He dragged her bed to the end of the room. “I’ll show you.”
He positioned her easel in the corner. Then he lay on the bed, his head closest to her, his feet farthest away.
She stood at her easel and looked at him lying there. It was a strange angle. She would have to paint his shoulder and his head very big and his feet very small. His shoulder was like giant Greenland in one of those projected world maps, and his feet were way down there, little, like the Cape of Good Hope. But then again, his private areas would be somewhat less apparent in this pose. Like maybe Ecuador.
This was about as good as could be hoped for.
“I think this will work,” she said.
“Okay. Good.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so I’ll just…”
“Okay.” She looked down at her paints, her cheeks flaming. She was such a baby. What would Bee say?
He sat up and pulled his T-shirt over his head. She kept her head down. “I’ve never done this before. It’s kind of strange.”
She couldn’t even make a noise come out.
“It seems so ordinary for the models in the studio, you know?”
She nodded, still staring at her cadmium red.
“I mean, it’s just a pose. It’s for a painting.” He talked himself through the unbuttoning and removal of his jeans.
“Yeah,” she attempted to say, but it came up more phlegm than word.
Was he really going to take off his underwear? Arg. She was such a baby.
“Hey. It’s not like there’s something else going on here….” His voice faded uncertainly. He tripped out of his underwear and was lying on the bed in under one second.
How could she look? How could she concentrate on painting?
He didn’t think there was anything going on here? She thought there was something going on here!
Her face was sweating. Her hands were sweating and also shaking. She tried to hold the brush. If she lifted the brush, he would see how badly her hand was shaking.
He said there wasn’t anything else going on here. Hey. What was that supposed to mean?
“All set,” he said. “Can you time the pose?”
No. She couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t even make her eyeballs move in their sockets.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She registered that his voice was actually quite sweet.
She tried to shift her weight. “I’m Greek,” she said finally. Her catchall. For garlic, for shame.
“Oh.” There was some understanding in the way he said it. “Can you try to think of me as a regular model in class?”
She made her eyes shift upward slowly. His shoulder, his face. His face was flushed, like hers, though not sweating as profusely. Their eyes met for a moment, which was not what she intended.
He didn’t think there was anything else going on here?
This was not how she felt when Nora posed. This was not how she felt when Marvin posed. Not even a twenty-millionth of this.
Her indignation kept her eyes up, though her pupils did not focus. She clamped her fingers around her brush and aimed it at the canvas. It was not a good technique. She made some clumsy strokes.
Too flustered to look at her canvas, she looked at him. Frying pan to fire. She looked down his body, down all the golden skin. Oh, my. She saw what was there. How could she not? It wasn’t Ecuador. It was more Brazil.
She looked away quickly. There was too something else going on here.
She let her brush rest on the palette.
“Let’s take a break,” he said.
“You’d be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.—Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’ the spring, that might
Become your time of day—”
Carmen looked up, caught her breath.
In spite of the fact that Polixenes was played by an actor Carmen had seen in at least four movies, he bore an almost uncanny resemblance to her uncle Hal. As she stood across from him, she tried to pretend he was Uncle Hal, because otherwise she felt too nervous. He nodded at her to keep going.
“That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing:—O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett’st fall
From Dis’s waggon!”
She was addressing herself now to Florizel, her supposed love interest. He was at least ten years older than she, wore cakey makeup, and seemed frankly more interested in Polixenes.
She was relieved when they finally got to take a break. They were now in rehearsals almost ten hours a day and costume fittings at other times.
She saw Leontes where he’d been watching from the side of the stage and nervously attempted to swing wide around him. He was so magnificent that she had not yet drawn up the courage to say a word to him that wasn’t one of Perdita’s.
The swing did not work. He was looking directly at her.
“Carmen, that was absolutely lovely,” he said to her as she scuttled along like a baby turtle racing for the sea.
“Thank you,” she squeaked in response, perspiring from every one of her pores.
But outside, she couldn’t keep down her joy. “Lovely,” he had said. “Absolutely lovely.”
“Absolutely lovely.” That was what he said. She laughed to nobody. The armpits of her T-shirt were soaked through in a way that was not absolutely lovely.
It was astounding to her. It really was. She had never in her life felt like she was naturally gifted at anything. In the past she had felt like she’d worked, willed, begged, bossed, or stolen everything she’d ever gotten.
She was good at math because she spent twice as many hours on it as the people who weren’t. She scored well on her SATs because she studied vocabulary lists and took practice tests every week for two years. She got an A in physics because she sat to the right of Brian Jervis, an overachieving lefty who never covered his test paper.
And now here she was, managing with little discernable effort to be absolutely lovely.
The joy of it. The loveliness.
Prince Mamillius came out the side door. When he saw her he sat down next to her. She couldn’t remember his actual name. Though he was technically her brother in the play, he died before she was born, so they didn’t share the stage.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
When he was the prince, he spoke in pristine Shakespearean English, but when he wasn’t, she was amused to hear, his accent was more like central New Jersey.
“Good,” she said. He had a tattoo of a badger on his ankle. He was actually very cute.
“Nice flowers,” he said.
Carmen lifted her hand to her ear. Andrew Kerr had asked her to wear flowers in her hair during the romancing scene to prepare for her elaborate costume as Flora. “Oh.” She felt stupid, and then she decided she didn’t.
He leaned over, very close to her, and smelled them. “Yum,” he said. She could feel his breath on her hair.
“Can I get you a lemonade?” he asked, standing up again. He was a jumpy sort of person.
She thought of saying no, but then she said yes. “I’d love that,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows at her before he turned to walk away. She realized in slow motion that Prince Mamillius, her own brother, had most likely just flirted with her.
Three hours later, Lena had squished several dollars’ worth of paint around on a perfectly well-made canvas. She had wasted both, as well as Leo’s time. Her painting wasn’t even a painting. Her sister, Effie, would have made a better painting.
For the third hour, Lena’s cheeks smoldered deep purple. There was no way she could let him look at her so-called painting.
“Let’s call it quits for the day,” she said defeatedly.
“Are you sure?” He didn’t sound opposed.
“Yeah.”
He was undeniably awkward too. “Sorry I’m not a bet
ter model.”
“No. No, you’re fine. It’s just.”
She washed her brushes in the bathroom while he got dressed. When she came back they sat side by side on her bed.
“That didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped,” he said.
She breathed out in relief. That he was dressed. That she wasn’t trying to hold a paintbrush.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“No, it’s not.”