The Model's Contract

I signed up for the life drawing class on a Tuesday, mostly because my sister wouldn't shut up about me having no hobbies.

"Video games aren't a hobby," she told me at Thanksgiving. "They're a coma."

She's 34 and thinks she's my mother. I'm 28. I work dispatch at the ambulance company, twelve hour shifts where I mostly sit and listen to strangers' worst days through a radio. When I get off at seven in the morning, I don't want to think. But apparently I needed something that looked good on a person. Something adult. Cultured, even. I don't know where I picked up that word. Cultured. Sounded like something a guy with hobbies would say.

So. Life drawing. Tuesday nights, six to nine, at the community college two blocks from my apartment. Forty bucks a session, pencils provided. I figured I'd draw a bowl of fruit or whatever and call it growth.

Nobody told me there'd be a naked person involved. I mean, obviously they told me. It's called life drawing. It's on the syllabus. But knowing a thing and standing in a studio with a nervous guy named Derek who keeps saying "the human form" out loud to nobody are two different things.

The studio had high windows and easels in a half circle around a low platform in the middle. Faint turpentine smell, though the teacher said nothing in that room had been oil painted in years. Old buildings hold their smells, I guess. Like a bar that still stinks of smoke twenty years after the ban.

The teacher, a wiry woman named Ms. Parks, clapped her hands at six sharp.

"Model's here. Give her a minute, set up your charcoal, light strokes first."

She stepped behind a folding screen in the corner. A robe came over it and landed on a chair. I set up my easel and pretended I knew what I was doing with the charcoal stick; I held it like a pencil and hoped for the best.

And then she stepped out from behind the screen.

Around fifty, gray in her hair, flat stomach, the kind of body that's been somewhere. Not a gym body. A lived in body. She walked to the platform like she owned the building, and she did not hurry for anybody.

I knew her.

Down the hall. Two doors down. The woman who always says hello in the elevator and once caught my packages for a week when I was in Phoenix for work. Moira. I didn't know her last name. I knew her mail got misdelivered a lot and she was friendly about it, which is more than I can say for anyone else in that building.

Moira stepped up onto the platform, turned, and sat on the prop stool with one leg stretched out, as if it were nothing. Like she hadn't just dropped a robe in a room full of strangers.

"Long pose first," Ms. Parks said. "Forty minutes. Get your proportions down."

I drew. Or I moved charcoal around paper while my brain did math. My neighbor. My actual neighbor, two doors down, was sitting naked on a platform twelve feet away and I was supposed to render her shoulder blade like a professional.

Here's what got me, though. She wasn't nervous at all. Derek across the room was sweating through his collared shirt. A retired guy in a beret kept standing up to squint. And Moira just sat there, relaxed, looking at a spot on the far wall like it owed her money. She held the pose so long and so still I started to think of her less like a person and more like a chair that happened to be beautiful.

Around minute thirty she shifted her weight, barely, and her eyes swept the room once. They passed over me. Stopped. Came back.

Well. That was a problem.

She knew me too. I could tell, because her mouth twitched, one corner, the smallest thing, and then she went back to being a chair. I spent the rest of the pose staring at her collarbone and drawing what I swear is the worst ribcage ever committed to paper.

* * *

Break was at seven thirty. Coffee out of a burner machine that tasted like a radiator. Moira put the robe back on and came around with her own travel mug, working the room. She knew the regulars. Knew the beret guy's grandkids' names. Knew Ms. Parks's dog. Everyone lit up when she came near, and she collected it easy, like she'd done it before, which I'd learn later she had.

Then she got to me.

"Xander, right? 3B?"

"Moira." I stuck my hand out like an idiot at a job interview. "Sorry. Hi. I didn't know you did this."

"Now you know." She sipped her coffee. "Your drawing's crooked, by the way. Her hips are level. You've got her tilted like the Titanic."

I looked at my paper. She was right. The ribcage problem had spread downward.

"It's the charcoal," I said. "Charcoal's slippery."

"Uh huh." She smiled and let me off the hook, mostly. "You're not bad, though. Your lines are confident even when they're wrong. That's rare. Most beginners scratch. You commit."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation." She looked at me a second longer than the joke needed. "You're better than the room, is what I'm saying. And the room's pricey for what you get. Forty bucks to draw in bad light."

"It's forty dollars of culture," I said. "I'm investing in myself."

She laughed. Real laugh, head back a little. It did something to the room. Derek looked over.

"Look," she said, and lowered her voice like we were splitting a secret, which, in a room of ten people, we were not. "I do private sessions sometimes. My apartment. Quieter, better light, and I charge less than the college because I don't have to split it. If you actually want to learn instead of ticking a box, come by Thursday. Seven."

I blinked at her.

"Just drawing," she said, reading my face exactly right. "But I have rules."

"Rules."

"Rules. I'll write them down so there's no confusion." She dug a napkin out of her bag, clicked a pen, and wrote while she talked. "Rule one. No touching the model. You're there to draw, not to paw."

"That seems fair."

"Rule two. No talking during a pose. I hold better when it's quiet, and you draw better too, you just don't know it yet."

I didn't argue. She was probably right.

"Rule three. No asking about my past. Whatever you think you know about me, you know the building version. The rest is not your business," she said it easy, but there was a little steel under it, and I nodded.

"Rule four. Nothing past midnight. I'm an early riser and you're a boy who works nights."

"I'm 28."

"You're a boy who works nights," she repeated, and wrote it anyway. "Rule five." She paused with the pen hovering. "No sex."

I choked on my radiator coffee.

"That's a rule you have to write down?"

"I've found it's better written than assumed, in either direction." She folded the napkin once, crisp, and handed it to me like a contract. "Thursday. Seven. 3A. Bring your own paper, I've got easels."

She walked off to talk to the beret guy about his grandkids, and I stood there holding a napkin with five rules on it in neat handwriting, the last one underlined twice.

I read it four times on the walk home. Two blocks. Read it again in the elevator, where I'd stood next to her maybe thirty times and said "morning" and "cold out" and nothing else. How does a woman you've nodded at for a year turn out to be sitting naked in front of a room on Tuesdays? How does she turn out to have a whole other self that she keeps in a different pocket?

Her door was shut when I got to my floor. Light under it. I almost knocked. Almost. I didn't have anything to say yet and I got the feeling Moira was not a woman you went to with nothing.

I taped the napkin inside my sketchbook cover. Five rules. I counted them again. No touching, no talking during poses, no past, no midnight, no sex.

I realized somewhere around my second beer that night, sitting on my fire escape looking at the parking lot. Five rules is a map. Anybody who writes down exactly where the lines are is telling you where the interesting country is. I don't think she wrote that napkin to keep me out. I think she wrote it to see what I'd do with it.

Or maybe I'm full of it and she's just a careful woman who models part time and doesn't want a neighbor getting weird. That's possible too. Probably more possible, honestly.

Doesn't matter. Thursday, seven o'clock, I knocked on 3A with a sketch pad under my arm and the napkin memorized.

She opened the door in jeans and a sweater, hair down, holding a glass of wine.

"Punctual," she said. "Good sign. Come in, and mind rule one from the second you cross that threshold."

"What, no touching even before you're posing?"

"Especially then." She stepped back to let me in. "The rule doesn't know what you're doing at the time. That's the point of a rule."

Her apartment was sparse and clean. A pullout couch that looked actually slept on, one bookshelf, a big window with a view of the parking lot, and a proper easel set up near it with the light falling just right.

"Nice setup," I said.

"I've had years of practice." She set her wine down. "Rules first, then drawing. Say them back to me."

"Say them back to you?"

"A contract only works if both parties know the terms." She crossed her arms, waiting, and there was that steel again, friendly but real. "Go on. All five."

I recited them off the napkin in my head, and out loud, in order, and when I got to the last one my ears went hot and she watched me say it without blinking.

"No sex," I said. "Underlined twice."

"Good memory." She picked her wine back up. "Now get your pad out. We're starting with hands. Hands are where everybody fails."

We drew hands for two hours. Hers, mostly, in different positions. Open flat. Curled loose around an invisible cup. One draped off the arm of the couch, fingers hanging like they'd let go of something a while ago.

She was clothed, that first night. Jeans and sweater the whole time, and still the drawings came out better than anything I'd done in class. Quiet room does that, I guess. No Ms. Parks circling. No beret guy narrating his charcoal choices to the ceiling.

"Break," Moira said at nine. "You want coffee or are you one of those tea people?"

"Coffee's fine."

"Then you're salvageable." She went to the kitchen and talked from there. "Your line confidence is decent. Your proportions are a disaster. You draw what you think a hand looks like instead of the hand in front of you."

"That's what everybody says."

"Because it's what everybody does." She came back with two mugs and sat on the arm of the couch. "Look at the bone, then draw the bone. Not the idea of the bone."

"Yes ma'am."

"Don't ma'am me. It makes me feel like I'm collecting your homework." She sipped. "Same time next Thursday. We'll do faces. Faces and hands, that's the whole fight."

I gathered my stuff and stopped at the door. "Night, Moira."

"Night. And Xander?" I turned. She was still sitting on that couch arm, mug dangling. "You didn't break anything. I noticed. Most people break something the first time."

"That a complaint?"

"It's an observation." She smiled small. "Go home."

I went home and didn't sleep right away. Kept thinking about the word observation.

* * *

The next Tuesday class was a full pose, thirty minutes at a stretch, and Moira was on the platform in a robe she dropped for the long poses. Ms. Parks walked the aisles muttering about ribs. I sat third row with my charcoal and told myself I was just there to draw.

I was not just there to draw. Part of me was running Thursday scenarios like a guy planning a heist. Because I'd decided something on the fire escape and it hadn't left me. Five rules is a map.

Thursday, 7 PM, 3A. She answered in a gray robe this time, over what looked like a leotard, hair pinned up.

"Faces tonight," she said. "Or were you hoping for something else?"

"Just faces."

"Liar." She stepped aside to let me in. "But a polite liar, which is the best kind."

We set up. She took the robe off down to the leotard and got on the couch, and I'll be honest, my pencil hand was not steady for the first ten minutes. There's a difference between a college studio and a woman you know from the elevator, six feet away, in good light. In class there's a whole room between you and the platform. In her apartment the room is the size of the room.

She held a pose on the pullout couch, on her side, one arm bent under her head. I drew the face first like she said, cheekbone, jaw, the gray hair pinned up. Then the shoulder line. Then down.

Around minute twenty I hit the ankle. She'd crossed her legs and her top foot hung there, and I couldn't get the angle right on paper. The ankle bone kept going wrong. So I did the dumbest thing I've ever done, and I've done plenty.

"Can I touch the ankle?" I said. "Two fingers. I can't see the turn."

She was quiet a second. Then, without moving: "Two fingers. Half a second."

Just two fingers, on the bone, feeling where it turned. Half a second. Her skin was cool and I got the shape in my head and then her hand came down and moved mine off, firm, like closing a gate.

"Rule one," she said. Quiet. She didn't move out of the pose. "I said yes and it's still rule one."

"Sorry. The angle, I couldn't. The bone does this turn and I. Yeah. Sorry."

She held the pose another minute, and I stared at my paper like it owed me money. Then she sat up and reached for the robe, and I braced for the whole speech. Get out. Never come back. I'd already written the apology in my head on the walk down the stairs, three drafts of it.

Instead she tied the robe and looked at my sketchbook.

"Show me the ankle."

I showed her. It was good. Better than anything around it, honestly, because I'd felt the thing instead of guessing it.

"Huh," she said. She looked at it a while. "That's the best bone you've drawn." She turned a page, checking the rest. "So the lesson is you cheat and the work improves. That's a dangerous lesson for a boy like you."

"You're not mad?"

"I'm furious," she said, and she was smirking while she said it, which took some of the weight out of furious. "Pour yourself the rest of that coffee and sit down. You broke the contract, so the contract renegotiates."

She got a pen from the shelf and held out her hand for my sketchbook. She opened the cover to the napkin taped inside and added a line under rule one in her neat handwriting, then closed it before I could