Vara was dressed outrageously as usual, wearing a canvas smock over a crop top and high-waisted pink silk pants. Her long black hair curled down her back, and she had on a pair of gold glasses that Sasha hadn’t seen before.
“Hey babe, let me see those.” Sasha reached out to snatch them from Vara’s face.
“No, no, I’m blind without them, don’t.” Vara ducked her head and danced away.
“Those are fake, right? You don’t need glasses.”
“I desperately need them, get away!” Vara squealed.
“Hmm, okay, so from now on every time I see you, you’ll have them on?”
“Well, probably not these glasses,” Vara hedged. “It depends on the outfit.”
“Mm-hmm, okay.” Sasha grinned.
A good group had already assembled for the Drink and Draw: Vara’s girlfriend, Tammie, puttered around opening bottles of red and white, sniffing the corks and making a terrible face. Simon, a painter with a shaved head, kissed Sasha hello and dropped his money in the can. Zane, with floppy hair and skateboarding shoes, worked at a foundry designing typefaces by day. Allison had brought her dog, a sleepy old Lab who immediately settled in by her feet to snooze. Sasha poured herself a big tumbler of white wine, took a sip, and shivered. It really was horrible, but maybe that was part of the charm of the evening.
As more and more of their classmates arrived and claimed easels, Vara checked her phone again and again, frowning with annoyance. “Ugh, I hired a new model tonight and he’s not answering his phone. I have no idea where he is.”
Sasha groaned. On nights when the model didn’t show, one of their classmates had to sit instead. They got half the money from the coffee can, but it was in no way worth it, spending an hour and a half frozen in the same position, muscles screaming, foot asleep. Last time Sasha had been stuck modeling she had a crick in her neck for a week.
At a quarter past seven, Vara gave up on the model and put a dozen paintbrushes in a jar, one of them marked with a blue tip. The loser would sit for the group. One by one they picked paintbrushes blindly, Sasha sighing with relief when she pulled a regular brown one. Zane pulled the blue brush and swore. “I got the fucking blue brush in February. This is bullshit,” he complained as he shucked off his long-sleeve shirt and pounded the rest of his wine. He stalked to the center of the room and unbuttoned his jeans, letting them slide to the floor. He was in a mood and Sasha fought back a grin. Nothing like staring at someone fume and pout butt naked for ninety minutes. Just then the door burst open, and a big, tattooed guy rushed in, dropping his bag and apologizing bashfully. The model had made it.
“Yes!” Zane hollered, yanking up his jeans, darting back to his stool, and pulling on his shirt. Everyone clapped and Vara patted him on the shoulder. It was funny, Sasha mused. She had seen most of her friends naked at some point in drawing class, and yet it was the least sexual thing in the world. But she still preferred it when they had a professional model. Often they were actors, and they brought specific energy to their poses, or they were significantly older, their bodies so different from Sasha’s own that she could get completely lost in studying the way the light moved on their skin. She loved drawing men with big muscles or low bellies, women with scars or thick, powerful calves—anyone who looked different, anyone who made her truly pause and see the shape of the human form anew.
Sasha set her plastic cup aside and started to sketch. Within minutes of the first pose the room was quiet, the sounds of pencils scratching interrupted only by the occasional murmur or the rustle of paper. As she drew, she amused herself thinking about how foreign her world would seem to Cord’s family. She wondered if Tilda ever saw a naked body beside her husband’s—or if she ever even saw his.
As she biked home later that night, slightly tipsy, she thought about her hometown. Maybe she loved Vara’s neighborhood because of the way it reminded her of Rhode Island. Unlike Brooklyn Heights, which was swarmed with tourists and bougie young parents, Red Hook was a decidedly blue-collar part of the city. It just made sense to Sasha in a different way.
Back in Rhode Island, there was a little scrap of shoreline along the river by Sasha’s parents’ house where Mike Michaelson kept his dinghy. Sure, most people kept their dinghies in their yards or paid to chain them to the dock, but Mike Michaelson was at least eighty years old, and nobody expected him to lug the thing a block to his house—he’d always kept it there. Then one year a new family bought the giant house across the street and claimed that the grass along the water’s edge belonged to them—that it was included in their deed. They posted a small sign that said private property. no boats allowed. Mike Michaelson’s dinghy stayed and the next day another appeared beside it. The day after that yet another. Soon there were thirty dinghies all piled on the shore, and everyone who went by the docks on their way to their moorings snapped pictures and cackled. The new owners took down the sign.
The more Sasha tried to fit in with Cord’s family the more she thought about those dinghies. Every society had traditions, institutional knowledge, their own innate sense of how things should be done. If you grew up in a snowy climate you knew to pop up your windshield wipers before a big storm. On Lower Road if you shoveled out your car you put a beach chair in the spot to make sure it was there when you got back. When you took your boat back up the river you kept the red buoys on the right and watched your wake around the little boats. At the bar, a coaster on top of a pint glass meant the seat was taken and the drink was still good. These rules were so deeply ingrained in Sasha that she barely had to think twice about them, but suddenly, with Cord, she was subject to an entirely different array of social niceties: You cleaned the lines on the clay tennis court after a match; you never wore denim to the club; you didn’t show up with wet hair; you said “Nice to see you,” never “Nice to meet you,” even if there was no conceivable way you’d ever crossed paths before in your life.
Sasha felt wrong-footed 90 percent of the time but also simultaneously felt she was Molly Ringwald in an eighties movie and everyone else was the preppy villain. Cord’s world was full of pearl girls, all wearing their grandmother’s earrings with crisp button-downs and loafers, as interchangeable as they were sexless. Sasha often had the sneaking suspicion that if she saw them naked, they would have bodies as smooth and flat as Barbies. She swore to herself that the day she tied a cable-knit sweater around her shoulders would be the day she died.
* * *
—
When Cord had suggested they move into the Pineapple Street limestone after their wedding, Sasha hesitated. Sure, it was big and nice, but she never felt comfortable there. Sasha loved her own apartment, a glass box in a doorman building in Downtown Brooklyn. The windows stretched floor to ceiling, and she could see all of Manhattan spread out across the river. It was new construction, all white walls and chrome appliances, and Sasha loved the modern spareness. She kept it neat as a pin—she tucked away her books and pretty vases, didn’t even put art on the walls, loving the feeling of giving her eyes a break after a day of working on her computer in Photoshop.
The Pineapple Street apartment was anything but spare—sometimes Sasha felt the clutter was going to send her into an epileptic fit, overwhelming her like a strobe light. “How about instead of the limestone we move into my apartment after the wedding?” Sasha tried to entice Cord.