I.
I am accustomed, now, to being in a room with seven men who are drawing my pubic hair. I have been on the other side of the drawing board, and I know that bodies are reduced to shape, distance, and shadow: hold up the pencil. This is how far the nipple is from the armpit. Squint. It is not even a nipple anymore, not to them, though my nipple has not changed any since I took off my clothing.
The first time I posed naked in the basement of the man whose ad I answered there were only two artists. The host would grimace and then relax his face in quick succession like a broken smile doll while he sketched. The other rubbed my shoulders over the thick blue robe during a break. The music was incredible: blues, and old music from 1940's Japan. Bad luck for the band, my host comments, because then Hiroshima happened. I found something to focus on so my body would hold still and steady. One time it was a finished drawing. Something about the light on the woman's breast made it look like the shape bread dough takes before rising. I do not know why there are no women in this group. I wonder sometimes if I would feel differently about shedding my clothing for a woman. I do not think I would; though I am using my naked body in a way a man dictates, I have sanctioned this and am making forty dollars in three hours. I also love the bluegrass, I love lying down during breaks and reading essays and books for my courses, I love the corner with all of the records and pastels strewn like pick-up sticks.
When I arrived I asked for the bathroom. Perhaps because I come from a place where basements and attics are rare I love them, and his basement smelled pleasant and damp, pastel and cardboard everywhere, with a cat who wound round the artist's legs. The kitchen and bathroom betrayed the smell of the five cats who live there total. I have five cats also, but they spend their time outside accruing foxtails. The wife had headphones on and didn't look at me as she hurried into the car he had taken to pick me up from campus. He spoke to her as if he didn't know she had tuned him out. I stood bare under the hot lamp unsure of whether I was welcome, holding onto the curtain so my arm would catch the light, staring into the face of the clock until it became an object representative of nothing important, bread, an elbow, skin, scattered records.
They are drawing my person but it is not personal. If it were not my body, but another's, they would still be gaging, squinting, marking. The only time the fact of their masculinity becomes acute to me is when it occurs to me that I know as little of their minds as they know of mine, that any or all could have committed a rape twenty years back, or two days back. I do not fear for my safety. I only would rather they not see me when I slide the robe off and hang it over the chair: that is the one moment that feels intimate.
How are you? one of the irregular comers asks the man who leads and hosts the drawing group. I'm okay, he says, in the kind of way that suggests both men know he has recently not been so okay. This man, who teaches at a nearby art school and whose figure drawings sell, tells me which way to roll my hips and whether to expose my ear, but I have no right to ask about these other things, just as I have no right to sneak a dried apricot or two or a vanilla cookie from his kitchen when I take my bathroom break, though I do just that.
At the end of the evening sessions there has started to be that clarity of star winking above the deck, a bite to the air, to the shadow of roof: autumn. At the end of an afternoon session I straighten my jacket on the deck, scoop-shaped yellow leaves heaping all over the deck and deck chair, and turn to smile at the men filing out, saddled with art supplies. Take care, they tell me.
II.
During the first broken heart I ever had I woke up feeling like ropes were tying me to the bed, crisscrossing plushly but firmly, and I could not move my body under their weight, and my mind did not want my body to move under their weight. That was also the way it felt when I woke up after election day 2004. Certain thoughts I have make me a political leftist. The thoughts have a lot to do with my body, actually, and its landscape of hip and skin being one over which I, my thoughts, preside. I read the results of the election and I floated on my bed, floated and was also tied there: I could not nudge my thoughts or my body and so they could not nudge each other, either. And when I talked the next day to a dear friend who devoted her vacation time to liberal activism, she had a hollowness to her voice, and described it like this: it feels like I have had a break up, it feels like someone has died. Neither of us could move either our thoughts or our bodies in ourselves or in each other, but it was a lucky feeling to not nudge together, to not be able to nudge together.
I remember to think sometimes, in the middle of the twenty minutes between breaks, the muscles in my calf or neck or arm starting to ache, the tiny muscles I did not know were there and certainly have never used for this long continuously, that these men have traveled, been married, probably been divorced, probably been discovered masturbating by their mothers, perhaps discovered their own sons masturbating, perhaps raise their voices when they are angry, like cream in their coffee, do not like cream in their coffee, prefer Toyotas to Acuras and rain to sun, hate their job, love their job, remember that year they spent hating their first out-of-college job in Phoenix, regret smoking so much weed or starting to smoke cigarettes, miss their grandmother Doris who smelled like rice pilaf.
It does occur to me that it is the right of any person to say I do not want to be naked anymore in front of you and step down from under the bright lights, and that were I to do that nothing more than losing this job would come of it whereas over history this may not have always been the case. I have never needed to do things with my naked body that I did not want to do, as is my right, and for which I also feel guilty since most women I know and most women who ever lived have had that right taken away from them at one or many points.
Slavery, also, has been described as not owning one's life; in other words, not owning one's body. Since we can think whatever we like and not say it, for one's life to be controlled is then the control of the body, which is trackable and seeable in ways our thoughts are not. We can even use our bodies to say exactly different things from what our minds are thinking, like I hate you when we are thinking I love you, or the other way around. I cannot tell if one of these happens more than the other. They both seem to happen a lot. Sometimes my fingers fall asleep from holding onto the blanket hung from the ceiling, but the artists need the arm upraised so I keep the fingers there and rub them when the clock's wide face looks roundly up at me with the right whiskers and then I move.
III.
There is a red rose on my desk that has been opening since Friday. It is Sunday. On Friday my new Boy's only very recent ex-girlfriend came into town for a tournament between universities. I have not met her. At 3am Friday morning my new Boy bought me the rose in a Providence Seven Eleven. My new Boy is not actually mine; I do not own him. The rose is in the only thing that I could find to serve as a vase at 4am on a Friday morning in a dirty apartment shared with three dudes: a washed-out forty-ounce beer bottle. The rose has done quite well, blooming an aching red on my white desk next to my printer (though the desk is not mine either, it belongs to the university) and I have somehow attached my hope that the Boy will still want to hold my body and call it his--in the nice way that we can lay claim to one another's bodies sometimes--to the rose and how well it has done over the weekend we agreed he would be sorting things out with the ex. Now on Sunday evening one petal, full and triangular and on the lower left end of the blossom from where I am sitting, looks like it might drop from the flower soon. There is only a faint smell, but even during more difficult moments this weekend when I have thought in my mind of imputing things to say to the Boy if things do not go as I would like I have touched my nose to this, this cracking-open red star, and pushed my face into a smile to get my mind to follow.
Sometimes, on break, I hold my breath through the kitchen that smells like cat pee to the bathroom and take off the robe and look. I take off the robe and look at what they have been drawing; it is strange that they know better the shapes of my shoulders than I do, strange that I forgot about the tattoo on the back they have been drawing and on which they must have seen the tattoo. There is a New Yorker Cartoon on the wall: "I'd invite you in, but my life is a mess." Up in front of all of those grown men, on display, I do not feel vulnerable.
IV.
After modeling I walk with my book into my kitchen where there is a poster of Andy Warhol. The one with two of the same picture, two of his faces ringed by a tambourine. Paul's pressed leaves are on the hall wall. The floor is littered with trash. Take care, meaning, take care of yourself. And the self that takes care of me, the me that is different from the self that does the caring for, are these two different parts of me, even, from the me that does the thinking and the me whose shapes and breasts and thighs seven men just spent hours drawing? Even to owe something to oneself is a schizophrenic term, someone told me once. To do anything to oneself. There is I, there is I doing something to myself, to my self. I think now that our language just does not know what to do with this: if someone cuts their own wrist, then the giver and receiver of the action are the same. Why isn't it my self is doing this to my self? I am doing it to me? But no, the correct way to say it is that I am doing something to myself, and so I am a different entity from my self.
I pause while reading an essay about holocausts and crimes against humanity because my roommate Chris has enlisted me to help with a short film for his media class. I am to act. I am glad to, because I need a break from the part of myself that is trying to gather up feeling good about anything after the election and an essay that is about what this one is about. I need a break from the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes. I need a break from the part of myself that is imagining all of the bodies in Sudan and Rwanda and back centuries in the Ottoman Empire and back decades in Germany. I need a break from the part of myself that thumps painfully whenever the part of myself that looks at the rose every few minutes looks at the rose every few minutes.
I have done theater before, and I like to assume the expression of someone else with another set of memories. What I think is interesting is how many actors say that in order to cry for a scene they think of something sad from their own lives, not of the sad thing that has happened to their character. If that is true, then people watching the film or play are something like the men who draw my naked body: they are only getting part of the whole, they are seeing the part of the actor who cries but not the part of the actor who thinks of reasons to cry.
It was Chris who decided on Wednesday to be nicer to everyone than he had been during the preceding weeks and think of people primarily as systems of family and friends and not as participants in the body politic. My roommates and I know about and read about and talk about the body--and by the body I mean the bodies we use to get too drunk and make love and have sex (which are different things, even we know) and get our selves to classes, and by the body I also mean the big body whose disconnect I feel in this, my small body, when I cannot nudge this, my small body; I mean the big body that is the body politic.
Brendan sits on the curb in his beret and moccasins and watches, waiting to help Chris move the dolly. I crouch in the street and wait with the matchbook. I do not know what Brendan thinks. I do not know what Chris, fiddling with the big clunking camera, thinks. I do not know what the Boy, who has light green eyes, thinks. I do know that I love them all, Chris and Brendan and the Boy, as I crouch in my jacket with my hair on my face and matches in my hands. I know also that in some way I love the seven men who have drawn my pubic hair, not because they have drawn my pubic hair but because the room is quiet save for the bluegrass music playing while they draw and I stand still, and there is buzzing and whirring inside them that I cannot hear, memories inside them that I cannot see.