It had begun on the plaza -- a small oasis of concrete, dwarf trees and benches tucked down in the steel and glass towers. On crisp autumn days the women of the towers descended to the plaza to munch sandwiches, talk about obtuse bosses, suburbs soccer, Sex in the City, and obtuse husbands.
Elise noticed the small woman one day in late October. She sat apart from the others sketching at a pad cradled in one arm.
From a distance she looked like a child -- a flower child from another generation with straight dark hair parted at the center and a long cotton dress of tiny faded flowers. The women at lunch glanced curiously at her, but mostly ignored her.
One day Elise approached her.
"May I look?"
The woman smiled with small child's teeth. Her eyes were large, piercing gray, the skin dusky. Elise thought of gypsies.
"Sure."
She turned the pad. The sketch was a caricature of the women -- exaggerated jaws and noses, hiked skirts, knotted calves, outrageous breasts, broad bottoms, mouths in motion. A gaggle of absurdity.
Elise laughed.
Another woman drifted over, looked, shrieked. Soon a crowd gathered. The giggles overpowered the rustle of dry fall leaves. Pigeons on a ledge fluttered away.
The next day the woman -- her name was Micah -- sketched again, slimming a blousy secretary, arching her horn-rimmed glasses into alluring cat-eyes, and turning a large mole on the woman's cheek into a heart. The secretary was delighted. Micah tore it from the pad and gave it to her.
On Wednesday she gave a skinny paralegal gentle swells of breasts and huge fawn eyes.
A receptionist wanted a sketch for her boyfriend Thursday, but a copy editor had promised one to her husband. A twenty five dollar tip from the editor settled the dispute.
By Monday the going rate was fifty dollars.
"I played right into your hands, didn't I?" Elise said seven days into the enterprise. She had begun sitting with Micah each day, watching the lines and smudges spring to life.
The child-woman laughed as she sketched a stringy platinum attorney.
"If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else. Curiosity always gets the best of somebody. Do you want a commission?"
"Of course not. Do you make much money?"
"It helps pay the electric bill."
"Do you do anything besides caricatures?"
"Sure. Look straight ahead."
"Oh, please don't," Elise demurred.
"Don't be bashful. Straight ahead."
Micah shifted toward her and began to draw.
"I'd never do you in caraciture. You're too good a subject," she said.
"I doubt that. My chin's too weak -- and I hate my eyes."
"You're chin is fine and your eyes are great. Very unusual."
"You're kind. One side of my family is French, the other is Turkish. The result is --"
"Whore's eyes," Micah said and smiled.
Elise flinched.
"That's a compliment. Maybe erotic would be more politically correct," Micah said.
Elise laughed, but she felt a prickle of heat at her throat.
"Hold still," Micah ordered.
The heat on her throat deepened as Elise became self-conscious of the little woman's eyes on her. The breeze picked up, scattering brittle leaves across the plaza.
"Winter's coming," Elisa said.
Micah sketched in silence.
"I have to get back to the office."
"Okay," Micah said. She tore the page from the pad and held it for Micah to see.
"Oh, my!"
The figure was unmistakable A few lines captured the highlights in the dark blonde hair, the apples of the rising cheekbones, the small straight mouth, the large light brown eyes with the thick dark lashes and the straight slash of brows.
"Like?"
"Very much," Elise said.
A strong gust caught the page and tore it from Micah's hands.
"Shit!"
The little woman ran after it. Elise grabbed at the pad as it tumbled from the bench. The wind riffled at the pages. She caught it and looked down at a drawing beneath her fingers. Heat rose on her cheeks.
"I got it!" Micah yelled in the wind, holding the sketch tightly.
Elise turned the pad to her.
Micah looked at the page, shrugged and smiled with her little teeth.
Elise dropped the pad onto the bench and walked away.
"Don't you want your picture?" Micah called.
Elise walked faster, her face hot with blush.
Elise did not go to the plaza the next day -- or the next. She watched from her tower. The air had grown gray and cold.
Few of the women went there to lunch. Micah sat on her bench wrapped in a bulky shawl -- and sketched.
Elise tried to put the image on the wind-whipped pad out of her mind, but it always came back -- at her computer, in the boardroom, and always at night.
The soft lines of the shoulders, the curve of the narrowing waist, the subtle shadings that became shoulder blades and spine. The slender arms with long-fingered delicate hands. The cord that bound the wrists together at the small of the back. The flare at the hips that flowed into the graceful pears of buttocks. The lines across those globes -- so subtle as to hardly be there -- but clearly the marks of a lash.
And the face. Turned in profile over the left shoulder. The dark blonde hair cascading down. The small mouth sensually opened. The dark-lashed eyes. Whore's eyes!
"Why did you do it? Why did you draw me like that?"
Elise confronted Micah on a Thursday. The child-woman looked tiny and vulnerable wrapped in the old shawl, cold wind lifting her long hair. She sat alone sketching an old man who sat forlorn on another bench.
"Because I wanted to."
"How dare you!"
Micah's gray eyes flashed something Elise had not seen before. Not fear. Not anger. Steel, coldness. Then they softened. She smiled.
Evil child's smile. Tiny sharp teeth.
"Sometimes," Micah said slowly. "An artist sees beneath the skin."
Winter came in earnest one Saturday in mid-November. The sky darkened and lowered early. Elise watched her breath billow out in small gray puffs. The first orange embers rose from the street-corner cans and the men who warmed themselves turned to watch the tall woman pass. Her stride was steady but slow, pressed on by an unseen hand -- not on her back but on her soul. The hand had been there as long as she could remember, small and incomprehensible at first -- now strong, urging, beyond denial.
Sometimes an artist sees beneath the skin
She watched the numbers on the buildings. The one she sought was a red rough brick. She ascended the stone steps, pressed the button and waited for the buzz. The hallway smelled of old wood and many lives.
She hesitated, then knocked.
Micah wore the same faded-print cotton dress as the first time Elise had seen her.
"You came," she said. Her eyes were bright, alive.
Elise was struck by deep aromas -- fresh-sawn wood, oil paint, leather, the dull metal steamed smell of the radiators.
The apartment was a single room strewn with the orderly disorder of an artist. Micah's work stood on easels and hung on the walls. Sketches, etchings, oils, pastels. Elise stared an exquisite etching of a reclining woman's curved buttocks, stark and naked between the lines of a rigid corset and the bands of dark stockings. A whip was coiled on the bed beside her.
She felt the prickle of heat.
A lank young man with a scraggly dark beard looked up from a table where he was carving inctricate details into the wings of an alighting eagle.
"That's Chad," Micah said. "He's from New Mexico. We share the place"
The man nodded, then returned to his work.
