BANG OUT

Violet unlocked the classroom with a quick turn of her copied key. Entering, with the door shutting behind her, she found herself swallowed in strange volumes of darkness. The polished floor stretched through various degrees of shadow; a flat lake of concrete in that abandoned hour of night.

Vi suddenly perceived figures standing there in the room amidst the blackness, staring at her. They gaped, bent into grotesque positions and held their breath, watching. They stood motionless, like skeletons. Violet’s eyes slowly adjusted and she convinced herself finally that they were only easels. Someone had left them out after the advanced painting class. Violet groped at the wall beside her with clammy fingers and found the light switches. She flicked up the nearest four out of eight. A murky fluorescent rectangle illuminated in the ceiling above her head, two more over the counters, and one in the ceiling of the walk-in.

With just enough light to navigate, Vi moved to the center of the classroom. She rolled the easels, rearranging them sporadically as if to erase the intimidation of their first encounter. She then positioned them in an oblong circle that surrounded the modeling platform. One by one, she drew more easels out from the cluttered walk-in. The easels were a circle of dance partners, waiting for their students to enter.

Violet was startled by a noise as a freshman girl with dreadlocks pushed through the door, clicking her cell phone and scowling at the screen. The girl hoisted a satchel off her shoulder and slung it to the ground. More students entered, two or three at a time, chatting as they entered the blurry room and dropped their things against the wall. They claimed easels, resting enormous pads of newsprint on their sills.

When Ms. Roberts entered with a click of snakeskin high heels, she glared into the dim perspectives of the room. Then with a snarl of contempt at having to do everything herself with no help from Vi, she flicked all the remaining switches. The room jumped into new levels of light that underlined every object in the room at once.

Violet felt dizzy from the bright room; she slunk back into the cluttered shadows of the walk-in and opened her bag. She pulled out her artist’s smock. It began as an old collared shirt of her father’s but had belonged to Vi ever since she moved off to college and discovered it packed away with her things. She slipped the smock on over her sweater and rolled the big sleeves up to her elbows. The shirt tails hung down to her knees. Vi left her bag in the walk-in, picked up her newsprint and carried it into the classroom along with charcoal and pencils. In the glaring lights of the classroom, her smock looked dirty with clay and charcoal finger-streaks, built up over months. Oils and acrylics stained her in a thousand hues.

Searching for the space heater, Violet opened the door to the adjoining office. The doorknob pushed into the soft waist of a girl who looked back at Violet with a glare. Her eyes shimmered darkly above a nose that flared for an instant. Her pouted lip had a piercing and she wore only pinstripe boxers and a thin men’s undershirt that traced like a ghost over her skin.

Violet dropped her hand off the doorknob and stared with a silent apology. The girl shrugged past her and walked out into the center of the classroom where students casually ignored her approach. Violet stood motionless in the doorway, watching dumbstruck as a nervous feeling rose within her. Ms. Roberts made a gruff announcement to the class:

Our usual Tuesday model, Saundra, has the flu, so we have a substitute for the day. Please start the two minute sketch.

The new Tuesday model stepped up onto the platform. She turned the metal folding chair backwards, then straddled it, leaning back. Where her legs extended, the lower muscle hung from the leg line. Students considered the shape and line of these legs, calculating the amount of clay that would roll between their hands later in the evening. First they had to sketch her body, its compact volumes, its bronze sheen.

Violet remembered the space heater. She found it in the office, grasped tightly at its handle and carried it through the busy orbit of students. She placed it down on a bare corner of the platform and turned the dial to a medium setting. The coils flushed orange with an expanding glow that reflected off the model’s shirt and angles of her face. Violet glanced up at the model by accident and was rushed by an intense beauty, the glow of heat refracting against the model’s defined face. She had meant to ask if the heater was warm enough, but her throat swelled with silence. She tightened her dirty smock around her own frail body and dropped her eyes to the model’s feet, bare and bent against the platform’s surface.

Vi turned and pushed away from the easels and the students, now sketching methodically. Their eyes followed closely along the path of their own fingers, dragging charcoal against the page. Vi followed the path of her awkward sneakers with as much concentration towards the mixing barrel.

Already lagging in her assistant duties, she would do this one task ahead of time. She lowered the dense blocks of clay into the barrel and drenched them with a pitcher-full of day old water. Letting it soften, Vi peeked back at the model’s pose. At least from this distance the sound of her breath was inaudible. Vi churned into the clay, her eyes still glancing up, mixing the blocks of tough material. When it had softened a little, she dug her hands in deep. Leaving impressions of fingers, fists, and palms on every surface of the clay, she pressed all her weight down through her arms and into the material. She went to refill the pitcher at the utility sink. Adding more water, the clay finally loosened and billowed in on itself.

Eventually, Vi couldn’t stop staring at the model. She glanced up from her task while pouring water, while churning, while pressing. The model’s form was neon and burning like a dancer in a nightclub, as if her body did not belong in the sterile white light of the classroom. She curved back against the negative space below her. The hoop in her lower lip caught the moisture from her mouth.

Most models didn’t wear makeup, as this was an artistic exercise in appreciation of the nude. Most models let their natural beauty hang out in fleshy weight. Most models moved with serene respect for the form of their own bodies. But her eyes were painted with eyeliner reflecting black like metal. Her body twisted back further than the chair allowed. Her dark, narrowed eyes searched the faces around the room.

Ms. Roberts’ heels clicked over towards Vi. Violet, tell the model to get undressed, Ms. Roberts commanded in a whisper, we need to start the forty five minute sketch.

Vi stood and breathed in, hands aching and covered by a film of clay. She approached the platform with the intention of seeming nonchalant. Her eyes settled on the clothes, what she was about to ask the model to remove. Then, reeling her eyes back too late, Vi had glanced at the dark, rough curls between fabric and thigh. Vi coughed and turned her head quickly to cover the gaze that had unexpectedly come out of her. The model would be naked in a minute, anyway, but that was different. That was Art.

We need to start, Vi said to the model in a shaky murmur, hoping the request would be understood. After the sentence was out, Vi slipped back to her place by the barrel of clay. She avoided looking directly at the model who was boldly peeling off her underclothes. Instead, Violet watched the student sketches of the body as they developed around the room. Some used dark, thick lines. Others etched a thin film of charcoal in sweeping, atmospheric patterns. None captured the animal growl Vi had seen in her; the legs thrusting forward, the exposed teeth.

After half an hour, Vi was dizzy from over-churning the wet clay and her underarms burned with the repetitive motion. A few students lined up by the barrel, ready to take a portion of clay, as if their sketches were done. As if they had seen all there was to see in her. Vi was surprised by their ease as they took the sticky heaps of clay and landed them on the rolling stands. They wheeled about the room like brown bonsai mountains.

Soon the whole class had moved on to sculpting. They dug in immediately, barely looking at the model. They made legs, stomach, chair, back, and stuck all the pieces together. Last week’s female model was much heavier through the chest and sides, with thick wobbly pads of flesh above her hips. Sculpting her had been simple because the textures were similar. Softness created folds. Clay became body.

The students tried to use that same technique this week, clumping heavy limbs of clay together, but frustration took over. The rough drafts they created leaned strangely off their bases. The students grimaced at this new Tuesday model and her difficult body. Her pose was balanced on the curve of her spine. Her eyes and neck strained. She was not asexual like other models whose breasts you could pass off as fleshy muffins. She was harder to look at, or at least, harder to understand.

She was looking back at you.

Copyright © 2009, Laura Wolfe