Art Object

The first time that I saw Violet Gable was on a warm Saturday afternoon at the end of March, when I decided to sit in Mount Vernon Square and admire the weather, as well as the young women just out of their winter coats.

Needless to say , I had no idea that she was named Violet gable. I was fairly sure from looking at her that she was somewhere between 18 and 25 (20, I eventually found out), and that she was a student at the Art Institute since it was nearby and she was using a pencil and an art pad.

She was slim and long-bodied (or I guess long-legged, really) and cute if not strikingly beautiful. She had medium-length black hair and dark eyes (though I did not see them that day). I kind of wish that I could say what she wore that day, but I am afraid that I do not remember.

She favored dark slacks and flowered blouses, though.

I hope that all this does not sound like I was staring at her. Certainly I was glancing at her - enough that she caught me at it and smiled.

After that I tried not to look at her openly, since I did not want to make her nervous or make her want to move away. When I got up to leave, I made a point of walking behind her to see what she had been sketching - it was the ornamental fountain in the middle of the east end of the square.

The next time I was in the square was probably a week or so later, and I will admit to sitting where I could get a good view of Violet, once I saw that she was there sketching again.

By the square was as reasonable a way as a couple of others to go home from work, and a good way from the central library, and I began to take it regularly. If I went by the library, I had a good excuse to stop and sit without seeming to stalk her - I could read for a while in the sunlight.

Some of the sketches were probably assignments, but some I am sure were not. I glanced at one that may have begun from a drinking-fountain there, but grew more elaborate in the telling, as it were, and surely had more and more varied birds around it than there was ever in one place and moment in Mount Vernon Square - though they may have been somewhere in Mount Vernon Square that day.

I always looked for her, I usually stopped if I saw her, and once in a while I commented on her work, though I worried about bothering her. I suppose I was cautious enough, since she smiled at the attention.

Then one day, a Saturday, she walked over to me and asked if I would be willing to have her draw me.

I put down the book I was reading and said to her:

"Yes, but if I am going to be a model, I expect to be paid for it."

She tilted her head and frowned.

"You have to agree to have coffee with me at the Buttery when you are finished," I continued. That was a coffee shop a block away.

She thought for a moment, and said, "Okay."

That was how I learned her name, and a fair amount about her classes (part-time, mostly evening; she worked in data-entry days) and her ambitions. She hoped to get a job with a comic-book company as a penciller, and for that reason worked on being fast but fairly realistic.

She was single and unattached at the moment, not even seeing anyone, which sounded good to me. At the end of an hour as we were about to part, I asked her for a date. She said no.

Well, she was still nice to look at. I still stopped, and one day in June there was a sudden shower. I had prepared for it by carrying an umbrella, and she hadn't. I liked to carry tent-umbrellas, the sort that open to six feet across, and I offered to walk her up to the Art Institute.

She accepted. By holding the umbrella up high and between us we could walk without quite touching or getting very wet. By the end of the trip, as she was going through the door to wait for her class to start, I asked her for a date again.

She laughed, and said, "I admire your persistence. Why not? All right, just this once."

"Please," said, looking very hurt. "At least wait a while before turning me sown for a second date. Who knows, you might actually like the first one."

She smiled and turned away.

As it happened, she did like the first date, for all that it was something of a busman's holiday for her. We went to an art museum; the Walters had reopened its medieval wing after two years, and she spent most of the time studying armor and weapons. She was fascinated though appalled by the small shield with a concealed pistol in the middle of it. She refused to let me buy her the exhibit catalog, but agreed to the postcards for that wing.

She also agreed to a second date.

For the first date, we met at a restaurant and parted at her car. On the second, I picked her up in front of an apartment building and drove her to another one at the end, where she actually lived. During the second date, she was willing to tell me that she had an apartment of her own. Before that, she had implied she lived with her parents.

We spent one or two afternoons or evenings a week together after that, and I found that I got to like Violet quite a lot. From what I could tell, she reciprocated. Certainly the kisses, while a little slow in coming, showed that. As did a few other things, though nothing major or prolonged. I was not inclined to push her toward the physical very much. Let's just say that some evenings left us both flushed and happy, though not fully satisfied.

I posed for her several times. I offered to pose nude, but she said that she was willing to use her imagination there, at least for a while. I suppose not too much imagination would be needed, since she did see me in swimming trunks on the afternoon we spent at a pool. (I had hoped to see her in a bikini, but she wore a modest one-piece suit.) But she took a number of fully-clothed snapshots of me in different motions and emotions.

Toward the end of October I had met her in her apartment on a Sunday afternoon, when she got a telephone call from an old friend or hers. The friend was a young woman who had either had a big fight with her boyfriend or caught him cheating on her, or something of that sort. In any case, that woman was very upset, and Violet felt that she had to go over and calm her down.

Violet warned me that this might take an hour or two, though maybe only a few minutes. I had barely met the woman, once at a party, and would be of no use if I went with Violet. Indeed, I would probably make the woman feel worse if she thought she was interfering with our afternoon.

So would I just be willing to stay here and wait? I would, of course. There was nothing urgent about the afternoon for us.

I did not feel like watching television, so I began to look at the books on Violet's shelves, though I had glanced at them before. I looked at her magazines, and read an article or two.

I yielded to an impulse and got up to look around Violet's bedroom, which she had always kept the door of closed. I found that there were a few dresses that I could not recall seeing her in, and a lot of fancy underwear that I would like to.

At the other end of the apartment were her art supplied, and with them portfolios of drawings, some in color. I found that these were grouped by subject - buildings in one, statuary and such, birds and animals, smaller objects, scenes, and people. I was surprised to see that this last case did not have any drawings of me.

Then I saw that I had a folio to myself. On top were the ones that I knew of and some from photos that Violet had taken. Then there was one of me in a bearskin with a club in one hand and Violet thrown over the other shoulder, a caveman dragging off his mate. A picture of me in a Highland kilt with a sword, in a parody of a romance novel cover, with Violet in an impossibly frilly dress, almost showing breasts larger than she really had. Me in a flamenco outfit, bending Violet in a Spanish dress back in a deep kiss.

That seemed to be the last. But no, there was a zipped compartment in the back that seemed to have something in it. I pulled the zipper.

The first one showed that Violet did imagine what I would look like nude. Full frontal, too. The second one had me from the rear, standing in the shower with Violet, one of her arms around me and smiling wickedly while her other hand was between our bodies. No doubt working up a lather, from the suds.

The third picture showed me lifting one of her breasts to my lips where I circled her nipple with my tongue and her mouth was opened. Her mouth was open wider in the fourth, while mine was busy about two feet lower than the breasts on her prone body.

In the fifth drawing she was also lying on her back, with her eyes staring at the erection that I had poised and about to enter her. This became a case of life imitating art, since what was in my pants by this time was as hard and full as what was in the drawing.

In the sixth drawing I had entered her almost all the way, and Violet's body was arching under me.

After that were less detailed sketches showing us in various positions and variations. One in particular intrigued me, since I would not have thought it possible for a woman to swallow quite that much of a man's apparatus.

I restored the drawings to the zippered compartment, sealed it, and carefully replaced the folio. Then I sat and thought for a while.

After a few minutes I decided to do some more classical snooping and looked in Violet's bathroom medicine cabinet. Among the more usual things - headache remedies and such - I found birth control pills. The date of the last refill showed that she was taking them currently, the date of the prescription was before I ever had spoken to her, so she had probably been on them for some time.

I sat on her couch again and looked through some of her art books, thinking through the implications of what I had learned about how she thought.

When Violet came back, two hours or so after she had left, I looked up and said to her:

"I've heard that you can learn a lot about a person by observing how they live, especially from the books they have. I think I like you even more than I did before."

She looked at me, thought about it, smiled and nodded.

"I suppose that this afternoon is going to have to be written off," she said. "Are you willing to just stay here and talk? I could fix us dinner after a while."

"Spending time with you without definite plans appeals to me quite a lot right now," I said to her.

As she walked across the room toward me, I set down the art album, got up, and took Violet in my arms, bending her far back and kissing her deeply. She was startled but cooperated quickly.

She also cooperated with, and enthusiastically elaborated on, everything else that I suggested that day. It seemed that she had kept her fantasies away from what she felt proper to actually do, and having me act out one of her milder fantasies broke the dam, as it were.

I saw the inside of her bedroom again, this time with her in it. That kiss led to another, which led to my holding her waist in my hands and kneading my fingers into the small of her back. I raised my hands to her shoulder-blades to hold her to me above the waist and pressed my hips - and a part of me that she had drawn sight unseen - against her below the waist.

My hands returned to the small of her back and my fingers dipped below the waistband of her skirt to find the bottom of her blouse and pull it up. I touched the bare skin of her back, there and soon higher up. When I reached the bottom of her bra, I extended my hands around her, going from her spine forward, then moving around until my thumbs were under the cups and I could push up against her breasts.

Violet stepped away from me, but took my hand to show that she had not been offended. She looked at the couch for a moment, and took a step toward it, then stopped.

"No," she said, but rather to herself than to me, I thought.

Those dark eyes looked up into mine and studied me. She said, "Yes, I can. Yes." Just what the question had been I did not know and never asked, but the results became plain. She stepped to the door of her bedroom and turned the knob with the hand that was not holding mine.

Our clothing slowly made a neat common pile as we removed it from each other. I learned that her drawings of her nude body were very accurate, though reversed left-to-right since she had copied it from a mirror. Not that I confined myself to looking at her, when I could touch and taste her, and see and hear her reactions to my touching and tasting. Though I did look a lot at her slim face between sessions of kissing it.

Her reaction to having one breast lifted and caressed by my tongue was not quite as she had pictured it, but very gratifying none the less. What Violet did when I buried my face between her legs - well, I of course could not see what she did, and the picture could not capture the sounds she made.

She did indeed stare at my erection as I knelt over her and prepared to fulfil a daydream of hers (and mine) by filling her. At the next stage, she cried out as her warm wet walls moved apart and I moved inward, over and over.

Violet showed that her slim body could be used as artfully as her pencil or brush, with a bedsheet for her canvas. Ah, the art of love!

Our collaborative effort was a masterpiece (or should I put it that way?), we both felt, when I painted "each secret hidden part" with my seed. We rested in each other's arms for hours afterward. No, that's not true; we mostly rested, but our hands and mouths did some roving and I was in a place much tighter than her arms after her skilled hands worked up my human clay - though not to the end this time.

In the evening, she put on an apron (just a long apron, hanging from her neck) and made dinner for us. We ate in out underwear.

We talked over plans for next weekend and I began to prepare to go home when Violet asked if I wanted to take a shower with her first. I would be inclined to accept an offer like that from a young woman anyway, and when I though of the second drawing in the zippered section I was definitely interested.

Yes, her hand did work up a good lather, but we got the sheets wet afterward. We almost did not go back to her bed, but staying in the shower was more appealing than comfortable, though we tried it.

I left her early in the morning to change before going to work. That night I called her, and the night after. On Wednesday she asked if she could come over after class; she brought an extra dress and put it on in the morning. After three weeks, we moved some clothes into each others' apartments.

At the end of December, we signed the lease on a larger apartment, for both of us.