Kimberlea

Savannah placed an ad in the Help Wanted section of the L.A. Weekly classifieds:

PROFESSIONAL ARTIST SEEKS NUDE MODEL

Experienced Only. Portfolio Required. $20.00 per hr., Ongoing Position

Reply Box 7654239

Within two days Savannah was sifting through a landslide of replies. She telephoned the respondents personally and requested coffee shop meetings with every one of them to view their portfolios. She chose the Starbucks at Pico and Robertson, a brisk ten-minute stroll from her house and artist’s studio.

She liked Rosemary, a wispy blonde who had done some impressive work for a renowned photographer, but Savannah couldn’t get past the coiled snake tattoo on her left ankle. Evelyn was a possibility but there was something in her eyes that Savannah did not trust. Portia was beautiful, although a bit on the zaftig side. Her modeling portfolio was unfortunately limited to obscene spreads for Busty Beauties magazine.

The eleventh interview was the charm. Kimberlea. Auburn hair to her shoulders. Deep-set almond-shaped eyes. Her portfolio revealed a slender body sporting small, pert breasts, sturdy shoulders, devilish long legs, and a thick patch of dark, swirling pubic hair. Her complexion was slightly sallow, leading Savannah to speculate that the young model was an alcoholic. That was okay. She knew her way around alcoholics. Her ex-husband was one. All writers are drunks, she never tired of explaining to her mother, The good ones anyway.

Savannah would never allow Kimberlea to lay her eyes upon the canvas she was posing for. Every day, from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, Kimberlea was posed in an overstuffed armchair, right leg crossed over left knee. There was always an unlit cigarette clutched between the middle and index finger of her right hand and in her left hand she held open a book. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This was the image that Savannah stared at for three hours a day, paint brush in hand, occasionally dabbing and stroking at the canvas. And she demanded that Kimberlea remain fully clothed.

“I thought you wanted a nude model. That’s what the ad said.” Kimberlea was confused. She didn’t like being confused.

“I’ve seen your portfolio,” Savannah calmly explained on the first day. “I already know what you look like nude.”

Sixty bucks a day, seven days a week, was $420 that Kimberlea otherwise did not have, jobs had been very slim lately, so she gladly assumed her fully-clothed sitting every morning at ten o’clock sharp.

On a mild Sunday afternoon in May, three months into the assignment, Savannah suddenly announced that the painting was finished. She beamed at Kimberlea from behind the canvas, an unsettling grin on her face, little smudges of oil paint on her oval cheeks, brown and blue and green and red. She appeared to Kimberlea as a demented clown. Kimberlea hated clowns.

“Do you wanna see it?” Savannah said as though to a child. “Take a little peek?”

Kimberlea rose on unsteady legs and approached the painting in a long, slow march across the studio floor. She could feel every second ticking by. She had never felt like this in her life, this dread, this apprehension, and when she laid eyes upon the canvas she knew why. A scream rose in Kimberlea’s  throat at a pitch loud enough to set off car alarms on the tree-lined street. She stumbled for the door, arms groping and flailing in the air like a blind man’s, and ran as fast as her feet would carry her.

She never collected her final paycheck.