Model of Life
6/11/11

It’s midnight...or something like it. A breeze whistles up and around the balcony high above laser streaks of headlights all herding through intersections. Stop and go, ushered anonymously past stop lights and sidewalks, a crawling luminescence. If I stood here long enough, I could probably figure out the algorithms...or at least the timing.
From this height, angry horns sound muted and trifling. The trash problem has been reduced to dust. Even the graffiti looks neat and unthreatening.
The balcony is a good place, a bastion of perspective over productivity’s lime-encrusted drain. From here architecture is simple and subdued. The concrete is smooth and toned. From here the headlines are illegible and advertisements are aimed elsewhere. The atherosclerotic figure of the American Dream still appears charming and xenophilic from this height. Horatio Alger never had to dig trenches.
A rustle of blinds.
“Do you want like...a robe or something?”
The breeze tousles my hair as I turn. Goosebumps ripple across my bare skin. A delightful shiver snakes my spine.
She glances down, and I cross my hands like a fig leaf. “Hey,” I scold, “I’m on break here.”
“But you’re still naked. It’s cold out.”
“Cold, please. I grew up in the Midwest.”
“It’s time to come back in.”
Inside on a low end table, an ambitious stack of blank paper, a box full of soft-vine charcoal. A vigorous Miles Davis warbles from the turntable, and she gestures that I should lift the needle to silence the record; her fingertips are smudged black.
For an artist, she keeps her studio surprisingly neat. Where you’d expect to see piles of easels and drawing boards, there are flowers and potted plants. Where you’d expect to see gray-fingerprinted volumes on anatomy for artists, there are tables and chairs wiped clean. There’s no film of pastel dust or shavings of heavy metals coating every surface—instead a vacuum crouches in the corner, almost invisible like a good Victorian servant in his alcove.
The walls are festooned with portraits and profiles—but not her own. Her Study of Influence. Her own work either gets sold for five figures or mulched into her next batch of homemade paper. The work on the walls is strictly amateur; one of which, I’m proud to say—a three-quarter profile of the artist herself—by me, sketched while posing for her Study of Study.
She’s an oddball, this artist, with her high-rise studio standing in mad contrast to her sprawling ranch-style mansion in the hills. Two red-stained wine tumblers and a charred opium pipe watch from the table as she settles on her bench and stabs a few perspective lines before I’ve even settled myself into a pose.
“No, no,” she says, shaking her head. “That pose is too lax.”
And here I am trying not to make it obvious that I’m flexing my glutes for her benefit.
“How’s this?”
“Better,” she nods, tongue poking from the corner of her mouth in concentration.
It’s funny how twenty minutes turns out to be an eternity in the absence of the dynamic of movement—even within the first sixty seconds of standing still. The only sounds are the whick-whock of an antique timepiece and the whisper of charcoal on rough paper.
The noisy clock, she says, is to keep her movements brief and pointed, to guide her rhythm away from careful deliberation, and into the effective realm of jazzy motion. The careful artist, she says, teaches elementary school.
Wrapped in the slow-motion blanket of the opium, she sweeps and thumbs, rubs and hums, talking to herself and contributing her own out-loud critique as if she were alone. I’ve been reduced to deltoid and scapula, rib ridges and knee shadows. I’ve become the slow vibration of life itself, unfettered by identity or soul, consciousness replaced by pure form. Essence. The effect is diminishing and exhilarating, distracting from the ache of immobility and transcending the tremor of muscle fatigue. I’ve lost count of the pendulum swings.
A light pulse flicks at her throat as she looks up.
“Hold this pose for another while,” she says.
I nod imperceptibly. Her robe has fallen slightly open, drawing shadows down toward her belly. A wave passes over, prickling skin and thumping chest, sending blood southward. I squeeze my eyes shut to block out the image, but then all I can picture are the tiny barbells through her nipples, the smooth skin arcing downward, the unholy triangle. I open my eyes and focus on a cactus in the corner, but try as I might, there is no stopping the course of nature. Only a slight arch of an eyebrow indicates her notice.
“This isn’t intended as erotic portraiture,” she says.
“Sorry.”
She signs. “Though I suppose it could be. Nothing secretly pleases a doddering old collector more than subtle indications of sexual interest.” She brushes a strand of hair back from her forehead, leaving a sooty streak in its place.
“I like when you talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“Feigned uninterest.”
“Feigned, huh?” She stands and swings a smooth leg over the bench, gliding to the table. The hem of her robe flirts with her gluteal sulcus, and the sheer material hugs her shadows as if afraid to let go as she leans over the pipe and thumbs a smudged butane lighter. A pale curl of smoke drifts from a gem-studded nostril as she straightens and smiles, holding her breath.
Most of my clients are not this dazzling. She crooks a finger, and I break the pose.

The clock’s beat punctuates the hush at the end of the record, and the pipe is cold once again. Half my body is asleep, propped up by the rest. The scratch of charcoal indicates she’s taken advantage of me nodding off to work on her Study of Repose, and I feel vaguely used. Her previous sketch lies crumpled on the floor, stained and stiff now. A smear of charcoal dried to a film spreads across my lower belly. I wonder if that will make it onto her new sketch.
“Don’t move,” she hisses, and then sighs. “That’s it. The naturalness is shattered. You’re awake.”
“Sorry.” I seem to apologize a lot to this one.
“No worries,” she says. “You can get dressed. I’m not drawing well today anyway. It’s not you; it’s me.”
She hands me a check as I pull on my jeans, and escorts me to the door. “See you next week.”