Work Text:
Jordan’s never had a live model before.
Even the conté in her hand and the fuzzy sheets of paper clipped to the board feel foreign to her. Usually she creates an outline of the object with a paintbrush and some brown or green that’s so wet and thin that it drips down the canvas.
Drawing is different from painting. Drawing, even with a blunt tool, is wickedly precise from the get-go. Every perfect line carves out something. And each misplaced mark exposes the shape of the muse too, in a roundabout way—filling in the negative space. Identifying what’s wrong to then get it right. Painting’s like that too. But painting, at least in Jordan’s work, is the end goal. Drawing hardly is for her.
Declan Lynch is sitting uncomfortably upright before her, the corners of his mouth slightly tense and his eyes burning straight at the back of the drawing board. She can tell he’s trying to look relaxed, with one of his legs falling open an inch to say, I’m in a natural pose. This is a portrait of me that is true to my nature. This is who I am, for you. His hand plays with the arm of the chair. His neck looks stiff, like he’s keeping himself from tilting his head to one side or the other.
“You having a good time over there?” Jordan asks.
“The best,” Declan replies, humour in his tone, but he remains tense.
She’ll do a sketch of him like this first, and if she really can’t extrapolate an honest person from what he’s presenting to her, she’ll make him loosen up.
Gripping the conté lengthwise, she marks his head and shoulders on the paper. It’s hypnotic to focus so intently on something physical. She whittles away at his form. It’s a world away from replicating artwork; all planes of Declan are in front of her, twitching, shifting, holding still, all for her to resolve into two dimensions, whereas an already produced painting would be flat, but alive, in its own way.
Declan Lynch, the persona, is like a painting. Maybe less alive. He’s just as intentionally worked as a thousand brush strokes. His shoes are like a blotch of paint spilled over the final piece.
Declan the person is right here. As Jordan outlines the chair and his legs, she slides her eyes over his stomach and chest, which rises and falls steadily, if a little constricted. She wants to open the buttons of his shirt and outline and shade in the contours of his ribs. She doesn’t, and uses her free hand to smudge the mark she made for his knee and redraws it.
Jordan is a fairly efficient artist. She has to be, to keep up with Hennessy’s continuous schemes, although she argues for more time and often gets it, on the basis of perfection in her work to prevent any truths being revealed. Quickly her blocking of Declan’s form is done and she squints at it and then at him, holding the conté arm length in front of her to measure his body. His shoulders are a little narrow on the paper and she widens them with a stroke.
She stares at the sheet. From the corner of her eye she sees Declan tilt his head, maybe in question.
The sketch isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s a person in a chair. It’s very geometrical, with squares and rectangles forming the bulk on the shapes but she’s left circles for the eyes and parts of the hands. When she looks at Declan the person and then Declan the drawing she doesn’t see much resemblance other than the vague outline.
What will happen if she leaves the drawing as it is, a carefully, swiftly placed collection of lines that create a smudge of a figure?
What if she steps away, says, This is Declan Lynch, in all his intricacies, and reveals a half-formed person with no details at all to denote individuality?
It won’t be true. Even if she isn’t chasing a fully wrought picture, she’s not gotten any Declan-ness in the broader strokes. Even his weird, bland public persona is more alive.
Jordan flips that sheet of paper over the board and faces a blank one. She decides she’ll crumple the first drawing into a ball and throw it into a bin later. Or burn it. “I’m doing a second.”
Declan asks, “What happened to the first?”
“It was shit.”
Declan laughs and Jordan wants the bright curve of his lips and teeth on her easel.
“You’re a good image. Be a real person now, Declan,” she says.
“You know I can’t,” he says, smiling wryly. Shyly. His blue eyes peer from under his heavy brows.
It’s funny to Jordan that she can feel him baring his soul and she finds herself sometimes wanting to reciprocate. For all that he tries to be an enigma dressed as a plain man, Jordan can sense the ridges of truth, or a desire for it, all over him. He may be subtle, invisible to others, but he’s so sharply defined to her.
As for herself.
She knows who she is. She’s Hennessy to the wider world and Jordan to her own. And Declan’s act of boringness may fool everyone, including his family, but Jordan’s permanent role as Hennessy sometimes fools even herself. Every emotional and mental border is blurred when physically, they share all. Face, body, flowers. Jordan the person is eclipsed by Hennessy the persona. She has no idea how she would fit that relationship onto a painting.
Jordan’s tired of being two people; she’ll never be able to be just one; she knows Declan would hate her duality as much as she does, and that’s why she can’t tell him now.
She says, “Realer than me.”
Is this true?
There’s a moment of silence.
“Now you’re just lying,” Declan responds, resolving the room’s ripple of confession. “How do you want me to sit?”
She thinks for a second. “Stay as you are, but relax your muscles more. Look at me, too.”
“I already was,” he protests.
Jordan gives him a look. “Hardly.”
She wants the full weight of his gaze anywhere on her. Her hand as it draws him, her eyes as they dissect him. For him to be hers only.
Declan abides and sinks into the chair. He relaxes so naturally, as if he’d only been paralyzed before because she hadn’t told him not to. Or maybe the few words they’d spoken assured him that she wasn’t going to wreck his careful image by conveying his shape on paper. Now that he’s growing softer in his place, his head really does loll to the right. His weight distributes away from his hips and more into his back and Jordan feels her chest tighten at seeing his now poor posture, as if this shift has transported them into a world where he isn’t uptight all the time and somehow dreams are as real as non-dreams. He looks straight at her, blinking.
She inhales. “Alright,” she mutters to herself. “Alright.”
Conté lengthwise in her hand again, she swoops down the page.
She hears Declan’s breath hitch and she suppresses a smile.
She exaggerates his build. Every straight line and curve of him is bent, pushing enormity, her fingers digging into the edges of the conté and pressing her marks into the sheet, into him. There’s not much motion in his seated pose, so she runs over the bend of his neck, speed forming energy, and digs into his wide jaw. He’s so sharp like this. Her eyes flash between Declan the person and Declan the image, comparing the two as she goes and feeling a pang at every piece of him she carves out and replicates.
When she’s done with these lines, which miraculously form a person, she lowers her arm, shifts her weight onto one foot, and stares at the drawing. She took probably five minutes to place all of him down.
It’s Declan. It’s overwhelmingly different from the work she does for Hennessy, which is painfully exact in recreation of form and detail and colour. Looking at the two Declans in front of her, the shapes are different, but something is the same. How his eyes, blue in reality and black in representation, look openly into her. His pent up energy becoming the ferocity of her movement on the page. How he sits, now natural, now with emphasis, for her. Declan, by her.
She sets her conté down. They’re done.
“How is it?” he asks, breaking his position and bringing an ankle over his knee, bracing his hands on it.
Jordan swallows. “Better.” Not perfect, but not something to be ashamed of, at least in terms of quality of work. Maybe shame will arise at her growing want to draw him again, and again, and again.
“That’s good,” Declan says. “Another pose?”
“Next time,” she answers. There will be a next time.
Declan just looks at her, which she takes as agreement. Jordan looks again at her drawing of him. It strikes her how alive it is. That she’s capable of making people, like Hennessy, although this isn’t quite like dreaming. This is better. This is freeing, rather than constricting, the maker.
Jordan’s heart races at the thought of creating more.
Glancing at Declan, willing for time with him that she doesn’t have, gazing back at her portrait, she knows she’ll burn this one too.