Brimstone chp2

Chapter two: An unveiling of sorts

    Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Alina’s first class was life drawing. When she walked into the studio, her friend Mariabella was already there and had staked out easels for them in front of the model’s platform. Alina shrugged off her portfolio and coat, unwound her scarf, and announced, “I’m being Stalked.”

    Mariabella arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Alina envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.

    Mariabella could do both perfectly, but this was milder eyebrow action, mere cool curiosity. “Don’t tell me Jackass tried to scare you again.”

    “He’s going through a vampire phase. He bit my neck.”

    “Actors,” muttered Mariabella. “I’m telling you, you need to tase the loser.  Teach him to go jumping out at people.”

“I don’t have a taser.” Alina didn’t add that she didn’t need a taser: she was more than capable of defending herself without electricity. She’d had an unusual education.

   “Well, get one. Seriously. Bad behavior should be punished. Plus, it would be fun. Don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to tase someone. Zap!” Mariabella mimicked convulsion.

   Alina shook her head. “No, tiny violent one, I don’t think it would be fun. You’re terrible.”

   “I am not terrible. Mal is terrible. Tell me i don’t have to remind you.” She gave Alina a sharp look. “Tell me you’re not even considering forgiving him.”

   “No,” declared Alina. “But try getting him to believe that.” Mal just couldn’t fathom any girl willfully depriving herself of his charms. And what had she done but strengthen his vanity those months they’d been together, garing at him starryed-eyed, giving him…Everything! his wooing her now, she thought, was a point of pride, to prove himself that he could have who he wanted. That it was up to him.

    Maybe Mariabella was right. Maybe she should tase him.

    “Sketchbook,” commanded Mariabella, holding out her hand like a surgeon for a scalpel.

    Alina’s best friend was bossy in obverse proportion to her size. She only passed five feet in her platform boots, whereas Alina was five foot six but seemed taller in the same way that ballerinas do, with their long necks and willowy limbs. She wasn’t a ballerina, but she had the look, in figure if not in fashion. Not many ballerinas have bright blue hair or a constellation of tattoos on their limbs, and Alina had both.

    The only tattoos visible as she dug out her sketchbook and handed it over were the ones on her wrists like bracelets -- a single word on each: true and story.

    As Mariabella took the bo8ok, a couple of other students, Dayla and Gail, crowded in to look over her shoulder. Alina’s Sketchbooks had a cult following around school and were handed around and marveled at a daily basis. This one -- number ninety-two in a lifelong series -- was bound with rubber bands, and as soon as Mariabella took them off it burst open, each page so coated in gesso and paint that the binding could scarcely contain them. As it fanned open, Alina’s trademarked characters wavered on the pages, gorgeously rendered and deeply strange.

    There was a Issa, serpent from the waist down and woman from waist up with the bare, globe breast of Kama Sutra carvings, the hood and fangs of a cobra, and the face of an angel.

    Giraffe-necked Twiga, hunched over with his jeweler’s glass stuck in one squinting eye.

    Yasri, parrot-beaked and human-eyed, a frill of orange curls escaping her kerchief. She was carrying a platter of fruit and a pitcher of wine.

    And Brimstone, of course -- he was the star of the sketchbooks. Here he was shown with Kishmish perched on the curl of one of his great ram’s horns. In the fantastical stories Alina told in her sketchbooks, Brimstone dealt i  wishes. Sometimes she called him the Wishmonger; other times, simply “the grunt.”

    She’d been drawing these creatures since she was a little girl, and her friends tended to talk about them as if they were real. “What was Brimstone up to this weekend?” asked Mariabella.

    “The usual.” said Alina. “Buying teeth from murderers. He got some Nile crocodile teeth yesterday from this awful Somali poacher, but the idiot tried to steal from him and got half strangled by his snake collar. He’s lucky to be alive.”

    Mariabella found the story illustrated on the book’s last drawn pages: the Somali, his  eyes rolling back in his of his head as the whipthin snake around his neck cinched itself as tight as a garrote. Humans, Alina had explained before, had to submit to wearing one of Issa’s serpents around their necks before they could enter Brimstone’s shop. that way if they tried anything fishy they were easy to subdue -- ny strangulation, which wasn’t always fatal, or, if necessary, by a bite to the throat, which was.

    “How do you make this stuff up, maniac?” Mariabella asked, all jealous wonderment.

    “Who says I do? I keep telling you, it’s all real.”

    “Uh-huh. And your hair grows out of your head that color, too.”

    “What? It totally does.” said Alina, passing a long blue strand through her fingers.

    “Right.” Mariabella said sarcastically.

    Alina shrugged and gathered her hair back in a messy coil, stabbing a paint brush through it to secure it at the nape of her neck. In fact, her hair did grow out of her head like that color, pure as ultramarine straight from the paint tube, but that was a truth she told with a certain wry smile, as if she were being absurd. Over the years she’d found that it was all it took, that lazy smile, and she could tell the truth without risk of being believed. it was a easier than keeping track of lies, and so it became part of who she was: Alina with her wry smile and crazy imagination.

    In fact, it was not her imagination that was crazy. It was her life, blue hair and brimstone and all.

    Mariabella handed the book to Dayla and started flipping pages in her own oversize drawing pad, searching for a fresh page. “I wonder who’s posing today.”

    “Probably Vern,” said Alina. “We haven’t had him in a while.”

    “I know. I’m hoping he’s dead.”

    “Mariabella Ann!”

    “What? He’s eight million years old. We might as well draw the anatomical skeleton as that creepy bonesack.”

    There were some dozen models, male and female, all shapes and ages, who rotated through  the class. They ranged from enormous Madame Leevell, whose flesh was more landscape then figure to pixie Alexandria with her wasp waist, the favorite of the male students. Ancient Vern was Mariabella's least favorite. She claimed to have nightmares whenever she had to draw him.

    “he looks like an unwrapped mummy.” She shuddered. “I ask you, is staring at a naked old man ant way to start a day?”

    “Better than being attacked by a vampire.,” said Alina.

    In fact, she didn’t mind drawing Vern. For one thing, he was so nearsighted he never made eye contact with the students, which was a bonus. No matter that she had been drawing nudes for years; she still found it unsettling, sketching one of the younger male models, to look up from a study of his thing --  a necessary study; you couldn’t exactly leave the area blank -- and find him staring back at her. Alina had felt her cheeks flame on plenty of occasions and ducked behind her easel.

    Those occasions, as it turned out, were about to fade into insignificance next to the mortification of today.

    She was sharpening a pencil when a razor blade when Mariabella blurted out in a weird, choked voice, “Oh my god, Alina!”

    And before she even looked up, she knew.

    An unveiling,  he had said.Oh, how clever. She lifted her gaze from her pencil and took in the sight of Mal standing beside Katey Haz. He was barefoot and wearing a robe, and his shoulder-length golden hair, which had minutes before been wind-teased and sparkling with snowflakes, was pulled back in a ponytail. His face was a perfect blend of Slavic angles and soft sensuality: cheekbones that might have been turned on a diamond cutter’s lathe, lips you wanted t touch with your fingertips to see if they felt like velvet. Which, Alina knew, they did. Stupid lips.

  Murmurs went around the room. A new model, oh my god, gorgeous…

       One murmur cut through the the others: “Isn’t that Alina’s boyfriend?”

 Ex, she wanted to snap. So very, very ex.

       “I think it is, look at him….”

  Alina was looking at him,her face frozen in what she hoped was a mask of impervious calm. Don’t blush, she commanded herself. Do not blush. Mal looked right back at her, a smile dimpling one cheek, eyes lazy and amused. And when he was sure he held her gaze, he had the nerve to wink.

  A flurry of giggles erupted around Alina.

    “Oh, the evil b*****d…” Mariabella breathed.

  Mal stepped up onto the model’s platform. He looked straight at Alina as he untied his sash: he looked at her as he shrugged off the robe. And then Alina’s ex-boyfriend was standing before her entire class, beautiful as heartbreak, naked as the David. And on his chest, right over his heart, was a new tattoo.

   It was an elaborate cursive A.

   More giggle burst forth. Students didn’t know who to look at, Alina or Mal, and glanced from one to the other, waiting for a drama to unfold. “Quiet!” Commanded Katey Haz, appalled, clapping her hands together until the laughter was stifled. Alina’s blush came on then. She couldn’t stop it. Frist her chest and her neck went hot, then her face. Mal’s eyes were on her the whole time, and his dimple deepened with satisfaction when he saw her flustered.

   “One-minute poses, please Malyen,” said Haz.

 Mal stepped into his first pose. It was Dynamic, as the one-minute poses were meant to be -- twisted torso, taut muscles, limbs stretched in simulation of action. These warm-up sketches were all about movement and loose line, and Mal was taking the opportunity to flaunt himself. Alina thought she didn’t hear a lot of pencils scratching. Were the other girls in class just staring stupidly as she was?

  She dipped her head, took up her sharp pencil --- thinking of other uses she would happily put it to --- and started to sketch. Quick, fluid lines, and all the sketches on one page; she overlapped them so they looked like an illustration of dance.

   Mal was graceful. He spent enough time looking in the mirror that he knew how to use his body for effect. It was his instrument, he’d have said. Along with the voice, the body was an actor’s tool. Well, Mal was a lousy actor --- which was why he got by on ghost tours and the occasional low-budget production of Faust --- but he made a fine artist model, as Alina knew, having drawn him many times before.

  His body had reminded Alina, from the first time she saw it… Unveiled… Of a Michelangelo. Unlike  some Renaissance artist, who’d favored slim, effete models, Michelangelo had gone for power, drawing broad-shouldered quarry workers and  somehow

managing to render them both carnal and elegant at the same time. That was Mal: carnal and elegant.

  And deceitful. And narcissistic. And, honestly, kind of dumb.

  “Alina!” The British girl Alexandra was whispering harshly, trying to get her attention. “Is that him?”

  Alina didn’t acknowledge her. She drew, pretending everything was normal. Just another day in class. And if the model had an insolent dimple and wouldn’t take his eyes off her! She ignored it as best she could.

  When the timer rang, Mal calmly gathered up his robe and put it on. Alina hoped it wouldn’t occur to him that he was free to walk around the studio. Stay where you are, she willed him. but he didn’t. He sauntered toward her.

  “Hi, Jackass,” said Mariabella. “Modest much?”

  Ignoring her, he asked Alina, “Like my new tattoo?”

  Students were standing up to stretch, but rather than dispersing for smoke or bathroom breaks, they hovered casually within earshot.

  “Sure,” Alina said, keeping her voice light. “A is for Alyssa, Right?”

   “Funny girl. You know what it’s for.”

   “well,” she mused in thinker pose, “I know there’s only two people that you really love, and their names start with an A, and a M. But i can think of a better place for it than your heart.” She took up her pencil and, on her last drawing of Mal, inscribed a A right over his classically sculpted butttock.