Highland Portrait (2 page)

Stella’s parents were both a mystery to her.  Her mother had died when Stella was very young and she had a vague memory of a beautiful woman with long dark hair.  In that mysterious space between dreams and memory, she recalled being dressed in pale yellow walking hand in hand with her mother through a meadow of white flowers. Stella had a vague notion that somehow her mother had ceased to exist at the end of that meadow.  She wasn’t sure why she felt that but she felt it very strongly.  Since that time, though, she still felt connected, as if the bonds of maternal love and care had not ceased, but were delivered in a spiritual rather than temporal manner.

Stella did not have pictures of her mother, everything of note having been burned in a fire shortly after her death.  She couldn’t remember the fire, being just a toddler at the time, but her father assured her that all that was left of Merry McKenzie was memories.  Merry had been an only child and both her parents had died and any living relatives were in Scotland.  After her mother’s death her father was a constant presence in her life and they had always been very close, even though there was an air of secrecy and mystery about him that she could not penetrate.  He was a professor of Renaissance History at the university, had written numerous books on the subject and was widely acclaimed for his keen knowledge and sense of detail about the time and the people.  He traveled a good deal, but never took Stella on his research trips, citing her own school work or limited child care options, and as she got older there was always some conflict or other that prevented her from accompanying him. She loved her father dearly and was just glad that when he was in town he spent a good deal of time with her.  He encouraged her in her career and was her biggest supporter. 

Taking a long draw of the wine she closed her eyes and winced. “My god, that is some nasty shit.” She chewed on her stale spring rolls wishing they were fresh pad thai, but she was not inclined to go out and buy more Styrofoamed food. She got up and headed to the sink to pour the wine down the drain.

Stella walked with quiet grace into the kitchen, the motion of her arms and legs economical and direct, but fluid.  She was one of those women that could walk with elegance, as if walking were dancing, floating just a little above the floor. Not particularly tall, she carried her weight on a slender, but not delicate, frame. She had an ice skaters body, her muscles tightly toned, her curves strong and athletic, her legs spectacularly fit.  She had classic good looks with a wide, full mouth, high cheekbones, large, deep set eyes and skin glowing with health.

Her long curly hair was springy and soft, a black cloud of shine. She seldom did more than wash it and tie it up in a pony tail, and when she thought about it she had it cut.  In her twenty three years it had been styled less than a dozen times and never permed, but for all its neglect, or perhaps because of it, it was shiny and healthy.

Generally lacking in vanity she was proud of her hands. They were small and well shaped, her fingers long and smooth.  They were hands made for pouring tea from old Wedgewood pots, hands for dabbing perfume from crystal phials on porcelain skin. They were aristocratic hands that served her well, nails always neatly trimmed, although too often stained from paint. Hers were hands that had the power to brush life onto canvas, sometimes with a touch so feather light that only molecules of paint were left behind.

Her eyes were not the eyes of smoky sensuality, but were startling in their color and intensity. Deep set and large, they were volcanic eyes, the amber color so light they appeared gold, ringed with hazel.  She was well aware that her stare was unnerving and often used her eyes as a weapon to startle people, pulling them in like a laser beam, offsetting and confusing them.  Flashing with fire when she was angry, they burned bright and hot, but when engaged with passion her eyes were molten like golden lava.

Not only skilled in her creative pursuits, she was also highly intelligent and had an almost photographic memory.  College had been a breeze and it had been a disappointment to her teachers when she chose to major in art instead of medicine or law.  She had the brains for anything she wanted to do, they said, but art was her passion and her ‘magic’.  Besides, she couldn’t stand sick people and lawyers pissed her off, so she would never have been happy at either of those pursuits.  College was four years of impassioned focus and was perhaps the happiest of her life. She had devoted herself to her goals, centered on becoming good at what she loved and had given no thought to the experiences and opportunities for pleasure she had passed on.  Her work was all she really cared about.

She was relatively happy, regardless, but had increasingly begun to feel the loneliness of her life.  She had been married briefly to another artist, much to her father’s angst, but it had not played out well so she was not anxious to jump back into that skin again.  But something was missing, something was not right.  She felt as if she were late for an important appointment and her disquiet grew.

She wasn’t going to think about that now, though.  She had a commission which would relieve a good deal of financial stress and she was hoping that would quiet her yearning – even if it were due to some silly Highland warrior.

Nothing provoked Casper’s over-zealous barking like a doorbell chime.  It was the alarm that roused all of his basest instincts.  A doorbell chime indicated immediate danger, possible murder, and if he was lucky, a squirrel.  Barking and howling as if the lives of all those in the surrounding neighborhood were in imminent danger Casper jumped at the door, feverish to charge someone.  Something.  Anything.

“Shut the hell up, dog!  You are a nut job,” Stella grabbed Casper by his collar and pulled him away from the door.  She opened it just enough to look outside and was shaken to the core to see who was standing there. 

Stella was in the business of beauty and fantasy but outside her door stood a man right off the cover of a romance book.  He was so breathtakingly, beautifully perfect she thought he might actually be computer generated.  Nobody was that beautiful.  Or perfect.  But there he was standing outside her door smiling at her, his midnight black hair blow dried in a tousled, sexy, but manly style.

“Uh, um, hello, can I help you?”  Stella stuttered.  Casper started to bark again, but she grabbed his collar tighter and pressed the dog in between her legs, capturing his head between her knees.  Casper struggled to get loose but she squeezed tighter.  He relented and made do with smelling rather than barking.  The murderer on the other side of the door smelled like lemon grass, a sure sign of evil.

“Hi, I’m Shawn Craig.  The Meade agency sent me.  I’m your model.”  Shawn’s smile was noteworthy in that it, too, was perfect.  Model perfect teeth.  The teeth of classic toothpaste commercial perfection.  Stella, always sensitive to bone structure in models, noted that his museum quality cheekbones, chin and arched brows were the classic golden ratio.  He was one of the few really perfect faces that Stella had ever seen. She wished she had a ruler to measure the proportions of his features because she knew this face would work out to be the cosmically transcendent archetype.  He was The Mold, the beginning, the ultimate male beauty, all others being blurry, thrown together imitations. In his case, Beauty was NOT in the eye of the beholder, but it was flesh.  Undeniably gorgeous flesh. 

“Oh yeah, the model,” she said.  “Shawn, I have a killer dog here.  Please go through the side door, that’s where my studio is.  It’s open.  I’ll be there in just a minute.”

“Sure, be glad to,” he said, flashing her another toothy, perfect smile and with a nod he turned from the door and walked to the side of her house.

Stella closed the door and dragged Casper to the dining room.  She opened the back door and shouted, “Squirrel!  Go get that squirrel, Casper!”  Like a cannon shot Casper flew out the back door looking for his beloved enemy. 

“You crazy-ass dog.”  Smirking at her deception Stella quickly closed the door and walked down the hall to her studio. 

Her studio was a converted garage to which she had added lighting and windows so that it suited her needs.  She had spent countless hours and dollars modifying the space until it was transformed into an enviable studio.  The air quality and temperature were exact to keep her oils from drying too fast or too slow, there was very little dust and if she didn’t have enough natural light from the large windows then she had a bank of lights that imitated natural light very closely.  It was a wonderful space and she loved being there.  It was, quite literally, where the magic happened. 

She walked into her studio and Shawn was there, his back to her, taking off his shirt.  He had on a blue and green kilt and there was a rather large sword lying on the floor next to his duffel bag.  It was not a toy, but looked heavy and dangerous, made of polished steel, something you might expect to see at the Renaissance Faire.  ‘Who carried a sword on a modeling gig?’ she asked herself. 

His back was to her but she knew without looking that his chest and arms would be ‘chiseled’.  She knew that he had a body that he spent hours defining and maximizing so that every inch of his gorgeous self would reek with perfection.  She knew it even before he turned from the window and smiled at her.  Tanned and chiseled and, not surprisingly, his chest shaved clean as a baby’s behind, marble smooth and glossy.  He was godlike in his masculine perfection, the ultimate male, the yang to the ultimate female yin.

She watched Shawn’s movement, the sway of his kilt, the muscled calves covered in thick white socks, and felt there was something undeniably sexy about a man in a kilt.  Not that all skirted males were sexy, she mused.  The Greek fustanella looked like a tutu and the Pacific Islanders lavalava looked like a bath towel, but the Scottish kilt was a garment that titillated her and she had no idea why. Maybe it was the reputation of the men that wore them.  During battle the Highlanders had often been called the ‘Ladies from Hell’ because of their fierceness as warriors.  Yet there was a vulnerability about them, too, and whenever Stella saw a man in one she wanted to slide her hand up his kilt and touch the naked warrior.  

Shawn reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a bottle of baby oil.  “I can oil my chest if you’d like,” he smiled knowing that his oiled chest was the pinnacle of his appeal.

“No, that won’t be necessary, Shawn,” she said.  “I’m going to spend a couple hours doing some preliminary sketches and once I decide what works best for this piece and start laying down paint then you can oil up your chest.” She gave him an indulgent smile. 

“Ok, you’re the boss,” he said, although he looked somewhat disappointed, and put the bottle of baby oil back in his duffel bag.  “Where do you want me?”

For the next couple of hours Stella filled page after page with sketches.  Shawn was an excellent model and used his body like a tool, being a bendable, moveable doll doing exactly as she asked.  He held the sword as if he knew what he was doing, as if he was the last of the Highland warriors, born to the weapon, generations of combatants pooled in his genes.  His muscles sprang to life with the weight of it giving her pause as she watched him wield the weapon.  Had she been prone to being easily impressed by male beauty she might have swooned.  Stella was impressed, however, that he was able to give her exactly what she wanted when she asked for emotional range.  Noble. Sad. Loving. Angry. Tender. Whatever she asked for he reflected that emotion, right down to the glint in his eyes.  He was good.  Very good.

As she drew the many images of Shawn she couldn’t help wondering about the real Robbie MacDougall and what he might have looked like.  Certainly nothing like Shawn. He probably, as Kyla suggested, looked and smelled like a bear.  The 1600’s had not been an easy life and Robbie may have been a strong man, but he wouldn’t have been ‘chiseled’.  Only hours at a gym could cause chiseling.  Robbie may have been powerful, maybe tall, but never chiseled.

As the hours passed she began to feel a slight niggling in her mind that she was heading in the wrong direction with Shawn.  She didn’t know why she knew it, but she did.  He wasn’t right, he wasn’t Robbie.  She knew he wasn’t even though she had no idea who Robbie might have been or what he may have looked like. To begin with, he would not have had highly coiffed hair. His hair would probably have been an egregious wiry mess that hung down past his shoulders or gathered in a queue, washed every summer.  Nor would he have had the smooth as glass chiseled chest. In fact, no part of him would have been smooth as glass.  He would probably have been blanketed with battle scars, pock marked from disease, and hairy as a gorilla. 

A small voice began to emerge in her brain.  ‘Not Robbie, not Robbie, not Robbie.’  A dark, uneasy feeling grew in the pit of her stomach and she knew that there was no ‘magic’ in Shawn.  She felt a shiver of goose bumps and the hair on her arms stood up like antennae.  She felt a ‘whoosh’ of cold wind pass by her and she knew something was in the air, something that was going to alter her ‘vision’.

Frustrated that she was being ‘interrupted’ by a force not her own, she threw down her pen and sketch pad.  “Shawn, lets finish for today, I need to look over these sketches and make some decisions.  Besides you must be tired, you’ve been posing for hours now.”

“Actually, I’m good.  I can keep going, if you need me to, but if not I’ll head to the gym.” His smile was engaging and in spite of herself Stella smiled back.  Of course he was going to the gym.  He was going a ‘chiseling’.

“Go on to the gym and let’s pick up again tomorrow.  I’ll be ready to put some things on canvas tomorrow.  You good with that?”