Chapter 5: New Model

“Wow! What a sweet setup,” Kendra said. We’d finally taken her upstairs to our suite. That’s what we’d taken to calling it. We had a bathroom, bedroom, and studio. All three of us had workspaces in the studio, but it was small enough that we overlapped and shared a lot.

“This is where Morgan works on spreadsheets,” Annette laughed pointing at my sister’s desk and laptop.

“Hey! Spreadsheets aren’t all I do,” my sister objected. “I’m into event planning, marketing, and communications, too.”

“I always wondered what the BBA in Arts Administration was all about,” Kendra said. “Where do you plan to work when you’re out of school?”

“I’m doing my internship at the Schipford Gallery this summer,” Fay said. “I just got accepted and I’m really excited. But I’ve also got inquiries out to a couple agencies where I might be able to pick up part time work next year. It’s still too far in advance to know what will happen when I’m out of school. It seems forever from now.”

“What kind of agencies?”

“Literary and talent. We’re pretty remote, but with the arts community as strong as it is here, there are some good opportunities. Of course, if my mates are as successful as I think they’ll be, I’ll have enough work right here to keep me busy.”

“You mean representing them?” Kendra asked. Fay nodded. “I’d sign on. Will you rep me, too? I bet we could get you a whole client list just from our class. Where’s your spot, Annette?”

“Can’t you tell? The sofa with the embroidered pillow. Reading lamp. Tea tray,” Annette said as she pointed at her reading nook.

“Really? I thought that was like a still life that Arthur was painting.”

“Oh, he’s painted it, but the life is seldom still. I mostly do my reading and writing there.”

“Do you use a quill?” She sounded so serious! I was beginning to really appreciate Kendra’s sense of humor.

“Only to defend myself from my lovers,” Annette shot back. Kendra turned to my easel.

“It’s obvious to see where Arthur works,” she said. “Is this where I’ll sit for my portrait?”

“It can be. We can do it almost anywhere,” I said.

“In fact, we’ve done it almost anywhere,” Annette quipped. “He did our nipples in bed.”

“Are we talking about painting or sex?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the second time I’ve heard about this nipple thing. Somebody has to explain.”

I pulled out the portfolio where I was keeping the drawings and watercolors. Kendra sat on the sofa next to Annette and opened it.

“Practice,” I said. “Repetition. Draw and observe and draw again. It started as an exercise in the drawing studio and I got carried away.”

“I’m taking that class next semester. They make you draw nipples?”

“No. I just found them more interesting than vases,” I said.

“Um ... Yeah. Oh! Look at the watercolors. These are beautiful. And they’re like... your breasts, right?” she asked looking at Annette and Morgan.

“Our right breasts. We’re trying to convince him that he needs to get more models and do a whole suite of these,” Morgan said. “It’s ... really an intense experience.”

“Yeah. Well. Um ... What do I need to do for the portrait? You know, mostly my face. Maybe a little shoulder. But ... um...”

“I won’t ask you to get naked,” I laughed. “Here’s what I was thinking.” I pulled out my classroom sketchbook and we sat on the sofa to leaf through it and talk about the various poses she’d taken. We talked about the benefit of posing versus just relaxing and the difference between one of my quick classroom sketches and the drawing I’d do to paint from. When we agreed on what we both wanted out of this, she went to change clothes.

Annette volunteered to help Kendra get ready and fix her makeup, but Kendra declined. She said she knew exactly what she needed and would rather surprise us.

“Did she think I was going to rape her?” Annette asked sheepishly. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“You have to remember that we’ve gotten comfortable with being with each other in any state of undress,” Fay said. “Not everyone is. Especially with people who are really new friends. As outgoing and talkative as Kendra is, I think she’s really kind of shy.”

I was leafing through my sketchbook again to look at all the sketches I had of Kendra. There were a lot of them. After I started sketching, she’d made sure that I got at least one of her every day we had class together. Four or more a week from September through November. But one thing I noticed more than anything. I’d never seen any of Kendra’s skin below her neck except her hands.

“Modesty,” I said. “Look at the drawings. I wonder if she’s ever let anyone see any more of her.” I certainly didn’t expect to see any more of her than that. Her portrait would be her face, not a full body drawing. I could draw about any kind of clothing on her that I wanted to.

When she arrived back upstairs, she surprised us. She was, in fact, wearing a conservative skirt and blouse. A long skirt with granny shoes peeking out from beneath the hem. The laced blouse was cream and the long skirt was tan. I thought how appropriate that was based on Mom’s reading of her neutral aura. I thought Morgan could see it, too, though we’d never talked about it. Sometimes I wished I could see what they saw.

What surprised me most, though, was that Kendra wore no makeup. Her face was pretty, but not glamorous. When women go to get their picture taken by a photographer—even if they are just visiting Santa—they tend to be very careful about makeup. Kendra had worn makeup to class and even to breakfast. She was being very daring to approach her portrait with no makeup. She took a deep breath and spun around.

“Am I acceptable? I was going to save this to wear tomorrow to dinner, but I really like it. I guess I’m an old hippie at heart. Arthur, I took off all my makeup. I really want a portrait that shows how you see me and not how I try to present myself. Does that make sense?” Kendra could never stop at one sentence. I just nodded and she kept going. “And just for the record, I’m not charging a modeling fee. I hope you knew that.”

“Kendra, I was just going to give you the painting. You can do whatever you want with it.” Had I misunderstood?

“What? You can’t just give away your paintings, Arthur! I’m just a model. I’m nobody famous who needs a portrait. I just want to be in one of your paintings!”

Morgan and Annette were looking between the two of us speechless. We’d all completely misunderstood. Especially as body shy as Kendra was, I just assumed she wanted the painting, not that she just wanted to model.

“You’ve taken me in for the weekend and are treating me like one of the family and it just wouldn’t be right to take anything for modeling. Besides, it was my idea. I just want to be in one of your paintings. You are going to be a famous artist one day and maybe sometime my grandchildren will see my portrait hanging in a museum and know it’s little ol’ me.”

“Really? You just want to model?”

“I’ve practiced holding a pose for all these years! I want someone to paint me. Just tell me how you want me posed.”

“Well, okay. Um ... I think ... I want you over by Annette’s reading lamp. Is that skirt loose enough that you can tuck one leg up under you? Yes! Like that. Lean a little to your right. We need a book!” Annette was on the spot with a popular romance that she handed to Kendra. Kendra’s eyes popped open when she saw the title.

“You read this?” she squeaked. Annette kind of shrugged and nodded. “I thought I was the only one,” Kendra continued. “In the Scottish Highlands, and with the last lines of the movie Brigadoon fresh in her mind, Irene Redmond signs up for a tour, hoping to uncover secrets hinted at in her mother’s diary. Instead, Irene is transported back in time to the thirteenth century, along with the rest of the tour group,” she read. “I loved this one! Did you read The Quest? She is so good. So romantic.”

“Dad treats them as serious literature and assigns one to each of his literature survey classes,” Morgan laughed. “Annette got hooked.”

“At least he can’t complain when he catches me reading one,” Annette laughed.

“This requires an adjustment to the pose,” Kendra said. She sat on the sofa next to Annette’s reading light and untied the bow at her throat. She gave a tug and the laces came loose as she dragged the collar toward her right shoulder. The lace popped out of the top eyelets and the vee gapped open. She wasn’t exposing anything explicit, but it was more flesh than I’d ever seen her expose. I thought of how Annette sighed when she read the book.

“Can you hold the book in your right hand?” I asked. “Then with your left hand, reach up and touch your cheek. No. Let it slide down a little to touch your neck below your left ear. Turn your palm out toward me. There. Tilt your head just a little to the right. Smile just a little. Pose!” I shouted. I grabbed my sketchbook and started drawing furiously. Kendra stayed in exactly that position. I’m not sure she even blinked. I drew for half an hour. “Can you get back in that pose if we take a break?” Kendra relaxed.

“No problem. I’ve got it memorized.”

“You are fantastic!” I said.

“That was unbelievable. Let us see, Arthur?” Annette said. She and Morgan had been with us the whole time but Kendra had never acknowledged their little conversation and jokes.

“Such a good model,” I said. “I want to paint you a lot.”

“I know you,” Kendra laughed. “You just want to paint a lot of me.” Her expression suddenly sobered. “I look at this and see what you’ve captured—really, what you see. I’m nowhere near that beautiful, but you ... I can’t wait to get started again!”

“I need the bathroom first,” I said. I left the others. I think Kendra and maybe Annette went downstairs to use the guest bathroom and Morgan pushed her way in with me. I pretended not to notice as I peed, but I couldn’t help but notice when Morgan sat down before I could flush.

“It still embarrasses you a little, doesn’t it,” she giggled.

“Um ... just ... um ... polite.”

“My darling Pen, this part of you that dangles out here while you pee has been inside this part of me that I’m patting dry. Repeatedly. And it will be there again as soon as we take a longer break and find something for Kendra to occupy herself with. Maybe she’ll do something with her clay to keep her fingers occupied. Sweetheart, you never need to be embarrassed with me, nor be afraid that you aren’t being polite. Just love me. And kiss me,” she said after she’d flushed the toilet.

I did.

“It’s intriguing. I might, but don’t push me, okay?” Kendra said to Annette as Morgan and I returned to the studio.

“No one here will ever push you to do something you don’t want to do, Kendra,” Morgan said looking sternly at Annette. Annette shook her head.

“We were just talking about some of the other artwork and how good a model Kendra is,” she said. “I’m not pushing anything.”

“I actually brought it up,” Kendra responded. “I might be interested, but I have to think about it some more.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to. Will you finish this pose?”

“Oh, of course! I have an empty bladder now and I’m ready to perform.”

“Perform?”

“Yeah. Performance art. A living being that people stare at. Maybe we could get a whole group together to do it. Anyway, am I in the right position?”

Kendra must have fantastic muscle memory. I tilted her head to the right just a fraction of an inch more and it was perfect. Kendra held perfectly still while Annette and Morgan quietly talked about school and how it had been getting through the first semester. It was just background, but it was soothing. They didn’t try to engage Kendra or break her concentration, but I could tell Kendra was listening.

“Can I see that smile again?” I asked. “You just let it flicker across your face and I liked it.”

“Oh. Sorry. Sure. But I liked the expression you had before.”

“Don’t worry. I’m just doing a quick sketch to see if I can capture your version of the Mona Lisa.” I flipped to a blank page in my sketchbook and just focused on Kendra’s lips and nose.

“Will it be okay?” Kendra asked as we prepared to leave for Annette’s family home. “I didn’t pit it out or anything while I was posing, did I?”

“You were cool as a cucumber. I don’t think you sweat at all,” Morgan said.

“You look lovely, dear,” Mom joined in. “And don’t be nervous. You’re practically part of the family now.”

“Family? I mean ... I’m not ... you know,” Kendra sputtered.

“If you mean you are not one of their lovers,” Dad said calmly, “that doesn’t make a difference. I’m not either and I’m still part of the family.” That made us all laugh and we headed out to Thanksgiving Dinner with the rest of the family.

“So, I guess I felt like I needed to make a clean break and move away,” Kendra explained to Gramma. Gramma had drawn her out with subtle questions about her aura. “Just kind of blah,” Kendra had said.

“Oh, no, dear. Neutral, yes, but it has brightened even since you arrived this afternoon. I would call it balanced, not blah.” It had gone on like that and before long Gramma had gotten Kendra to talk about why she had come all the way out west to go to school. She’d already alluded to the fact that she and her friends did a lot of smoking weed, but the story she told now made it much clearer.

“I was becoming self-destructive,” Kendra said. “I thought of myself as a Suicide Girl, though I never tried to join them. I amplified the bad things in life and ignored the good. An ... um ... artist ... I was posing for, I guess ... told me I needed to look up or I’d never see the sky. Isn’t that a poetic way of putting things? It really made me think about what kind of a track my life was on and how my friends were influencing me.”

“There is a certain attraction to dystopian romance,” Dad said. “If everything is doomed from the beginning, then there is no reason to hope for anything better. If you don’t expect anything, nothing can disappoint you.”

“You mean like Steampunk stuff?” she asked.

“Long before that,” Dad said. “Take Shakespeare, for example. When you read or watch one of his tragedies, you know in the first act, usually in the first scene, that there is no hope. Romeo and Juliet will die. Lear will kill his beloved daughter. Hamlet—everyone will die. It goes back to the Greeks, perhaps even further. Oedipus will insist on bringing the murderer of the former king to justice, only to find he himself committed patricide and has married his mother. Not only will he be the cause of her death, but in his blind rage he sets the stage for his sons and his daughters to all die. There is beautiful poetry in all their works, but we know from the outset there is no hope.”

“I still don’t know where the hope is,” Kendra mused. “But I see the sky.”

“Is anyone going shopping today?” Kendra asked on Friday morning. There were a few snorts from around the kitchen table.

“We aren’t really into that kind of thing,” Morgan said. “Our family has a pretty low-key Christmas tradition and shopping isn’t part of it.”

“I started getting texts at four o’clock this morning about the sale my mother was standing in line for,” Kendra sighed. “I’m pretty sure that by five o’clock she’d spent a thousand dollars. It’s not like we have such a big family. I have two older brothers and a younger sister. My brothers moved away. One’s in the army and the other just took off wandering one day. We usually hear from him at Christmas with a report of what he’s been doing the past year.”

“Is your little sister doing okay?” I asked. From what Kendra had told us she had been self-destructive when she lived at home.

“Okay is a relative term,” she laughed. “Of the thousand dollars my mother has spent on Christmas presents this morning, $996.50 was probably for Tricia. The other $3.50 would be for a pumpkin spice latte.”

“Spoiled little girl?” Mom asked pointedly. I liked the way Mom and Dad just sat at the kitchen table with ‘us kids’ and joined in the conversation like they were friends. Not that there was ever any doubt that they were parents when it was needed, but they didn’t pass judgment on us when we were just talking.

“She does a better job of standing up to it than I did. Right now, Tricia is mad at me for leaving. She’s fifteen years old and is a powder keg with a lit fuse. I’m hoping if I can get an apartment out here when the dorms close that she will come out to stay with me for a month. That would be so cool!”

“Be sure to start looking early,” Dad said. “A lot of students will be looking for someone to take over leases they should never have signed in the first place. The same for the job market if you are going to be hunting. Everyone wants a summer job.”