Affection (14 page)

Someone changed the topic. I wanted someone to respond so that I could valiantly defend my stance on anal sex, but they moved on to other things. Put some distance between them and me. I was embarrassed back into silence.

One of the other girls mentioned her new job modeling. Katherine was a sweet girl, luminously beautiful, statuesque with long black curls and porcelain skin. Her family knew artists, not artists like my
own mad hermit family, but rich artists who threw proper parties and exhibited in private galleries. Katherine modeled for a few of them and found there was a circuit of modeling to be done.

Back in my cold unloved flat I pored through my collected Anaïs Nin. Stories about artists and their models and the sex between the two, and yes, stories about anal sex and the pleasure that can be had, a pleasure that reflected my own. I suspected that no matter how sophisticated and worldly they seemed, the drama students were wrong, that it was all right to enjoy this kind of physical sensation. That no sensation should be taboo. I thought about my evenings with Emily and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
and I curled up inside my cupboard, and I masturbated. I inserted a finger into my anus while I did it and enjoyed it despite them.

 

 

The problem with taking my clothes off in public was my relationship to my body. It was a young body, not quite nineteen yet. It was tighter than it would be in subsequent years. It was fitter. Drama classes provided a regime of movement that stretched and toned and whittled away the puppy fat. I had started to eat since leaving home, but my diet consisted of small cups of couscous with avocado sliced into it, some tamari, tahini on rice crackers. I ate occasionally and on the run. I couldn't bear to sit amongst the other girls in the Country Women's Association accommodation dining hall. I tended to help myself to an apple and some crackers and cheese, hover at the edge of the dining
room, swallow it down with a coffee, before grabbing a coat and racing out into the night. I couldn't bear to be alone in my flat. I walked for miles and sometimes I would stop and fish a novel out of my satchel and curl up under a streetlight to read for a while before wandering off again. My restlessness burned calories.

My body would not look nicer than it did in those days, and yet, when I stepped out of my clothes in front of the students, all I could think about was the dimpling on my thighs, and the midget proportions of my calf bones compared to the rest of me and the soft place on my belly. I undressed in the crowded room because there didn't seem to be anywhere else to do it. I stood naked and faced the students who would be studying my body.

They were art students and this meant there was a lot of cheesecloth in the room. Hairstyles were colorful and full of texture. These students were not as beautiful as my own class, they were thin and pale and beaky, but still they seemed more beautiful than me.

I stared them down. When the lecturer suggested I should do a series of quick twenty-second poses as a warm-up, I made sure to have eye contact with at least one student for each pose. This is how I survived it, that first time. Later it would be easier, but that first time was a challenge and I faced it as such. The room was cold, the students were my own age.

That first time my poses passed without comment. I did what was asked of me and then I dressed hurriedly, took my cash and left
the room. I didn't even glance at their sketchbooks. I didn't want to see myself interpreted through their eyes. Later, at another session, a young student whined that they always got fat models and I was mortified and almost quit the job. But he was a pimply, consumptive type with a fringe that covered his eyes and when I looked at his sketch pad he had turned me into a stick figure anyway. His figures were not at all beautiful. I could see his criticism for what it was, he was blaming his tools as any bad artist does. My mother had taught me that on our afternoons painting in front of the television. A bad artist blames the tools. I dressed and walked toward the bad artist at the end of the class, brushing past his mediocre images, making his easel wobble.

Sometimes I posed for Katherine's clients in their big houses with their expensive canvases. I didn't particularly like the work I saw on their walls, but they were rich and I supposed their work must be more valuable than I could judge.

“Pretend you are washing your hair,” one of them told me. I raised my hands to my scalp. This is how I washed my hair. It wasn't a particularly interesting pose.

“No, no. Like this.” He showed me. Some kind of lean and bend, an athletic kind of personal grooming that I had never seen before. So this is how other people wash their hair, I thought. I am doing it wrong.

I was constantly astonished by the real world. Everything was new and strange. I had never experienced other people's lives. I had
never stayed at someone else's house before leaving home, I had never spent quality time with anyone outside of Dragonhall. I entered university trusting blindly that everyone else's way of doing things was probably the way things should be done.

I kept up the modeling, wondering when one of the artists would find me attractive and proposition me, as in Anaïs Nin stories. I waited, and slowly, session after session, began to realize that none of them found me attractive at all.

I wrote to the boy from Gladstone and he wrote back to me. I love you, he told me. I love you, I said back, but I knew I was just speaking from the kind of loneliness that bites into your bones, the kind you could die from unless you found your way out eventually. When I let myself back into the Country Women's Association late at night and rode the elevator to my floor, I felt numb. When I sat on the single bed there and pulled off my sandals I would find that I was crying, and wonder when the tears had started. I would pick them off my cheeks and let them drip from my fingers, curious. I was crying and I knew that probably meant I felt sad, but really I felt nothing at all.

John, the boy who played the clarinet, lived across town in a lodge in Auchenflower run by the Uniting Church. I sat quietly with him at a café and I no longer felt all that teenage angst and longing that had plagued me through the years of high school, but it was good to see him again.

He lived in Raymont Lodge, more expensive than my own accommodation and not as close to the university, but I didn't care. I had to leave the Country Women's Association where I knew no one and barely came home to sleep.

I spoke to my mother on the phone, and she was worried. There were boys there. It was a unisex accommodation. She was happier with me at the CWA, in the cloistered safety. I told her that I almost always stayed late at university and missed meals and came home hungry and
broke. I told her that I was lonely and couldn't bear that place any more. I threatened that if it wasn't Raymont Lodge then it would be a share house with some people from my course, boys probably, a share house full of drugs and boys and sex. She agreed, reluctantly, and John helped me to move my few possessions to a room at the lodge.

The rooms were grouped around a communal kitchen. The girls in my cluster were friendly enough, but they were as alien to me as the girls at the CWA. I heard noises and smelled things coming out of their units that I couldn't identify. They showed each other makeup they had bought and set unfathomable rules for the collective kitchen, endless lists of things that should or should not be done. They were always on diets. Sometimes the units smelled of boiled cabbage, and some weeks there was nothing but silver Jenny Craig containers cluttering up the refrigerator. They shared diets and stories about boys and jokes about popular culture that I didn't understand. In the daytime there were soap operas on the communal television. At night there were sitcoms and the only difference as far as I could tell was the laugh track.

I would cross the central courtyard to John's wing with a cask of wine, which was against the house rules, and we hid it in the garden and skulled coffee cups of the stuff after dinner. It was an easier time. I still felt restless in the evenings and found myself spending time in a nearby park overlooking a train station, watching the commuters trudging home through the puddles of streetlights and reading the names of dead people on the memorial statue.

In the set of rooms close to John's I noticed a group of boys. They had pulled the table away from view and huddled around it. They would spend their evenings quietly, erupting into laughter before shushing each other back to quiet. They were an odd bunch, badly dressed and not seeming to care about that. A couple of them wore the trademark black stovepipe pants and pointy boots of goths, but even they were half-hearted about their costume, venturing out in flannelette shirts and T-shirts torn at the seams. One of the boys was the same age as me, but had a beard down to his midchest and a receding hairline that made him look quite grandfatherly. One night I ventured in for a closer look.

Dungeons & Dragons. They slapped the Dungeon Master screen down as soon as I entered their enclave but I had seen it. I could see it still, despite the heavy chemistry textbooks they nudged casually on top of it. Dungeons & Dragons was banned at Raymont Lodge, the magic and demons considered an affront to Christian values. It was specifically written into the rules. No closed doors if you had a visitor of the opposite sex, no alcohol, no drugs, and no Dungeons & Dragons.

The boys were pocketing their twenty-sided dice and their little metal figurines when I approached them. The boy closest to me smiled, a cheeky cherubic grin, and held out his hand to shake my own. Robert was studying information technology.

“Krissy,” I introduced myself. “Drama student, but don't hold that against me. I play a ranger.”

“Evan,” said a red-haired, blue-eyed boy with a shy smile. “Girls don't play Dungeons & Dragons.”

“Well I do, and I have wine. I think that entitles me to join your game.”

I sat between Robert and Evan and filled their coffee cups under the table. We played quietly, secretly. When we heard people approaching we hid the module under textbooks and pretended to talk about exams. I laughed. It was the first time I had laughed since leaving Dragonhall. I teased the boys and they teased back and we became friends quickly. I was invited back the next night and the night after that and soon they knew how I liked my tea and sometimes Evan would wander across the complex carrying two cups of tea, spinning them in twine slings he had crocheted to prove the existence of centrifugal force, not a drop spilled. I still spent time with John but it was not just John. I had friends now, a group of them, and sometimes we wandered into the city, and sometimes we caught a train to the cinema and I would come with them to Hungry Jacks afterward to watch them eat greasy burgers, excusing myself by explaining my vegetarianism.

I bought pointy black shoes like some of the boys and listened to Bauhaus.

James made the trip down from Gladstone to visit me and although I missed the evenings playing Dungeons & Dragons, the thought of sex was more immediate. James and I touched and kissed
and petted but he still refused to have sex with me. “For your own good,” he said, and I never knew what he meant by that.

He left me to masturbate by myself, I shut myself in my room and drew the curtains and spent hours at it, coming and then resting and then coming again.

Then I had a dream about Evan.

I liked him. Many wouldn't, but I did. He had an awkward sense of humor. Sometimes it didn't seem like he was telling a joke, but hours later I would repeat something he'd said and find the humor in it. He talked a lot about computers, which were then new to the world. Some of us had them, huge boxy things with barely any memory. I printed my assignments out on a dot matrix printer and watched the paper catch and feed out all askew.

I still liked my typewriter with the two-line memory and the automatic corrective action that seemed to make the words vanish off the page with just the press of a key. He preferred my computer. He liked talking about old
Star Trek
episodes. He liked Mr. Spock and I liked McCoy and we agreed that explained the difference between us. Still, we were fond of each other. He made me cups of tea and didn't even ask the other gamers if they wanted one. I sometimes put a weedy flower in the keyhole of his dorm room because I knew that no one ever brought him flowers.

I dreamed that we were in the bath together playing D&D. There were other people in the room, the whole gothic, geeky,
overnourished, undersunned bunch of them. All of them with their little painted figures of magic users and dwarfs and rangers. Someone was rolling the multisided die and it was skittering loudly on the tiled floor. No one seemed to mind that Evan and I were naked in the bath. No one seemed to mind when I ducked down under the water to suck on his penis, an impulse I found odd even in the dream since I had never wanted even to touch him before this. I liked him. He was fond of me. There was a kind of familial easiness between us that we appreciated, but I had never even thought about his body under his pointy boots and his black trench coat.