Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

They call them masters, Hogarth said. But they all started with the figure, with drawing. Among other things, they all understood the principle of contraposition. They understood that all forms become dynamic by moving in opposition to each other. The shoulder moves up, the biceps and triceps move to the front and the back. .

I didn’t get everything that Hogarth was saying, but it thrilled me. Drawing wasn’t just God-given, like a voice; it was something that could be learned, it had rules, axioms, formulas. As crude and unfinished as I was, I would get better. All it took was work.

At night, when I came out of the subway beside the Totes, or stopped for food in the back booths at Lewnes’, my drawings became a hit. Naked broads! Duke Baluta shouted, taking the drawings from my portfolio envelope. The other guys grinned lewdly.

You mean to tell me, Baluta said, that you sit there looking at this broad, naked, tits out and all — and you don’t get a hard-on?

Duke, I said, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re so involved in getting the drawing right that —

That you don’t want to fuck her?

Uh, I, well —

See, Duke said, he does want to fuck her!

No, it’s like it could be apples or pears or something, I told him, my head filling with half-baked Hogarthisms. You’re trying to get the contrapos — the basic form. You want to get to the core of the shape.

You mean you want to get to the core of her pussy.

Usually, they all guffawed and I laughed with them. Sometimes, they called over a few of the girls and showed them the drawings and the girls giggled or blushed or got huffy. Some of the girls thought I was weird. Living alone at sixteen. Drawing naked women. In that neighborhood, it was too strange, too dangerous.

AT SCHOOL, the models changed every week, sometimes from night to night. Laura was gone after a few nights and I didn’t see her around. Then one chilly night, I went out on the break and saw her down the hall, wearing her smock and sandals, smoking her cigarette. I walked toward her, glancing into a painting classroom, and nodded at her. She smiled back.

You must be cold out here, I said.

It’s colder in there, she said. Here, I get to wear this.

Your name is Laura, right?

Right, she said. She seemed surprised. Cigarette?

Thanks, I don’t smoke. Would you like a coffee or something?

She smiled, in an amused way; it was the first time I’d seen her smile and it made her seem younger.

Sure. After the last bell?

Okay.

That wasn’t what I’d meant; I meant that I could go downstairs and get coffee from the machine. Now, somehow, I had a date. Tonight. Dressed in my Navy Yard clothes. Back in class, my heart was thumping. We were drawing from a black male model, but I kept thinking about that last bell. And Laura. Who was she? How old was she? If she asks, how old am I? An artist and a model! Jesus. But what if she’s just playing a game on me? Calm down. She probably won’t show up. She’ll think it over and just come and shake my hand and tell me something came up, she had an appointment she forgot, maybe next week or next term.

But there she was at the end of the last class, waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing a navy pea jacket, dungarees, a wool cap pulled over her hair, and sneakers. She looked much younger.

There’s a coffee shop over on Lexington, she said.

It had begun to snow. Big white flakes fell into Twenty-third Street, turning briefly black against the streetlamps, before melting on the roofs of cars.

Oh, great! she shouted, in an almost girlish voice. I love snow!

We sat in a window booth, facing each other and watching the snow falling steadily. She ordered an English muffin and black coffee; so did I (as in so many other things, I followed the lead of those who seemed to know what they were doing). Laura told me that she’d come to New York to be a dancer (and I wondered, When? Before the war?). But dancing hadn’t worked out. She married a photographer who took pictures of radios and refrigerators for catalogs; that didn’t work out either. But before it ended, the photographer introduced her to some painters, and after a while she started painting too.

The trouble is, there’s maybe twenty thousand painters in New York now, she said. Maybe more. That GI Bill, that made everybody think they could be painters. So it’s hard to make a living. That’s why I model. To make ends meet.

She smiled in a matter-of-fact way and sipped her coffee and lit another cigarette. I could see her nipples in my mind and her pubic hair and the thickness of her hips.

How do you feel, I said, with everyone looking at you up there?

Most of the time, I don’t feel anything. I think about the painting I’m working on. Or the book I’m reading. Or the landlord. Or the laundry.

She took a deep drag and then smiled, glancing at the snow.

But to tell the truth, Laura said, sometimes I get hot. I can feel all those eyes on me and I know some of the men must want to fuck me. Maybe some of the women too. And what happens is, I start thinking like them, some kind of transference, I am them, I’m them fucking me, kissing me, pressing against me, licking me; and I get hot. And then I’m afraid I’ll turn a certain way and you’ll see that I’m wet. Do you have a hard-on now?

Yeah.

Let’s go to my place.

Laura had a two-room apartment on Tenth Street, three buildings away from the Third Avenue El. The shades were drawn but I could hear the train rumble through the snowy night. One room was a kitchen with a table and two chairs beside a window that opened into an air shaft. The other room was studio and bedroom, cramped and messy. There were books packed on shelves, lying on the paint-spattered linoleum floor, used to hold open a door. There was a record player, a radio, stacks of records; a toolbox full of brushes and tubes of paint; a huge wooden easel; a long table covered with tomato cans full of paint, linseed oil, turpentine, and other cans holding big fat brushes; and dozens of canvases covered with shimmering abstract paintings, most of them in great splashy variations of a single color: blue.

My Billie Holiday paintings, she said. Want a drink?

Sure.

She poured an inch of Canadian Club into each of two water glasses. I felt unreal, as if I’d walked into a novel.

Okay, Laura said, now it’s my turn.

For what?

She sipped her drink and said, Take off your clothes.

I laughed.

You’ve been drawing me, she said. Now I draw you.

I’m sure I must have blushed. I took a sip of the whiskey, which burned into my stomach, and then put the glass on a table. I took off my shirt and undershirt, then my boots and socks and trousers. The paint-spattered floor felt pebbly. So did my skin in the chilly room.

Everything, she said.

So I slipped off my shorts and tossed them onto a chair, trying to look casual. In the chill, I was sure my cock had shrunk to its tiniest size. I was afraid to look. She was placing a newsprint pad on the easel, an amused look on her face.

Now what? I said.

Just like Hogarth’s class, she said. Quick poses.

I tried to remember what she did, bending, twisting, holding the pose. All I could hear was the chalk moving on paper, sheets being torn off the pad, ice clunking in her glass. Then she asked me to hold a longer pose, seated on a chair, right leg extended, left leg curled along the side of the chair. She brought me my drink; I sipped it and she took it away and put Billie Holiday on the record player. The recording was a worn version of “Strange Fruit.” I worked at holding the pose, knowing she was looking straight at me, sensing her presence but not seeing her. Then I remembered what she’d said in the coffee shop, how she’d imagine us thinking about fucking her. I tried to see myself on this chair, tried to be her, looking at my body, at my shoulders and belly and legs and cock, and then I could feel my cock getting hard. I tried to stop it then, shifting my imaginings, trying to will it away; but I only got harder.