Lines of Curiosity – by Margaret Aitken
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The building was once used for storing vegetables, but the huge fridges have been re-crafted into offices, the drafty attic spaces renovated into meeting rooms. Crumbling bricks and dusty wooden floors testify to the original use. Paint peels from the rectangle that stands against the winter sky.
I scramble up the hill toward it, my silky dressing gown stuffed into my bag. I’ve chosen my outfit carefully. It’s easy to slip in and out of, doesn’t wrinkle when folded, not suggestive. I don’t knock before I open the corrugated-iron door.
Sunlight pours into the building at every angle. There are various pot plants in the corners and a huge bookshelf of architecture magazines beside the space for coffee and tea. Halfway through, we’ll take a thirty-minute break here. I’ll be wearing my dressing gown and anxiously fussing with my cleavage so it doesn’t show. Someone will have brought a homemade cake or muffins or sweet loaf. We’ll chat around the table, about art classes happening in the next town over or the new movie with Emma Thompson or if Victor’s son will make it home in time for the wedding. I don’t talk as much as some. I’m the only person at the table under the age of fifty. They have all seen me naked.
*
The building’s been renovated into an art studio. The people I work for don’t own the building; they rent it for the afternoon and we all climb the stairs in a nervous way. There’s a window seat with a single orange cushion. Jemima, one of the artists, can’t come anymore because her knees are shot and there’s no elevator. As they walk, Madeline, the organiser, and Victor discuss whether that’s violating some code or not. I hurry to make it up the stairs before them, anxious to get it on with.
Madeline has a book with positions she’d like to draw. We discuss what I can and can’t manage. I can hold my arms up for five minutes if there’s something to hold onto. I can’t sit on my legs for longer than thirty seconds. I can stand up straight for fifteen minutes. I can lie down for an hour. I duck behind the screen and fold my clothes, hiding my underwear underneath my jeans and t-shirt. I try to make as little noise as possible. This space is used for storage as well. Little sculptures, golden vases, piles of plastic-wrapped canvases. In the corner, a painted portrait of a skeleton watches me with a perverted glare. Ignoring him, I slip into the dressing gown.
By the time I come out, most of the artists have finished setting up, and have paper on their easels. They shift on the uncomfortable stools. There’s a little platform draped with a white sheet and I grab a couple of props. There are a few introductions. I consult on what they’d like and how long they’d like to go for.
‘Shall we start with four five-minute poses, and then move on to ten-minute sitting ones?’
Viktor’s forehead wrinkles. ‘Could we do fifteen-minute poses?’
‘Absolutely, shall we get started?’
They nod, so I slide off my glasses, ascend the platform and slip off the dressing gown.
It’s honestly so goddamn anti-climactic.
*
To be honest, I’m an incredibly amateur model. Some people can pose for up to six hours. Sitting up, mind you. I would die, unless I had a podcast or something to listen to. At least once a session I’ll get too ambitious for my own good and try a pose that I just can’t hold. I’m lucky I work with such kind and patient people, or I’d have been fired. When you move, the last fifteen minutes, the last half-hour of tiring work is lost. But somehow, I’m not faulted for it. It’s the most peculiar things that will get you. Bent knees will mean your calves will start to lose feeling. I have to be careful how I angle my back, or the spine will make itself very well known. It doesn’t really matter what I do, I’ll be stiff by the end of it.
The trick to staying completely and utterly still is to choose a speck on the wall, a patch of light, or a crease of fabric and fix the eyes there. If my eyes don’t move, the rest of me isn’t as tempted to. I become a statue of the artists’ design. My eyes are fixed but my mind is not. I allow it to wander and daydream. My body wants to scratch and twitch, to flex. We’re not supposed to stay tensed, that’s the thing. It’s a sign that something is wrong. So my brain tries to drift out, but my body wants to alert it to danger.
“My body wants to scratch and twitch, to flex. We’re not supposed to stay tensed, that’s the thing. It’s a sign that something is wrong. So my brain tries to drift out, but my body wants to alert it to danger.”
The body will say, You can’t move. We cannot move. My brain, of course, starts logical. It will say, Yes, we are not moving. We’ll move later. Then my body will say, And what if we can’t move then? The spider on my back whispers that I have inadvertently frozen myself. That without knowing, for the long hour, I’ve become petrified. This brushes up against the other fear, of disappointing the artists. If I move just to check that I still can, I’ll ruin the pictures. I ride the worry like a wave.
*
The worst part of modelling, the most chilling, is the bones of it. The ordeal of being seen naked. Or of being seen. And in modelling, you can’t just be seen, you must be studied.
At the end of my poses, I put on my dressing gown again and take a slow walk around the studio, looking at the pictures of myself. Drawings are so different from photographs. There is kindness in the strokes, curiosity in the lines. Some draw noses so much more attentively than the rest of the body; some artists only want to study hands that day.
When I look at the pictures, I talk with the artists. I congratulate them. Some have to be coaxed. They sigh and say, ‘Oh, these legs are too long, this head is too small.’
My eyes gaze back at me in smoky charcoal and surprise me. My legs seem so much rounder and nicer, captured in hazy lines. Where I felt the light pouring in, I now see it spilling onto me, dripping over me.
I circle back to Madeline to see what she’s drawn.
‘It’s a handsome pose,’ she breathes. It’s not a pose I usually like, because it contorts the fat on my body. A roll of skin, framed perfectly by my elbow, the height of attention.
‘Look at the way this lines up,’ she says. ‘It’s beautiful. I loved drawing it.’
It’s beautiful.
It’s beautiful. ▼
Image: Dhanya A V
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