Paint It Black by Janet Fitch Page B

to her right now, she was trying so hard to keep it together.
    She shrugged. “They said you needed a model.”
    “Yeah, but not you. Christ, Josie, what are you doing?” Poor Phil. Just the kind of man who would fall in love with an impossible girl like herself.
    “Killing time,” she said. She didn’t know what she’d do with the rest of her life, but for the next three hours, it wouldn’t be a problem. Yet Phil Baby wasn’t Henry Ko, who viewed her as a glorified bowl of fruit. Phil wanted to hug her, adopt her, give her the key to his soul, his apartment, his checking account. He wanted to save her. “It’s okay, Phil. I’ve got to get used to it.” She pulled away from his graphite-dark hand, hitched her bag, and walked back to the screen where the models changed.
    Phil Baby returned to his student, a girl in overalls sitting in the chair where Michael used to sit. The seat closest to the windows. Suddenly, Josie felt a rush of fury. She wanted to go over there and yank that girl out of that chair, turn it over, kick her to the floor.
Do you know whose seat you’re sitting in?
But she didn’t. And it wasn’t his seat anymore. No, he’d given up any and all seats. He’d written himself off the seating chart.
    On the modeling stand, flame-haired Callie moved through her gesture poses. She caught Josie’s eye over the art students’ self-barbered coiffures, not moving her head, but her eyes speaking sympathy. Josie didn’t want anybody’s pity. Why wouldn’t they just let her get on with it, become an inert shape in space? She liked Callie, though, the way her body challenged the students’ ideal of beauty, its elongated breasts and the weals of multiple pregnancies. Josie appreciated that courage. At first, she’d thought, if she ever looked like that, she would disappear into the house and never come out, make love with the lights off. How had she ever been so ignorant? How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one’s capacity to endure it.
    She went behind the screen and removed her clothes, her shoes. Everything seemed suddenly sharp, dangerous, the hooks, the splintered supports with their graffiti—
Yolo ’
64
, Ben
+
Harriet.
She felt like old people who forgot what shoes were for, each gesture calling meaning into question—unbuttoning a button, breathing. Movement slowed to half speed, quarter speed, as if the air had thickened. She could take nothing for granted, her hand on her shirt, her ability to keep the floor underfoot.
    The students were playing Devo, their geeky mania filling the air. Normally she liked Devo fine, but today she wished she was at Phil’s place over at the Villa Elaine—he played Coltrane while he painted, Miles Davis. She wrapped herself in her sarong of a flowered tablecloth and came out to watch Callie. Ridiculous to have to cover herself, when she would be naked in front of them in a few minutes, but it was the convention and she hadn’t the energy to protest.
    As Callie finished her gesture poses, the baby artists sketched furiously. How real their own futures seemed to them. When any of them might be dead tomorrow. She thought of the prayer Michael told her the Jews said on their New Year: “On Rosh Hashanah it is opened and on Yom Kippur it is closed, who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water, and who torn apart by wild beasts . . .” She looked at the students, wondering which of them would be mangled in a car wreck, who would die by a stray bullet coming in off the park. The boy in the skinny tie? The girl in the shaved Mohawk? All looking at the model as if they didn’t own flesh, as if they couldn’t mount the stand themselves. Their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form, but so much like Cal, talking about “the bereaved” as if it didn’t apply to him.
    She walked behind them, glancing over their work. Some had airbrushed Callie,