"Could be some gal, you never know."
"You know what I mean," she answered sharply. "I'm being serious here."
"It'll be an artist. It'll be somebody with a good reputation."
"And it won't bother you?" she said, boring in on me with an accusatory stare.
"I don't know, Lea," I shrugged. "Maybe it will. I'm just telling you that this is what I want. It isn't something I just cooked up in that couple hours since I got your card. I've thought about this for a long time, I just couldn't think of a way to ask if you'd do it."
"And I gave you the perfect way," she sighed, sagging her shoulder into my chest.
"Yeah, you did," I spoke at her ear. "You think about it, okay. If the answer is no, then that's that. I don't want you doing something you wouldn't be comfortable with."
My wife sighed again, nestling her head under my chin, her fingers tracing circles over my thigh. I rubbed the back of her neck, feeling some of the tension melt away. I thought how much I loved her-how in a way I'd loved her from that first moment I laid eyes on her eighteen years before, when she'd driven my younger sister, Katie, home from Villanova.
I closed my eyes and had a perfect recall of her on that bitingly cold day right before Thanksgiving, the little Ford Escort she had, their dirty clothes and junk piled up to roof. She was wrestling a box out of the hatch when I came out to help them-her hair knotted back in a ponytail, a shapeless down jacket swallowing her up. She'd looked up at me and smiled, that was all it took. She owned me from that second on. Inside of two months we were dating, the four-hour commute between Villanova and Pitt seeming like nothing-then the engagement, then the wedding, then the kids. Like so many dominos toppling into place, all ending up with this terrific life we'd carved out for ourselves.
"It isn't a big thing if you say no," I murmured softly, stroking her silky hair. "Its nothing that important."
"No, a deal's a deal," I heard her say back after a minute or so. "So I guess you can start looking for a painter-somebody who'll hopefully make me look halfway good."
"He can't miss there," I whispered back, my heart skipping with delight, hearing the antique grandfather clock down the hallway as it started to chime its way towards midnight-a sonorous cadence of doom echoing through the walls of our picture-perfect home.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"I work exclusively in egg tempera," Kyle Donner explained as he took a seat across from us. "Egg white and pigment, no oils. No acrylics. I guess Andrew Wyeth and Hurd would be the best known of the people who worked in it." He sipped from the plain china mug gripped in both hands-he'd laced his coffee with a generous shot of Bookers Rye, planting the bottle at the center of his bare kitchen table, not bothering to even make an offer of it to either of us. "Tempera takes time, it can't be rushed. I've worked up my own palette, and I tell you that no one out there today can touch what I'm doing."
"That's why we're here," I answered, glancing quickly over at Leanne.
"I do only a couple portraits a year," he answered with a bored nod, again bringing the cup to his lips for a fast swig. "It's strictly dollars-and-cents work to me, a way to keep up the cash flow between my shows. It'll take at least a week and a half on average to complete, that of course though depends upon weather, seeing as how you want it done outside."
He reached down and moved through the snapshots of the waterfall, bending close to re-examine one of them.
"It looks like a pretty spot. How's the light?"
"Good I guess."
"Okay, then on to the particulars. I work on canvas. I do only about four or five hours a day, beyond that things tend to go downhill. I always work alone-just the subject and myself. I'm not there for entertainment. I don't put on a show. I don't want friends or neighbors dropping in to observe the so-called creative process, sit there watching me like some damned gorilla in the zoo. Anybody shows up, I close the paint case. Understood?"
"No one'll bother you," I assured him-hell, I was probably going to have my hands full just getting the "subject" there on a daily basis.
"Good," he answered curtly. He pushed his half-rimmed reading glasses down his nose and stared right at my Lea. "Mind standing up, Mrs. Ellison?"
I turned and watched Leanne hesitantly get to her feet, averting her eyes from his. She was dressed simply, jeans and a white blouse.
"Turn," he ordered, his index finger circling in command. His tone was officious, bordering on the arrogant.
Kyle Donner was a very big man, standing well over six foot, his short-cropped hair generously flecked with gray. The professional bio I'd pulled up on him-the one listed with the Chicago Institute of Painting and Sculpture where he held a Fellowship-said he was fifty-two. He had the solid physique of someone who'd labored with his hands. A man who routinely sledge-hammered rock and sank postholes.
You could just read the contempt he had for doing portrait work-of having to shop out his talent for some fast cash. By the look of his beautifully preserved fieldstone farmhouse though, he obviously did very well at it.
"How do you feel 'bout being naked in front of me?" he spoke up evenly, still doing his cool, detached appraisal of her body once she'd turned completely around.
"I'm okay with it, I guess," Lea half stammered.
"Mind undressing for me right now?"
I looked up at my wife, seeing her cheeks flush to a deep crimson. I wondered at what my own expression betrayed, as his words had set off the most unexpected jolt of excitement within me, a fluttering rush of adrenalin that coursed through my veins like a blazing flow of lava.
Lea's mouth moved over silence, she literally couldn't seem to squeeze a single sound out, much less a cognizable word.
"You can relax, Mrs. Ellison," he went on after letting her hang there for an excruciatingly long moment, waving away the question like unappreciated cigarette smoke. "That's just little assayer's query I like to run on potential models. The ones who don't blush and turn fifty different shades of red like you just did tend make really lousy nudes."
He lifted the coffee to his lips and sipped, never once breaking eye contact with her. I glanced up to see if the tension had eased from her features-it hadn't.
"Okay, so here it is. You want a nude done, then you get a nude done," he said slowly, leaning forward in his chair, deliberately picking for his words. "Don't take offense at what I'm going to say, but I paint what I see. How old are you?"
"She's..."
"I was asking your wife, Mr. Ellison. ...How old?"
"Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight next..."
"Kids?"
"I have two," Lea answered, almost glaring back at him now.
"Two kids and thirty-seven spell some not so perfect body lines. It's a simple fact of life. You pose for me, I paint you exactly as you are. Now you're very attractive, so don't take me wrong in this. All I'm saying is you ain't perfect, nobody is. Bodily perfection is a lie foisted upon our society by fairy Playboy photographers using a fucking airbrush, excuse my French."
"I guess I should be saying thanks," Lea muttered.
"No, I don't expect you to be saying anything," he clucked, breaking a smile for the first time. "All I ask is that you show up every morning on time. You don't wear makeup. You don't paint your nails or do anything with your hair other than washing and thoroughly combing it. And most of all, you never ask me to see the canvas 'til I'm done."
"...Okay," Leanne answered, shooting me a look to see if I agreed. I nodded.
"And one more thing," he went on quickly as he slid his calendar across the table and flipped to July-two months away, the kids scheduled to be a Lea's Mom's house for three weeks...marking the dates we'd indicated. "Something you need to understand about the basic nature of posing for a nude portrait."
He hung a short pause out there, looking from Leanne's face back to my own, as if waiting for one of us to make a well-advised break for the door.
"Nudes are about absolute vulnerability," he said finally. "The best work within the genre always has that type of edge to it. It's the reason we started wearing clothes in the first place, something you can easily make note of even in your most socially primitive societies. Why wear a damned fig leaf when you're out alone in the deep jungle? ...Do you follow what I'm saying?"
