Ending up

Jess Vandergroot had managed the about-face of her life as well as anyone could have. New Year’s Eve, eighteen months earlier, she’d stood at the door of her former Shaughnessy home and watched as her reliable and endearingly stuffy Richard got into an Uber. The fact that Richard didn’t have a car that day didn’t alter his plans. He’d made a decision to be out of the house by the last day of December and, after forty-two years of marriage, Jess knew he was nothing if not firm once resolved.

Which brought her to this evening, driving across Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge, in a little black dress not quite zipped all the way up at the back, heading to an art opening in which she had a stake. She wasn’t flexible enough to manage the zipper on her own. Richard, the husband who’d left, had always done that for her.

Arriving at the door of the building with a chiffon shawl covering the back of her dress, Jess solicited the first female she encountered to zip her up. Mission accomplished; she headed inside to join the party.

No matter what anyone might have thought of the corporeal state of the model, the drawings were indisputably beautiful. The artist, Cameron Laudner, was a gifted amateur whose day job was as a radiologist, so he knew a thing or two about bodies. When he spied her from across the room, he broke off from a group of well-wishers to gather her up and introduce her to his family. She had wondered if there might be any of the cliché “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on”, and quickly discovered her concerns were unfounded. They simply shook her hand and congratulated her on her part in Cameron’s success. Mariah, Cameron’s wife, wanted to know where Jess had bought her shawl. That was about as personal as it got for Jess Vandergroot – Life Model.

She’d fallen into this unusual employment unexpectedly. The previous year Jess attended a drop-in workshop thinking she might like to take up painting or drawing, and at the end of the six-hour session, she registered for the ten-week beginners’ Figure Drawing course. As a young mom, she’d spent a significant number of rainy Saturdays traipsing and dripping through the city’s art gallery with her brood. Jess hoped the years of looking at color and perspective and light might have rubbed off and that she might have some latent talent in that area. But as weeks went by, she became intrigued by the models who sauntered in, casually shedding their robes and kicking off flip- flops without so much as a by-your-leave. Jess became transfixed by them, wondering if she would have as much grace and nerve if she was ever the center of such attention, with nowhere to hide. She’d accepted that she’d reached the decade of fewer second glances, careening towards downright invisibility. Still, she wondered.

She didn’t have to wait long to find out. Like the proverbial understudy waiting in the wings, Jess was sitting patiently with an instructor and five other students when a message arrived that the afternoon’s model had been involved in a fender bender and was stuck waiting for the police. Jess took a breath, caught the instructor’s eye and raised two fingers slightly, as if she was catching a bartender’s eye and ordering a round, which was another thing she’d never done.

“I could step in if that would be of help.”

“Well, yes, thank you. That would be very helpful. Are you sure you don’t mind giving up today’s drawing time?”

“Not at all. I’m really not very good at this.”

Within five minutes she’d visited the ladies’ room to relieve her bladder in case she sneezed, and removed everything except her sneakers and spring trench – the classic flasher look – banishing all “am I out of my mind?” thoughts from her mind. She returned to the studio, left her folded clothes on the shelf by the door, and took her place on the sheet-covered chair, losing the coat and shoes as if she’d been doing this for years. It never even occurred to her how many weeks it had been since she’d shaved her legs. (It was three.) She did, however, notice the elastic marks from the tops of her socks just north of her ankles. When, after less than a minute, her heart stopped its wild beating, and when her classmates, three women and two men, settled in to the afternoon’s session, the fledgling artist became the model.

The air felt lovely and unfamiliar on her skin. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been naked in the middle of an afternoon. The teacher, a fifty-ish artist in his own right, had suggested a somewhat demure and easy enough pose: seated, feet and knees together, hands folded in her lap. Imagining herself channeling Rodin’s Camille Claudel helped her to not fidget, and Jess executed her part in the proceedings well, breaking the pose and stretching every few minutes as she’d seen the models do before resuming her stillness.

The biggest eye-opener of the afternoon came after she was clothed again. Did she want the check for sixty-five dollars mailed or would she pick it up? Jess was hooked. They even assigned her a locker in the model’s change-room where she kept a cotton kimono and a pair of old slippers. It was unequivocally easier than a pap smear with a new male doctor or the biennial squish-o mammogram.

That Friday evening at the exhibit opening, Jess thought about buying both drawings as keepsakes. Something to mark the next chapter of her life as proof that she was boldly going where she’d never gone before. However, she decided it would be braver to let somebody else have them. To know that these warts-and-all representations of the sixty-one-year-old female form, her sixty-one-year-old female form, were hanging on a stranger’s walls.

Ending Up will be available soon on Amazon books!