The stool in Westmore Community Art Center was cold. It had chilled in the night air, the windows left open for the mild Georgia winter to creep through the hall and pool in the studios\u2014the preference of the county\u2019s janitorial brigade.\u00a0 Anders sat, hunched and naked, in Studio C before a dozen seniors, technical school professors, and housewives. On the stool next to him was a new model: one Rose C. Lee.<\/p>\n
Before last week\u2019s class, Westmore\u2019s director, Karen, had scheduled a meeting with both Rose and Anders, introducing them, and letting Anders know that Rose would be modeling for the classes now as well, but that the funding allotted for models would remain the same as would the class times. They would share.<\/p>\n
Rose had looked lesser in her clothes, Anders thought. A short woman in paint-smeared jeans and a shirt with the neck stretched out. Hair and eyes an unremarkable brown. She sat slouched down in Karen\u2019s pleather chair, hands in her jacket pockets. These were not the things that one longed for later. Things missed if not drawn out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this is a change for the better. The best possible thing,\u201d Karen said, clasping hands over a herringbone skirt. \u201cA man and a woman. A woman and a man. How complete for the class.\u201d Though, when Anders thought of Rose standing next to him in Studio C, he did not imagine them in harmony, standing like Genesis with fig leaves and forest animals about them and their hair blown out; he could only imagine invasion.<\/p>\n
In the hallway, after the meeting, Anders gave Rose the names of several other community centers and studio spaces in bordering counties. \u201cYou won\u2019t much like these geezers here,\u201d he said. \u201cAll old. Not very skilled. And the pay.\u201d Anders made a thumbs-down.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019ll stay on,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, it would be best to split the classes by day,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can start with Sundays.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat works,\u201d Rose said. \u201cAnd the Tuesday\/Thursday classes as well. I\u2019ll be at those.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rose sat in on the day\u2019s session, sitting upright in a folding chair and doodling with a ballpoint and not saying much as the geezers sketched and jotted and Anders moved through his usual forms. All of Studio C was invited for post-session wine at the town bistro or the house of one of the geezers. Rose came along to familiarize herself with the group. \u201cIt\u2019s not Lee like \u2018Robert E.\u2019\u201d she clarified.<\/p>\n
Anders scoffed. \u201cI don\u2019t think you need to worry about Lee. Sherman, maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLee like an island,\u201d Rose said. \u201cLeeward. Away from the storm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several geezers moaned affirmations at this, or else nodded their heads slow, or else crowed from the table head for her to \u201csay again?!\u201d<\/p>\n
Her wine glass still full, Rose cleaned her teeth with a napkin edge. She was new to the group, a transplant come down from Iowa or Idaho or some such place. She was new and Anders was king here, and as such, he could welcome her with ease. One touch of his hand, one kindly smirk, and she would be accepted. She would be whole. And, when the weight of the crown shifted against her, when she felt unloved and unstudied next to him, he would make her understand that Sundays are where she should live. The weekday classes were his domain. He would get to sleep in on the weekends, and things would be fine.<\/p>\n
Anders reached across the table, his hand appearing before him as the marble palm of David, if a deal hairier. Open with fingers slightly bent. He sensed the table of novices lean in to glimpse the powerful swell of the thumb, the wise tracks set in the cup of the palm, if their eyes were sharper, they might see the colored suggestions of veins. He looked at Rose meaningfully, in olive branch and broken bread. He wished he had a ring, that she might press it to her lips.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re glad to have you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Rose stood and wiped her mouth. \u201cThe john?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBack left,\u201d Anders said, but Rose was already gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI much prefer your lips,\u201d Phyllis said next to him. She had gone to school with Anders\u2019 mother. \u201cSo angular.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phyllis was drawing a fried egg into her napkin. No, an oyster. Anders recognized the murky reflection of his own left ear and sucked in his breath. He tucked the ear behind his hair.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour lines were sloppy today,\u201d he said without looking at Phyllis, and the old woman wilted away.<\/p>\n
Now, at the next week\u2019s session, a steel rivet was pressing through the meat of Anders\u2019 right buttock, like a finger jabbing to the bone. He was in his \u201cThinker\u201d pose and had been holding a hunch for twenty minutes. His back ached, but the muted scraping of a dozen pencils serenaded him. It was his metronome, the drowning, unifying cadence, when his joints begged for reprieve\u2014the sound of being remembered. The sound that accompanied the airy mass of rheumy eyes flying about his every surface. It almost tickled, the eyes landing and flitting back to their pad and then lighting on his skin again. Except, it wasn\u2019t all the eyes. He could feel it: the absence of adoration. A syphoning of ambrosia.<\/p>\n
Rose sat with her chest thrust out and her arms locked behind her. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and outstretched, so her long muscles raised themselves to glow in the naked, overhead light. Her triceps and shoulders stood rocky, and there was a marvel in the way her veins buried and unearthed themselves\u2014appearing, just beneath the skin, as the splintering of a river across her shoulder before resurfacing over bands of muscle in the bicep, the forearm, the bulges of the hand where it gripped the lip of the stool. What had she done to earn veins like that? Anders imagined her in the morning dark, hoisting bags of cement with a pulley and chains. Deadlifting truck axles. Drinking eggs from a pitcher.<\/p>\n
Anders watched the right side of the room, those geezers more directly in front of Rose were absorbed in the worship of her knees\u2014the charm of the patella, the elegant union of the lacing quadriceps with the true line of the shin. A bead of sweat rolled from Rose\u2019s armpit and cut a jagged path to her waist over Victorian white skin. When Anders looked back up to Rose\u2019s face he saw that she was watching him. He shifted his eyes to the crowd of seats, and saw that they were all watching her then. Every one of them, turning for fresh sheets to discard the half-finished pages of Anders and begin pages of Rose.<\/p>\n
\u201cPose shift,\u201d Anders said, and stretched his back. He took a short wooden bat from his bin of materials and turned at the waist while he gripped it, stretching left and right and eventually freezing in a left-facing trunk-twist, his legs spread in an athletic stance. His eyes looked out into the high-nowhere of the room, finding the familiar corner where a spider had lived and died and now hung in a mausoleum of its own design. \u201cThe Modern Man,\u201d this one was called.<\/p>\n
Rose\u2019s arms reached beneath Anders\u2019 to clasp over his chest. They were heavy. The fingers were calloused. Her breath smelled of cigarettes. \u201cThis ok?\u201d she asked him.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course,\u201d Anders said, though he had never posed with a partner before. Murmurs rose from the crowd of artists as materials where readied and exchanged. Chairs were scooted about in the constant game of light and eye, each shift revealing a new scene.<\/p>\n
Rose matched her feet to Anders\u2019, and mirrored the twist of his back. He could feel her breasts rising and falling against him, and where the slight round of her belly rested, just where the rise of his glutes smoothed into the small of his back. A heat grew where her body touched his. He began to sweat.<\/p>\n
\u201cDr. Jervais,\u201d Rose commanded, and Claude stood as if trumpeted for. Traitorous, big-shot Claude, so eager for a new form. \u201cLet\u2019s get the big light involved. And cut the overhead here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oohs<\/em> and Awws<\/em> circulated the room. They didn\u2019t often use the spotlight in the corner, an ancient steely thing, rusted from someone\u2019s garage.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s fine,\u201d Anders said, but a few of the geezers were already positioning the spotlight, dragging it, squealing, over the linoleum so that it shown, hot and unblinking, on Anders\u2019 shoulders, cooking the wafer of his ear and bathing the long line of Rose where it curled against his back.<\/p>\n Anders knew that the muffled squeaks of the pencil tips, the taps and scrapes of the pens, they must be out there, filling the room, but the humming of the spotlight and the harsh of its beam had made him blind and deaf\u2014marooned. Then the hands around him shifted and Rose\u2019s palm pressed into the hollow of his sternum.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Sherman took Savannah,\u201d she whispered to his ear. \u201cHe left it unburnt.\u201d Her head rested below his left shoulder, away from the room of eyes. \u201cThat\u2019s how I\u2019d like to leave you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMerry Christmas,\u201d Rose said, and nudged the back of Anders\u2019 leg with her knee, causing his weight to shift, falling on the heel of his right foot and stinging under the load. \u201cSherman gave the city for a gift.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone knows that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was that?\u201d Phyllis asked from somewhere in the room.<\/p>\n \u201cMaintain focus,\u201d Anders called to the geezers.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m Sherman,\u201d Rose said. \u201cAnd Lincoln. We\u2019re the Union, these oldies and me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m Savannah?\u201d Anders asked through the corner of his lips.<\/p>\n \u201cYou lived in Savannah. You\u2019re like\u2026\u201d Rose let her head rest on the high of Ander\u2019s back, on the trapezius he had lovingly, daily, hardened and stretched that it might rise just so above his shoulder. She sighed. \u201cYou\u2019re like a man. In Savannah. A statue of a man. You don\u2019t live there anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy are you here?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is my work,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut why are you here<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe weather\u2019s nice. Karen\u2019s a friend. And there\u2019s a museum gig here. Long term.\u201d<\/p>\n Karen, Anders thought. Of course Karen. Karen who worked part-time at the art center and part-time for the historical society. Karen who had never once invited him to model in the traveling \u201cLife Size Civil War\u201d dioramas put on monthly. There had been hints she might try to be rid of him. Unexpected drop ins during sessions and long, meandering meetings afterwards, making him late for wine socials and bistro dinners on the geezer\u2019s dime.<\/p>\n Karen wanted something from him. Something \u201cuniversal.\u201d Anders wasn\u2019t sure what that meant. There was a universal quality to his body. His body that was like <\/em>any body. His body that could be anybody or anything, when viewed in the correct light. The arc of his back might well be the Knife Edge summit of Mount Khatadin. The dip and dark of his navel, the shadow of areola before the rise of his nipple, these were universal; they might be the pits and shadows of the moon. The poses he employed were meant to be all of these things. All of these and more. He had tried to explain this to Karen, who only nodded over her tea.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve been here, what? A month?\u201d Anders whispered. \u201cI\u2019ve been running this for two years. People have come. People have died. I\u2019m on refrigerators. Living rooms. Bathrooms. The women, their husbands are gone. It\u2019s me over their beds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe said you do the same three poses every class. She said there\u2019ve been complaints.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBull.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf it were bull, Karen wouldn\u2019t have called.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHold still please!\u201d Mrs. Orbee called from the back of the room. Anders and Rose straightened some.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to get a phone call,\u201d Rose said. \u201cI give it a week. Maybe less.\u201d<\/p>\n Sweat ran freely down Anders\u2019 back where Rose clung, content. He squinted out to see where the spider web was, but it was lost. What was out there for him if Rose was right? Not much. There was his day job, serving lunch at the State Veteran\u2019s Home, changing the trash bins and playing the geezers in checkers and walking them to and from their beds. There were the other venues he\u2019d told Rose about, underfunded or extinct. Anders had visited them all and sat alone in his robe more than once. This was where the eyes were. This was his little slice of fame, and if it was nothing, what of it? In the grand scheme of things, it was all nothing. If the bombs dropped tomorrow and the world were mostly ash, it would all be nothing. Let him die, at least, with his love of self intact, knowing that he was beloved in the way the amoeba under the microscope is beloved\u2014in that he was studied and picked from the millions and billions by way of his occupying the lens and that his all-in-all was relished and repeated in parts and in wholes.<\/p>\n And if the bombs stayed asleep, resting in their bunkers and warehouses and hanger bays, what then? A generation lives; a generation dies. But the portraits of Anders, the many, many portraits of Anders, those lived on. Those were put behind glass. Those were rolled and stowed in an attic box that would one day be given to a child and put in their attic and then another attic and then, one day, found, when cars fly and people design and order children like pizzas from their phones, portraits of Anders will be rolled out again! \u201cLook! Jesus look!\u201d They will say in the future. \u201cHere is a man!\u201d And in the way that all art is prized, if old enough or foreign enough or related to the finder in some way, Anders will be prized. Even the Anders that lives and comes to life through the sluggish hand of the dotard Phyllis will be prized. And, the fact is, this is where the dotards live. This is where the dotards sketch. And this is where he must be.<\/p>\n \u201cPose shift,\u201d he said, and broke from Rose\u2019s arms. The air reached out to dry away the sweat and prickle his skin. If there had been complaints, the geezers were complicit in this. For all Anders knew, they had their calendars marked. Had invited Rose over for lunch and ridden together to her first session. Anders eyed them now, scuttling and adjusting and waiting for him, who had for so long been the light of their Tuesday and Thursday evenings, to decide on a pose. Doubtless, they were expecting \u201cAscension\u201d wherein he stood like Christ in the center of the room, with his legs together and his arms held out at a \u201cT\u201d and his face inclined to the fluorescent lights like: \u201cFather, forgive these backwards, yokel geezers and their frail attempts to capture me on their pulp sheets.\u201d It was a favorite, but today he crouched, head and arms down like a sprinter. \u201cSixty seconds,\u201d Anders chimed, and the pencils raced. From between his legs, he watched Rose mount her stool and sit with her hands on her leg, as if massaging a knot from the muscle.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Sherman took Atlanta. When he shelled and burned it. He spared Newnan,\u201d Anders said. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bedroom community.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, do you know what happened after he left it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe marched to the ocean, took Savannah, crushed the heartland of the South, and named his horses Dolly, Duke, and Sam.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d Anders said. The clock on the wall hadn\u2019t made a circuit yet, but he wanted to move. \u201cPose shift,\u201d he said, and walked out of the spot to stand dead center in the room and assumed \u201cAscension,\u201d his reflection foggy in the buffed, grey tile. The room of geezers surrounded him now. And he was, again, the Sun. He was of solar importance. Anything that lived behind the geezers eyes and squeezed out on to their page, it was all his energy passing from one form to the next. In the way the farmer trades the corn to the mother who makes the child who grows the corn are only trading and made of the energy the careens into our sky\u2014so too were the geezers making and trading and being Anders on their pages and in their minds. In their very brains and blood, was Anders: their all-in-all.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Sherman left, the rest of Atlanta came to Newnan,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they looked at the buildings Sherman and his armies had left. And they knew they had left them because they were beautiful, and it was Sherman\u2019s vanity that saved them\u2014that he saved them because he wanted their beauty for himself\u2014the long wraparound porches and the wide-branching pecan trees and the brick roads with white-pink azalea beds along with edges and railcars\u2014Georgia\u2019s first railcars\u2014running through the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was worth keeping,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was worth stealing. But when Sherman left and the people of Atlanta got out to Newnan and saw what Sherman wanted\u2014to save it.\u201d Anders lay down on the floor with the big florescent lights over him and made an angel with his arms. \u201cPose shift,\u201d he cooed.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they saw Newnan, they burned it themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBelligerent,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd powerful,\u201d Anders said. He looked down lovingly at his body, his arms at his sides now and the length of him curling like a fish on the floor, offered up to the geezers to be made permanent. He looked at them all from the floor, bent like monks over vellum, quills loaded with the blood of the lamb.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd vain,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it was their vanity over his. They would rather the whole thing go than have it taken because, really, all the parts of it that were essential couldn\u2019t be burned\u2014not by Sherman. If Georgia burns by Georgian hands then the memory is one of sacrifice, not conquest. It\u2019s spit-in-the-eye, not a loss.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou gonna spit in my eye?\u201d Rose asked from her stool. Her toes were fanned out before her so that light made little shadows between each one, like stages of the moon. Why hadn\u2019t Anders ever thought of that?<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d he said and then laid still on the floor to consider the lies he had been spinning and where, if not here, he might live and be drawn. He reached out to the blurry lines of Westmore County in his mind and felt around them for some secret commune of mediocre artists, and he strained to think of another way to go about the work of becoming immortal.<\/p>\n There are pools of marsh mud that dried, from time to time, and hardened to make a sort of cement, and if the course of the salt-river shifted and the tide line moved, those cracked stretches of earth might remain. He could go to the tidal muds and make presses of his chest and hands, his back and buttocks\u2014two shallow divots to live and breathe for him when he was gone and mutants walk the earth. There wasn\u2019t much else that he could imagine.<\/p>\n Anders stood from the floor, graphite and eraser flecks and stray hairs falling from his arms and back. \u201cTime,\u201d he said, but the geezers kept working.<\/p>\n Rose hadn\u2019t moved from her pose on the stool.<\/p>\n \u201cTime,\u201d he said again, but no one budged. They were transfixed. Locked in the study of Rose\u2019s toes, which she arrayed like a hand of cards. \u201cThat\u2019s it!\u201d he shouted. Possibly they had all died and were stuck in some sort of joint nerve twitch. Perhaps the bombs had dropped and this was the fever after-wise that would last until the dead rise to say His name. Perhaps, perhaps.<\/p>\n \u201cA few minutes more?\u201d Rose asked, and the geezers murmured in agreement.<\/p>\n Anders walked the room, looking at the easels and sketchbooks. On them: Rose\u2019s back. Her spine, a mountain ridge. Stars and cirrus clouds for freckles and scars. Flower blossoms for ears. Phyllis\u2019s study of Rose\u2019s hands, with only the wispy afterthoughts of his chest hair beneath them to highlight the edge of her palm. Maxwell\u2019s reflection of Rose\u2019s breasts. Claude\u2019s good black ink poured over Rose\u2019s shoulders, the impossible line of the triceps where it fused stool to hand to arm to back. And nowhere was Anders. Anders was gone.<\/p>\n Rose called \u201cTime.\u201d She un-balled a terry cloth robe from the corner of the room and slipped it on while the geezers shuffled out.<\/p>\n Anders sat on the window sill and felt the night\u2019s first breaths slide past his hips. \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s not bad,\u201d Rose said. From the door of the studio, she took a picture of him with her phone, naked and in the sea of empty easels and desks. \u201cWhen Sherman sent Lincoln the letter\u2014that Savannah had been won. You know what it was worth? What the whole city was worth?\u201d The smoke of her cigarette coiled over her head.<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d Anders said.<\/p>\n \u201c250,000 bales of cotton. Dried. Unburned. Packaged and gifted and shipped to Boston to make blue shirts and blue pants and baby clothes and a blanket for someone\u2019s horse. It was a job. And nobody died. And the Sun went down and the Sun came up.\u201d She raised her phone again with both hands, her cigarette clenched in her teeth. \u201cSmile.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s only half the story,\u201d Anders began, imagining heroes with names he hadn\u2019t formed yet hiding away secrets from the invaders\u2014sealing them in burlap and skins and sinking them into the Savannah river, maybe with barrels for floats, and they could have painted the barrels white and red and pretend they were for guiding ships and so even when the city was taken and the ships were captured and converted and the people made subjects, even then, there would be gold under the water and waiting. Maybe still waiting, on the bottom of the river now, cleverly packed and still dry. All the heroes of Anders\u2019 mind were like that: conditionally defeated, but never entirely stripped. And so, eventually, when the world had spun ten thousand more times and the memory had been warped and warped again, and the occupiers were gone, and all that remained were old portraits and photographs and you could shift and change the facts to suit your needs\u2014you could win. It might be portraits of Anders to survive in the self-storage center while Rose\u2019s toes burn with the house. Who says what will last?<\/p>\n But Rose had not stayed for the story, and he was alone in the room of easels now. Outside, in the parking lot, the geezers were loading their work into their cars and calling out to one another, arguing about where to sit in the bistro and who the waitress would be and how much she should be tipped.<\/p>\n In the corner of Studio C were clay projects left by Monday\u2019s ceramics class, most wrapped and covered in plastic so they wouldn\u2019t dry out. Anders pulled back the plastic to see the chubby legged horses and too-tubular dolphins and other blobs of the clay tortured into wobbly bowls. One by one, he smashed the pieces into a singular mound, dousing it with water and working the pile to a smoothness before carrying it, wrapped in a towel, to Karen\u2019s office desk to tender his surrender. Gripping the desk and bending at the waist, he forced his face into the clay. When he was finished, he had made a hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhen Sherman took Savannah,\u201d she whispered to his ear. \u201cHe left it unburnt.\u201d Her head rested below his left shoulder, away from the room of eyes. \u201cThat\u2019s how I\u2019d like to leave you.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[803,222,1965,1966,1015,1967,1964,1280,265],"class_list":["post-15281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-apocalypse","tag-art","tag-civil-war","tag-eternity","tag-georgia","tag-jobs","tag-nude","tag-painting","tag-the-south","writer-stephen-hundley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15281"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15419,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15281\/revisions\/15419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}