Pete Hamill - Loving Women

Do I see the boy relaxing at last? Michael Devlin has eaten, he is full, he has avoided all additional use of salt. And listening to her he thinks: She isn’t that much older that I am, is she? There she was in the trailer, talking straight to me, not performing on some date, not angling for some extravagant trip to a prom, certainly not trying to look like a movie star. She pushed her chair back, relaxed, crossed one leg over another, lit a cigarette.

And I had discovered I could hold my own with her in conversation. She was older than I was, but I was sure there were things I knew that she didn’t. I couldn’t name the Seven Wonders of the World either, but I felt as she talked about them that I was sitting with someone my own age, the two of us in awe at the unknowable mysteries of the world. She got up and made coffee and then I started feeling nervous again. She cleared the table, laid her cigarette in an ashtray and ran hot water over the dishes, her face very concentrated. She dried her hands on a dish towel and waited a long moment, her back to me, staring into the sink. Then she took a deep breath, exhaled, turned to me and smiled.

“Well, I guess I’d better get ready for the posing,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and reached for the package. “I have my stuff.” Panicking. “But you know, if you’re too tired or something, you don’t—”

“I never done something like this in my life before,” she said quietly. She turned and looked around the small crowded trailer, at the couchlike bed at the far end. “That’s why I want to do it.”

“Look,” I said nervously, “if you don’t want to—”

“You’re more nervous than I am, ain’t you, child?”

“Well, no, I just—”

“You ever done this before? The truth …”

“No.”

“Then I guess we both better go ahead, huh?”

She turned then, padding on her wide bare feet into the bedroom area. She closed the drapes behind her. I took out the pad and chalks and laid them on top of the counter that separated the dining area from the sleeping quarters. I had to dry my hands on my trousers. The rain hammered down and the air felt wetter and thicker. I thought: We’re using all the oxygen, we should open a window . Better: We should leave. We might smother. I can do this some other time. Suppose I can’t draw her? I could freeze, could lose what I think I can do, could botch it, could be exposed as a fraud. Before I even got to really know her , she could find me out. I certainly couldn’t draw her the way Miles could. But then, what does she look like? If I. If she. What if .

The curtain parted. She stepped out in an oversized man’s shirt. Her hair was wild and electric. She looked at me and her face darkened into a blush. She covered one foot with the other, and suddenly seemed very young.

“What do you want me to do?” she murmured.

“Well, maybe — why don’t you just sit there on the couch, and I’ll move this stool over here, and — You want your cigarettes?”

“No, I don’t want to smoke while I’m — how’s this?”

She sat on the couch bed, and pulled a couple of pillows up beside her and leaned one arm on them.

“Great, yeah, that’s it, nice and relaxed.”

“Should I take this off?”

Cool , said Michael Devlin to himself. You’ve gotta be cool. Like Doagie Hogan, like Canyon or Sawyer, like Charlie Parker. It’s like drawing bottles or fruit or a mountain . And answered, staring at the chalk, its blackness on his thumb and forefinger: “If you want.”

She unbuttoned the shirt and wiggled out of the sleeves and let it fall behind her. There it is, skin and tits, flesh and nipples and hair, her body before me . She crossed her arms over her breasts for a moment, almost instinctively. Then she lifted one leg and let the other dangle off the edge of the bed and shrugged her shoulders as if loosening her muscles. “There,” she said. No panties bra garter-belts girdles no slip no dress no trousers just her before me in this small tight place and the rain and the flowers too . “That should be okay.”

I stopped breathing. I didn’t want to exhale, to let her hear me reacting to her nakedness, her lush woman’s body. O Catholic boy: as if it were all right to take pleasure as long as it was not expressed. This was no boyish angular body like that of the girls at home (touched smelled brushed against but never feasted upon), or the body of a fashion model in some magazine, with all her bones sticking out. Womenflesh . I started to draw almost frantically, blocking in the ripe breasts, the strong lean shoulders, trying to get the taut skin stretched properly across her belly. Her breasts and hips were much lighter than the rest of her body. Except, of course, for her nipples. Face skin and back skin and leg skin and arm skin had been glazed by the sun. But now I was seeing clearly what I’d only glimpsed that night on the beach: the lighter skin, the indoor skin. She had a thick mat of jet-black curly pubic hair, curlier than the hair on her head, glistening in the light as if it were wet. Look boy look at her pussy her box her snatch her cunt . I was trying desperately to keep from getting an erection. Seven heads, I told my hand. Get the head right and the proportions will follow. Don’t make a big deal out of her breasts or she’ll think you’re obsessed with them. Jesus Christ her tits right here right there . Those full round breasts, with their dark-brown nipples. Get the legs right. Make it right. Make it beautiful. The arc of her instep. The long curving neck.

She was looking at me calmly now, the blush off her cheeks, watching me in a fascinated way. I used the vine charcoal for all the basics: the shape, the form, a thin outline. It broke three times in my hand, too frail for my ferocious pressure. Then I switched to the blacker charcoal, making her eyes, using the side of the chalk for shading, digging in for the black hair on her head and between her legs. I smoothed out the hard edges with my fingers, smeared her legs to try to get flesh tones, and then, looking at her, and looking at the drawing, I saw there was nothing more to add. One more mark and I would botch it. I tore the drawing off the pad and laid it on the kitchen counter.

“You can change positions,” I said, trying to sound like a cool-eyed professional. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to see the first drawing. She shifted, letting one leg fall flat, her back against the wall of the trailer now. She shivered. “Damn wall’s cold,” she said. “How’s this?” She put her head back. I could see a thin scar about three inches long under her jaw. White against her dark skin. There was another scar just above the great black V, smaller but more raw that the one on her jawbone. “Fine,” I said, but thinking that this time she was posing instead of being natural, as if remembering pinups she’d seen somewhere; still, I was afraid that if I said I didn’t like the pose, she’d take it as criticism, the way I reacted to her line about salt. Ah, the little lies … “Just swell,” I said, and she closed her eyes. I drew more carefully. She had very long lashes.

“What are you drawing now?” she whispered, her eyes still closed.

“Your neck,” I said.

She ran a hand down her neck as I was shading the same place in my drawing.

“And now?”

“Your clavicle,” I said. “You know, at the base of your neck? Goes across from shoulder to shoulder.”

She ran a single finger along the clavicle. Then paused.

She was breathing in a different way. Her eyes were still closed.

“What about now?” she whispered.

“Breasts.”

She ran her hand around her breasts, from one to the other, feeling their shape and form, caressing them as if they belonged to someone else. Then she took both nipples gently between her thumbs and forefingers. I tried to draw. Getting hard.