Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (24 page)

That was your father?

She didn’t answer, just
stuck out a hand. Help me up.

I thought his name was
Harriman.

Forget it, she said,
looking up at me, dry-eyed, smiling. She patted my huge hand. Forget it.

And I did, until just now,
here in this hotel room, with you.

Those were, as they say,
the days. But it wasn’t all tear gas and rock music, there were longeurs, still
points around which the world turned, as the thing grew and leaped and
metastasized from the complaints of students into a mass movement that had brought,
as they say, all of France to its knees. We went to the movies, to lectures, we
argued with each other in the Sorbonne and on the stage of the Odeon where
spontaneous, sometimes very funny skits took place mocking DeGaulle, Pompidou,
LBJ, the CGT, even our own leaders—I remember a tall boy with a pillow under
his sweater and a red clown wig, pretending to be interviewed by an obsequious
reporter. Committees, committees, trying to maintain some kind of order within
the larger chaos, picking up trash on the Sorbonne grounds, fixing the toilets,
organizing the donations of food that came in with astonishing regularity, like
grace itself, from the grocers and shopkeepers and delivery men sympathetic to
the cause. Money was almost
meaningless,
one committee
was set up to investigate the possibility of a student-printed and
student-administered currency to challenge the franc, the pound, the dollar.
The Communists and the Socialists, grown men, serious men, came to visit us, to
talk with the students but more often to be lectured by them, to do them
homage, almost humbly, in awe of what we had accomplished, astonished and
uneasy at the spirit that prevailed everywhere, the shaggy dog joke of the
revolution waiting for its punchline, in the meantime everyone behaving as if
liberation had already come, as if being young were enough. It almost was. We
were never bored but there was still time, somehow endless time in a single
month, between actions and riots and speeches there was sex and reading and
movies and football and theater and art and even sleeping, people slept well
when they slept, they fell down wherever they were, in ateliers and lecture
halls and in the apartments of friends and strangers, angelic smiles on their
faces. And the days went on. And it seemed that reality, what we had once taken
for reality, was well and truly suspended, permanent vacation, no future to
worry about. I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of
my desires. My slow fat heavy body was slower to take in this message than the
others. But I began to feel it in my limbs. I was looking at her differently
now, when she was listening to someone else, laughing, arm in arm with Charles
and Simone, dancing in the streets, hysterical with joy. But still, if she
caught me looking, I looked away.

But finally some alchemy of
indifference and curiosity led her, one rainy afternoon when Charles and Simone
were out, to agree to pose for me. It was a kind of dare she made herself that
I was the vehicle for—I did not flatter myself that her willingness to be
painted was different in kind from her willingness to tolerate my simple oafish
presence. But she did admire my skills as a draughtsman. I had
come
dripping from the school where I had been engaged in my
usual practice of poster-making, left my portfolio in the living room while I
dried off in the bathroom. When I came back she had my drawings out on the
coffee table and leaned over them, frowning, a cigarette burning unattended in
the ashtray balanced on the sofa’s arm. She looked up at me and gestured at a
pastel drawing of a large woman with broad hips and low hanging breasts, posed
so that she appeared all buttocks and thighs, but the head and hands were
waifish and delicate, connected improbably but firmly to her lower half by a
sinuous sway of spine and back.

Does she really look like
this?
Your model?

That’s how she looks to me.

But would I recognize her
if I saw her on the street?

Perhaps.

She lifted the sheet, a bit
roughly, to expose the next drawing: a nude man in heroic posture, as if he had
just won a prizefight, one fist in the air. His muscles were huge and
exaggerated, like those of a comic book character, but his genitals were exact
and ordinary—their ordinary proportions made the rest of him seem inflated like
a parade balloon. She laughed and glanced up at me and a quick little spark
crossed the smoky air between us, a spark I hadn’t really felt since that night
in the cemetery. She looked at another drawing, and another. Then:

You should draw me.

Truly?

Yes.

Have you modeled before? I
asked. Conscious of an unavoidable sleazy lewdness to the question, I tried to
make a joke of it by waggling my eyebrows, as if I were Groucho and she was
Margaret Dumont.

Not for drawings.

Photographs?
I asked, removing an
imaginary cigar from my lips.

She just smiled. When can
we do it?

Well…

Why not now? What do you
need?

What if they come back?

Then they come back.

Well. I don’t have my
crayons with me.
Or an easel.

Here’s a pencil.
And the card table.

All right.

She had stepped to the mono
turntable parked precariously on a bookshelf and lowered the needle: a Bud
Powell piano riff punctuated the air.

Where do you want me?

Producing a joint from her
purse, lighting it, offering me a toke.
When I reached for it she
laughed and danced away. I tried to look severe. She danced back to me and held
the joint to my lips. I inhaled deeply.

Behind the sofa, near the
window there.
No, don’t open the curtains—that light is perfect.
Stand right there.

She stood on the bare
floorboards near the tall window, from which I could hear the occasional
spatter of rain on the glass in counterpoint with the piano’s cartwheels. She
looked left and right, as though crossing the street, then began to unbutton
her blouse.

You don’t have to take off
your clothes, I said stupidly.

She continued to unbutton
as if she hadn’t heard. I persisted in my folly.

You realize this can take a
while and be uncomfortable? Modeling is hard work.

Simone says there’s nothing
to it.
Sliding out of her jeans.

Simone…

She said to me in English,
Shut up and draw.

She was naked. In a glance
I took in the salient patterns of lightness and dark: the skin of her belly, her
thighs, the tops of her breasts, her face. And the black hair on her head and
the shaggier hair between her legs, and the little tuft visible beneath her
right arm as she bent it back to adjust her hair. The shadows played on her
neck. As an art student, and before that, I’d looked at innumerable naked
bodies of every shape and age. Old men with goiters came to pose for us, and
middle-aged men who removed suits to reveal the hard round bowls of their
bellies, their sunken chests. Many of the women were beautiful, but just as
many were not, and indeed it was the ugly and ungainly ones who were the most
interesting to draw. Strangely, it was not M’s body, as enchantingly curvaceous
as it
was,
that my eyes and pencil were drawn to; it
was rather as if her disrobing had revealed her face to me for the first time.
I put her through rapid changes, assuming the voice of command that up to now
I’d only heard from my instructors: lift your left arm, bend your right knee,
turn away from me, face me, squat on the floor,
raise
both your arms. She did everything I said, the features of her face unmoving,
but a flush started in her cheeks and across the thin skin of her sternum as my
hand moved rapidly, mechanically, sketching, getting a feel for how that face
and that body could fill the blank space of the page, bear its whiteness, the
viewer’s gaze.

Are you bored? I asked her
suddenly.

No.

Tired?

A little.

All right.

I turned one more page.
Having broadly and rapidly sketched the volumes and masses of her body with the
broad side of the pencil lead, I now concentrated the point on her face. Strong
eyebrows made more pronounced by the pale clarity of her complexion, high
forehead, a slight endearing chubbiness to the cheeks, a full, almost drooping
lower lip and a thin bowed upper, a Mediterranean whisper of a mustache, like
Duchamp’s Mona Lisa’s, under her nose, which was angular, almost
broken-looking. A face that could be starkly arresting or beautiful, depending
on the light, but never pretty, never
jolie
, and in her blanker moods—when a dark repose overtook
her features and the light went out of her bright brown eyes and her thick hair
hung lank around her ears and her mouth hung slightly open, the better to let
smoke in and out—she could seem very nearly malformed and hideous. It was that
face, to my growing alarm, that I found myself drawing—my pencil had subtracted
the twinkle from her eye and rendered it heavy, dragged down by shadow, and the
upturned corners of her mouth on my sketching paper tilted down toward the
center of the earth. Her nose, a challenge in any case, had become a
Picasso-esque wedge dividing the Red Sea of her cheekbones, which in any case I
had somehow rendered bloodless though working in monochrome, even as a slow
blush worked its way across her living face and the chill in the room stippled
her nipples and the fine hairs on her forearms. With a frantic blurring motion
of my thick fingers I put in her hair, not the closely shaped cap that she had
in life but a jagged thundercloud that darkened and darkened until the pencil
point broke with a snap.

Can I move now?
she
asked.

Yes, I said without looking
up. I felt a vibration, a lurch, as when a train starts unexpectedly, the woman
on the sheet and the woman by the window, both utterly alive, giving and losing
reality to one another. I thought about her looking at it and was frightened.
With a quick slap of paper I overturned the sheet and started again. When I
looked at her, I saw that she was now in three-quarter profile, and that she
had crossed her left arm across her torso, slightly lifting her heavy breasts.
I started with them this time, carefully but quickly shading in their volume,
getting a sense of their slight ripple and pliancy, the surprising red-brown
darkness of the aureoles with a stray hair or two springing from their
circumferences, a little red mole the size of the tip of pinky finger on the
inside slope of the right breast, just above where her arm was hugging them
together to make a cleavage of nearly parodic generosity—something the curl of
her lip suggested she was fully aware of doing.

Should I move?

No. Stay there, please.

I felt now that surge of
energy in me that was not only the surge of arousal—though it was surely that—but
of attention, a kind of inward leaning toward the object of my gaze I had
experienced from time to time when drawing or painting from life, which I was
capable of not only when confronted with a beautiful woman (in fact it was
rarely the case, for I summoned an excess of sang-froid in such moments to
avoid embarrassment) but with men of strong physique who would flatly or
twinklingly engage my gaze, and sometimes even when doing
natures mortes
, when I would permit
myself to engage the full voluptuousness, color, and albedo of a plumskin, an
apple core, a blue China bowl. It didn’t last long. My hand moved more slowly
and caressingly up the planes of her body to the face,
then
in a few sudden motions the picture was done. I stood there for a moment, hands
at my sides, then lurched back from the table and
sagged
my head to the rainy glass, conscious of my burning cheeks.

Can I see it? She stepped
lightly forward and around the table to examine the drawing. I couldn’t see her
face but was left to read the angle of her inclined neck and the fine hairs
quivering there.

It’s beautiful, she said at
last. But it doesn’t much look like me, does it?

I shrugged.

She arched an eyebrow.
You’ve had your vision, is that it?

I shrugged again. She
lifted the paper to examine the first drawing; I thought to stop her but then
didn’t, instead continuing to watch the rain streak down the leaded glass
windowpanes. Lights and colors free of figure and form rippled on the pavement
below. I heard her inhale quietly.