Virtuous Women by Sharon Coleman

Virtuous Women

nonfiction by Sharon Coleman

Once you consider your skin as working clothes, art modeling’s a pretty good side job. It’s like getting paid to meditate. The drawbacks are sore muscles (a perennial problem), finding sufficient work (classes use a variety of models), and the occasional voyeur. The latter comes in different forms: students from other classes, various workers, passers-by. Also poets and, even worse, fiction writers, who look for nakedness in nudity—who think this job is kinda sexy. Truth be told, you have to spin your thoughts to keep from getting bored. And stay almost absolutely still. But since this routine works for me, I sit like Eve—in blessed shamelessness—in a miniature Eden. The students come in hauling supplies, leaning to one side to counter the load on the other. Most are retirees. Some still middle-aged. An occasional college student. Some come early to chat. We’ve known each other for years and we’ve watched each other age. Each year, my hair’s greyer, and they mix in some white pigment to show it. Today I learn Jim’s last name, Reisman, and that he passed—an obituary’s taped outside the prop room, his life story in seven paragraphs. Others arrive right on time or while I’m doing the one-minute warm-up poses. I watch that only they come in, not some curious stranger. Actually, most of us keep an eye out for voyeurs, especially Jody, our teacher, who has the arm strength of Artemisia’s Judith—should she need it. All around, Jody’s got strong ethics: curtains kept closed, students reminded to tip, slight movements of the model are dealt with by the artists, and no photography— unless the model agrees and is paid extra. All the reasons why I’ve worked with her so long.

Today the students take a while longer to settle into wordless rhythms as their lines become forehead, cheek, shoulder, arm, a composition on newsprint, canvas, or thick pastel paper. Theirs is a choreography of measuring and sizing up proportions with one-eyed squints and a thumbnail on a stick or brush end. All muscle memory. And when they settle into theirs, I settle into mine: muscles relax into the pose and my mind’s free to float.

42

Ginny is late and just settling on the horse-plank with a pad of newsprint and charcoal. After chemo, she gets tired easily. Monica stands behind an easel and a goodsized canvas; she’s been drawing me for fifteen years, starting with small canvases and controlled strokes. Her sense of composition has vastly improved. Chuck is still dawdling with naïve abstracts in acrylics and tipping me well. Again, Mary reminds me that we once shared surnames before marriage changed hers. And again, I wonder whether her ancestors had mixed as much as mine—my surname a last remnant. Only Jody doesn’t settle. She rarely does even if she’s sitting at the back table filling out supply forms or working on a portrait. Her home studio is filled with almost done paintings. Before a show, she picks a few and finishes them without a model like the portrait she did of me years before: she completed the torso with her own breasts. Not as ahistoric as Michelangelo’s uncircumcised David, just odd and interesting to those who know.

Thirty minutes in, the door opens—a bamboo screen at first shields me on the model stand from an unknown person. I scan his quick, uneasy steps— long dirty-blond hair, white button-down shirt, worn blazer, a sketchbook gripped like a bible. He tells Jody he just signed up and sits down, removing the cellophane from his pad to draw. The class is already five weeks in. Eyes that normally pass from me to the work in progress now glance at him and each other. Jody goes to check his registration at the office.

Seven minutes: Monica watches him while she wipes a brush in a rag with solvent; Ginny leans back pretending to measure proportions; Chuck just paints; Mary leaves her easel and stands behind Jody’s table, turning pages of Grey’s Anatomy, a plastic skeleton grinning behind her. Mary looks up, and her scowl matches my greatgreat grandmother’s in a family photograph where she sits Irish stiff among her American children. Between my shoulder blades, through my chest, up to my neck, a wave of heat turns my olive skin red. Whenever the intruder’s eyes rise, mine shift away from him and then back when he looks down to his sketchbook. His hand ceases to move around the paper and just glides across, left to right—knuckles pumping. He’s writing. I fix my stare, hard, let his

eyes meet mine. His right hand grips the yellow pencil until his thumb breaks the lead point. He looks left and to the ceiling. Years ago in Jody’s class an older man to my left held out his pad to show his drawing to the younger man next to him. “The shading is everything—with it the body is there,” he ran his finger over the sketched figure. “This is my son.” They both looked into my eyes, smiled, returned to their craft discussion. If only more fathers taught this way.

The man in front of me, channeling his special kind of perversion, opens the pad to another page. Drops of sweat bead across my back. One rolls from my upper lip to my lower. My eyes statue-still. Of course, visual artists know the body’s no more than a contoured projection screen. It could be any vase, plastic fruit, silk flower, the old sewing machine collecting dust in the prop room, where we models change amongst these inert colleagues. Artists have no entry into my spinning thoughts—the part most invisible.

Jody returns, makes a beeline to him, her steps heavy. Just as we suspected. She leans over his shoulder. My mind falls upon the jeweled dagger in the prop room—dull as the day is long.

44