Chapter 6: Police Artist

“Look at them,” Kendra whispered. I was aware of her sitting with Morgan. We’d had an exhausting day. I couldn’t believe Kendra was still awake after posing so long. But after dinner, she’d grabbed her lump of clay and followed us upstairs. Annette grabbed a book and curled up on the sofa. I wasn’t sure what to do, but I was too tired to paint. I sat next to Annette and leaned on her. She petted my hair while she read and I just listened to Kendra and Morgan. “What do you see?” Kendra asked.

“My lovers,” Morgan answered.

“Look deeper,” Kendra said. “What is the dominant thing? Do they glow?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Describe it for me, Morgan. I can’t see it. I need to use your eyes.”

“Oh. Wow. I’ve never done this. We don’t even talk about it except I sometimes talk to Mom. Let’s see,” Morgan said. So she did see the auras. Sometimes I thought I did, but it was fleeting. She went on. “It changes when they are in different positions. Right now, it’s really bright where Annette is petting Arthur’s head. I mean, they are touching in lots of places, but that is where the aura is focused,” Morgan said. Kendra looked at us and then turned her chair around to face away. She focused on what Morgan was saying. That was good, because neither Annette nor I could hold a pose like Kendra could. We constantly shifted a little to get more comfortable. I kissed her shoulder. She moved to kiss the top of my head. She turned a page.

“When you look at it, how is the hand on his hair shaped? Do you see her distinct fingers?” Kendra asked.

“Um… not exactly. If I focus on them I can, but what I really see is the hand and the hair kind of becoming one. It’s almost like the hair grows from her fingers and then into his head. Or the other way around. It flows both ways. Like they merge together at that point, but not grossly. Her hand isn’t in his head or something.”

“You said they glow. Is it the same kind of glow that a lightbulb gives?”

“No. If we turned the light off, I think I’d still see them glowing there, but it wouldn’t light up the room. It’s more like little tendrils of phosphorescence continue the hair out away from his head and between her fingers.”

“You mean the glow isn’t uniform in size and shape?”

“Oh no. It shifts. Auras aren’t static. They move and respond to each other independent of how the physical body is moving. When she kissed his head, there was a bright flash where her lips touched, but it faded quickly. Where her fingers continue to stroke his hair, though, it’s almost like sparks are shooting off, only they are still connected.”

“Wow. Lean over my shoulder and point out things that should be different.”

I understood some of what Morgan was saying. I didn’t really see an aura around people, but I knew there were times when I couldn’t paint things… flat. Before I actually saw Annette’s breasts or especially her sex, I just saw an explosion of color there when I painted. I still see that, but now I can see the physical shape and I know the texture and the taste and the scent. Paintings that include their sex, though, still tend to be brightly colored in those areas. And I don’t even see auras like Morgan and Mom do.

“Mmm. Yeah. It’s not like a single row of fibers. It’s more like a little forest. It goes all the way back to… about here.”

“What about forward?”

“Just to the shape of her hand and her thumb.” Morgan continued to guide Kendra while Annette held me and read. Somewhere along the line, I fell asleep.

“I think I need to go back to campus today,” Kendra said at breakfast on Sunday. “I need more clay to keep working this. I think I have the general idea.” She brought out the little model she’d made the day before based on Morgan’s descriptions.

“Oh, isn’t that nice,” Mom said. “Annette petting Arthur’s hair. It’s a favorite position of theirs.” We all put our spoons down and stared at Mom. I looked at the lump of clay Kendra had worked on and it looked like some kind of hedgehog perched on a head.

“Mom?” Annette said. “Really?”

“What? I’ve seen you often enough in that position. I should know. This area always glows yellow, but I suppose you can’t show the color when you are working with gray clay.”

“But…”

“So, that’s what you see?” Dad said. “I always wished I could experience it.”

“Well, the color and brightness aren’t there. It’s nice to see a portrait, though, that shows what they really…” Mom said. Her face suddenly looked stricken. “Like they really… look.” She started hyperventilating. “Oh, dear.” Dad caught her as she fainted.

“I don’t think Mom has ever seen anything she recognized before,” Morgan whispered. “Can you imagine how hard it must be to live in her world?”

“But you live there, Fay,” Lady said. After the episode in the morning, Mom had gone back to bed and Annette had taken a very shaken Kendra back to campus by way of the art supply store. “Do you only recognize us by our auras?”

“Oh no, love. I see every luscious curve of your body in living 3D,” Fay laughed. “I thought Mom saw like I do. See this… spectacular fourth dimension that adds light, not only around you, but in you.”

“But poor Mom!” Annette said. “That’s why she needs dark glasses so often. You mean her eyes only record the fourth dimension?”

“We talked while you took Kendra back to campus,” Fay said. She looked puzzled as she sorted out the words. “Looking at Kendra’s clay model was like suddenly not being alone. She sees inanimate objects like the model. And photos. I think it’s why we have so many albums. It’s how she has learned to see us as other people see us. It’s how she learned what we look like. I mean to the rest of the world. She just doesn’t see us like we see us. We need to talk to Gramma.”

“That’s why you’ve never needed dark glasses,” I ventured, having spent some time putting together the words. “The aura doesn’t overwhelm everything else. You see both worlds.”

“I certainly got a super helping of aura sensitivity,” Fay said. “But I think you’re right. I can focus on an aura like I was doing when I described it to Kendra, but I see through it and as a result, the brightness is muted. Like when Pen drew your nipple.”

“What do you mean?”

“Among the three of us, and between Mom and Dad, there is an interaction of our auras. Do you remember what it felt like when Pen was drawing the first time?”

“At first, I was just a little embarrassed,” Lady said. “Believe me sweetheart, I love showing you my breasts,” she giggled kissing me. “But I’ve never been… um… examined so thoroughly. It was like you weren’t just looking at my breast and drawing my nipple, but you were looking right inside it. The longer you looked at me, the more sensitive my nipple became. I thought I was just fantasizing. I could feel you kiss and caress it. It started tingling and I could feel you touching me, even though you never got closer than a few inches.”

“What I saw was your auras reaching out to each other,” Fay said. “Little tendrils were touching and kissing. It’s hard to see my own, but I could feel it when Pen did my sketches.”

“Wow. Um…” I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask the next question. “Kendra?”

“Yeah. Her, too. It was no accident that she needed to go put her hands in her clay. Or something.” We all laughed about that. If it was anything like my experience, being talked through a wet dream by Annette and Morgan, then I knew Kendra’s hands had been in the ‘or something’ part of that sentence.

“You need to work with Kendra more,” Annette said to Fay. “She’s the only one who’s ever modeled an aura like you see, as far as I know.”

“I’ll help her, but I need to get a bigger vocabulary to describe things. It seemed like saying ‘thinner’ or ‘longer’ just didn’t give her enough hints.”

“I’ll work with you on that,” Annette said. “I’ve got ideas for some other experiments, too, but right now, I’ve got a real itch that I’d like one or more of my lovers to soothe.”

Final exams in art school are a little different than in liberal arts. Which meant that I had a final for my Liberal Arts Seminar and one for Art History. There was no tricky final in Freshman Studio, and in Drawing Studio we just had to turn in our sketchbooks. For Writing Roundtable, we had a final essay that was to encapsulate our key learning experiences over the first semester. I worked hard on it and Annette edited it for me. I was sure I did well. Annette thought so.

It was Drawing Studio I was worried about. It’s not that I was worried about the quality of my drawings or having fulfilled the assignment; it was the subject matter. We’d been assigned to make at least one drawing each day of a single subject. I had plenty of drawings. But they were all of nipples. Annette’s, Morgan’s, Kendra’s, and I’d even drawn mine a few times trying to get the difference between how my chest looked and theirs.

Aside from the fact that theirs sat on lovely soft mounds, the nipples and areolae were different. Mine were smaller and maybe darker. There was certainly more contrast between the dark area and my skin. It seemed I had fewer sulci than the girls and my nipples never shrank down to nothing. At different times, I’d seen all three girls when their nipples were almost completely flat against the areolae. And in spite of the fact that my nipples were sensitive and I liked having them tongued as much as Annette liked hers, they never got significantly bigger.

After Thanksgiving, Kendra invited me to her room after class and immediately stripped off her shirt so I could draw her again from a different angle. It would only take about fifteen minutes and she’d pull her shirt on again and if we had any assignments we could work on together, we did. If we didn’t, I’d rush over to the cafeteria where Annette and I would work on our writing assignments until she had to go to her late class and Morgan arrived from her last class so we could go home.

The upshot was that I had four sketchbooks filled with nipples.

“Very interesting, Arthur,” Dr. Robinson said when she reviewed my portfolio. “These are, of course, four different subjects and you were to draw the same one daily.”

“This one was the first day and there is at least one for every day after. I started this one the second day and there is one every day,” I said pointing to the sketchbooks of Annette and then Morgan. “Um… I only started this one at Thanksgiving and can’t do her every day.”

“And the fourth?”

“Uh… that’s me. I didn’t think to start that until a week or two later.”

“I know you have a little difficulty verbalizing your thoughts. You’re doing well, Arthur. This is a critique and evaluation from a classroom perspective, but feel free to offer comments if you feel I have missed something. Fair enough?” I nodded. Dr. Robinson was a good teacher and I felt like I learned things in her drawing class. Technically it wasn’t figure drawing, but I thought I had done the assignment. “Let’s look at a comparison between the first drawing of subject one and the last. Your first drawing was good. You are very accomplished at the basics of drawing. It is technical and shows your power of observation. It could almost be a medical textbook drawing. You captured things here that casual observers—and dare I say even passionate observers—miss. You focused on drawing every detail in great magnification. I hope it was magnified. If not, I don’t want to meet your model! But look where you are now. The detailed lines of the texture began to disappear as you took in the overall effect of that texture. I would have to say that, by comparison, the later drawings are less technically accurate than the early ones, but you have begun to capture something more. You have started to draw with emotional impact, not just technical accuracy. Do you see the difference?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. I could see the difference and found myself struggling to get the intense detail that I had in the first few drawings. I was afraid I was failing.

“This is where a technical drawing changes into an artistic drawing. From a technical perspective, I dare say we could compare your early drawings favorably to a photograph. But where this one has greater accuracy, the latter one has greater emotional impact,” she said. “You can see the same progress in the second subject. In a similar timeframe. I’ll skip to the fourth, your self-portrait. Notice that it continues to be highly technical through all the drawings. It never progresses to emotional involvement. But the third—your part time subject that you acquired at Thanksgiving—the change from extremely technical to highly artistic took place over less than two weeks. In fact, I can see it in the progress after just one week.”

“Is that good?” I asked. I wasn’t sure where she was going with this, but I could see the difference in the progression of the drawings of Kendra compared to Annette and Morgan.

“Yes. It is the essence of what this exercise has been about. You acquired the skill to see and capture the technical details rapidly and then moved on to the essence of the subject. There is no question that the four latest drawings are of different subjects, but three of them are works of art that capture more than the texture or details of the subject. Don’t despair about the fourth. We have over fifty self-portraits of Rembrandt and none of them approach the artistry of his other subjects, though all are technical masterpieces.”

“Thank you?”

“I hear the doubt in your voice, Arthur. You are welcome. And I encourage you to continue this exercise. If you can get more models, do the same and discover how your artistry progresses. I will even suggest that a couple contact you. Next term, you will capture them in paint, but you must continue to practice the basics with pencil and paper, even as you apply color and texture.”

I guess my project was okay. I got an A for the class.

“All I’m suggesting is that, since you live in town and will be available all through the semester break, you pose for Arthur and let him do a daily drawing of your right nipple,” Kendra said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Susan was in our Lib Arts class and was seriously cute. She also often wore… provocative clothing. She liked to show off her body, but in a different way than what Kendra did. It was really nice to look at, and I’d sketched her in class a number of times.

“Yeah, sure,” Susan laughed. “I don’t mind showing. If it gets his rocks off, I’m good with that.”

“But… no… I don’t…” What did she mean?

“Susan, you have to understand that Arthur is serious about this. He doesn’t do it to get his jollies.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to diss you, Art. It’s just such a bizarre subject. What inspired you to draw girl’s nipples?” Susan asked.

“Girlfriends.”

“Oh, yeah. Two of them, right? And Kendra?”

“My friend.”

“Do I get to meet these women?”

“That’s what we’re doing now,” Kendra answered. “It’s why I asked you to walk to lunch with us. Here they are.” By the time Kendra finished speaking, Annette and Morgan had both spotted us and I ran off to get a hug and kiss from each of them.

“Damn! He really does have two girlfriends,” Susan said.

“And they’ll both be present when you take your shirt off for him to draw, so don’t be imagining it will be anything but art,” Kendra said. “Annette and Morgan, I’d like you to meet Susan. She’s in our Lib Arts class and I think I’ve talked her into being a nipple model for Arthur over the break. I knew you’d want to meet her.”

“Hi, Susan. Aren’t you in my poetry survey class?” Annette said. I noticed she often took the lead when we were in a group setting. Morgan was right there to back her up, but Annette controlled the conversation.

“I thought I recognized you,” Susan said.

“Grab your lunch and sit with us so we can get to know you.”

“So, um… you’re really Art’s girlfriends and live together?” Susan asked as we got seated with our lunches.

“Yes. I’m still not certain if I should be proud of him for that paper or upset that he wrote about us,” Morgan said. She leaned over and kissed me to take the sting out of her words. I was really worried that I’d betrayed our trust when Professor Denham started reading that paper to other classes. Most people still didn’t know it was me. And most who did, thought that was the lie, though many couldn’t believe I’d been on detention for most of a year, and those I had class with couldn’t imagine me presenting a seminar at Idyllwild.

“I’ve been working on Susan to do a modeling stream for Arthur’s project over the holiday break,” Kendra said.

“Why Susan, Kendra?” Annette asked. “She’s a lit major.”

“Ye-es. That’s part of why. She doesn’t have to see all the art geeks every day.” Kendra glanced at Susan and our guest rolled her eyes. “And Susan’s kind of an exhibitionist. I thought this would give her an opportunity to do it intentionally to see how she liked it. And I’d like to do a couple clay molds with Morgan’s assistance to see if we can tell the difference the drawing instructor saw in the drawings. What do you say?”

“Is it safe? I mean, Kendra said I’d need to come to your house,” Susan said. We all chuckled at that, but it was obvious she was serious.

“Let me ask a question of you,” Annette said. “What do you think of Professor Étrange?”

“That’s kind of off the wall. I’m not really into the dead poetry thing, but I like him. He always seems to have a way of putting the poems we’re studying into a context that is relevant. Besides, he’s pretty dreamy, isn’t he?”