for a burrito before class. I considered stopping at the antiques store before meeting her, but I wasn’t going to be late to pick up some crusty old chamberpot.
“I’m thinking of quitting.” I put the tray of food on our table outside the burrito place: veggie tacos for me, chicken burrito for Wren, and cheese quesadilla for Ny. “Salsa?”
Wren gave me a look as she unwrapped her burrito. “Why?”
“For spice,” I said, tossing Ny’s quesadilla to the ground. He engulfed it.
She gave me another look. “I mean, why quit?”
“Yeah, I know. For spice.”
“Ha-ha.”
“I dunno…I just think it’s time.”
“What would you do instead?”
“You know I never have trouble getting a job.”
“Just keeping one.”
“I’d still be working at Element, if you hadn’t fired me.”
“If I hadn’t fired you,” she said, biting into her burrito. “There wouldn’t be an Element anymore.”
I made a face at her. “I wasn’t that bad.”
“You were worse. You haven’t broken up with Rip, have you?”
“No.”
“Not yet,” she said.
“You sound like my dad.”
“I like your father.”
“Yeah, a little too much. You want to get it on with my dad, don’t you?”
“I’m serious. Rip is great. You don’t deserve him.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Give him a chance, Anne. I know you’re approaching the sell-by date, but—”
“I’m not,” I insisted. “That’s why I want a new job. To preserve the relationship.”
“I thought you got along great at work.”
“Well, aside from the buzzer.” I toyed with my taco, before pushing it away. “God, Wren, I’m just so…bored. With me, with my job. Everything.”
“Here.” She dumped salsa verde on my taco. “A little more spice.”
For some reason, this made me feel better. Maybe because she seemed to be agreeing with me, even if it was only about the taco. We finished our meals and Wren sat back in her chair, replete from her burrito. “Now all I need is a naked woman and fifty pounds of warm mud, and I’ll be good.”
Twenty minutes later, she got more than she asked for. We were in the main room, the drapes pulled tight over the windows, with spotlights on a beautiful naked man, and Wren was up to her elbows in clay. She rolled her sculpture stand closer to mine and dug a big hunk from a bag of terra-cotta.
We’d been attending the Adult Ed clay sculpture class for the past three years. Originally, we’d started because Wren thought it would be a good place to meet sensitive men, and I thought I’d like mucking around with mud. She’d never found a sensitive man—or an insensitive one, for that matter—but we kept coming.
Our patience had finally been rewarded. In three years, we’d only had a handful of male models, and none of them had looked like Mr. Nude America here. There were a dozen students in the class, held at the Schott Center on the upper west side. The sessions usually started with around twenty-five students, but it was fairly late in the season, and we’d dwindled down to the regulars.
I glanced briefly at the model, clinically observing his broad shoulders and washboard stomach, and when I looked away I noticed that Wren had already roughed out his torso. In clay, that is.
“That was fast,” I said.
She glanced at the clock. “You’ve been staring at the poor guy for twenty minutes.”
“I was examining the subject.”
“And drooling.”
“I’m an artist, Wren. He might as well be a bowl of fruit.”
She sighed. “It is a pity.”
“What is?”
“That he’s gay.”
I glanced at the model again. “He’s straight as a yardstick, Grasshopper,” I said. Because Wren was a novice when it came to men.
“With that body?”
“From tip to toe.”
Wren just shook her head sadly, so I sliced off a hunk of clay with my wire tool and started pushing it around. Making his feet. I thought I’d start low and move up. Let the anticipation build.
I was on his ankles when Claire, our teacher, drifted behind us.
“Excellent work, Wren,” she said. “You might want to caliper his chest, though. It looks a bit off scale. Remember there’s a rib cage under there.”
We had big metal calipers to measure distances on the models and then convert them into 1/3 scale. But to measure you had to approach within nibbling distance, in the middle of the room, and share the spotlight with the gloriously defined and shamelessly undraped model. Wren was usually extremely businesslike about measuring models. This time, however…
She blushed. “Oh, I see—you’re right.” She fiddled with her clay. “I think I can eye it, though….”
Claire nodded and checked my work. “Feet,” she said.
“I’m afraid to look any higher,” I told her.
She didn’t smile. She was very professional about the models. “At least give his feet arches, then. And his toes should not look like sausages.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Well—” I grabbed the calipers. “Only one way to fix that.”
I strode into the limelight, offering up the calipers at the altar of this sex god. I measured the distance between his feet, the distance from heel to toe. I leaned forward a bit and smiled up at him. “Bored yet?”
He smiled down. “It’s not as bad as my day job.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m a librarian.”
“Get out of town.” I leaned forward a bit more. “At the university?”
“No, the law school. It’s not the boredom that bothers me, so much as the larval lawyers.”
I laughed brightly and scurried back to Wren. I whispered: “Gay.”
