The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [69]
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