The ad didn't specify whether the modeling was done in the nude, so I called to make sure it was. Turns out nude models get paid $5 more per hour than clothed. I nearly jumped out of my skin when they told me.

Sign me up! I said.

I wondered if they would paint me all at once, or if they would split it up. 

Draw her arm today, the instructor might say. Now her knee. Now her belly button. Now her cunt.

I imagined pieces of me hanging on a corkboard, connected with string like an evidence wall in a true crime TV show. I imagined the artists moving the pieces around, rearranging them until the parts fit together. 

Perhaps I would befriend one of the artists and convince him to paint me any way I want.

"I want you to draw me like one of your French girls," I'd say, and maybe he'd think I was being suggestive. Or I'd tell him to paint me in a surrealist style—my naked body with the head of a shark in the middle of a salt flat. Or like the impressionists, my breasts smudging into my stomach and my eyes globby dots, only distinguishable from several feet away. 

I imagined collecting all those versions of myself in a room, stacking the paintings and hanging them on the walls until the room was so full that I had to slip canvases through the slit under the door to stuff more inside. I’d fill up the room until no one could force anything else in there, even if they tried.

#

This all started after Terry suggested I seek out a "safe" experience with my body. 

I like to pretend I'm buying into Terry's bullshit so that she can scribble in her notebook and report to her supervisor on how much progress she's making with Poor Troubled Girl. I want her to believe she’s making a real difference and that whatever degree she’s in debt for was totally worth it. 

But I'm not always nice to Terry. The nude modeling, for example, I’m doing just to fuck with her. The next time I see her she'll ask what progress I've made, and I'll tell her (very excitedly) about my new gig. 

You were right, doc! I'm cured! 

Can't wait to see the look on her face. Fucking priceless. 

#

I didn't know what to wear. So I googled, "What do you wear to take off your clothes for strangers?" and found an article called "People Show Us the Outfits They Wear to Get Laid." The first woman in the article wore a jean skirt and a t-shirt. She described her look as "cool but casual." The second woman wore a cropped top and high-waisted white pants. She said this outfit attracted "indie guys."

I wondered if people would think I wanted to get laid if I wore one of these outfits to my modeling gig. Or if being naked was enough. Then again, maybe people who use nude models are Serious Artist Types who respect the “artistry” of nude modeling, and they wouldn’t think of me sexually at all.

Like when actors do sex scenes in movies. I heard it’s very professional and clinical, and that there are "intimacy coordinators" whose sole job is to make sure no boundaries are crossed. 

Imagine “intimacy coordinator” being your job title. I wonder what prerequisites you need for that. Skills: faking consensual sex, directing orgasms, tricking people into feeling comfortable.

Yikes.

#

The professor had a robe for me, which felt cliché. But I suppose there is an indignity in doing the hop-on-one-foot-to-get-out-of-your-underwear dance in front of people. 

The classroom was in a basement. Wouldn't be the best lighting for my physique. I was tempted to ask the professor if he had taught them how to paint cellulite but decided against it. He was very old and very mustached and very polite, and probably couldn't see cellulite anymore with his bare eyes.

"We're going to start with you lying down on that bench," he motioned towards a coffin-like box in the middle of the room, covered with a white sheet. "We might adjust your pose, but try to be natural."

"I was thinking something like the Étant donnés," I hid a smirk, doing my best impression of a Serious Artist Type. 

He looked at me strangely. 

"Duchamp?" I said.

"Okay," he nodded. "You said you've modeled before?"

I sat in the back of the room in my robe while the class shuffled in. They didn’t look at me. They set up their easels and unpacked their supplies. I felt oddly calm about the whole thing. Until the professor started speaking at the front of the room and said we were fortunate enough to have a live model and still none of them looked at me and then he talked for a while longer about what techniques they were practicing and none of them looked at me and finally he motioned for me to come to the front of the room and I walked forward in my robe that smelled like a broom closet and still none of them looked at me.

Only when my robe dropped silently to the floor and I lay across the wooden box, the softest parts of me spilling onto the too-thin sheet, only then did they look at me. And their gazes did not display attraction or disgust or glee or scrutiny. They were looking at me as if I were unattached to anything human. Which made me feel that familiar sucking out of my insides and my heart beat slowed, and my eyes focused on a small water stain on the opposite wall, and I felt myself escape to that corner of my brain where my body really was a fortress and I its gatekeeper.