A Study in Charcoal: Nudity No. 3

Published in Colonnades Literary and Art Journal, 2019; winner of the William Maness Fund Creative Nonfiction Award, 2019

The model was professional as her clothes came off, engaging in a laughing conversation with our professor, Anne, as she undid her bra, heavy breasts swinging free. Her body was lumpier than I expected. Clothes do a lot to smooth out the divots and dimples that come with being flesh and bone. Once she took that protective layer off, she had nothing left to hide behind.

She was quietly comfortable in her nudity, and I was maybe the only person in the drawing studio that blinked twice at the ease with which she revealed her body. I suppose that ease was learned, coming with many paychecks and many hours spent standing naked before a collection of 20-something art students.

The model climbed onto the raised platform in the center of the room. Her back was to me as she faced the mirrors mounted on the far wall.

“Make sure not to lock your knees.” Anne adjusted the model’s arm into the pose she wanted. The reminder was unnecessary, but worth giving. “You will pass out if you stand like that for too long.”

The naked woman didn’t react, allowing our professor to maneuver her body. As she made adjustments, Anne launched into a lecture on the contrapposto pose, how the Renaissance had encouraged the depiction of people as fluid, flexible beings.

“One knee bent.” Our professor reached out and tapped the model’s thigh. She bent her knee. “The other stays straight. This causes one side of the body to be higher than the other, creating lots of interesting angles.”

Anne dragged her fingers down the model’s naked spine to illustrate her point. “I want you to start from the spine and work your way out.”

Before stepping away, Anne adjusted the model’s hips. It exaggerated the curve of her butt, the dip between her hip and her waist.

It felt invasive to watch this woman be manipulated like a puppet. There was nothing sexual in Anne’s touch, nothing dirty about our model’s nakedness, but I still swallowed discomfort.

I adjusted my pad of paper, set the charcoal down, and began to draw.

***

He was sitting on our couch when I walked into the apartment. My work schedule had kept me out late, and I was the last to come home. I had forgotten he would even be there until I heard his voice mixed in with my three roommates’. Hearing them was enough to shock me into stillness outside the door to our apartment; it was the most I had heard them say to each other in weeks.

We all had received the text from our roommate, Kirsten, earlier that day: a friend of her was in town for a few days visiting, but his sleeping arrangements had fallen through; could he stay with us? I was the first to respond with a “yes”, despite the tension that now existed between the four of us, despite the stress of the past few weeks. What was the harm of a few awkward nights with a stranger sleeping on our couch?

Although, I suppose he wasn’t quite a stranger. While I had never met him personally, he had come up in conversation with Kirsten before. Every time, I would tease her about it, insinuating a deeper relationship between the two that didn’t exist, just to get a rise out of her. At first, the teasing made her blush. Later, she learned that simply rolling her eyes and ignoring me was the best way to get me to shut up about it. She had shown me a picture of him once, with a thick beard and leaning on a bicycle.

He was quick to introduced himself with a name and a handshake before I ducked into my room to drop off my backpack. His face was thinner than I expected, his beard more neatly trimmed than in the picture I had seen, his hair a little more red. I could hear him chatting up my roommates through my open bedroom door as they mingled in the kitchen and living room.

I took a moment to compose myself and made my way back into our common space. As much as I wanted to, it would be rude to immediately hide in my room while we entertained a guest.

He said something that made Kirsten laugh for the first time in weeks, and I smiled as I went into one of our cabinets for a glass. I could feel his attention turn to me as I opened the refrigerator.

“So, what kept you out so long?” he asked as I grabbed our Brita filter and filled my cup.

I turned to answer, meeting his eyes. “Work.”

Those eyes, I decided. That’s what made me uncomfortable. They were an unassuming brown, but intense in a way that made my stomach perform an impressive display of gymnastics. If I were to draw him, I would draw him with lots of lines of charcoal in and around those irises, more lines than anywhere else on the page.

“She works in the library,” Kirsten said, volunteering the information for me. I glanced over at her, but she didn’t meet my eyes.

“That’s cool,” he said. He leaned forward, propping an elbow up on the arm of the couch. “Do you like it?”

I straddled one of our barstools backwards, resting my arms against the high back. “Yes.”

He smiled, but there was a little roll to his eyes. “You know, it takes more than one-word answers to have a conversation.”

I took a sip from my glass to stall my response.

***

A line for the spine, for the hips tilted this way and the shoulders tilted that way. A curve to make the hollow between the hip bone and waist. There were ridges where her skin stretched tight over her ribs. Drawing a butt wasn’t as simple as drawing two half circles; there were dimples in the uneven distribution of fat and the cheeks were never the same size.

There was an intimacy in staring at the model’s body as she changed poses for that handful of hours, and I felt like I came to know her body as well as I know my own.

Anne’s voice pulled me from the trance of dragging charcoal across paper.

“One last pose,” she said, gesturing for our model to lie down on the raised platform. “Try to fill the whole page, to get the whole body in proportion.”

Our model’s hair spread beneath her like a puddle, one arm propping her head up while the other stretched above her head. Her legs were a tangle beneath her hips. The pose was more complicated than the other ones, with more of her obscured from view. Biting my lip, I set down the charcoal and started with the line of her spine.

Her left breast was slightly larger than the right, hanging down lower and hiding more of that ribcage. A shadow between her legs, beneath her chin, carving out a jawline. Lines behind her knees to show how they would bend.

I met her eyes over the edge of my pad of paper. Sort of. She stared straight ahead, blinking every so often, but looking past me. I paused on her face, my charcoal against the paper. There were no lines in her eyes, nothing of interest there. I left her face blank and moved back to the rest of her body.

***

This was not what I had signed up for when I agreed to let him stay. I thought I could get away with twenty minutes of limited interaction before claiming I needed to do homework and retreating to my room.

I settled on honesty when I spoke again. “Sorry. It’s just been a shitty day. A shitty couple of days.”

My roommates lapsed into an uncomfortable silence when I said that. We had been friends long enough that I knew they could tell something was going wrong in the last few weeks, but they had neither the time nor the patience to ask. I had learned to read my roommates well over the last year of our friendship, and I was familiar with the silence that came with their stress. It was a new theme in our relationship; I wouldn’t talk about my problems, if they would not talk about theirs.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he said, no hesitation in his voice. “Sometimes an outside listener can really help.”

Or any listener at all. I was keeping my issues to myself, knowing my friends had no room in their lives at the time to deal with my problems, but not talking was quickly becoming an issue of its own.

“No,” I said, hunching down against my stool. The answer was automatic, learned in the absence of understanding from my friends. I twirled the charm of my necklace around its chain, mimicking the action of my stomach.

“That’s fine,” he said, sitting back. “How about I tell you about myself instead? Ask me a question.”

This was not anticipated. I glanced around the room for inspiration. “What’s your favorite...” my eyes landed on the pumpkins we had out for Halloween. “Gourd?”

The words sounded more awkward out loud than they did in my head. Two of my roommates burst into laughter, while Kirsten looked ready to slam her head in the refrigerator door. My cheeks pinked. Our guest raised one eyebrow so high it practically vanished into his hair.

“Really?” he said. “That’s the best you could do?”

I shrugged, swallowing my awkwardness. He would be leaving in a few days and I would never have to see him again. What did it matter what I said?

“Probably not.” I straightened my spine. “But what’s your answer?” He thought for a moment.

“Acorn squash,” he said. “With lots of butter and brown sugar.”

His eyes met mine, and in an instant, I knew he saw right through every pretense I put in the falsely confident set of my shoulders.

“I think this might work better if I ask the questions,” he said.

I shrugged. “Okay.”

He leaned forward again. His eyes bore into me. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

I pressed my lips together, staring his down instead of looking away. “What even makes you think something’s wrong?”

He looked ready to roll those eyes he wouldn’t take off of me. “I could tell something was wrong the minute you walked in the door.”

I didn’t want to tell him he was right. I didn’t want to tell this complete stranger about the stress and the panic and the sadness that had been building the past month. My roommates—my friends—wouldn’t listen, but here was someone who would.

I could feel my roommates’ eyes on the back of my neck, waiting for the words to come crawling out my throat. I wanted them to, but this was a stranger, and despite the fact that he was offering no judgement, I wasn’t quite ready to believe him.

“I’m just tired,” I said with a shrug. The words burned in my mouth. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t look like he believed me for one second, but instead of pressing, he shrugged. “Well, if you change your mind.”

My hands were shaking as I took another sip from my glass of water, saying nothing as he drew my roommates back into conversation.

***

Anne ended class ten minutes before the time listed on my schedule. She offered our model a hand, pulling her into the sitting position and helping her to stand. I hurried to finish up the last few strokes of her body. She sprawled across my page, body bent and twisted in the final pose. If I had turned to other pages of drawings, I would have seen that she was faceless in every one.

Our model put her clothing back on with the same quiet confidence that she had taking them off. Pants slid up to cover the wrinkles of her knees, a shirt was pulled over her head to hide the tucks of skin at her sides. There was an intimacy in drawing her without clothes, and that intimacy remained when she put them back on.

I tossed my charcoal into my bag of supplies and then flipped my pad of paper closed. The rest of the class slowly filed out as I slipped my materials into my flat file and turned to gather the rest of my things. Our model stood laughing with Anne, looping a scarf around her neck. The article of clothing felt oddly out of place; we had just seen her naked not five minutes before, now she was wearing multiple layers, her armor going back on.

I met her eyes across the room. They were blue and bright and dancing, but in the corners, I could see the lines. More naked than she was without her clothes. If I were to draw her then, I would give her a face.

***

My hands shook as he came to sit next to me on the couch, and I pressed them between my thighs to get them to stop.

He had been sleeping on our couch for two days, but it took him less than three hours to get the words out of me. My roommates departed one by one that first night, and as each one left, the harder it had been to keep from spilling all my secrets. The pressure disappeared entirely when Kirsten went to bed, leaving me alone with our house guest.

He listened quietly as the words came in the absence of a fear of judgement; words about stress and panic and my roommates; how we had stopped talking and our trust had stopped with it. How the night he arrived was the first night in a long time that we were all in the same room for longer than five minutes.

He stayed up with me long after my roommates vanished into their rooms, when my mind was too busy to even think of sleep. Again, sleep was a long way off.

He tugged at my wrist and pulled my hands out from their prison between my thighs. Our fingers laced together. His palms were rough, and he squeezed my hand tight. My heart squeezed too, and I took a moment to remind myself it was just a show of support. Nothing more.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, voice soft. The lights under my roommate’s doors had flicked off hours ago. “You’re going to be okay.”

We were balanced on the edge of a cliff, he and I, on the verge of a change from something easy to something much more complicated. I couldn’t help but wonder if he felt it too.

I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes, mopping up tears, and then under my nose, mopping up snot.

“Why do you even care?” I croaked, blinking to get rid of the tears. “This is ridiculous. I have got to stop crying.”

“Crying isn’t bad,” he said, squeezing my hand again. Everything in me tightened. “And I care because I know where you are. You know, emotionally. I’ve been there, too.”

I choked on whatever words I would have said. His eyes looked so sad, eyebrows pulled close together. If I were to draw him then, I would put just as many lines in his forehead as in his eyes.

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

I looked at him, considering every word before I answered. “I’m thinking about how I would draw you.”

He raised his eyebrows, a look I had come to recognize in the past few days. “And how would you draw me?”

I pulled my hands from his and tucked them close to my chest. “You have a lot of lines in your eyes.”

He paused. “What does that mean?”

“With charcoal,” I clarified. “If I were to draw your face, there would be lots of lines of charcoal to make your eyes. They’re...piercing. Weighted.” I paused, but then let the next words roll off my lips. “They make me want to be vulnerable.”

I could tell by the way his body fell still that he could hear the honesty in my voice. It was another vulnerability, that answer, but he was honest with me the entire time I had known him, so I felt obligated to give him the truth. It would have been easier to lie to him if I knew he was capable of lying to me too.

“Vulnerable isn’t bad,” he said. He was quiet for a moment, looking at my face. “You would draw lots of lines in your own eyes too, I think.”

I pressed my lips together, and when I blinked, two fat tears made their way down my cheeks. He saw them and reached to pull me into a hug. I leaned into it, wrapping my arms around him, my hands catching in the soft fabric of his shirt. Another step towards the edge.

He traced a comforting hand up and down my spine and held me until I was done.