“At the next class I put Margot on the stand, seated on a low stool. I aimed a light at her right knee and told them to draw it. From the work in front of you, you can see how things have progressed. There are now classes four nights a week, and a waiting list. Managing the students grows more and more difficult. I have to keep dangling the girls in front of them to get them to draw the clams and carrots. The girls are really too complex for them. I insist that they make an honest effort to sketch the week’s simple object before I bring the girls out. This insistence of mine has become a kind of joke. They arrive chanting it.”
He laughed in spite of himself and shook his head.
“It goes something like:
You must make an honest effort.
I insist that you make an honest effort.
Please won’t you make an honest effort—
Before I bring on the girls?
But as time goes by the ‘honest effort’ shows less and less effort and less and less honesty. Their real desire shows through their work—”
He held some of the work up for me, a drawing at a time, just drawings that he chose at random, not the drawings of the girls, but the drawings of the set pieces—the watermelons and clams and potato chips—to illustrate the point he was making.
“You can see their impatience with the task,” he said, “in the lines that are too quickly drawn, just laid on the paper to fill a space, to satisfy a requirement, without a thought for what they depict or reveal—and what those hasty lines really reveal, of course, is that their maker wanted to be done with the assignment, to be let out of the dusty schoolroom, to picnic with the girls. They want more girls and more of them. My daughters have begun a sort of attenuated striptease. You see that they’re down to these wispy bits of fabric already, and I don’t see how, if I’m to hold on to the students and complete the study, they can avoid having to pose—well, surely you know what I mean without my having to say it, so I can leave it unsaid—can’t I, Peter?”
There was something about the suddenness of this direct personal address that seemed to bring me right into the middle of the action that Andy was describing. It made what Andy was saying affect me more profoundly, and made me more attentive and full of active interest. I seemed to be right there in the class with the other students, ogling the girls in their wisps of cheesecloth. Suddenly I had the suspicion that the whole story up to this point had been the elaborate construction of a trap—this trap. You see the spot I was in. If I agreed that Andy and I could leave the missing word unsaid, then I would be acknowledging that I understood that the missing word was nude, wouldn’t I? What else could it be? And if I acknowledged that I understood that the missing word was nude, I would be admitting that I was able to complete the picture that he had sketched for me up to the point of the missing word. Archetypes, indeed! Ideals, ha! He was trying to find out whether there was, residing in my mind somewhere, an image of his daughters nude.
I smiled inwardly, because I knew that I could pass the test of this particular type of trap. I was a boy on the edge of adolescence, after all. I knew what to say in a moment like this.
“Huh?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
“I mean,” he said, with a note of impatience, “that the way things are going, it won’t be long before they’re posing in the nude.”
“Wow,” I said, with what I hoped was more a tone of embarrassment than lechery.
“Well,” he said wearily, “that’s not your problem.” With an air of coming to the point at last, he added, “Let me show you what is—I mean, the problem that I think you can help me with.”
[to be continued]
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