Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

6. The Lie That Tells the Truth

in a many-pinned and twisted crown. In short, today is the day the painting has truly come to be of me. “What do you think?” Robin asks, and I jump. She is standing in the doorway. On my breaks, whether I am posing in a school or a private home, I can never resist sneaking peeks at the artists’ progress. I am obsessed with the way a roomful or a succession of individuals can perceive the same person or thing in an endless number of ways. Yet I never offer my opinion of people’s depictions of me unless they ask, and even then I hesitate. I am not an artist myself, and so feel unqualified to speak with authority on the quality of a trained professional’s compositional decisions. And I don’t want to risk seeming vain, don’t want to seem as though I like a painting just because it makes me look pretty, or that I dislike a painting because it does not. “It looks like me,” I say. “It looks like it’s been worth it for us to work together all summer.” “Oh, absolutely,” says Robin. “I’m still not satisfied that I’ve got you quite right, but it’s been very necessary to have you up here. It’s been lovely. I obviously couldn’t have done it without you.” “You’ve heard of the model Kiki of Montparnasse, haven’t you?” I ask. “Yes, the one who posed for Parisian artists in the teens and twenties.” “Right,” I say. “When I came around to take a look, I was thinking of her. I’ve been reading her diaries, and she tells this story about posing for Maurice Utrillo. She said that after hours on end of her standing there naked, and him standing there drawing, she put on her clothes and took a peek at the canvas. She discovered that all he’d been doing that whole time was this quaint pastoral scene of a little country house. ‘I was knocked off my pins’—that’s what she said.” “Well, whatever we end up with might knock you off your pins, because I still have time to ruin it,” Robin laughs. “But I swear I’m at least trying to make it look just like you.” As I kick off my sandals and position myself in the chair, I consider how many artists don’t try to make their work look just like me. Nobody’s ever been quite as dramatic in their disinterest in depicting me as Utrillo was with Kiki, but I have seen someone—a sculpture professor from BU named Chris Untalan—come close. I first encountered Chris when I was posing for the life-sized sculpture in Isabel’s class at the university. The art department there was in the middle of 148 Chapter Five a search, and Chris was one of the finalists. As one of the last steps of the candidate screening process, Isabel brought each of the three finalists into our sessions to have him—and they were, for whatever reason, all hims— practice interacting with the students. Chris was the third one to put in his appearance. The preceding two candidates had had big personalities —had talked, had laughed, had introduced themselves to me, as well as to the students—and even though they were being friendly, I had felt weird, slightly, at having these two strange new men suddenly see me nude. The sensation wasn’t sinister, but it woke me up and made me alert, made me prepare my own personality to react to theirs. Chris, on the other hand, was so subdued, so professional and detached, that I felt nothing when he looked at me, even when he held a plumb bob up to my knee to help one of the junior sculptors tackle a finicky angle. With the preceding two candidates , I could imagine having a conversation with them when I put on my robe and hopped off the stand. Chris seemed like the most words he’d likely say to a model would be when, where, and how long to stand. Chris got the job. That following fall, when he was responsible for his own classes, I found myself working quite a bit for Chris, or “Untie” as the students called him—never to his face, as he was not a nickname kind of guy, but behind his back; not meaning any disrespect, but more...