“You mean,” India said, “you’re a lesbian?”
“Bisexual,” Lula said. “I’ve been with too many men to consider myself a lesbian. I like men, but I’m done with them sexually, for the time being.”
“Are you?” India said.
“I’m into women,” Lula said.
“Is there anyone special?” India asked.
“No,” Lula said. “Not really. Do you ever think about women?”
“No,” India said. “Never.” When she said this, she felt immature, provincial.
“Let me ask you another question,” Lula said. She had devoured her dessert and was pressing the tines of her fork against the remaining crumbs. “Would you ever consider modeling for me?”
India had smoked the second joint late that night, blowing the smoke out her open bedroom window. Insomnia, her own personal Satan, had her by the neck. Her mind was a bloodred room, alarms sounding. She had known, the second she agreed to model for Lula, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She feared she would never sleep again.
Initially, she had turned Lula down.
No, heavens, no, there is nothing about my body that deserves to be reproduced in any medium.
Lula had been persistent.
I’m trying to get at something inside the body. To show inner strength, resilience. Surely you’ve picked up on that?
Yes, India had picked up on it. It was what made the nudes distinctive. You looked at Lula’s figures and saw the iron and the elasticity.
Who have you used before?
India asked.
Lula shrugged.
The sylphs from the stable.
She meant the aspiring actresses and waitresses who got paid thirty dollars an hour to pose for PAFA students.
Also, a friend of mine from over the summer. And once, a black high school girl I picked up off the street.
Jesus, India thought. Lula was out there, inviting lawsuits. And yet, India had seen the studies of the black teenager and found them brilliant.
No one can know,
India said.
No one can know I’m doing it and no one can know it’s me when they see the paintings. You can imagine the imbroglio that would ensue?
I can imagine,
Lula said.
So,
India said, feeling both honored and supremely uncomfortable. Feeling, in fact, like she was being propositioned. This was a chance to be a part of something new and alive. There was no doubt in India’s mind that Lula was going to become a major artist of the new millennium—as big someday as Rothko himself, or Pollock, or O’Keeffe—and how could India, mere mortal that she was, give up the opportunity to be a part of that? India did possess inner strength and she did possess resilience and she was sinfully proud of both. She was a phoenix, risen from the ashes. She should be painted! If not her, then whom? Lula might ask Ainslie next, or Spencer Frost’s sultry wife, Aversa. India would have been offered her chance and blown it. So she said yes. She would pose.
Lula had left the house shortly after getting the answer she was looking for, taking with her a generous piece of plum crumble on a paper plate sealed with Saran Wrap. Lula was drunk and high and driving a borrowed car on unfamiliar, winding roads; it was unethical, indeed criminal, to send her home. India should have invited Lula to spend the night.
You can follow me in tomorrow morning.
But India’s sense of decorum told her to
get the girl out of the house
before any other boundaries were crossed.
India smoked the joint, which led her downstairs to the kitchen to finish both the plum crumble and the amaretto ice cream. She fell asleep around five and awoke at seven with her teeth unbrushed and a vague sense of shame in her heart.
At the picnic table, India polished off the second glass of wine. It was quarter to four and she was still alone. It was a gift, she supposed, to have time to think about the letter, and about Lula, without other people around. If Birdie were here, she would want to know who the letter was from and what it said. India’s head was floating. It was a singular experience, getting drunk on a sunny afternoon. She had reached the point where she either had to rein herself in—figure out how to work the ancient French press and make herself a cup of coffee—or keep going with wine. What the hell, she thought. She was on Tuckernuck, where nothing was expected of her.
In the kitchen, she poured herself another glass of wine. She checked to make sure Chess was still breathing. Yes? Okay.
Posing for Lula was as secret as a love affair. India refused to pose in Lula’s studio or in any other PAFA-owned space. And so they decided on Lula’s apartment.
India checked in with the doorman under an assumed name, Elizabeth Tate, which was, India told Lula, a family name. Lula didn’t understand the need for aliases—the doorman was discreet, India could use her own name. But no, she wouldn’t.
Lula met India at the apartment door. She had Schubert playing, which was a balm for India’s sensibilities; in her studio at school, Lula listened to the Smashing Pumpkins and the Sex Pistols and the Ramones at ludicrous volume. (The other students would have complained if it had been anyone but Lula.) Lula greeted India in a businesslike manner—a crisp hello, no kiss—and handed India a waffled white robe.
“You can change in the bathroom,” she said.
Lula’s bathroom was sleek and modern like the rest of the apartment, and as impersonal as a bathroom at a hotel. All of Lula’s personal effects were secreted away behind mirrored cabinets. So many mirrors, doubling and quadrupling India’s form in its dishabille. She tried not to look at herself. Her mission here today was
not
one of personal vanity. It wasn’t about the body and what had happened to her once-magnificent ass (too much plum crumble, too many sweet cosmopolitans, age). It was about art.
She entered the living room in her robe. “Where would you like me?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Lula said. She wore a white ruffled tunic over some electric green leggings. She was barefoot, she was smoking. Her hair was half-up, half-down; she had kohl smudged around her eyes. “I’ve been thinking about it. Let’s start on the sofa.”
The sofa was white suede. India was afraid of it. Or rather, what she was afraid of was this moment, the moment she was to remove her robe. It wasn’t like India to be nervous; it wasn’t like India to feel vulnerable. She tried to concentrate on other things. The Schubert was nice. There was a vase of crimson dahlias on the table next to the sofa.
She slipped off her robe, exposing her backside to Lula. She lay down on the sofa. “Like this?” she said. Her voice sounded strange.
Lula barely nodded her assent. Her pencil made a frantic scratching sound against the paper. India was electrified. She was instantly aroused, as sexually turned on as she had ever been in her life. She was nothing at that moment but a naked body stretched out on skin-soft suede. She was a woman with another woman’s eyes all over her. It was obscene and exhilarating. Lula’s pencil was moving faster and faster. India felt as if the pencil was touching her, as if the eraser of the pencil were teasing at her nipples, which were now erect. Did Lula see? Did she see what she was
doing
to India?
Lula said, “Pivot your hips, a little, toward me.”
India had heard all the jokes, of course, about the sylphs from the stable. The girls who modeled at PAFA were, when class was over, the easiest lays in the Delaware Valley. It only depended on which student offered to buy her a drink first. Now, India understood why. It was an incredibly sensual experience to bare your body and let another person render you.
India closed her eyes. She was wet between the legs. She was pulsing with heat and light.
“Eyes open!” Lula snapped.
India opened her eyes.
She had managed to get out of the apartment an hour later without incident, a fact that had dismayed her at the time and came as an enormous relief once she was out on the cold city street.
What had happened in there? India wondered. What kind of witchcraft?
She decided she wouldn’t go back.
But go back she did, every Tuesday at five o’clock, for eight weeks. The posing took the place of their weekly dinners. India couldn’t sit with Lula and have a meal; something had shifted between them. The posing was serious business; during the sessions, they barely spoke. India didn’t know how to process the sexual energy. Did Lula sense it? Did she feel it, too? She didn’t let on.
During those eight weeks, India started to take care of her body again. She joined a gym in King of Prussia; it wasn’t a place where India would bump into anyone she knew, so the business of building her strength and endurance was her only focus. She hired a personal trainer named Robbie, who was a transvestite and worked her like an ox through the machines and the free weights. She ate chicken and fish and vegetables. She cut down on cigarettes and stopped drinking at home. She invested in creams and lotions for her skin; she booked manicures and pedicures and massages on the weekends. (Taking care of herself, India realized, could take up every spare hour if she let it. Did other people do this?) She flossed every time she brushed. She took vitamins. She soaked in lavender baths. She considered getting a risqué wax on her pubic hair, but she didn’t want to call attention to herself.
Lula didn’t seem to notice any change, until one day when India slipped off the robe, Lula said, “Are you getting skinny on me, Indie?”
India was quick to deny it.
“Really?” Lula said. “You look positively svelte. And you’re glowing. What’s that about?”
India shrugged.
“Lie down,” Lula said.
Then, the posing ended. It was spring break, which was two weeks long. India went to Greece with her college roommate Paula Dore-Duffy, who was now a professor of neurology at Wayne State University. Paula did research on the blood-brain barrier; she wasn’t interested in the art world or PAFA or late-emerging lesbian feelings, and India didn’t speak of these things. Paula wanted to shed her white lab coat, drink ouzo, and dance in the hotel discos, which overlooked the Aegean Sea, and India joined her in these pursuits. The one morning at breakfast when Paula did ask India about work, India joked that thinking about PAFA made her worry for her own blood-brain barrier, and she dove into her honey and yogurt. The subject didn’t come up again. It was a relief.
When India got back to the academy, things progressed into end-of-the-year mode. Third- and fourth-year students were preparing for the Annual Student Exhibition. India checked in with all of her advisees, including Lula. Lula was busy painting. She was back to her obsessive ways—in her studio from seven in the morning until midnight, smoking two packs a day, drinking ten lattes, ordering Indian food from Mumbai Palace that sat, untouched, in the cartons.
Everyone’s expecting big things,
India told her.
Fuck you,
Lula said. But she was smiling when she said it.
The ASE was always the biggest night of the academic year; it was, in many ways, more important than graduation. Graduation was a ceremony, a passing on of a (basically useless) degree in fine arts. But the ASE was the meat; it was the money. Art dealers from all over the city and from New York and Boston and Chicago attended—as well as family, friends, previous graduates, colleagues from other schools, other museum curators, serious collectors, novice collectors, and society matrons who couldn’t tell Winslow Homer from Homer Simpson but who wanted to see and be seen. The ASE was the premier evening in the Philadelphia art world; there was a line at the gates hours before.
India always wore something new and fabulous to the ASE because inevitably her photograph appeared on the society page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the glossy center pages of
Philadelphia
magazine. She was, in so many ways, the face of PAFA; hers was the name people recognized. India Bishop, widow of the famous sculptor. And this year she knew her involvement would be deeper and more nuanced than it had been in years past. The paintings everyone would be talking about would be of her.
Because the ASE was student curated (which was part of the buzz: not even the administration knew what to expect), India hadn’t seen the paintings. A hundred times, India had been tempted to ask to see the paintings so she could confirm that the nude body would not be recognizable as
her
nude body—but she couldn’t risk insulting Lula this way. She and Lula had an understanding: her one condition would be honored.
India wore a flowing white one-shouldered Elie Tahari dress that, while quite lovely, most closely resembled a paint-splattered sheet thrown over her body. Before India even made it through the back entrance, before she lifted a glass of champagne from the tray, she was receiving compliments on it.
Beautiful dress, so elegant, so fitting, where did you get it?
People were everywhere, they were a flock of birds descending on her, seagulls at the beach where she had the only sandwich. Everyone wanted to talk to her; everyone wanted her attention. A reporter from the
Inquirer
snapped her picture while she still had her sunglasses on. India was overwhelmed. She needed the tiniest bit of personal space, a few moments to set down her purse, taste the champagne, get into the exhibit rooms. Had her entrance always caused such a buzz? Or was this interest caused by something else? Did they know? Was it obvious, or just a rumor?
India forced out a breath. She had to relax. The ASE was this overwhelming every year, she reassured herself, because she knew nearly everyone in the room, and those few people she didn’t know wanted an introduction. Still, scenes from her waking nightmares spooled through her head—her body hideous and lumpy, her face twisted and ugly, her form revealing what an evil bitch she really was—as she made her way through the crowd.
The president of the board of directors, Spencer Frost, was waiting for her just outside the exhibit rooms. He was flushed and sweating, as if experiencing his own private ecstasy. “My God, India, it’s fantastic. The girl is a superstar. I want to buy them all. I’ve already bought two for myself and one for the school. They are… well, go, woman, see for yourself.”