Little Birds (6 page)

My mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls of my age. I was what you would call a sheltered person, very much like some Chinese woman, instructed in the art of making the most of the discarded dresses sent to me by a rich cousin, singing and dancing, writing elegantly, reading the finest books, conversing intelligently, arranging my hair beautifully, keeping my hands white and delicate, using only the refined English I had learned since my arrival from France, dealing with everybody in terms of great politeness.

This was what was left of my European education. But I was very much like the Orientals in one other way: long periods of gentleness were followed by bursts of violence, taking the form of temper and rebellion or of quick decisions and positive action.

I suddenly decided to go to work, without consulting anybody or asking anybody's approval. I knew my mother would be against my plan.

I had rarely gone to New York alone. Now I walked the streets, answering all kinds of advertisements. My accomplishments were not very practical. I knew languages but not typewriting. I knew Spanish dancing but not the new ballroom dances. Everywhere I went I did not inspire confidence. I looked even younger than my age and over-delicate, oversensitive. I looked as if I could not bear any burdens put on me, yet this was only an appearance.

After a week I had obtained nothing but a sense of not being useful to anyone. It was then I went to see a family friend who was very fond of me. She had disapproved of my mother's way of protecting me. She was happy to see me, amazed at my decision and willing to help me. It was while talking to her humorously about myself, enumerating my assets, that I happened to say that a painter had come to see us the week before and had said that I had an exotic face. My friend jumped up.

"I have it," she said. "I know what you can do. It is true that you have an unusual face. Now I know an art club where the artists go for their models. I will introduce you there. It is a sort of protection for the girls, instead of having them walk about from studio to studio. The artists are registered at the club, where they are known, and they telephone when they need a model."

When we arrived at the club on Fifty-seventh Street, there was great animation and many people. It turned out that they were preparing for the annual show. Every year all the models were dressed in costumes that best suited them and exhibited to the painters. I was quickly registered for a small fee and was sent upstairs to two elderly ladies who took me into the costume room. One of them chose an eighteenth-century costume. The other fixed my hair above my ears. They taught me how to wax my eyelashes. I saw a new self in the mirrors. The rehearsal was going on. I had to walk downstairs and stroll all around the room. It was not difficult. It was like a masquerade ball.

The day of the show everyone was rather nervous. Much of a model's success depended on this event. My hand trembled as I made up my eyelashes. I was given a rose to carry, which made me feel a little ridiculous. I was received with applause. After all the girls had walked slowly around the room, the painters talked with us, took down our names, made engagements. My engagement book was filled like a dance card.

Monday at nine o'clock I was to be at the studio of a well-known painter; at one, at the studio of an illustrator; at four o'clock, at the studio of a miniaturist, and so on. There were women painters too. They objected to our using make-up. They said that when they engaged a made-up model and then got her to wash her face before posing, she did not look the same. For that reason posing for women did not attract us very much.

My announcement at home that I was a model came like a thunderbolt. But it was done. I could make twenty-five dollars a week. My mother wept a little, but was pleased deep down.

That night we talked in the dark. Her room connected with mine and the door was open. My mother was worrying about what I knew (or did not know) about sex.

The sum of my knowledge was this: that I had been kissed many times by Stephen, lying on the sand at the beach. He had been lying over me, and I had felt something bulky and hard pressing against me, but that was all, and to my great amazement when I came home I had discovered that I was all wet between the legs. I had not mentioned this to my mother. My private impression was that I was a great sensualist, that this getting wet between the legs at being kissed showed dangerous tendencies for the future. In fact, I felt quite like a whore.

My mother asked me, "Do you know what happens when a man takes a woman?"

"No," I said, "but I would like to know
how
a man takes a woman in the first place."

"Well, you know the small penis you saw when you bathed your brother—that gets big and hard and the man pushes it inside of the woman."

That seemed ugly to me. "It must be difficult to get it in," I said.

"No, because the woman gets wet before that, so it slides in easily."

Now I understood the mystery of the wetness.

In that case, I thought to myself, I will never get raped, because to get wet you have to like the man.

A few months before, having been violently kissed in the woods by a big Russian who was bringing me home from a dance, I had come home and announced that I was pregnant.

Now I remembered how one night when several of us were returning from another dance, driving along the speedway, we had heard girls screaming. My escort, John, stopped the car. Two girls ran to us from the bushes, disheveled, dresses torn, and eyes haggard. We let them into the car. They were mumbling chaotically about having been taken for a ride on a motorcycle and then attacked. One of them kept saying: "If he broke through, I'll kill myself."

John stopped at an inn and I took the girls to the ladies' room. They immediately went in to the toilet together. One was saying: "There is no blood. I guess he didn't break through." The other one was crying.

We took them home. One of the girls thanked me and said, "I hope that never happens to you."

While my mother was talking I was wondering if she feared this and was preparing me.

I cannot say that when Monday came I was not uneasy. I felt that if the painter was attractive I would be in greater danger than if he was not, for if I liked him I might get wet between the legs.

The first one was about fifty, bald, with a rather European face and little mustache. He had a beautiful studio.

He placed the screen in front of me so that I could change my dress. I threw my clothes over the screen. As I threw my last piece of underwear over the top of the screen I saw the painter's face appear at the top, smiling. But it was done so comically and ridiculously, like a scene in a play, that I said nothing, got dressed, and took the pose.

Every half-hour I would get a rest. I could smoke a cigarette. The painter put on a record and said: "Will you dance?"

We danced on the highly polished floor, turning among the paintings of beautiful women. At the end of the dance, he kissed my neck. "So dainty," he said. "Do you pose in the nude?"

"No."

"Too bad."

I thought this was not so difficult to manage. It was time to pose again. The three hours passed quickly. He talked while he worked. He said he had married his first model; that she was unbearably jealous; that every now and then she broke into the studio and made scenes; that she would not let him paint from the nude. He had rented another studio she did not know about. Often he worked there. He gave parties there too. Would I like to come to one on Saturday night?

He gave me another little kiss on the neck as I left. He winked and said: "You won't tell the club on me?"

I returned to the club for luncheon because I could make up my face and freshen myself, and they gave us a cheap lunch. The other girls were there. We fell into conversation. When I mentioned the invitation for Saturday night, they laughed, nodding at one another. I could not get them to talk. One girl had lifted up her skirt and was examining a mole way up her thighs. With a little caustic pencil she was trying to burn it away. I saw that she was not wearing panties, just a black satin dress which clung to her. The telephone would ring and then one of the girls would be called and go off to work.

The next was a young illustrator. He was wearing his shirt open at the neck. He did not move when I came in. He shouted at me, "I want to see a lot of back and shoulders. Put a shawl around yourself or something." Then he gave me a small old-fashioned umbrella and white gloves. The shawl he pinned down almost to my waist. This was for a magazine cover.

The arrangement of the shawl over my breasts was precarious. As I tilted my head at the angle he wanted, in a sort of inviting gesture, the shawl slipped and my breasts showed. He would not let me move. "Wish I could paint them in," he said.

He was smiling as he worked with his charcoal pencil. Leaning over to measure me, he touched the tips of my breasts with his pencil and made a little black mark. "Keep that pose," he said as he saw me ready to move. I kept it.

Then he said: "You girls sometimes act as if you thought you were the only ones with breasts or asses. I see so many of them they don't interest me, I assure you. I take my wife all dressed always. The more clothes she has on the better. I turn off the light. I know too much how women are made. I've drawn millions of them."

The little touch of the pencil on my breasts had hardened the tips. This angered me, because I had not felt it a pleasure at all. Why were my breasts so sensitive, and did he notice it?

He went on drawing and coloring his picture. He stopped to drink a whiskey and offered me some. He dipped his finger in the whiskey and touched one of my nipples. I was not posing so I moved away angrily. He kept smiling at me. "Doesn't it feel nice?" he said. "It warms them."

It was true that the tips were hard and red.

"Very nice nipples you have. You don't need to use lipstick on them, do you? They are naturally rosy. Most of them have a leather color."

I covered myself.

That was all for that day. He asked me to come the next day at the same time.

He was slower in getting to his work on Tuesday. He talked. He had his feet up on his drawing table. He offered me a cigarette. I was pinning up my shawl. He was watching me. He said: "Show me your legs. I may do a drawing of legs next time."

I lifted up my skirt above the knee.

"Sit down with your skirt up high," he said.

He sketched in the legs. There was a silence.

Then he got up, flung his pencil on the table, leaned over me and kissed me fully on the mouth, forcing my head backwards. I pushed him off violently. This made him smile. He slipped his hand swiftly up under my skirt, felt my thighs where the stockings stopped and before I could move was back in his seat.

I took the pose and said nothing, because I had just made a discovery—that in spite of my anger, in spite of the fact that I was not in love, the kiss and the caress on the naked thighs had given me pleasure. While I fought him off, it was only out of a habit, but actually it had given me pleasure.

The pose gave me time to awaken from the pleasure and remember my defenses. But my defenses had been convincing and he was quiet for the rest of the morning.

From the very first I had divined that what I really had to defend myself against was my own susceptibility to caresses. I was also filled with great curiosities about so many things. At the same time I was utterly convinced that I would not give myself to anyone but the man I fell in love with.

I was in love with Stephen. I wanted to go to him and say: "Take me, take me!" I suddenly remembered another incident, and that was a year before this when one of my aunts had taken me to New Orleans to the Mardi Gras. Friends of hers had driven us in their automobile. There were two other young girls with us. A band of young men took advantage of the confusion, the noise, the excitement and gaiety to jump into our automobile, remove our masks and begin kissing us while my aunt raised an outcry. Then they disappeared into the crowd. I was left dazed and wishing that the young man who had taken hold of me and had kissed me on the mouth were still there. I was languid from the kiss, languid and stirred.

Back at the club I wondered what all the rest of the models felt. There was a great deal of talk about defending oneself, and I wondered whether it was all sincere. One of the loveliest models, whose face was not particularly beautiful but who had a magnificent body, was talking:

"I don't know what other girls feel about posing in the nude," she said, "I love it. Ever since I was a little girl I liked taking off my clothes. I liked to see how people looked at me. I used to take off my clothes at parties, as soon as people were a little drunk. I liked showing my body. Now I can't wait to take them off. I enjoy being looked at. It gives me pleasure. I get shivers of pleasure right down my back when men look at me. And when I pose for a whole class of artists at the school, when I see all those eyes on my body, I get so much pleasure, it is—well, it is like being made love to. I feel beautiful, I feel as women must feel sometimes when undressed for a lover. I enjoy my own body. I like to pose holding my breasts in my hand. Sometimes I caress them. I was once in burlesque. I loved it. I enjoyed doing that as much as the men enjoyed seeing it. The satin of the dress used to give me shivers— taking my breasts out, exposing myself. That excited me. When men touched me I did not get as much excitement it was always a disappointment. But I know other girls who don't feel that way."

"I feel humiliated," said a red-haired model. "I feel my body is not my own, and that it no longer has any value ... being seen by everybody."

"I don't feel anything at all," said another. "I feel it's all impersonal. When men are painting or drawing, they no longer think of us as human beings. One painter told me that the body of a model on the stand is an objective thing, that the only moment he felt disturbed erotically was when the model took off her kimono. In Paris, they tell me, the model undresses right in front of the class, and that's exciting."