Altogether Now

P. S. Ehrlich

He agrees to reproduce her, or at least redouble his efforts toward this her end, it being her own broached notion whatever muffled fancies he may have or let pass:

she inquiring whether he ever does portraits? like of people? like nude? and uh well, stammers he, away back awhile but no, not all that often, he means he draws or rather drew not all that often in the nude;

which she considers wittily put but he does draw, does he not? and he will think of maybe drawing her, like in a portrait, like in the nude? and while he boggles noncommittally she is in perfect earnest, insistent on having always wanted to do this, to have it done, this posing for excitable posterity;

so he offers to make at least a meeting-partway preliminary sketch or two of her face and general form, and even as her face brightens she begins to lighten her general form of its overall garments, paying no-never-mind to his not-really-necessary since after all (says she, unsnapping and destrapping herself) it's not like she's changing into something;

which turns out to be quite untrue, as clad only in her swirling sweptback coif she appears to have changed into something extraordinarily . . .

absolute, for want of an apter word--

Yet as banal cliché would have it she has never done this or anything like it before, neither a doffer-down nor yet an habitual poseur is she however often she may have been contemplating this scenario, putting her act together, turning her plucky full-length flush into a luxuriant wriggle from tip to all ten toes;

and any doubts she might still nurture about living up to his uncertified fantasies seem wholly allayable for just look at his eyes looking, she smiles approximately unselfconsciously since she has caught him eyeing her before, yes, and behind, envisioning her doubtless outwardly if not altogether in;

so perhaps there is a degree of vanity at play here but not entirely in vain for as she lives and breathes her hair is lustrous and her skin does glow and brightglancing are her clearsighted eyes--

She wants him then to tell her where and whether she should stand or sit, or does he picture her supinely reclining? how does he want her to pose? and he attempts to let Art if not Instinct take over while she smothers her mirth at his gathering resources with furtive goatish sweating stiffness;

all so ridiculously gratuitous! he has attended life classes after all and is no callow stranger to mammae or pappae or even Puddleby-on-the-Marsh (though admittedly unacquainted at first or even secondhand with her own particular allotment of hithers and yons)

but here they are so better get started, yes, on with it, go through with it, and after some repositioning of lamps and the like she strikes her idea of an at-ease attitude, the first of several while he starts off in search of her aforementioned general form:

crowding his makeshift pad with sketchily attempted abstractions in stubby graphite, shading and blending with fingertips and side of thumb--

Breaks he allows her every quarter hour or so (depending on the strain of the assumed stance) after which a fresh pose is chosen and her best foot put forward, one shoulder squared, the other aslope:

allemande left and dos-a-dos! he roughs her in, blocks her in, goes defining and designing her, modifying and refining her, stretching and foreshortening, enlarging and diminishing, plumping her out, leaning her down;

watch him as he distorts and interprets and makes variations on her assorted themes, his teeth all a-chatter and hers biting her lips at such evidence of her effectiveness, see:

he is smart and he is clever and good with those limberfingered hands of his but so much of the same time she can see he's off someplace else, even with her he tends to sit by his lonesome in unapproachable corners, staring into his own secluded glass;

so it isn't so much out of rampant exhibitionism that she puts herself on display like this nor yet any hankering to be well-preserved ahead of her time, but maybe in this manner she can snap him out of incessantly drifting unblinking along for behold:

she is flesh and blood and no impossible moonbeam dream but an opportunity at hand and he does have a thing for her, she knows it, he shows it;

and even if being so totally lost in oblivious thought he can't see Life passing by and moving on she is nonetheless here, standing right in front of him, getting hopefully through with this her bold direct all-or-nothing stroke;

so that together they might take fantasy and out of it make reality--

Keep it moving, keep it going, gently blending, don't or rather stop sweating it, let the pencil work and the paper respond and apply that graphite like paint from a brush, direct yes but delicate, ever so delicate, in fact infinitely delicate lest her so-to-speak waters be as-it-were muddied;

bring out her values, mold those textures to match her modeling, go now from highlights down into darker tones, shape the shadows on her brightness and yes he does fancy her generously presented countenance, yes he does seek to achieve penetration, make no mistake about it (where's that kneaded eraser?)

but what he means by getting on and going through is to something more than flesh 'n' blood, to something more like her very essence;

and some of it comes out just as it should but the rest got botched at the beginning and may not be put-rightable though it's near enough in places to be seen, to be felt;

yet what with his rustiness and general inexpertise it's like trying to pin down a venturesome moth trying to fly to unreachable stars, yes, pin it down with wings still beating, still living and indeed more alive than before:

something truly evocative that will linger in the memory and last forevermore--

Although it appears to her he's getting somewhere it's evidently not where he wants to go, he can't manage it, not this way, just a clumsy blundering mess, his moth inessentially frazzled on some remorseless lightbulb, wasting away the entire afternoon;

and from his sudden dejection there sprouts a mutual insecurity, her pose begins slipping and slumping like an overheated waxen image, her candlelike face appropriately aflame as if from shame but maybe just the result of the duskheaded sun's backdropping and by damn that might be IT!

with eager liplicked diffidence he suggests they take an altogether different tack by her posing for a camera instead of a pad, to which hot-eyed proposal she hunches quasimodically away with a hey now wait a minute;

she having the inbred notion that while drawing or painting a nude woman is Art, taking photographs of girls with all their clothes off is graphic peepshow sleaze-a-rama which could end up passed around by God only knows whose gloaty itching hands;

but a camera he is saying can achieve a recognizable rendering rather than a simple likeness and she isn't sure she likes the sound of that at all, no, this she hadn't bargained for, there's such a thing after all as leaving a little to be desired or does she mean the imagination?

and just how realistic does he intend this ripoff-connotative rendering to be?--

Hear how oversolicitous he must sound even as the urging-on words are leaving his lips:

what need for him to fake up a respectable motive for wanting to take high-quality snapshots of a strikingly attractive young woman safely alone (or seemingly so) and au naturel in a windowy whitewall'd room?

seeing how exquisite she is and so too he promises will pictures of her be sensual without lapsing into salacity intimate yes revealing sure but there he assures her will be depth there in a manner of speaking will be breadth there

(taking breath)

will be Art and she his volunteer model will find her winsome comely self most definitively changed into a Work of the Same!

so she melts, she swims, she makes him swear an all-but-blood oath that no one else shall ever look upon any photo or photos taken of her, she means it, without her express in-writing permission, he attending to every aspect of their development and printing himself unaided;

and only then will she agree to undergo exposure for his sake, reserving the right to shout down any further suggestion smacking of the pimply--

Once her back is firmly set against the semiobscured sun his attention is given to the blinds, to the lights, to dousing all those unnatural lamps, allowing the sun's lengthening rays to stream freely in and bounce back off all those wonderfully reflective whitewalls, camera out of mothballs and pointed contre jour!

or so he says and doesn't that mean Between Us she wonders or maybe Bottoms Up but he must take care, don't turn her into an empty silhouette or fiddle around so long that all light is lost better get on with it

get on into it she is told lovely excellent but we can make it better yes together move on adroitly now no more messing about, her stance he has her rearrange with hands up sweeping back that swirly coif, her very expression is subjected to adjustment:

mouth slightly open please and eyes closed yes she can close her eyes, it'll be all right, composure is in order so can we have a little more

focusing on that minute gap between her two front teeth which (though he does not know it yet) causes her to whistle during Gallic kisses

she unexpectedly stifled by a kind of blind excitement a sense of suffocating anticipation that makes her heart hammer and gives him a pain in the vicinity of his ribcage

must prevent the ambient light from flaring back but bathe her in backlit effulgence yes she is a beauty, the sung-of one-in-a-million girl and now he is going to capture that beauty, of her, from her, fix it once and for all and preserve it enhanced

burn out the highlights expose for the shadows enrich all the subtleties of tone and value revealed by the nimbus goldenrosily encircling the hair which is lustrous the skin which does glow YES!

That's It Keep Still Don't Move hollers he

but stripped down to essential bareness her setup has turned into a reverse-Pygmalion noilamgyp and though holding her pose she declines to be possessed in this shall we say objectionable way

so when she senses his fingers those limber marvels poised upon the shutter she lets fly her painted eyelids and sanguine light of her own shines clearsightedly brightglancingly forth

offshoots of which mingling with the glow wrapped around her now smite his own eyes which caught by her glare cannot be averted and in that all-things-considered absolute moment of consuming suffusion he releases the shutter with a SNAP--