Читать книгу All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages - Saundra Mitchell - Страница 16

Amsterdam, 1638

Two weeks into the new year—the third of our apprenticeship—the master painter Cornelius van der Loos declares me the best of his students.

Though not for my skill behind the easel—I have yet to master shadows in the still lifes, so my light often seems to be coming from a cosmically improbable sun that has been spread across the sky like a pat of melted butter.

But I am the boy most accomplished at not becoming distracted by the first naked woman we draw. Which is something, I suppose.

It has been all vanitases and still lifes for us for years, though just before Nieuwjaarsdag we graduated to plaster casts of the human frame, so the appearance of the living versions in our studio seemed inevitable. But the first day that van der Loos plucks a round-hipped girl from De Wallen and perches her in the center of our circle atop a stool for us to sketch, the study for the other apprentices seems to be more about keeping themselves in control as van der Loos calls for her to change positions and she presents us with an arched back that make her breasts reach for the ceiling.

But for me, it’s as easy as not going hard over the Delft candlesticks and Jakartan pomegranates we have been sketching since we were twelve.

Though if it were Joost Hendrickszoon reclining naked on a ragged sofa in front of me, a barely there whisper of silk draped over his most vulnerable bits—or, God help me, perhaps no silk at all—it would be me gasping down lungfuls of the frigid January air with my breeches tented, trying not to think about how desperately I would like to put my hands on some tackle that wasn’t my own.

It’s been a time since I spoke to Joost—though spoke seems too generous a term for the blushing conversations I occasionally stammered my way through with him after Sunday services. That hasn’t stopped me from fantasizing about him without his clothes on when I am supposed to be staring at van der Loos’s girls and sketching them in repose. His family put their money in Viceroy bulbs and when the tulip market shattered, he had to abandon his own apprenticeship with the faience maker and take up work with the dockhands who load the cargo onto the East India clipper ships.

I catch sight of him sometimes from afar, down at the docks, when van der Loos sends Augustus and me to fetch his imports for his vanitases and sacks of pigment powders, the sort than can be bought only on the other side of the world. As we load our handcarts with the smalt blue of Delft china or the yellow ochre stripes on the inside of an Iris petal, the thought of Joost somewhere nearby always has me by the throat. Even when he’s not in my sights, I can picture him—the muscles in his arms tense beneath the weight of porcelain, the concave hollow of his back bowing beneath their weight. All the anatomy lessons of my apprenticeship put to questionable use. Once, when he passed us by with a crew of the burly dock men, he winked at me, and I was so flustered I dropped a crate full of dried puffer fish from the West Indies I was holding. When we cracked the lid back at the studio, we found half of them had crumbled into dust, and I took a lashing over the knuckles for it from van der Loos.

But Joost winked at me. All things have a balance.

So my apprenticeship gives me charcoal stains in the creases of my palms, knuckles scratched from catching loose nails when we spread canvas over frames, my fingers dyed the color of Admiral Liefken tulips from priming red ochre pigment, while Joost broadens out his shoulders, sculpting him a silhouette like one of those Renaissance Christ paintings in church I used to stare at so long my mother thought I might become a clergyman.

But so long as it is a woman draped across the sofa in the center of our sketching circle, I’ll be, as van der Loos proclaims, the best apprentice in the Guild of St. Luke.

Though, it is mortifying to be declared thusly in front of a room full of the other boys, half of them rising to attention when our model stands at the end of the session and reaches down to touch her toes, presenting us with a near-telescopic view of her nethers. Johannes’s charcoal falls out of his hand and breaks in two against the floor, and Augustus already has that glazed look in his eyes of being halfway through a fantasy about taking this girl out behind the Wolf’s Head and getting his head under her skirt. Though knowing Augustus he’d be so sweaty with nerves if he ever got this girl alone he’d probably slide right off her. When we boil the linseed oil for binding, he can hardly look me in the eyes—I can’t imagine a girl would be any easier on him.

From the back of the room, van der Loos knocks a hand against the wall, so hard and sudden that all the boys startle, eyes ripped from the model. “Good lord, it’s like you’ve none seen a woman before.”

None of us want to be the one to admit that we haven’t—Braam, the oldest of us, is fifteen, so up until now it’s been mostly mothers and sisters and the occasional tavern whore for all of us.

Van der Loos shoos the model into the back room, then stalks forward to the center of our circle. A curtain sheltering the high windows catches on his lace collar as he passes and he swats it free.

“What’s this?” He flicks at Braam’s parchment, which is mostly devoted to breasts. “Is this what a woman looks like, or what you want her to look like in your fantasies, Englen? And this, Hermanszoon?” he snaps at Johannes, who reaches up like he’s going to cover his work and keep the rest of us from seeing it. Van der Loos passes Augustus’s easel without comment, but pauses on mine. I brace for a criticism, but instead he says, “This is well done, Constantijn,” and I start—I hadn’t realized he was so near to me.

He takes up my sketch and holds it for the other boys to see. “And you know why this is well done? Because it does not reek of childish fantasies. Constantijn here has sketches that are anatomical. No breasts that defy gravity or exaggerated curves. You would all do well to adopt his attitude—this is not the last naked figure we’ll be drawing, and I expect a certain level of work from you.” He drops my board back on the easel, then claps me hard on the shoulder. “Well done. You did very well today.”

I try to look pleased, but the compliment sends my heart hiccuping. A singling out is enough reason to be taunted on our walk home, perhaps get a handful of snow stuffed down the back of my breeches. I’ve done the stuffing before—we all have. But to be called out for being the only boy entirely disinterested in the female body could have a different end. They drowned a guild master in Delft last year, and shaded taunts don’t take long to darken into rumors. Though the danger of a jest holds little water with these rich boys whose parents pay fifty guilders a year for them to become painters, who will never have to grit their teeth when they lie with a woman or worry their minister will confront them about their unclean desires that could end tied to a millstone and tossed into the sea. Whose desires their masters condemn, but at least they’re boyish.

I leave the studio that night sweating in spite of the winter cold. Most evenings, the five of us apprentices walk from van der Loos’s studio along the Uilenburgergracht to Dam Square, where we break apart, following the veins of the canals to our homes, but I try to clean up as quick as I can and escape alone. I’m the first one to leave the studio—I realize halfway down the stairs I’ve left one of my gloves behind, but I can’t muster the courage to go back to fetch it.

I’m half a flight from the gate when I hear the lumbering thud above me of the other boys’ klompen on the stairs. They swarm around me on the street, like I’m a boulder in their stream. I speed up, trying to stay a few steps ahead with my scarf pulled tight around my face, but I can still hear them behind me.

“Eyes ahead, Constantijn,” Braam calls. “Don’t want you getting distracted.” He strikes the last syllable like a cymbal, just as a clump of slushy snow slaps the back of my head. I don’t turn around.

“Look at Constantijn, so focused.”

“Doesn’t even notice the girls all around him.”

“Have you ever seen a girl before, Constantijn? Come out tonight and we’ll give you some tutoring.”

Another lump of slush hits near my feet. No wonder Braam’s vanishing points are always a few inches off.

I pull up the collar of my cassock and walk faster, but my klompen slide on the stones, still slick with last night’s new snowfall. I have to grip the bridge rail as I cross the canal like it’s a lifeline just to stay upright.

“What do you like more, Constantijn—girls or dogs?” Braam calls, and Johannes laughs.

“Girls or chickens?” Johannes adds.

“Girls or sailors?”

“Go to hell, Braam,” I say, quiet enough I think they won’t hear me but I’ll still get the satisfaction of having told them off under my breath.

But Johannes hears—he’s deaf to instructions about canvas priming but he’s dog ears for everything that isn’t meant for him. “What’s that, Constantijn? You’re going to hell?”

Dam Square looms at last—the milky green dome of the weigh house wears a hat of new snow, militias of sharp icicles lined along the gutters. The low clouds swallow the spire of the Westerkerk over the tops of the canal houses. A breeze spools off the water, bitter and ripe—I can smell the stench of the harbor, oysters spitting seawater and herring left to fester in shining piles upon the rotting slats of the docks. My stomach heaves.

I would be smart to joke back jovially, pretend like the taunts didn’t sting like rust on a razor, then say yes to a drink when Johannes suggests it. Probably would have been good to muscle down a kiss with a carmine-cheeked whore just to prove that I don’t find the female form almost entirely repellent. Maybe if I look long enough it won’t be; all these weeks of nude studies adding up have built up my tolerance. Maybe sinful desires can be cleansed through prolonged exposure, like colors faded from a canvas by hanging too long in a sunny corner of the house.

But instead I keep walking as the boys peel off toward the Wolf’s Head, letting their taunts roll off me like the snowballs melting down my back. I duck down Raadhuisstraat and across the Singel Canal, toward my parents’ house. They’ll have the stove lit, peat smoking in its belly, and my sister will take my cassock and my klompen and they’ll want to know about what I’m painting and my mother will have herring and none of this will matter. In a few moments, I can be home and pretend everything is fine.

“Constantijn, wait!”

Against my better judgment, in the middle of the bridge, I turn. Augustus jogs up beside me, his feet sliding on the icy planks. I grab his arm before he falls. “Thank you.” He ruffles his hair, a powdered snow like the sugar dusting on oliebollen scattering over the front of my cassock. “Sorry, I...” He starts to brush it off for me, then stops, his face going red.

“What is it, Augustus?” I ask, and my voice sounds like van der Loos’s, pinched and tired.

“What? Right. Yes.” He fumbles around in his satchel, then comes up with my missing gloves. “You left this. Back at the studio.”

“Oh. Thank you.” I try to take it, but he doesn’t let go as fast as I think he will, and it clenches up between us like a taut sailing rope. Neither of us let go for a moment, but Augustus shies first, and the glove slumps into my knuckles.

He scuffs a toe along the ground, his klompen making a horrible scraping noise against the ice. “They’re just jealous, you know. Because you draw so well.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Truly. You’re the best of us.” He kicks a lump of muddy snow and it bursts against the rail like a Catherine wheel. “Have you thought of your specialization yet?”

“Landscapes. Maybe. I don’t know. Not nude women.”

“Why not?”

“They’re...” I scratch the back of my neck. “Not really my subject.”

“Nor mine. I liked when we were painting the fruit.”

“The fruit?”

“Fewer breasts on the fruit. I mean...” He presses his hands to his cheeks. “I’m not good at breasts.”

“Most fruit is rather breast shaped, though.”

“But they’re not so squishable. They’re more solid. So the shadows are easier on the fruits. And I like the colors.” He’s got his hands up in front of him, flexing them, gripping these imaginary not-breast squishable fruit, but then he shakes them out, like he’s only just realized what he’s doing. “God, what a conversation. If someone were to overhear us.”

I laugh. “The scandal of naked fruit.”

“The church would have a whole business around making dresses for apples and pears by the week’s end.”

“That’ll be the new commodity now that the tulips have failed.”

“And it would be a very specialized profession, since only those with the tiniest hands could sew these tiny dresses for the fruit.”

I laugh again, almost more from surprise than at what he’s said. Augustus is so quiet and nervous in class, I’ve never heard him speak so freely. Or realized how funny he was. When he looks up at me, the reflection of the dying light off the canal catches his eyes, the warm umber of cane sugar.

Augustus smiles, the tips of his ears poking out from under his knit cap pink where the cold nips at them.

“Well,” he says, after a moment of staring at each other, our breath fogging the air between us. “I’m back that way.” He points back over his shoulder, toward the square. “Don’t worry about what Braam said.”

“I’m not.”

“I know. But if you were. Or if you need to hear it. You’re all right.”

He reaches out and touches my shoulder, so quick it’s almost imaginary, then walks away, leaving the cold clawing at me, each breath burning as I swallow it and coming up misty and white, warmed by my lungs.

* * *

By the end of February, the girls have become more ordinary—we can all draw hips and breasts in a creative array of positions now, most of us without exciting ourselves. We still draw the plasters, now interspersed with models once or twice during the week. When we’re not sketching, van der Loos has Augustus and me glazing his undercoats for a new series of domestic scenes while the rest of the boys mix his pigments and prepare the pallets, so we spend most mornings shoulder to shoulder, our hands sticky with glaze. Augustus sometimes hums under his breath while we work, his usual twitchy hands still and steady on the brushes.

A snowstorm buries Amsterdam and we’re out of the studio for three days, all of us trapped in our homes, and when we return, we’re all buzzy and talkative, so the shout of someone entering doesn’t register with me straight away as out of the ordinary. I’m stretching parchment on my board, trying not to smudge my charcoaled fingers over the edges, but then I hear Braam say, “What are you doing here?” And I look up just as Joost Hendrickszoon steps out from the studio doorway, his wool cap crushed between his hands.

I drop into a nonsensical crouch beside my easel, an action born purely from the panic of seeing him out of context and so unexpectedly, then fumble around for something to do so my sudden drop to the ground looks even remotely motivated. I thrust my hand into my satchel, just to look like I’m doing something, and I nick my thumb on the knife I use to sharpen pencils.

“Constantijn!”

I stand up, thumb in my mouth, so fast I knock my head on the edge of my easel. The whole thing teeters, parchment board tilting at a dangerous angle, but Joost catches it before it falls in earnest and tips it back into place for me. The charcoal falls off the edge and breaks against the floor. When Joost casts his gaze down to it, I can see the red-gold freckles sprinkled over his eyelids and, when he bends, the spot behind his ear where his hair doesn’t lie flat. He’s sheared it off since he started his dock work, and the short curls feather against the back of his neck.

He tries to scoop up a few salvageable pieces, and when he hands them to me, it takes a full minute to remember how to make my fingers work to take it from him. Another to recall language and form the shape of it with my tongue.

“Joost. Good evening. Morning. It’s morning.”

He wipes the charcoal off his palms, leaving black smears on his cassock. “How are you faring? I saw you at the docks last week.”

“Did you?”

“You looked occupied or I would have come over.”

“Oh. I was fetching the plasters.”

“The what?”

“We were doing a study...” Halfway through this sentence I realize I had been at the docks retrieving the plaster casts van der Loos had made of naked male torsos and I go so light-headed with embarrassment I think I might faint.

Joost raises an eyebrow. “A study?”

“For painting.”

“Ah.”

His eyes drift over my shoulder, like he’s tiring of this conversation and looking for someone else to speak to, and my mind becomes so overwhelmed by desperation to keep him here that it latches on to the word I have been so careful to skirt for this entire conversation and spits it out. “Penises.”

Which gets his attention back on me, but at what cost!? “What?”

“We were painting... We’ve been talking about the musculature of...” I do a mime of something oblong shaped with the unfortunate placement of right in front of my crotch. “It was just for the painting. We didn’t do anything with them. Not the penises. The casts. The plasters.”

“Oh. Well. I suppose you have to start somewhere.”

A wild little giggle escapes me. Joost raises his eyebrows, and I look around for some sort of pallet knife on which I could fall on and impale myself. “Are you making a delivery?”

“No, not many ships of late—the snow’s kept them from docking. Hard to make a living.”

“Yes, hard.”

“What?”

Don’t say it again, I think, but of course I do. “Hard,” I repeat, louder, and, Jesus, take me now. Scoop me from this earth; I shall never recover. I tug at the front of my smock, which I have somehow sweat through, and force myself to keep my eyes on Joost’s face and not the pale dip of skin visible between his kerchief and collar, sprinkled in freckles the same color as his hair. “So are you, um... What are you doing here?”

“Take your seats, please,” van der Loos calls. “Hendrickszoon, if you’ll come with me.” Joost ducks out from between the easels to follow van der Loos, and I collapse into a swoon upon my stool, so light-headed I almost tip backward. I plant my feet on the floor and try to breathe and not look around for Joost, though just knowing he’s near makes me feel set aflame. I hear the scrape as van der Loos drags the sofa into the center of our circle. All I catch of his words is “return to life drawing today.” I peer out from behind my easel just as he slaps the sofa cushion once, raising a mushroom of dust. “Hendrickszoon,” he calls. “If you’re ready.”

And then Joost steps out from behind the partition, wearing the thin dressing gown, same as every woman we’ve drawn. My heart starts to pound its fists against my rib cage like it’s trying to burst out and lay itself dramatically at Joost’s feet.

Van der Loos presents the couch with an extended hand. “If you please.”

It seems to take a thousand years for the robe to come off. It slides like slick oil off his shoulders, and if I thought they were a thing of beauty beneath a shirt, they’re miraculous unsheathed, whorls of thick muscle coiled beneath his skin. His whole body is taut as he unfastens the sash, the studied concentration of a beautiful man who knows he’s being watched but chooses to pretend he’s unaware because it makes for better planes of his face. As the robe falls open, I wonder if it will be possible for me to complete this entire study without once looking any lower than the dip of his hip bones, so sharp and precise they look as though someone chiseled them.

This, I think, as I keep my eyes determinedly focused on his face while the robes thumps softly to the floor, is entirely not my fault, and entirely his, for being so pretty.

Joost nudges the robe beneath the sofa, then gives van der Loos a smile. His hands twitch at his sides, like he’s trying not to cover himself. “Shall I...?”

“Prone, please, to begin. And your boots.”

“Oh.” Joost laughs as he looks down at his feet. “I forgot.” He kicks off his boots, and they bounce across the floor, landing in a rumpled heap before Augustus.

I duck behind my easel, close my eyes, try to take a breath, fail, try to take another, nearly pass out, give my cheeks a stern talking to about being a little less red or they’re going to give us both away. Another breath, another failure. Peer out from behind the easel.

Joost stretches out on the sofa slowly, like a thing unthawing. Braam whistles, and there are a few laughs, though of an entirely different variety of those that accompanied the bare-breasted women who have previously draped themselves over this sofa.

“Quiet please,” van der Loos says, then, to Joost, “You might begin with your arms above your head please.” Joost obliges, stretching himself out to his full length. He’s so tall that his feet hang off the edge of the sofa, and the muscles in his chest coil, his skin gilded by the sunlight curling in through the windows, brighter than usual as it reflects off the new snow piled along the sills.

Van der Loos adjusts the drapes, letting in more light, then turns to us. “Gentlemen, observe particularly the musculature here, in the torso, how it connects differently than on the female form.”

Look somewhere else, I think, as van der Loos strokes a hand through the air over the ladder of Joost’s abdominal muscles. Look at his boots.

I stare at the material in a muddy heap on the floor, the way the folds drape, the leather sole, the hole along the heel where the stitching has come loose and he hasn’t yet taken it to the cobbler.

“Constantijn, are you paying attention?”

I raise my eyes from their determined study of the boots. Van der Loos is staring at me with a frown. So is Joost, less frowny. So are all the other apprentices. Braam’s mouth is quivering with trying not to laugh.

“Yes, sir.”

“What are we discussing?”

“His...torso, sir.”

“We’ve moved lower.” He points straight between Joost’s legs. “Follow along, please.”

And, because everyone is watching me, I look.

As Joost lounges upon the sofa like some god ripped from mythology, the entirety of his front side on display, I have a stern talking to with my own bits about calming down and they staunchly refuse to listen.

I try threats. If you don’t go soft, you’ll have no supper, though my body seems far more interested in sex than food.

BUT LOOK AT HIS CHEST, it seems to scream in response.

I try bargaining. If you go soft, I’ll give you a good workout tonight.

BUT LOOK AT HIS BARE THIGHS.

I try pleading. If you do not settle, all of these boys are going to see me go stiff over Joost and I will get more than a handful of snow to the back of the head.

BUT LOOK AT HIS—

Think of the least arousing things possible. Gutted herring in the market. Spilled sewage in the greasy snow outside the Wolf’s Head. The old woman who begs outside the church with a mouth full of rotted teeth she sometimes spits at my sister and me like melon seeds.

“If you would change, please, Hendrickszoon,” van der Loos calls, and I start, nearly crushing my charcoal between my fingers—I hadn’t realized we had started to sketch. Joost sits up, letting one leg dangle off the sofa and giving me another eyeful of his crotch that sends all the blood fleeing my head.

Maybe if I faint, van der Loos will let me go home. Maybe if I throw up, he’ll let me leave early. Maybe if I keel over dead they’ll bury me in the churchyard with “Here lies Constantijn, slain by the first penis he saw that wasn’t his own.”

I look at my parchment. I completed nothing from his first pose. I start to scribble frantically, tracing out the arch of his back just to get something on the page. My heartbeat is sitting in my hands—the few strokes I manage are palsied. I look around at the other apprentices, hoping at least one of them will look as uncomfortable as I am and my own fumbling can be passed off as something other than unholy lust. They all seem focused, and the room is quiet but for the soft shush of charcoal on parchment. Beside me, Augustus bends so close to his sketch that his nose seems likely to smudge the charcoal.

“Constantijn, what are you doing?”

I start so spectacularly my charcoal skates across the page, leaving a long black smudge. Van der Loos is standing over me, frowning at my board.

“Sketching, sir.”

“You have yet to finish a figure.”

“It’s difficult.”

“How so?”

“Different. Than the women. The anatomy,” I tack on hastily.

Van der Loos’s frown deepens. “Constantijn, are you well?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You look feverish.”

“It’s very hot in here, sir.”

“Perhaps you’d prefer to sit by the window.”

“Oh, God, no,” I say, too quickly, and van der Loos frowns at me. “It would disrupt my angles,” I say, instead of explaining that sitting by the window would give me a view that is far more full frontal than my current.