Upon returning from lycée, I found my little-used French mobile phone clogged up with nagging voicemails from the sixty-odd-year-old sailor turrned artist who occupies a little art studio near the port in my little town. I decided to submit to his begging, and pay him a small visit.
His art studio is a square room with a little table covered in a colourful woven silk tablecloth. There is a window in which he has created a haphazard display of his sculptures, exhibited alongside a clutter of found-junk, including a mexican hat and a random book with chinese caligraphy on the cover. These objects are presented on shelves and pedestals, surrounded by brightly coloured scrunched-up tissue paper.
Inside his flat/studio, there is a blow-up mattress leaning against the wall, and a long sideboard cluttered with the tools of his trade- flowers, paintbrushes, tubes of paint, books, and sculptures made out of clay.
A recurring theme in his recent sculptures, which he has been busily crafting in my absence is the figure of a young girl. He portrays her naked, displaying her skinny gold-painted body proudly, moulded and dried rock-hard in various suggestive positions, thin clay legs spread apart, back arched, just the pert naked sculpted bottom and an elbow making contact with the ground, balancing the thing.
This is a depiction of me. I am now an artist's muse. He tells me that some of his previous sculptures sold for sums in the thousands. I'm not sure if this is fact, or just a tale to impress. The jumbled array of stories that he throws me give me a glimpse into his past life, but the narrative jumps and falters, like a scratched DVD. He has lived in the poshest neighbourhood of Paris with a rich model, he has lived in London and the list of mildy famous people who have entered his life is as long as it is unimpressive to my untrained ear. He has been close friends with the greatest sailors in history, those who win races and make round the world circumnavigations.
These tales do render him with a fantastical glow that leaves me more impressed than i would otherwise be, and i think he is aware of that.
He is obsessed with me, and has made me promise to keep our little friendship a secret, which i can somewhat understand in a small gossipy town. I don't doubt him when he says that he will contain his adoration and suppress his desire to make love with me. I wish he wouldn't tell me these desires of his, because they thoroughly disgust me.
I have made the somewhat unwise decision to agree to do a film with him. He tells me that he has made films in the past, which were a succcess, but am i to trust his words? He is somewhat rambling and insists that i stay at his flat for longer than i would freely do so, pestering me for "just another half hour more" while i am itching to spring up and leave. He asks me questions and doesn't seem too interested in the response.
He offered to give me a massage, so i agreed. It's a perfectly innocent and quite enjoyable thing. I told him to massage my neck, which gives me constant achy pain, and my feet, which were cold and overworked as always, but of course he didn't rest "there. I would absolutely draw the line at touching me anywhere that a professional masseur would not, and i think he was aware of that, because he stayed just about in the boundries of decency. I won't let him massage me again though, the whole thing was quite sordid and even though quite innocent, the desire which carroused through his wrinkled old hands and made itself known on contact with my flesh was somehow painfully offensive to me.
He suggested, over our dinner of pasta cooked with egg, tomato and basil (a fantastic meal, and certainly money-saving for me) that maybe one day i would agree to make love with him, even just as an experience, not as a love-binding agreement, just as something which one should experience in one's life. I told him I'd already had plenty of lovers and experiences, and didn't have need for any more, as well as my unshakeable faithfulness to the boy who i love. I might have added, following his probing, that my "number" certainly couldn't be counted on the fingers of both hands, which has probably made him mark me down as an easy catch and increased his hopeless and somewhat disgusting efforts to seduce me.
What sucks about being a woman of your word, which i am, is that you have to follow through with things you don't really feel like doing, simply because you promised you would. I am not a promise-breaker, and in any case, he's made me write and sign contracts for all our artistic projects in biro.
Being a man of my word, sometimes conflicts with my desire to be sincere. I value sincerity highly. If one isn't sincere, one must at least have a fabulous and stylish facade to earn my respect.
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