Ruins & Relics
stories by Alice Zorn
Nude on Velvet
Hardy grins. “I bet you like that.”
Ben doesn’t answer.
“Hey, you can’t argue with the rationale. That spoon is nude.” Hardy has to look up at Ben when he speaks. He’s short with a shaven skull and a mouth full of crowded teeth he’s always more ready to show with a laugh than hide. Ben stands with his legs apart, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his trench coat. He’s still attractive — with his chiselled jaw and deep-set eyes — despite his pallor and strangely puffed skin. Both men are Toronto artists who’ve placed enough pieces with the Heritage Art Bank to assure them a few grants yet.
“A nude?” Ben scowls. “That’s just screwing around with words — to make you see it that way.”
“I don’t know.” Hardy tilts his head, leans close to the glass. “You have to respect the artist’s intention. How you’re supposed to see, not just what.” He grins at Ben again.
Ben sees his goofy teeth and looks away.
Other cases house a carving knife, a slotted spoon, a potato masher with a wooden handle. The masher is called Meeting a Deadline. The slotted spoon is Dreams vs. Mortgage.
“No, but really,” Hardy goes on, “why not see a spoon as a nude? It’s not dressed. It’s got a head. So what if it doesn’t have much…?” One hand describes a sexy curve in the air.
“Because a nude is the human body. Not just any object that doesn’t happen to be wearing clothes.”
“Dictionary definition?”
“I do nudes, remember?”
“There’s the rub,” Hardy hams. “He’s on your territory. You’re — ”
“Not even,” Ben cuts him off. “Not until he’s done a nude.”
The art gallery is small, but its name and location are prime. The front is glass, open to the view of passersby on the street. Eggshell white walls, discreet lighting, only one massive pink styrofoam relief sculpture hanging, as well as a small, early Borduas behind a Queen Anne desk. The gaunt woman who sits there, her thin neck rising from the cowl of her shawl-like dress, can no doubt hear Ben and Hardy, but she keeps her eyes on the open — and so far today empty — agenda on the desk before her.
Hardy taps a finger on a case that holds a glass juicer on a doily. Dinner with the Boss. “What about art as anarchy? The reign of unreason, found objects, humour?”
“This isn’t anarchy. And it’s not funny either.”
“Maybe this guy thinks your nudes are passé. The human body! You hardly discovered it. There’s no way you can do a nude that hasn’t been done before. It’s the body, it’s the body, it’s the body, right?”
“It’s still the only one we know.” Finally roused, Ben drops each word precisely. “Let’s come to terms with that — the way we are, straight up. Flesh and bones. Nudity. No landscapes to frame it. No costumes. No sentiment. It’s our body whether it’s sick or it’s healthy, ’til death do us part. There’s no divorce and no warranty. You’re stuck with it even when it starts to give out.”
Hardy watches Ben and, for once, doesn’t tease or grin.
“You try painting that,” Ben says, “and then see how you feel about this gimmicky shit.”
A young woman, tentatively sidling in from the street, seems to wonder if she can approach them. “Ben? I thought that was you!”
Hardy raises his eyebrows, ready to be amused again. Ben only looks at her. She smiles, dimpling her light-brown cheeks, and coyly slides a black curl behind her ear. Finally Ben says, “Hardy, Shoba. Shoba, Hardy.” And as an afterthought, “My model.”
“For your show?” Hardy gives her an approving once-over.
She turns to Ben, eyes wide with delight. “You’re having a show?”
He seems about to deny it, but then admits, “Maybe.”
Hardy glances from one to the other. “Where do you find these gorgeous women, Ben?” And confiding to Shoba, “I don’t do nudes myself, but I’d give it a shot if I knew where Ben got his models.”
Shoba smiles at the praise. She knows she’s pretty. But she’d sooner he say more about the show, since it doesn’t seem that Ben will. They’re paintings of her. Of course she wants to know!
Instead Hardy brings her to a display case. “Tell me, what do you think?”
To Shoba the slotted spoon looks exactly like the one she has at home in a drawer, but she knows she can’t say that. “I was just passing by on my way to work,” she gestures at the street, “and I saw Ben. I didn’t really — ”
“Can’t you see it’s junk?” Ben asks irritably.
She looks at him with surprise. “Then why are you here?”
“Politics,” Hardy says. “You don’t think painting pays? This is how we make our living. You never know who’s going to be on a committee or a jury. It’s hard to schmooze if you don’t know what people are doing, right? Sweetheart,” he croons, turning to the pink relief sculpture on the wall, “your conceptualizations of styrofoam are brilliant!”
“Bloody nuisance,” Ben says.
Shoba blinks at them. She wonders if they’re teasing her. Uneasy now, she suddenly remembers the time. “Oh! I have to go or I’ll be late for work.”
Ben turns away. Hardy more graciously holds out his hand. “Nice to have met you.”
She shakes his hand, but she’s watching Ben. “Tomorrow at eleven?”
“Isn’t that what we said?”
She didn’t forget. She wanted his friend and the lady at the desk to hear that Ben was expecting her.
She swings through the glass door and trips down the single granite step. The news that Ben will be having a show twirls through her mind like a song. The four canvases are large enough that if the show is in a gallery fronted with glass, like this one, she’ll be visible from the street. She presses her arms to her sides, excited. She’s going to be in a show!
She turns onto Queen, her heels clicking rapidly. Already November, the wind slaps cold fingers. She was supposed to get to work in time to relieve the last of the lunch crew. From a distance she can see the neon cactus that heralds their high-end Californian cuisine. White stucco walls, blonde wooden tables, a clay tile floor with woven sisal runners, dry desert tones and textures.
Jerry waits at the bar with his jacket already on. Before she can say a word, he nods at the dining room. “That couple by the wall have been crying into their coffee all afternoon. I think they’re breaking up. I didn’t ask them to pay. And them — ” He fans a hand at two women, “I just gave them menus.” He looks at his watch. “Gotta go.” And with an unpleasant moue, “You’re late.”
Asshole, she thinks, deliberately not hurrying as she heads to the back to take off her coat. Through the service window to the kitchen she sees the manager, Gail, talking to the chef. Gail looks vulnerable with her narrow shoulders and dark hair feathered around her face, but Shoba sees how she stands eye to eye with the chef. She could be flirting; she could be discussing the menu. Either way Shoba knows she won’t leave the kitchen until she gets what she wants.
All evening the tables stay mostly empty. The first cold weekend. People would sooner rent a movie and order sushi, pretend that winter isn’t coming yet.
Shoba stands at the bar, waiting for Vance to make two Cosmopolitans and a vodka martini, when Gail slides onto the stool next to her. “You look like a cat who’s had a bowl of cream.”
“Mm,” Shoba agrees with cat-like reserve.
“Mm, what? You’re dying to tell me. You know you are.”
Shoba cocks her head in a will-I-won’t-I gesture. “Remember I told you I was modelling for this artist? Well,” she can’t stop herself from smiling, “he’s having a show.”
“The paintings must be good.”
Shoba lifts her chin, ready to take the credit, enjoying the envy in Gail’s quick up-and-down scrutiny.
“You’ll have to tell me when. I want to see them.”
“Are you kidding? I’ll tell everyone I know.”
By ten o’clock there are only three tables left and Gail tells Shoba she can go. Christina can handle the after-theatre crowd. The play next door has had bad reviews, and the house has been far from packed.
Shoba didn’t expect to get off so early, especially on a Saturday. She calls Kyle at home, not at all surprised when he doesn’t answer, then tries his cell. From the noise she can hear that he’s at a party or in a bar.
“I’m finished work. Where are you?”
“I’ll leave,” he says. “Meet me at my place.”
She pouts into the phone. “I feel like going out.”
He pauses before telling her where he is.
“Kyle, that’s only a few blocks away. Why should I go all the way up to your place if you’re just there?” Shoba has known Kyle for almost a year. Friends often comment that they make a handsome pair, her with her black hair and brown skin, him with his Nordic good looks. She brought him home to meet her family in Calgary, and afterward he told everyone how her mother fed him lamb samosas and perfumed his sheets. Of course, at her parents’ they couldn’t sleep together. He hasn’t mentioned the trip for a while now, though, and when she asked if he wanted to go at Christmas, he said he couldn’t get the time off work.
In the dim light of the bar, Shoba scans the crowd several times before she spots Kyle’s blonde head. She has to maneuver between tables and around bodies. Her coat snags on a chair. What a nightmare it must be to work here.
People sit to either side of Kyle. She taps him on the shoulder and he nudges the man next to him, who looks at Kyle, sees Shoba, grabs his beer, and moves down the table. The music is so loud it all happens in pantomime.
Shoba recognizes a couple of the people from Kyle’s office. She nods and they nod. They lean into each other’s ears, shouting. Probably about work. And on a Saturday evening. No wonder Kyle always seems so stressed.
A violet ray from under the DJ’s table lights his chin and nose grotesquely, making him look like a jack-in-the-box monster. The thump of the music reverberates so thickly Shoba feels it as pressure on her skin. She sips her Moscow Mule, not letting Kyle rush her, though he keeps turning his head to see if she’s done yet. Let me enjoy my drink, she thinks. Finally she lifts her empty glass to show him they can go.
Outside the air nips after the warmth in the bar. Shoba snuggles her chin into her collar as they walk to the subway. “It wasn’t too busy tonight,” she says. “And guess who I saw on the way to work? Ben.”
“Who’s Ben?”
“The artist I sit for. He’s going to have a show — of the paintings he’s doing of me. Isn’t that great?”
“You never told me he was having a show.”
“I didn’t know before. He doesn’t talk about his work. Big Mr. Silence. But his friend who was with him today, he said so.”
They’re walking down the stairs when they hear a train and break into a run — feet pounding, arms wide — to try to catch it. They slip through the doors on the warning bing-bing-bing, Shoba gasping with laughter at how crazy they must look, and drop onto a side bench. The few people in the car look sullen and weary in the harsh light.
Still breathing heavily from the dash, Kyle says, “Shouldn’t he have told you he’s having a show?”
“I guess he was going to.”
“When he had it all set up? What if you don’t want to be in a show?”
Shoba’s eyes widen. “Of course I want to be in a show!”
Kyle stares down the length of the car. “You don’t mind if half the city sees you naked?”
“It’s not like that! It’s art. It’s …” But then she smiles. “Are you jealous?”
Kyle turns his head quickly. She’s never been able to read his pale blue eyes, but there’s no mistaking the annoyed slash of his mouth. “I’m talking about the way he’s using you as it suits him.”
“He’s not using me. He pays me.”
“And that gives him the right to do whatever he wants with the paintings he’s done of you.”
“I told you, it’s not like that. You don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand.” Kyle looks away.
“He’s an artist. He’s painting me. That was always the plan — that he was going to have a show.”
“If that was always the plan, then why are you announcing it like it’s special?”
“Because it is — for me!”
“Just not special enough that you expect him to tell you.”
Kyle always traps her with words. If she’d known he would react like this, she wouldn’t have told him. Or told him differently. Brought him to see the paintings when they were hung — and he’d see that they were art. Not that she could explain why art wasn’t nudity, but artists she’s posed for have told her. Edward had shown her pictures in books, all famous paintings, he’d said. The sad-eyed blonde standing on a shell in the sea, the woman with her perfect back turned to the painter, another lying on a bed of sumptuous cloth.
She glances at Kyle again, his profile backed by its hollow reflection in the tunnel-dark window. The set of his mouth. She nudges his arm until he lets her slide her hand underneath it. But when they get to his stop, he stands so quickly her hand drops away. It doesn’t matter, she thinks as they walk the two blocks to his high rise. She knows how she’ll get him to soften.
She’s slipped off her shoes and dropped her coat on a wall hook when she hears the TV. Uh-uh, she shakes her head. Smiling, she sways her hips into the living room. “Kyle? Don’t you want to take a shower?” On the shelf next to the tub she has gel, massage oil, and other toys.
Kyle lifts his hand off the armrest in the direction of the TV. He’s watching, can’t she see?
Shoba glares at the back of his head, stomps to the bathroom, closes the door hard, then whacks it with the heel of her hand. She lets the water drum into the tub as she peels off her sweater and jeans, her bra and her thong. She can ignore him too.
She’s about to step in the shower when she sees herself in the mirror — one leg lifted, toe poised on the rim of the tub, hand out to hold the curtain aside. A good pose, she thinks, and for a moment she holds it, straightening her back, sucking in her tummy, flexing her calf. Admiring herself.
Ben always lets her sit or lie however she wants. He doesn’t talk or even play music while he’s painting. He stands before his easel, making a few swift lines with a blunt stub of charcoal. He dabs and swirls paint on the clear plastic plates he keeps, dozens of them, stacked on a shelf. Sometimes he squeezes a short worm of paint directly onto the brush.
All Shoba hears is the sound of Ben working. The slide of graphite, the duller swerve of chalk, the liquid squelch of paint, the thud of a drier tip. Posing for Ben, she doesn’t budge long past the time she’d normally plead for a break. She’s helped by the controlling force of his gaze, the careful scrutiny of his eyes following the contours of her body, burning along her hips, up her thigh. No one has ever looked at her so intently. Entranced as she is by his stare, she hears each slide of the pencil, each stroke of the brush, as if it were touch. Ben makes her feel bare … open … desirable.
That’s what she’s never told anyone about modelling — how it arouses her. And sometimes, yes, in the past, a modelling session moved from the easel to the couch. But not since she’s been with Kyle.
Ben keeps a respectful distance, sitting on his fancy black chair behind his drawing block or easel. At the end of a session, he takes the painting from the easel and leans it to face the wall, then spends a long time swishing his brushes in jars of water, wiping them with rags, as if she weren’t even there.
Behind the striped curtain, water streaming down her back, Shoba squeezes gel onto her palm, smears it around her nipples. She doesn’t need Kyle if he’d sooner watch TV. Slowly, she inhales as she smoothes her fingers in an arrow down her belly.
In the morning she wakes to find Kyle turned away, facing the wall. She was already asleep when he came to bed last night. She slips out from under the comforter and tiptoes to the dresser, eases open a drawer to get a clean t-shirt. Rather than wake him, she’ll leave a note.
But then he speaks into the still air of the room. “You’re going.”
“To work.”
“At the restaurant?”
“Modelling.”
He rolls over and looks at her. “On a Sunday morning.”
“It’s not the first time.” She lifts her jeans from the chair. “You just haven’t noticed because you’re playing basketball or something.”
He says nothing for a moment, then shifts and faces the wall again. “You’d better go then. Don’t keep him waiting.”
His tone hurts her. But she refuses to feel guilty and continues getting dressed. Zips her jeans, buckles her belt. Pulls on her socks. Modelling for Ben is too important. She’s done nothing wrong.
She closes the apartment door with a firm pull and holds her head high as she walks along the frozen sidewalk to the subway.
Ben’s studio is on the top floor of a house near Kensington Market. Once a genteel Victorian structure, its edges are crumbling, the bricks flaking shards onto the dry weeds below. The gingerbread trim has gone unpainted for so many years it’s no more than a screen for the sparrows who’ve built a tenement of nests behind it. Inside, on the top floor, a previous owner knocked down the walls to create an open-concept loft. Concept aside, the ceiling is low, the windows too few and far apart. And without walls, a draft all but whistles across the bare floor.
When Ben has a model, he aims two electric space heaters at the body-length wooden square that serves as a platform. He doesn’t mind the poor natural light and in fact prefers Northern Light bulbs, which he screws into lamp stands he’s rescued from sidewalk garbage over the years. Several shine constantly throughout the large and sparsely furnished space. Rolls of paper and stretched canvas on frames stack against the walls. Shelves hold paints, bottles of ink, coloured pastels, pencils, and crayons. Easels are sturdy, box-frame structures.
Only Ben’s siblings would know that the painting of seaside cliffs, one of Ben’s few landscapes, hanging on the far wall used to hang over their mother’s bed. Ben’s older brother and sister have never been to his studio, and his younger sister, Amy, moved to Vancouver a couple of years after their mother passed away.
Ben stands at the counter now, eyes fixed on the clutter of jars, paints, and rags. Somewhere there’s a tin of Oolong and a teapot. But even when he sees the top of the tin and the flat shine of the pot, he doesn’t pick them up. He keeps his eyes on the counter — the squeezed and wrinkled tubes, the softer folds of rags, the cocky thrust of brushes — his gaze abstracted. Ben never looks for a thing. He waits for the shape to emerge.
But as the yellow shape of a lemon persists in not appearing and the kettle is about to whistle, he finally lifts a rag or two and pushes aside some paints. No lemon. Damn. He doesn’t paint without tea and he doesn’t take tea without lemon. Oolong and lemon to charm the beast.
He yanks the kettle’s plug from the socket, turns, and surveys the room. His roving look comes to a stop at the balled-up sheet on the platform. The model, he smirks. The one he’s had lately is about to be sent on her merry way. She seems to be under the misguided impression that she’s on a bed of velvet, spread before him as if he’s shooting a porno flick.
Ben’s eyes narrow with disgust. Sex is the last intimation he wants in a painting. But he’s always let models take whatever pose suits them, as long as they can find it time and again and hold it without moving. He paints the body, not poses. Limbs and flesh. The duplicity of health and youth. The body in its trembling veneer between life and death.
The doorbell rings. Ben takes his trench from the peg on the door and pulls it over his paint-flecked sweater as he heads down the stairs.
“Hi!” Shoba and her dimples.
“Go on up,” Ben says. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The closest greengrocer is a few blocks away between a Chinese bakery and a dim sum takeout. Ben walks quickly, though he can’t help but scuff his shoes. They’re too loose now, but they’ll fit by this evening. The medication makes his feet swell. Recently he’s started wearing slip-on moccasins one size larger than he normally takes. The nurse at the clinic suggested it. She keeps asking if he’s tried the powdered Javanese root another patient said made him feel more energetic.
He used to take note of the various extracts, ointments, hookah, and snake oil people recommended. Now he limits himself to the pills the doctor prescribes — more than enough and already too much. Apart from that, he keeps regular hours, doesn’t smoke or drink. As long as he can keep painting, he doesn’t care about the rest.
Ben has always been stern about his work, but now especially he feels gripped with the imperative to make people see flesh as it is. He uses paint, sandpaper, crayon, palette knives, and putty sticks to layer and scrape — to expose the rot beneath every bloom, the corrosive bubble of sores. Gesture is contorted, the body a cage, the edges of the canvas abrupt.
In the store he takes three lemons to the small-boned Asian woman at the cash. A goddess of indifference. She’s never once looked at him when he pays, but she also doesn’t reach for a bag. She knows he never takes one. As the door swings shut behind him, he slips two of the lemons in a coat pocket and keeps the third in his hand. He likes the feel of the grainy rind. The pleasing lemon shape against his palm.
He’s thinking about the canvas he put on the easel this morning. He always keeps work on the floor turned to the wall, so he can’t see it and get tricked into believing this is how it should look. He wants to see the painting fresh each time. Get the visual jolt. He was pleased this morning. Very pleased. He’d used an undercoat of green to block the form — an oval for the face, limbs like bent tubes, the torso a sack. For detail and shading, he’d brushed such a light wash of sienna, burnt umber, and ochre that the green still breathed through. Like a ghost. Memento mori. That grimace on the face, too. She — the model — probably thinks she projects longing. He sees avidity, rapacious need, all the desperate scrabbling to pretend that the pit of last throes can be eluded. Ben knows it can’t. Her body, even luscious, is already tense with death.
Ben recalls the painting, detail by detail. He wonders if it’s finished. A painting is always better left a tad raw.
He’ll need another larger painting for the show. Or two smaller ones. But not with this model. Her display of herself has become too graphic. He doesn’t want people to look at his paintings and think of sex. They never need more than a hint, with his work especially. They’re looking for a message, whether defiant or remorseful. They still don’t get it. Who cares what he’s got and why? He’s dying. Don’t people realize they’re equally destined for this one and only end — however it happens, whoever they are.
Climbing the stairs to his flat, Ben sees that the door at the top is ajar. Why didn’t she close it? She’ll have made an even bigger draft, losing the little warmth there was. She’s the one who’ll freeze, the little idiot!
He closes the door behind him. She must be in the bathroom. Then he sees the canvases tipped on the floor. No, not just —
Ben crosses the room slowly. Great puddles of white splashed across his paintings, leaked on the floor. The bucket of gesso on its side. A whole bucket empty. The lemon in his hand drops to the floor.
What has she done. What has she. What. The word numbs his mind.
His eyes follow the trajectory of white splashed across his pots of paint, dribbled on the floor, then flung —
He blinks before stepping around the easel to look at the painting he’d left. Gesso takes only an instant to dry. He still touches the surface with shivering fingers — like touching a corpse in a coffin: afraid, but needing to test that cherished, once-supple flesh has stiffened. Truly cold and dead.
Ben reaches for the back of a chair to steady himself, then sits heavily. He’s used his last strength to do these pieces — to summon all he knows, to hold the images in his mind and to paint them.
A sound escapes him. A helpless moan. With a single glancing coat of primer, she’s obliterated the years he’s spent mastering that patina of layered nuance and colour. All that’s left is a brown thigh, the lower half of a face. A random map of white.
Ben doesn’t ask himself why. He’s long stopped asking why. He knows there’s no answer.
To read more stories by Alice Zorn, be on the lookout for Ruins & Relics, being released in March 2009.