The Scent of the Blueberry -- 4

Well, OK, Evelyn knew who it was – it was Michel. It’s just that she saw Michel as being a little strange. Not especially bad strange – not ax-murderer strange – but, well, eccentric.

Michel. Evelyn remembered the first time she had met him. He was a male model, and Arthur, the community center life drawing coordinator, had inadvertently booked them both for the same session.

Arthur had been upset about it. He knew that, like most models, Michel and Evelyn weren’t in the game necessarily for the love of the activity – they needed the money. So Arthur’s solution was, as he tritely put it, to make a lemon into lemonade. He had them pose together.

Evelyn had had her doubts – she had never posed nude with a man before. But the rent had been due the following week and, with an assistant district attorney seated approximately six feet away, she figured that there wasn’t any real danger involved. Although, looking at Michel’s muscular body after he had discarded his robe, she did wonder whether a little danger might not be just what the doctor ordered for this girl. No, what am I thinking? Remember the fucking bastard! (He had still been the “fucking” bastard at that point.)

But it was OK. Michel had not touched her at any point during the evening and, much to her relief, had been enough of a professional to not develop a hard-on. Not even a little one. Probably gay, she figured. The ones with the muscles – they often seem to be. Probably wouldn’t be interested in me, well, not me personally, of course. Probably just doesn’t like girls. Thank God. (That’s one thing about modeling – even during the short poses, she had plenty of time to let her mind wander in any direction she wanted. Usually that involved self-talk – but not during that session. Evelyn let her mind wander in directions that would have totally freaked her out if she had thought for a single moment that Michel could know.)

But Michel did seem to be off in his own world. He was different – definitely different. Most of the male models tended to have well-developed bodies, Evelyn knew, so this wasn’t a surprise. But Michel – well, to begin with, there was the almost total absence of body fat. Usually the guys who lack any body fat may still be muscular, but they would still be kind of slender. Maybe “lithe” would be the right word. But there was nothing slender about Michel – he was built like a linebacker. Whenever he shifted even a fraction of an inch in the pose, different muscles – hell, entire groups of muscles that Evelyn couldn’t begin to name -- would pop out of his body, while others would retreat into hiding to make room for their newly-evident friends.

But there were 2 other things that were really unusual about Michel.

There was the scar tissue. All over his body, old and new, apparently random – they didn’t look like the results of surgery. Someone had really done a job on this guy – and not just once. Evelyn closed her eyes and tried to imagine the physical pain that had to be associated with that type of scarring, but her only real reference point was the emotional pain that she had been undergoing. And that was not a pleasant recollection. . . so she let that train of thought go. Still, she wondered. Did it hurt when he stretched? Did it hurt when someone touched him? Some of those scars looked recent. Maybe, just maybe, he enjoyed it. But that didn’t seem fair, and she felt guilty for even allowing her thoughts to wander in that direction. But, of course, posing is inherently boring, and there was plenty of time for her mind to wander all over the place.

The other unusual thing about Michel was his selection of poses. A session of so-called short poses for figure drawing generally consisted of a series of progressively longer poses, punctuated by breaks. So a model might take about 20 2-minute poses, take a break, then several 5-minute poses, then take a break, then 4-5 10-minute poses, then another break, then finish the 3-hour session with a few 15-minute poses. Evening sessions tended to be less intense than daytime sessions, and sessions at the community center were particularly laid back because a few of the artists had severe nicotine addictions that demanded considerable break time.

So the most common strategy for the models was to reserve the more strenuous poses for the first part of the evening, with simple reclining poses for the end. The strenuous poses were, of course, easier to hold for the shorter periods of time, and the relatively quick changes enabled the model to stretch and utilize complementary muscle groups. By the end of the evening, the artists understood that it was the end of the day, you had put forth a good effort, and that you couldn’t be expected to hold anything outrageous for 15 minutes anyway. Once Evelyn had even fallen asleep during the last reclining pose – she had awakened when Arthur announced the end of the session, only after a moment remembering why she was stark naked in front of a roomful of people. In retrospect, she had been glad that she hadn’t screamed – although she did wonder if she had snored.

Anyway, Michel didn’t play by the unwritten rules. Rather than assuming easier poses as the evening wore on, he pushed to assume more difficult ones. He hadn’t pushed her to go along with his posing regimen, thank God – it was obvious that Michel was used to playing a solo act. She had felt lazy, somehow unworthy, when she had assumed a simple reclining pose at the end of the evening while Michel was standing over her, weight almost entirely on one foot, arms stretched to the ceiling without quivering. That’s when she wondered whether he enjoyed pain, whether the genesis of the scars involved something that was not entirely against his will. Studying his muscles over the course of the evening or, more precisely, his control of his muscles, Evelyn wondered how easy it would be to get this man to do anything that he didn’t really want to do.

Evelyn’s next encounter with Michel was more intimate – at least, in the emotional sense. That had seemed incongruous at the time – the idea that sitting down with someone and talking could be more intimate than wordlessly cohabiting a model’s platform for 3 hours without any clothes on. But it was true.