” He stood. “Close your legs and get dressed.”
She leaned over and put out the cigarette in a glass ashtray on the floor beside the bed. Still leaning over, her beautiful face looking up at him, she said, “You’re right. That’s not going to get us anywhere, is it?” She straightened up, her hands on her thighs. “I’m still, uh, a little nervous.”
She was shamefaced, and he was suddenly remorseful. He could have, and should have, done that differently.
“Forget it,” he said, picking up his sketchpad, fiddling with his pencils. “Look, it’s lunchtime. I usually put together a plate of sliced fruit, some cold meats and cheeses, white wine. Why don’t you have a bite with me before you go.”
“No,” she said, standing shakily and reaching for her clothes, “I can’t stay. I did this. That’s all I needed to do, to know that I could.”
He stood and turned away as she began putting on her clothes. Dressing was more pedestrian than undressing. The moments of high tension and anticipation had passed. It was different, and he didn’t want her to feel the difference between the two after the exchange they had just had. He flipped through his sketchpad. He knew she would be cutting glances at him. That was something he noticed about her. She was watching him as much as he was watching her.
After she finished dressing, she came down from the platform and went over to the drawing board, where he was going through the sketches. She stood to one side behind him, and he went back to the first page and began turning slowly through the drawings as she watched over his shoulder. Some pages were covered with several studies, some with only a large single drawing. He’d always been good at quick studies, and he’d covered a lot of territory.
After they had looked at the last drawing, he started to close the book, but she reached around him and stopped him. She turned back a few pages and stared at one of the sketches.
“So this is me.”
It wasn’t a question.
“When I was younger,” she went on, “I used to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, naked. I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t born like this, you know, I got this way gradually, from twelve to fifteen. It was a nightmare. I was obsessed with what was happening to my body. I just couldn’t get enough of looking at what was happening to me. I’d use two mirrors, three.”
She paused.
“I’ve contemplated my body from angles, from perspectives, that most women die without ever even wondering about, much less seeing.”
She paused.
“But I’ve never, ever seen myself like this.”
He couldn’t tell if she was angry or shocked or humiliated . . . or any of these.
She reached out tentatively and touched one of the pencil sketches and smeared it a little.
“What do you see you’ve never seen before?” he asked.
“I see what you see. Always, before, I saw what I saw.”
He wanted to ask her what she was thinking, but something stopped him. He wanted to turn around and look at her, but something stopped him from doing that, too.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” she said at last, stepping away and around the drawing table, “tomorrow again? Same time?”
“If that suits you.”
“It suits me,” she said. She was already walking away.
He watched her cross the studio and approach the doorway that led outside. As she turned slightly to step into the courtyard, the yellow dress went black in silhouette against the brightness, and the hump on her back, caught in three-quarter profile, filled the doorway. It was a startling image. For an instant she was not a woman, but a creature.
• • •
He sat at the kitchen table, his empty plates pushed to the side, the sketchbook propped up against the heavy crockery bowl of peaches. He had been back and forth through the pages, studying the drawings, marveling at the extraordinary idea that had been brought to him. He was excited, more excited than he would let either of the sisters know, and not a little worried about the prospects of dealing with so strange a figure.
His concern was technical, yes, but that wasn’t his most troubling challenge. Far more disturbing was the problem of how he was going to present Leda to the viewer. How in God’s name did he pose her? He shared all the concerns that Céleste had expressed and many more. If he was careful, if he was meticulous, if he was sufficiently obsessed, the finished sculpture could be an explosive event in his career. It wasn’t too early to begin worrying about the plethora of variables that would have to be considered, weighed, and controlled. He had no doubt whatsoever that the finished piece would justify everything he could put into it.
Chapter 14
“Thanks for loaning me your car,” she said.
She stood in the doorway of the studio, her dress translucent from the bright light behind her. His eyes followed the narrowing vertical space between her legs all the way from her ankles to her crotch. The sheer fabric floated a millimeter away from her hips.
“Glad to,” he said, turning away from the drawing
board, where he was noodling halfheartedly with his sketches from the Beach photographs. It was hard to whip up any enthusiasm for these now. After his sketching session that morning with Leda, Lily Beach’s body seemed bland and predictable in its proportions, a committee-designed frame without variety or surprise.
“What are you working on?” she asked, approaching his desk. She was wearing a shirtwaist dress of summer cotton, short sleeve with a collar. It was a style she seemed to favor, probably because it flattered her.
He studied her face, looking for some residue of resentment from his insult that morning. He saw nothing. She was going to pretend it hadn’t happened.
She stood by the desk while he flipped through his sketching sheets, showing her what he was doing, what problems he was having, how he was hoping to solve them. She seemed genuinely interested and asked questions that were perceptive. She knew what she was talking about. He caught wafts of fragrance from her. Not perfume, but something softer, like the lingering scent of underclothes stored in sachet.
When they had finished talking about the sketches—she hadn’t said a word about Lily Beach’s flawless body—she moved away idly and wandered over to the modeling platform. She stood there, her back to him, looking at the bed where Leda had posed for the first time that morning.
“How did it go?” she asked, turning around.
“Great, as far as I was concerned.”
“Do you mind if I see the sketches?”
He picked up the sketchpad and took it over to her. She sat on the platform and opened the cover. She stared at the first sketch. It was a slight image. She began going through the book, taking her time, page by page.
As he watched her, one long leg crossed over the other, the sketchbook lying on her thigh as she focused on the drawings, it occurred to him that she may never have seen Leda naked, and he reminded himself of the strange and complicated relationship the sisters shared. Nothing about them was easy to understand, but he was drawn to them, to each of them, for very different reasons.
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