The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [71]
“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