Nudes in the 21st Century

Jill Varani won the Open category of the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition with a tale which judges said was lightly seasoned with imagery, allusion and irony and would ‘leave its mark on you like the artist-lover’s charcoal thumbprints’. ‘‘A fetching title and an opening paragraph packed with sensory detail draw the reader into this concise, tightly controlled story. With every page we are exposed to new depth in the protagonist as she negotiates the gig economy, romance, an unplanned pregnancy, Grey Lynn real estate, guilt, grief and loss.’’

Here she is at the shabby community centre. The musty smell of old carpet and the sting of disinfectant. Her timing is perfect: they’re just setting up. She changes in the small bathroom behind the kitchen. In the tight space, she folds up her dress and places it in the canvas bag, underwear, socks and bra on top. She comes out wrapped in a white sheet, cold kitchen tile under her bare feet replaced by warm carpet. The floor is blanketed with light from the high windows of the old building. She stands in front of the group, throws off the sheet without hesitation. Like opening a newspaper. She holds her gaze over their heads and freezes, one hand on her hip.

‘‘Thirty seconds,’’ Dimitri says from the front. She listens to their pencils, their charcoal, swishing and swashing against the rustling pages.

When Dimitri’s timer beeps she changes her position, drops the hand, lets her glance slide down the curtain, and freezes again. In her peripheral vision she can see someone at the back using broad sweeping gestures, as if he were conducting a symphony.

Freeze, beep, freeze.

After the short poses, she must sit for the last two hours in one position. She chooses carefully, knowing she must be able to hold it even after the numbness sets in. Even after every muscle aches and burns, after the legs fall asleep and the blood sinks into the tips of the fingers. This is her talent: holding herself still against the pain until she is as solid as the furniture. And this is what she enjoys: all eyes on her, no part of her body unexamined, no fold of flesh ignored, no flaw un-noted. Sweat creeps across her skin, itching to be swatted away. Between her legs, crossed almost delicately at the ankles, the sweat drips into the starched sheet. Her ankles are pressed together like a knotted rope.

After a while she slips into a reverie, soothed by their constant glances as if by a lullaby.

When it’s over, she scans the drawings. It’s always a shock. Narcissus at the lake. She sees herself anew. Through their eyes, two dimensional. The odd length of her torso, the smallness of her hands. And the scar. Lightning from her cheek, along her chest to her tummy, forked like flames. Drawn in silver or deep purple or grey, smudged charcoal. It looks like a tattoo on some of the pictures. Stuck on, an afterthought. But she finds it most disconcerting when the artists have chosen to leave it out. As if they had tried not to see it. Instead smoothing her out, cleaning her up.

Dimitri hands her the money in an envelope. ‘‘You’re the best one,’’ he says. He’s blushing.

She mumbles her thanks, lets the envelope drop into the bag unopened.

Once home, she opens it. There is cash, three twenties, one ten, one five, scrolled around a small card. Dimitri Callas, Artist. She remembers his embarrassment and realises what it was for. Not the money. He didn’t know how to ask her on a date. She sets the card on the bench by the kettle and in the morning she looks at it again. Thinking of the way he looks at her before he starts to draw.

She hasn’t touched anyone since the accident, when her car had rolled off the side of a steep embankment and landed in the rocky lagoon beneath a waterfall. Sometimes now she hears the memory in the rain on the roof of her mother’s house: the thunder of water rattling the split metal of the car, frothing in the lagoon. She would have drowned if it weren’t for dumb luck, the way the car had landed. The memory still makes her dizzy. She often wakes from a dream of falling. Her heart buzzing against her chest like a fly trapped in a box. The water beating the glass. I’m here, she reminds herself. I’m right here.

The card doesn’t sit long by the kettle. Dimitri Callas. Artist. She remembers how he held her hand briefly when she’d first introduced herself. The way he caught her eyes in his as he drew her. His gaze holding her gently, wrapping her up.

He invites her to his studio, where he draws her again. She watches him, watches her own figure grow underneath his fingers. She cannot look away from his hands, black with charcoal like those of a coal miner’s. When he’s finally finished, he stands and approaches her.

Her hands are cold from posing for so long in his studio and he shivers as she touches him. She feels his hair, wiry up his chest. The curls on his head are soft as sponge. His mouth is warm against hers. His hands explore the body he already knows by heart, leaving a trail of black prints like bruises.

Her mother’s house is an old villa in Grey Lynn. Original floors beneath a vaulted ceiling, its exposed beams fanning down. The ceiling has always reminded her of a ribcage. There is no denying it: the house is beautiful. Real estate agents knock on the door. They leave pamphlets in the letter box. ‘‘Thinking of selling?’’

She isn’t thinking of that at all. It’s not really hers to sell, after all. But she could, if she wanted. She could take a holiday. Fly off somewhere.

‘‘Can I store a few things in your garage?’’ Dimitri says. ‘‘Just until I find a place?’’

She balks. Can almost hear her mother scoffing.

And how long is that going to take?

‘‘Please?’’ he says.

It isn’t as if she needs the space. She doesn’t own a car.

He has pages and pages of drawings which he stores in huge metal drawers built for architects and draughtsman. After the drawers are situated in her mother’s garage, he begins to show her his favourite drawings the way a doting parent exhibits photos of her children. Leafing through, laughing. ‘‘Look at this one!’’

She can see that Dimitri is a Serious Artist. Ambitious. He works big. He has range, enjoys variety. He never throws anything away. She can see how he started, small awkward figures outlined in thin pencil on the crisp white pages of cheap, over-starched paper. She sees the bodies grow in depth as he learned to shade, as he learned how to render light by its absence. Charcoal on brown paper, ink splashed against board. She sees the way sometimes, even now, a hand or a foot or one half of a person will be tilted at a strange angle from the rest. Dimitri explains that it wasn’t an error on his part, but simply that the model had moved during the pose. Ever-so-slightly over the allotted time, she moved -- they are mostly female models -- and the movement was drawn out over so much time that no-one really noticed. Except then the artists all looked at their drawings, afterward, and saw the strangeness of the body on the page, as if the woman were trying to escape it.

When she sees the drawings of herself she realizes that there is none of this awkwardness.

None of this movement. She is like a moth pinned to the surface, set behind glass.

‘‘You can choose one,’’ he says.

Later, after he’s gone, she’ll wonder why he thinks she should want one. The assumption almost naive in its arrogance. But she doesn’t refuse. She selects a small ink drawing of a woman reading a book. The energy of that pose conveyed by the uncertain neck, a smudged hand. ‘‘That one?’’ he says, one eyebrow arched. Perhaps he thought she was going to pick one of herself.

The pregnancy is a surprise. She had been told, after the accident, that it was unlikely. Now she is aware of the tiny bolt of energy warming her abdomen. She’s delighted for no other reason than this feeling, growing inside her, as if she has uncovered a new way of knowing the world. A new set of eyes. A new heart.

She poses in front of Dimitri in her mother’s lounge and waits for him to guess. She watches him impatiently, fidgets.

‘‘What’s wrong?’’ he says at last. ‘‘You won’t hold still.’’

She clears her throat, suddenly uncertain. ‘‘I’m pregnant.’’

He is very still for a brief, flickering moment. She clears her throat again, shifts on her feet. Finally Dimitri says, ‘‘I guess you’ll want to get an abortion.’’

He doesn’t look up from his paper. The dull spread of disappointment weakens her legs. She wants to sit down, but he’s still drawing. Why had she thought he would be happy?

‘‘I was thinking of keeping it.’’ It. She wishes she could rephrase, instead carries on. ‘‘I was thinking, perhaps, we could move in together.’’

Dimitri looks up at her sharply, as if he has only now seen her. ‘‘You would really move out of here?’’ he says, glancing around her mother’s lounge. Misunderstanding.

‘‘There’s room enough for both of us.’’

He doesn’t say anything. He recaps his pen and shuffles his paper together.

He doesn’t stay long. Doesn’t call her again.

Awoman’s body was made for pain, she thinks. The hugeness of her belly, the skin pulled tight and glistening. There is an imperceptible but constant shifting – of organs, tissue, muscle. A spreading ache throughout her torso, her back.

She’s tired and hungry and broke. If only there were money for proper food. She needs to make a plan. How is she going to pay for this?

Her neighbour is selling up. But this is not her house. Her mother still lives here, in some way. She is in the solid oak furniture. The off-white walls. She is in the choice of chandelier lighting in the entrance. The sheer gold fabric of the bedroom drapes. The brand new kitchen, barely used. The polished rimu floors. This is her mother’s house. She needs the money, but she won’t sell.

She still has her paltry job. The artists, even without Dimitri, are happy to welcome her. A pregnant woman! Nothing is more beautiful, they say.

So she endures the pain and stillness. Time, elastic, grows around her as her womb grows inside. Out and out and out. She tries not to think about Dimitri. His absence palpable in the room. She misses him. Though she shouldn’t. She’d hardly known him, despite the way he drew.

‘‘Dimitri moved back to Europe,’’ says the new group administrator. ‘‘He couldn’t afford the real estate.’’ Everybody laughs in the room.

She has to make do. She sells a few things. Not much, just enough. The oak furniture – a sideboard and a dining table. In exchange for a cot and baby linen and a woollen blanket. She keeps the spare bed and the dresser for the child – she imagines him already grown, a teenager. A boy. She’s having a boy. She plays with names, rolling them around in her mouth. Dimitri, Mitch, Tristan. She sells the lounge suite – it’s too good for her anyway. She sells the bookcases and all the books too. She buys baby clothes, pre-loved.

Here is her child’s room. The yellow nursery walls. A mobile with airplanes and birds together. A white cot and a toy box and a tiny bookcase with her favorite childhood books. Peter Rabbit. The Little Yellow Digger. She wishes her mother could see the room. Could tell her what she has forgotten. What she doesn’t know.

She stands there until the light is gone and the sound is the static of distant engines and crickets.

The cramps come early. Then the blood. They rush her into surgery. The scar tissue is suffocating the child. They cut her open and pull him out. He’s blue and silent and she knows before anybody has to say anything. He’s four weeks early. Stillborn.

She goes home with her carefully packed bag of baby clothes, worn by someone else’s child.

The wound on her belly is an ugly gash intersecting her old scar. The stitches take a long time to dissolve. The cut oozes for weeks on end. Each time she bends she feels it split again in places. The dressing is a constant yellow, blooming pink around the edges, and she has to change it often. It itches and burns.

Her nipples are also sore. Her breasts are heavy with milk. They weep through the night and she wakes twisted in wet sheets. Her body is a limp sack that she has to lug around. A Sisyphean punishment.

This old house is a dying thing, with its growing population of ghosts. Perhaps she’ll sell after all. The unused nursery has been left unopened since she got home. Her mother can be felt in every other room. Dimitri’s drawings wilt in the garage. Traffic wheezes by.

She starts with Dimitri. She’ll get rid of everything. But first she decides to go through the drawers. To look again at his work. Just to see if there’s anything worth keeping. The metal cabinets gleam in the half light of the garage. He’d abandoned this too.

Rifling through the paper, she marvels at his skill. So he was an artist. But something bothers her about it, has always bothered her -- his surprising lack of imagination. Nudes in the twenty first century.

There is one she likes, though. Despite herself. She’s looking up, hands on her hips. As if looking at something far away. In front of her, she remembers, is a roomful of people looking back. The lightning scar from her chest to her womb goes nearly unseen. A shimmering slash in silver pastel. He must have thought it was beautiful.

When she is able, she hires a car and drives to the place where her mother died. The little black urn sits in the passenger seat. Her son’s ashes. She carries the urn with her on the steep walk down to the lagoon. Her breathing quickens with the increasing noise. Finally she’s near enough to see the white water rushing over the rock face. She sets the urn on the ground, kneels down and digs an ankle-deep hole. She pours his ashes into the ground, covering him with the soft dark earth. Nameless one.

The waterfall is nothing like she remembered. The sound is less one you hear, like rain on a rooftop, and more one you feel, a drum echoing in your chest. A heartbeat.

He shivers as she touches him. She feels his hair, wiry up his chest. The curls on his head are soft as sponge. His mouth is warm against hers. His hands explore the body he already knows by heart, leaving a trail of black prints like bruises.