Chapter Text
Illi’s POV
Professor Hargrove had a way of delivering life-altering information in the same tone someone might use to read a grocery list.
“Your final project,” she had said, perched on the edge of her desk with her arms crossed and her reading glasses pushed up into her silver hair, “will be a large scale figure painting. Minimum thirty by forty inches. You will source your own live model.
The model will be nude. You will complete no fewer than eight sessions — four sketching, four painting — and you will submit both your preliminary sketches and your finished piece along with a written artist statement at the end of the semester.”
She had then looked around the room as though daring anyone to have feelings about this and said, “Any questions?” in a tone that suggested the correct answer was no.
Illi had not asked any questions. She had written everything down in her sketchbook in increasingly small handwriting as though making the letters smaller would make the assignment smaller, and then she had sat very still for the remaining forty minutes of class with the specific stillness of someone trying not to visibly panic.
Source your own live model.
The model will be nude.
She was still thinking about it when class let out and she spilled onto the sidewalk with the rest of her cohort into the cold grey afternoon. October in New York had that particular quality of light she loved even when she was stressed — everything a little golden and a little melancholy, the trees along the street doing their slow undressing, the city carrying on around her with complete indifference to her problems.
She pulled her coat tighter and started walking.
The school sat in the middle of the art district and her apartment was a fifteen minute walk if she went the direct way, which she almost never did. She had a habit of drifting, of taking the longer route without deciding to, pulled down certain streets by the light or by habit or by the particular feeling of needing to think something through before she arrived anywhere. Today she went past the gallery on Mercer Street with the photographs in the window she’d been meaning to properly look at for two weeks, past the coffee shop with the steamed up windows where someone inside was doing a pencil drawing of the person sitting across from them, past the mural on the side of the building on the corner that changed every few months and was currently a enormous deep-sea creature rendered in shades of blue and green that she stopped and looked at for longer than she meant to.
Nude model, she thought, staring at a painted anglerfish. I need a nude model.
The thing was, it wasn’t the nudity itself that was the problem, not really. She was an artist. She’d done figure drawing classes. She understood the human body as subject matter in an academic sense, had sketched enough of them to feel comfortable with the concept. The nudity was fine.
The problem was the person attached to the nudity.
It needed to be someone who would actually show up. Eight sessions was a significant commitment and she could not afford to get three sessions in and have someone bail because it got uncomfortable or because life got in the way or because they’d agreed without fully thinking through what they were agreeing to. She needed someone reliable and unbothered and comfortable enough in their own skin to sit still for hours while she stared at them with the particular focused intensity she knew she brought to her work, the kind that had been described to her on more than one occasion as slightly unsettling.
She also needed it to not be weird afterward.
That ruled out most of the people in her program, which was a small and incestuous social ecosystem where everything became weird eventually. It ruled out her two closest friends from undergrad, one of whom lived in Chicago now and one of whom had a boyfriend who she could already imagine being strange about it. It ruled out basically everyone she could think of in the first thirty seconds of thinking about it.
She turned down her street and dug her keys out of her coat pocket.
Her building was an old one, narrow and red-bricked, squeezed between a framing shop and a building that had been a laundromat for as long as she’d lived here and had recently and inexplicably become a very small and very expensive restaurant. The elevator had been broken for six weeks and showed no signs of recovery so she took the stairs up to the fourth floor, her bag heavy on her shoulder, her sketchbook tucked under her arm, and let herself into her apartment.
It greeted her the way it always did, which was to
say it looked like the inside of her brain made physical.
Canvases everywhere. That was the first and most accurate thing anyone could say about Illi’s apartment. They leaned against every wall in various states of progress or abandonment, some of them turned face-in like they were being punished for something, others half-finished and staring out at the room with a kind of raw unfinished energy she found either inspiring or accusatory depending on her mood. The kitchen table had not been used for eating in at least three weeks — currently it was home to three mugs with varying amounts of dried coffee in them, a palette she kept meaning to clean, a stack of art books with receipts and paint-smudged sticky notes marking various pages, and a sketchbook open to a page of hands she’d been practicing at two in the morning because sleep had felt impossible and drawing hands always helped.
The walls that weren’t obscured by canvases were covered in things she’d torn out of magazines and printed from the internet and painted directly onto the plaster in moments of inspiration — color swatches and anatomy studies and a quote from an interview with Kiki Smith that she’d written in pencil above the light switch in the hallway. The windowsill above the radiator held a collection of objects that had accumulated without her fully intending them to: dried flowers in a glass jar, a small ceramic skull a friend had made her, three different shades of the same blue in small paint tubes she’d been comparing for a project that was technically finished, a worn paperback with a broken spine.
The light was good. That was why she’d taken the apartment despite the broken elevator and the slightly unhinged radiator that made noises in the night like it was processing something emotionally. The windows faced west and in the afternoons the light came in at an angle that made everything look like a painting already, which she had decided was worth whatever else the apartment was doing.
She dropped her bag by the door and her coat on top of it and drifted through the familiar mess to the kitchen, where she put the kettle on and stood with her hands flat on the counter staring at nothing.
Eight sessions, she thought. Four sketching, four painting. Thirty by forty inches minimum.
She could do this. She was a third year MFA student. She had done harder things. She had gotten through an undergraduate degree and a cross-country move and approximately one thousand moments that had felt impossible at the time and had turned out to not be. She could find a nude model.
She just needed to think about it methodically.
She made her tea and took it to the couch, sitting with her legs folded under her and her sketchbook in her lap even though she wasn’t drawing anything, just holding it the way she sometimes held things when she needed to think. She chewed on the end of her pen and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that she’d started turning into a bird with a pencil one sleepless night and which now looked more like a cloud having an identity crisis.
Twenty minutes passed. Her tea went lukewarm. She had eliminated, mentally, nearly everyone she knew.
She picked up her phone and called Mikey.
He picked up on the third ring.
“Hey.” His voice was flat in the easy unbothered way Mikey’s voice always was, like he had all the time in the world and none of it particularly needed to be rushed toward.
“I have a problem,” Illi said.
“Okay.”
“A significant problem.”
“Okay,” he said again, identical intonation.
She pressed her free hand over her eyes. “My final.
For Hargrove’s class. I told you about it, the figure painting class.”
“The painting one.”
“Yes. The painting one.” She exhaled. “I need a live model for my final project and the model has to be nude and I need them for eight sessions over the semester and I need someone who is actually going to show up and not make it weird and not bail halfway through and I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to think of someone and I’ve run out of people.”
“What about someone from school?”
“I don’t want it to be weird with someone I have classes with. If it goes badly I still have to see them constantly.” She pulled at a loose thread on the couch cushion. “It needs to be someone I trust enough to have in my apartment every week but who isn’t already in my daily life. Someone unbothered. Someone reliable.”
There was a silence on Mikey’s end that she recognized as him actually thinking rather than having nothing to say, which with Mikey could look identical from the outside.
“Frank,” he said.
Illi went very still. “What?”
“Frank Iero. He goes to your school. Second year, photography.”
She knew who Frank was. That was the immediate and slightly inconvenient truth of the situation. She knew who Frank was in the specific detailed way you know someone you have never actually spoken to — peripherally, carefully, in glances at parties and openings that she had always told herself were just the general people-watching she did everywhere and not anything more specific than that. He was difficult not to notice. Shorter than most people in any given room, compact and tattooed with dark hair that had grown out past his jaw, always looking faintly like he’d wandered in from somewhere more interesting than wherever he currently was. She had seen him at a gallery opening in September standing in front of a large abstract piece with his arms crossed and his head tilted like he was having a genuine argument with it in his head and she had thought, not for the first time, that he had a very good face.
She had not thought about that. She was not thinking about that now.
“I know who Frank is,” she said, carefully neutral.
“He’s reliable. He won’t make it weird.” A brief pause. “He needs money too, he’s always complaining about being broke. And he’s—” Mikey seemed to search for the word. “Unbothered. About stuff like that.”
“You’d have to ask him,” Illi said. “I can’t ask him, I don’t know him like that.”
“I’ll text him.”
“Mikey, wait—”
“I’m already texting him.”
She made a noise that was somewhere between exasperated and helpless and stood up from the couch, drifting toward the window the way she always did when she didn’t know what to do with herself.
Outside the afternoon light was doing something beautiful to the rooftops across the street and a pigeon was doing something undignified on the fire escape directly opposite. She watched it and waited.
“Done,” Mikey said.
“What did you say?”
“I said my sister needs a figure model for her MFA final, it pays, are you interested.”
“You didn’t mention—”
“He’ll know what figure model means.”
“Mikey.”
“He’ll be fine.” There was the sound of Mikey shifting position somewhere on his end. “Stop spiraling. It’s a normal thing. It’s art school.”
“I know it’s a normal thing.”
“You’re spiraling.”
“I’m not spiraling.”
She was a little bit spiraling. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window and breathed. This was a professional arrangement. This was for her final project. This was a completely standard component of figure painting as a discipline and she was a third year MFA student and an adult woman and she was going to handle this with complete professionalism and it was going to be fine.
Her phone buzzed against her palm. A text from Mikey.
‘He said yes. Giving him your number.’
She had approximately forty seconds to exist with that information before her phone buzzed again with an unsaved number.
‘Hey, it’s Frank. Mikey gave me your number hope that’s okay. I’m in if you still need someone — just send over the details whenever.’
Illi read it twice. Then a third time. His texts had a straightforwardness to them that she found both reassuring and slightly disarming.
She typed back ‘Hi! Yes, that’s great, thank you so much. I’ll send the details over soon, I’m thinking we’d meet at my apartment if that works for you.’
She stared at the exclamation mark for a long moment. It felt like too much. She deleted it, made it a period, then changed it back to an exclamation mark because a period felt weirdly cold, then put her phone face down on the windowsill and looked back out at the city.
The pigeon had gone. The light was shifting.
Somewhere below a cab horn sounded once, sharp and brief, and the city absorbed it the way it absorbed everything, without ceremony, without comment, just continuing on.
Illi picked her phone back up. He had already replied.
‘Apartment works fine. Just let me know.’
She set the phone down again and looked at the half-finished canvas on the wall across from her, a swirling dark thing she’d been avoiding for three weeks, and thought about thirty by forty inches and eight sessions and the very specific quality of afternoon light that came through her west-facing windows.
She could do this.
She was going to do this.
It was going to be completely fine.