Faking It (6 page)

She was exquisite. I'd never seen such fullness, so much fertility in this five-foot-four-inch frame. I began to trace her, line by line, in my mind's eye: a combination of controlled contoured lines and sketchy, gestured strokes. I shadowed in the crevices where her thighs met, where the cleavage of her breast began and ended, like a waterfall. I highlighted the roundness of her shoulders, the delicateness of her fingertips, the softness of her cheekbones. I posed for these portraits everyday, as traces of ugliness and self-judgment melted away and beauty blossomed.

This was a far cry from the hate-hate relationship I'd had with my body ever since I was about nine and embarrassed myself one summer afternoon. Dressed in cut-off denim shorts, a child's bikini top, and Dr. Scholl's sandals, my skin a lustrous bronze from carefree play and summer vacation-swimming, I had entered the livingroom where my brother Joey was playing his guitar.

"Does this look sexy?" I asked, in reference to my outfit, wishing open-toed Candies shoes came in kids' sizes (for all I know, they did; but there was no way in hell my mother would have ever bought a pair for me).

He laughed. My brother
laughed
at me, and I figured I must have looked as ridiculous as I felt at that moment.

By eleven years old, I'd stopped playing outside and started reading inside--mostly novels about shy high school girl heroines winning the hearts of captains of the football team. I secretly wrote similar storylines as well. By fifteen years old, I'd discovered Drake's Ring Dings. By eighteen, I'd surrendered in defeat to the enemy that was my fat body. Even when I Slim-Fasted myself down twenty-five pounds, it didn't matter--the psychological collateral damage had already been inflicted. Since then, I'd yo-yoed the same twenty-five pounds every three or four years; I was on the upswing since I'd broken up with Andrew, plus another five pounds since my once-a-week jaunts with Maggie to the Krispy Kreme kiosk in the Brooklyn U Student Center.

***

When Devin and I met again for our second meeting, he instantly noticed a difference in me.

"Wow!" he exclaimed. "You've been practicing!"

"How can you tell?"

"Your walk. You entered upright, confident. As if you own this room."

I couldn't help but reveal my enthusiasm. "It was incredible, Devin. I've never been so accepting of my body. It's such a good feeling to look in a mirror and like what I see, even if
Cosmo
is telling me I'm too many sizes too big."

"Fuck
Cosmo
--those models are all airbrushed anyway. You're real. Besides, you look gorgeous." I blushed and turned away for a second in an attempt to hide a smile from him; I hadn't been called "gorgeous" in a long time.

"How'd you make out this week?" I asked. He raised his eyebrows and handed me three pages, typed and double-spaced, as required. One of them was the list of his twenty favorite words:

kiss

watercolor

tarantula

shadow

stroke

pet

cadmium

caress

lake

ostentatious

pedantic

shaft

lecherous

cookie

tarp

canvas

bunny

didactic

turpentine

cochlea

I read the list silently, smiling at every other word, with the exception of "tarantula".

"What made you pick that word?" I asked, pointing to
tarantula
.

"It's just a cool-sounding word."

"And the others?"

"Mostly I either like what they are or the way they sound when they're said. The words that end in 's,' for example, can sound really sexy depending on what kind of voice you use." In a low and softened tone, almost Barry-White-ish, he cooed, "
Lecherous
." I laughed and imitated him.

"
Carresssss
," I exaggerated. He looked at me flirtatiously.

"Oooooo," he moaned with a wink.

Next, we talked about the Hampl essay, and the fine line between memory and imagination. What's the difference between a lie and fiction? I asked. Voice, Devin replied. Interesting answer, I thought, not to mention impressive. Finally, I read the draft of his memoir:

My fifth grade class took a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art when I was eleven years old. I didn't know anything about art, my only experiences consisted of whatever we had to do for art class in school, which was mostly paper mache projects or painting with poster paints or working with tissue paper and that sort of thing. I remember liking to finger-paint as a child, though. My mother bought me a set and for hours I set my dirty little hands into the colors and made all kinds of patterns in the newsprint.

The class went to see a Picasso exhibit. We spent a week in class learning about Picasso and all I got out of it was that he was a weird Spanish guy who was supposed to be a genius. The museum was huge. A castle of marble. Gigantic wall after gigantic wall of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and tapestries.

The class listened to the old tour guide talk about Picasso and explain the paintings, when he painted them, but I wasn't listening, and I wasn't interested in Picasso. We had passed another room that had caught my attention, and that's what I wanted to see. So I snuck away from my group and my class buddy (we always had to have a buddy when we took a field trip so as not to get lost) and went into the room. It was not as big as the other rooms, but just as well lit and quiet as the rest. I must have been a curious sight: an eleven-year-old boy dressed in Levi's jeans and a Rolling Stones glitter t-shirt and Addidas sneakers so fascinated with these pictures on the wall.

The first painting spanned almost the whole wall. It almost looked like a finger-painting, and perhaps that's what caught my attention. It had lots of blues, greens, whites, and yellows in it from far away. But when I looked up more closely, I could see just about every color you could think of in these tiny, quick brushstrokes. It was as if my eyes had suddenly become blurry and I could not make out shape or image. I circled the room and looked at other paintings and was fascinated the same way by their use of color, light, brushstrokes, and form. The dancer was my favorite. She almost looked as if she would pop right out of the painting and start twirling, just for me. She was absolutely beautiful.

I don't remember how long I was in that room, it seemed like an eternity. I don't even remember other people walking around the room. It was as if I was the only kid alive. The next thing I know, I hear someone calling my name, and it's one of my classmate's mothers who was chaperoning the field trip. She didn't yell at me but she seemed to have both a mixture of relief of having found me and anger at me for having run off. My teacher, however, had no problem yelling at me. I didn't care, though. I discovered the beauty of art that day, even though it wasn't through Picasso. I did, however, develop an appreciation for Picasso much later on, but to this day it's still the Impressionists that blow me away. I came home from the museum and announced to my parents that I was going to be an artist. My mom said, "that's nice." My dad, however, told me that the only thing that men paint is houses, and if I wanted to be an artist the first thing I should paint was a pair of fairy wings for myself. I never could stand his closemindedness.

"I didn't really know how to end it," he said, almost apologetically.

I read through the draft once, and then a second time, taking out my felt-tip blue pen and making notes in the margins, underlining some phrases and circling certain words. Devin watched me do all this, and with my peripheral vision I saw his apprehension. The writing was choppy and repetitive in style and structure, as well as laced with comma splices and fragments, with dabblings in metaphor and description; much like my freshman students' first drafts. And yet, I saw something else here, something more complex bubbling underneath the surface. I see that with all student writing--the possibility that lives within the flaws.

"What do you like about this draft?" I asked him, breaking the silence. Puzzled by the question, he studied the words as if they were cryptic markings, as if the idea of liking his writing was something foreign to him.

"Actually, what I like is what I didn't really write about. It wasn't just that I fell in love with those paintings, but that I also found them on my own. No tour guides, no teachers. It was the
solitude
of the moment--I was in my own world, and it could've lasted ten minutes or two hours, I really don't know. And maybe there was a little excitement at having escaped from the herd, so to speak."

"That's what I see," I responded. "There's so much in this memoir that's not on the page yet. So much you can do with it."

We discussed figures of speech and adding description and letting the moment of revelation--the discovery of beauty, both in art and solitude, and the rejection of his father--show itself without him having to tell his readers. As time ran out, Devin looked at me with admiration.

"Wow. You're really good at this."

"Thanks."

I must have sounded unconvinced by his sincerity, because he continued. "No, I mean it. You really know how to see what's going on while giving constructive criticism at the same time. I think I was expecting you to tell me it was crap. If I had a teacher like you the first time around, I might have remembered more about writing. Hell, I might even not have been so bad at it."

"Well, you're not a bad writer; actually, I think this is quite good. You're inexperienced, that's all."

"Same as you."

"Huh?"

"There's a ravenous, sexy lover in you, and we're gonna bring her out just like you're gonna help me with my writing. You'll see."

He was so corny that I gagged in the process of laughing and swallowing at the same time. I took a sip of water. Devin looked un-phased.

"Okay," he said, standing up. "Your turn. Strip."

My eyes widened and I coughed again as I looked at him.

"Geez, you could be a little more tactful. Whatever happened to foreplay?"

"First of all, foreplay is next week. Second of all, I don't wanna be tactful. Tactful is:
Now take off all your clothes, piece by piece, and don't worry, your body is beautiful
," he said in a condescending voice. "We did that last week. You're beyond that now. Let it out."

"How much am I letting out?"

"As much as you can."

"Would you at least lower the blinds so I'm not giving the rest of the city a free show?"

He rolled his eyes and closed the blinds, shutting out the streams of sunlight that cascaded onto the walls and floor and sofa. I noticed the color of the sofa had changed from a slightly off-white to taupe once the rays were extinguished. He likes neutrals.

This time I wore a matching pink bra and panties, again by Victoria's Secret. Beads of sweat formed at my temples and rolled down my flushed face. He took a step towards me, and I backed away. "What are you gonna do?" I asked.

"Relax. Geez, Andi. You gotta trust me."

I remember:

I am twenty years old and in one of the co-ed fitting rooms at the Gap. An eighteen-year-old employee accidentally unlocks my room for another customer and gets an eyeful of me in bra and panties and one leg in a pair of size twelve jeans that are too tight. I recoil in both surprise and horror and don't know what to cover first. He promptly but disingenuously apologizes and slams the door, and I am mortified. When I finish changing, I bring the tight jeans and other rejects to the entrance of the fitting rooms and hand him the stuff without making eye contact. As I walk away, the tow-headed kid mutters under his breath but loud enough for me to hear, "Get over yourself, bitch; there was nothing worth looking at."

"Fuck you, Devin." The words fired out of my mouth like a bullet. "You take your clothes off. You think this is easy? I don't even
know
you." I recalled saying that to him once before.

Devin didn't even flinch at my words; instead, he did as I commanded and started to remove his t-shirt and jeans, revealing a chiseled body and navy blue silk boxer shorts. The hair on his chest was dark and short and drew a line from his breastbone to his navel. His skin was tan and firm, his muscles toned and trimmed without bulging or looking like an abs infomercial. His legs were powerful and sturdy and tall. I was viewing a replica of Michelangelo's
David
. He stood before me, completely uninhibited, and stretched his arms out, almost in a Christ-like way. My mouth hung open like a thirsty dog.

"See how easy it can be?" he said.

I had to catch my breath before I spoke again. "Of course it's easy for
you
--look at you! Who wouldn't wanna show off a body like that?"

"Andi, you just got through telling me that you fell in love with your body."

"Yeah, well, that moment's over."

"Why?"

I didn't answer him.

Devin looked at me with compassion, then closed the rest of the shades in the room. Next, he turned on the stereo and went through his CD collection. "We've had enough of Etta James," he said, more to himself than me. He finally settled on a Latin album. The syncopated drums were no match for the rhythm or the rate my heart was beating at. He padded back towards me, his bare feet making light thumping sounds on the hardwood floor, and stood right in front of me, invading my space. I felt myself lean back slightly. His eyes locked into mine and overpowered me in such a way that my insecurities were stopped in their tracks by stun rays shooting out of his pupils. And yet, his sienna irises radiated firm gentleness, as if to protect the rest of me from freezing in fear.