‘Maybe even try it from the other side,’ Mr Jackson had teased the class, staring straight at me.
‘It’s Jamie, not Mr Jackson,’ he’d chided when he helped me take off my coat this afternoon. ‘I’m not your teacher anymore, hey.’ And I’d automatically said, ‘Sorry, Mr Jackson.’ Which made him laugh, and lightly touch my cheek. He said he was glad I had called.
‘It isn’t easy in this town’—he’d waved his hand about, as if there was no need to finish the sentence.
He understood. I didn’t need him to tell me that it’s never easy around here.
The ad Tammy pressed into my hand said: Life models wanted. $200 cash. Potential for further work. My hands shook when I called his number.
‘Yes, I’m eighteen now. Yes, I’ve done this before. Yes, I’m still painting and, yes, it will be good to see you, too,’ I said on the call.
All lies, except the last part, or maybe that was the biggest lie. Thinking of two hundred dollars in cash, and the distance this could buy me.
Now, I am alone with Mr Jackson for the first time ever, watching him look from me to his sketch pad and back again, his tongue set between his teeth as he draws. He doesn’t look like the other men around here. He is slight, and tanned, and he has stubble instead of the full beard everyone seems to grow these days. He’s not wearing shoes, and his jeans, frayed at his ankles, are taut around his thighs. He used to wear slacks when he was teaching. In jeans he looks lean and coiled, and I realise I’m sketching him, too, working out the curves and lines of his body.
Skin and bone and curve.
‘That’s a serious face you had just now,’ he says, stepping out from behind his easel. ‘Just when I think I have you, Alice, your expression changes.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m … concentrating. And, um. My arm kind of hurts.’
I let it drop and sit upright on the couch.
‘It’s harder than I thought.’
A slip. My second lie is revealed so easily, and he catches it immediately. Sees what he must have suspected. I have not done this before.
‘You want something to help you relax? It’s after’—he checks his watch—‘two o’clock.’
I nod, and Mr Jackson—Jamie—rolls a tight smoke, then sits down beside me. The couch is draped with a white sheet. Our thighs touch and he doesn’t move away.
He holds out the joint and I take a deep drag, feeling a burn in my throat and nose. It’s better quality than I’m used to, and the second hit makes me cough until I’m doubled over.
‘God. You really are an amateur, Alice.’
Mr Jackson says this affectionately, laughs softly as he pats his hand against my back. With my head between my legs and his hand on my back, I’m afraid to sit up. The room is too small, it’s spinning around me, coming too close. It might be his fingers or the smoke, or what I’m doing here. With my art teacher, who used to look at me in class, and now he’s reaching around, sliding his hand over my belly, pushing me upright again.
‘Can I take this off.’
Maybe it’s a question. Some other day I’ll wonder if it wasn’t really a question at all. I’ll wonder if I could have said no to the weed, and those stained fingers pressed against my skin, pulling the straps of my singlet down. I’ll wonder why I didn’t try out that word, see where resistance would take me. But, for now, I simply close my eyes and nod. Missing the look on his face as he removes my singlet, and then my shorts. Unaware of the gleam when he reaches for a camera sat next to that stack of twenty-dollar bills and fixes the lens on my body.
Does it matter that I never actually said yes? I knew what was being asked of me. Life models wanted. $200 cash—Mr Jackson was clear enough about what he wanted. I don’t suppose I had any right to be surprised by the camera, or what it would lead to, eventually. It must have seemed, to him at least, like a natural progression.
He might even say I asked for it.
Back in Melbourne, Ruby is showing her sister the website of the long-stay studio apartment she has booked on the Upper West Side.
‘It’s small,’ she says, taking a sip of the wine Cassie has poured for her, ‘but it has everything I need.’ Next, they look at maps of the neighbourhood. ‘I’ll run here,’ Ruby says, tracing her finger around the blue of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park, ‘and maybe here’—her finger travels to the western border of the map, to a thick green line that snakes alongside the Hudson River. ‘Riverside Park. I read it’s less crowded there. More . . . local.’