Breath and Bones by Susann Cokal Read Free Book Online Page A

the window, to watch the sailors staggering up and down the street like drunken elves in their double-pointed winter hoods. Albert and Fru Strand were nowhere in sight.
    That night, and for several nights thereafter, before he would so much as touch Famke, Albert wetted the canvas; every morning he tightened it, until it was so taut it sang like a bell when she tapped it.
    Meanwhile, Albert sketched more Nimues. “She must be
perfect
,” he insisted, shading in a sketch he had allowed to progress rather further than the others.
    â€œPerfect,” Famke echoed. Then she giggled, noticing what Albert habitually omitted. “But no hair,” she said. To her, perfection meant an exact likeness. When Albert blinked at her, she touched the picture and explained,“Down There, she has no hair . . . She hasn’t even a sex. It be as if a cloud passes over.”
    â€œSexual hair is not a subject for art,” Albert said on a note of reproof. “It is not for ladies to see, even if they know it must be there.”
    Famke subsided with, “
That
is not like nature.” She thought of Albert’s
Pik
, so surprisingly rosy in its dark-gold nest. She wondered if she should be shyer about looking at it—if perhaps he didn’t like her to look . . . It was the artist’s job to look, and to have opinions, never the model’s.

    When she wasn’t posing, there was little for Famke to do. She’d washed all the bedding and every garment the two of them owned, and she’d had a long wash herself. There was nothing left to clean, and no stove on which to cook (for which she, with her dislike of fire, had always been grateful). She had even grown tired of looking at sketches of herself. So when Albert took out his tubes of paint at last, Famke breathed a sigh of relief. But he explained that before he would need her again, he had to lay down a white ground. Layer by infinitesimal layer he built it up, and the seams in the canvas disappeared.
    â€œLet me help you,” Famke begged, eager to hurry the process along. She churned the brush through the thick gesso, and Albert lifted her hand away.
    â€œIt must be absolutely even,” he said. “It’s really best that I do this myself.” He explained that only against a smooth, hard whiteness would his colors glow—“and I want you to glow, darling,” he finished. She almost didn’t need him to look at her then; these words were enough to keep her warm for the rest of the day.
    The time it took for the white coat to set, they spent in bed. The sun’s hours were getting ever shorter, and despite her boredom during daylight, Famke was quite happy in the dark, keeping Albert gladly distracted.
    On the morning that they woke to find the canvas’s final white ground was perfectly smooth, dry, and hard, Albert gulped. He lingered in bed much longer than was his wont, and Famke practically pushed him out of it. “You said today you should start,” she said. “So start!” When still he dallied, looking at the vast blankness with something akin to despair, she got up and led him to the chamberpot; she saw him finish, then put a morsel ofdark bread between his lips and bade him chew. She fed him cheese and sausage in this way as well, and then she—still naked herself—helped him don his layers of clothing.
    Only once Albert was fed and dressed did Famke pull Nimue’s bloodied chemise over her head. She tugged Albert toward the canvas and put a stick of charcoal in his hand, climbed onto her pillowed platform, and struck the pose. “Now draw me,” she ordered him.
    After a moment, Albert began. Hesitant at first, then more sure, he marked the canvas with the line of her nose, then a bit of her shoulders, and her breasts, belly, and legs, through the cobwebby cloth. He consulted his sketches and made a few refinements to the piles of pillows. Last he did her arms and the