Drawn from Life

My mother gave me a camera. Tonight I took this photo of one of my drawings from the Sunday life workshop, of the splendid model Alan who even heterosexual Latin men call an Adonis. He is not only splendid looking, he's as solid as a rock, can't, apparently, put his body into any pose that is not beautiful, and is of such serene good nature that he really is a model on more than one level. This is actually an old drawing of him but I like it better than the one I did today.

And by the way this drawing is not actually on a red background. It is this color because the flash on my camera bleached out all the color so I covered it with my finger and this was the result.

When I go to these sessions -- I have my pick of Saturday or Sunday morning or both -- I carry all my art supplies of course, and I also carry my iPod. And I carry something to read.

I’m reading Volume II of John L. Motley’s The Rise of the Dutch Republic. There may be a more objective and modern narrative of this amazing and terrible period in European history, but I doubt that there is one more movingly told. And the hero of it, William of Orange (not the one who various things in Virginia are named after, but an ancestor of his), is a real hero. The villain of it is Phiip II, who Marvin Mudrick called “a double-dipped dirtbag from hell,” which on this, my second reading of the book, seems a bit of an understatement.

Anyway that’s a tale for another day I hope. My point in mentioning it is only to indicate that I travel heavily fortified against boredom and anxiety. So during a model I was on my way outside for a wee smoke and I grabbed the book of course. Various other people from the group of about eight were out in the hall and one was this woman named Y., shall we say? She is Anglo-Irish I think. She has taken a great liking to me and apparently regards it as a great compliment to me. There was an old man in the hall also, who asked me what I was reading. I handed him the book. He glanced at the spine and handed it back.

“I don’t read books,” he said. “I get all my reading from newspapers.”

I nodded politely.

“I read the New York Times of course, and the Forward, and The New Yorker.”

I nodded politely.

“My wife gets the Washington Post on Fridays and Sundays.”

“Well that’s certainly enough reading to get you through the week,” I ventured at last.

He looked blankly at me and I thought, “What did I say? What am I supposed to say? What did I miss here?”

Not a moment too soon, Y. intervened. “I went to see that movie The Queen with Helen Mirren,” she announced to me rather breathlessly. “Did I tell you I went to see it? It was marvelous. You must see it.”

She had told me that once that morning. And last night when I got home from Tower Records my father said “Y. called. She said she saw the movie The Queen and it was marvelous.” He had written it down, too.

When I checked my email there was a message from Y. “I’ve just been to see that movie The Queen, with Helen Mirren. It was marvelous.”

“Yes, you did tell me,” I said. I said it nicely OK? Suppose I had lied (which occurred to me for a moment to spare her finding out how many times she had told me), then later she would remember that she had told me. I can’t keep all that sort of thing straight so now I just say the truth on a Need to Know basis.

At any rate hearing about that movie The Queen with Helen Mirren was very timely. It was like she threw a rope and sort of rescued this old man from the bog of self-consciousness in which he was apparently sinking. He departed from the conversation the way people do at cocktail parties when they have listened to you long enough and now they see someone else coming that they have to be interested in for exactly 10 minutes. (More if they are bigger social fish of course.) Not that there was anyone coming, but perhaps The Void was preferable to my mute reproaches on his literary taste.

But you will note, won’t you, that I did not initiate this conversation with the old man. I did not put him in any difficulties. I never said or implied a word of about his reading habits, I didn't ask him to explain them to me. All I did was answer a question that he asked me, a question, by the way, he showed not the remotest interest in hearing the answer to.

The thing is for months after I started coming to these workshops in January I would hear these people talking to other people and they sounded sane enough. But apparently when I come near, all the bats start swooping and flapping about in the belfry.

Is it something about me, I wonder? The answer is yes. I am a loony magnet. I inherited it from my grandmother. But I am not sure what makes some people loony magnets and others loony proof.

And then maybe, you know, I sound nuts too. I leave that to you to judge.