fiction by claire stemen

Half-Shell

What a splendid thing to be naked! In front of fourteen people no less and yet Mira found she did not care. She sat upon a throne of no grand structure, her neck stretched regally, her fingers resting upon the seat, a single silky cloth tossed over her by a passive hand. Her eyes flickered in the direction of the clock. They had but five minutes left and this saddened her. This hour-long session once a week was her meditation, and her heart hung when she remembered she must go back.

“Time,” Tom said, letting his ill-fitted watch swing back down to uselessness. The sound frightened her, how harsh it was! Her mind roused itself in sleepy annoyance. She brought her wide eyes to a young man in the front. She watched him leave, but he did not look at her. No one did. No one would.

They only looked at her when they were in the midst of it and then they really didn’t look at her, they looked about her, at the edges of something unseen emanating from her, from which she was unacquainted. She was no longer Mira, she was an object with valleys and curves, highlights and shadows, and pencil strokes. She was an exhibition.

Mira had never been taken in the way they took her in, the pieces and parts of her separated and translated. Men’s eyes were starving or condescending and the women’s were sizing—always sizing—determining how to love or hate her. Her mother told her that it would be wise to avoid those darting glances, to abstain from reciprocation. Still, she wondered, she questioned the place where strangers’ eyes traveled, asking herself what attracted their leering. Was it beauty or distortion?

Everyday, nervousness flitted and flocked in the spare spaces of her chest cavity when she walked to pick up lunch or meet friends for drinks. It knocked around in her chest as she deflected a look here, a stare there, and, by the time she arrived, her hands were knotted and strained. It couldn’t go on like this; she couldn’t sustain her paranoia. Who’s to say that the older man with a bunch of bananas on the corner of 25th licked his lips because of her? Who’s to say that a woman rolled her eyes at her? 

She began reading any words that crossed her vision—newspapers, flyers, TV captions, instructions, nutrition labels—in lieu of eye contact. Pull with both hands. Tirez avec les deux mains. Made with Smiles and Unbleached Enriched Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid). . .

On and on, she’d scour the printed words on the sides of toilet paper dispensers or the wall in a coffee shop, positively crawling with business cards and flyers. And after seeing the same advertisement for a “Fun Run Five K!” three times, Mira realized she was stuck. She needed a new venue. The Art Museum pulled her eyes from the wall, looming some way away from the window she stood by, its grandeur more appealing than any storefront or sidewalk café. Mira checked her watch—she had time to spare.

Rembrandt. . . Dutch Painters. . . Ancient Roman Pottery. . . Help Wanted: Nude Model Required. . . Mira scanned the table of flyers before her, as she meandered up to the woman at the main desk. Nude. It struck her, brazenly emblazoned on this paper before her, boldly suggesting she confront taboo. The woman at the desk must have noticed Mira’s agitation and offered her a smile as well as the news that admission was free. Caught staring—she looked away, blushing. She nodded at the woman, pointed to the stacks of flyers, and said, “I’m just looking!”

She glanced back again quickly, reading it greedily. Now that it was there, that it had been suggested to her, growing from a hypothetical to an irresistible “what if,” the thought was escalating, developing, becoming a risk, a delicious notion. She snatched it, pretending to be in shock about how late it had gotten! Mira apologized to the woman—“Can’t make it today, so sorry, wish I could check it out, another time”—and targeted the brass door leading to the exit.

The little flyer traveled, folded hastily in the pocket of her jacket, through the streets, in the subway, a couple of blocks, up rickety stairs, into her apartment, and finally, concealed under her underwear in the top drawer of her dresser. Her back pressed against it, she plopped to the floor, landing with a muffled bump on the rug-covered hardwood and decided: she would do it.

*

The first time, she arrived on her tippy toes, apprehension creeping up her like mercury in a thermometer. She hardly knew what to expect. She hardly knew why she was doing this in the first place. Perhaps leaving would be best, shutting the door and forgetting this ridiculous business.

“Ah. You’re here. Mira, right?” a man in a white t-shirt extended his hand towards her. Too late. She had been spotted.

“Yes. . . ” she said. His eyes weren’t assaulting her, but they were relentless. She held his gaze. A pause widened between them.

“Tom,” he said, shaking her clammy hand. “Please. . . ” he gestured to a chair—some makeshift perch of blocks and cloth—in the center of easels placed in surrounding concentric circles.

“I’m sorry, but. . . What do I do?”

“You disrobe. Whenever you’re ready,” he laughed at her wide-eyed response, “I’ll leave for about five minutes and bring in the students. Enough time for you to prepare, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, trembling. He gave a slight nod and smile, turning to leave. She felt desperate: “One last thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Why didn’t you get a professional?”

“Because we don’t want to paint professionals,” Tom said. Mira nodded, not feeling appeased. She dropped her purse near the wall. “Five minutes,” he said and left.

The seat intimidated her; to reach it meant that she should be naked. She began by removing her shoes, entering this home with respect. Her steps silent, she glided towards the perch ahead of her, running her hands on the easels as she approached it, determined to find a way to rule in tandem with it. She moved closer, shimmied her sweater off and crossed her hands over her nearly-naked chest, shivering. She sighed and undid her pants button, then the zipper, hearing the unzipping at a volume that seemed impossible within the constraints of time and space.

Underwear-clad now, Mira faced the chair and glanced at the clock, she realized a minute—or less—remained of her time to prepare for this ridiculous endeavor. She flung her underwear off and threw it at the wall. It crumpled in a corner. She practically fell onto her makeshift stool, feigning ease.

The door opened.

“Mira? Can we come in?”

“Yes!” 

They came in, all minding their own business, laying a canvas this way or that, tenderly placing paint tubes, adjusting canvases, and arranging themselves in a circle around her. Her cheeks burned and she imagined the blood vessels in them dilating, but none of the painters looked at her, just a glance, if that. Even Tom busied himself, writing words on a teetering chalkboard. Then, he looked at her.

“Good, Mira. Begin whenever you’re ready, everyone. You have an hour.”

An hour. Mira despaired over how long it would be, how when idle, the hour is so long.

A young man sat directly before her. He observed Mira intently, running up and down her legs with his eyes. The urge to shift and hide overcame her, but she resisted. He sat without a tool in his hands, one of the few who hadn’t already begun, and seemed to be shaping her in his head.  He cocked his head to the side like a dog.

A woman to her left coughed. Mira’s attention flew to her. Was she laughing? Her eyes weren’t even on Mira, her brush on the canvas. There was tenderness in the look she gave it, like she was caressing the face of a child.

The hour passed without terror overcoming her, without any remark or sideways look to dissuade Mira’s continuation. Tom ended the class, the artists packed up and departed—simply departed, and then she was left to dress. She donned her clothes again, foreign as they felt, and answered with luminous eyes when Tom asked if she would return next week, “Yes!”

*

A month of posing and musing passed unnoticed by Mira. It rose to the foreground of her life. She waited for it eagerly, as if she had a new lover she couldn’t wait to meet illicitly. Some days she would arrive excessively early or stay late, wandering the halls of the museum, prolonging the time she spent in this bliss. 

She felt she could see something in these painted, sketched, and statued women that she hadn’t been able to grasp before. Their softness, the way their stomach folded and spilled onto their thighs when they bent over, cheeks ruddy and unevenly toned when they poured from a pitcher, and their drooping sleeping visages were untranslatable beauty before. Now, it was a language she could decipher. They were the same places she poked and prodded, sneering in the mirror, the ticker tape in her head, “if only if only. . . .”

Her fingertips grasped at her elbows in a hunched embrace. Here what was unforgivable was priceless, was world-renowned. All you had to do was affix a label indicating Name, Date, and Medium. She rubbed her arm—here—it would be here. Mira, 1995, Flesh and Bone. 

*

“Do you want to see them?” Tom asks one day after she finishes modeling.

"The paintings?” she asks. Tom nods, gesturing to a closed door.

When he opens it, she can’t see a thing. The lights aren’t on, but Tom urges her to step in anyway. “I’ll turn them on when you get in so you get the full effect,” he says. 

The lights switch on, flickering a bit. She is surrounded by herself, like in the reflection of a mirror into itself, continuing ad infinitum. She is surreal, she is impressionist, she is abstract, she is highlighted, and she is shadowed.

She recognizes herself in a large painting, all of her in shades of blue, cerulean, teal, and so on. Here her face is lachrymose as it slopes down, her chin resting in her palm. So this is her sorrow.

And here, her legs, punctuated with purple-tinged toes in an abstract piece. She never knew herself to be so leggy, never thought to knot them into pretzel shapes like here. A little bounce on her feet and she understands that yes, this is true in some way—these are her legs. 

So it goes, a painting of her backside, the contours of her shoulders, of her back, of the curve before her buttocks. Each strand of hair lying on her shoulders and running down her back, a system of rivers, connected and splitting at parts. Ah! There—that mole on her back she only learned of when someone pointed it out, their face twisting into disgust. She falls in love with that mole, with the way that this painter sees it.

“Do you like them?” Tom asks. Does she like them? Does he see them? She can’t see them anymore. Tears fuzzy her view, so that the gathering of her images wavers into a mass of technicolor Miras. Turning to Tom, she wipes her cheek hastily and sniffs up the gathering mucus.

“Oh yes, I love them,” she says, after gulping back her joy. He murmurs something about letting her be alone for a bit, Mira can’t recall.

The light comes in from cracks and spaces in the windows; it lands on her face and strikes her eyes, where everything glistens and cracks, fracturing into beams, like glass-stained windows of a cathedral. She sniffles and weeps at her altar.