Art Project
4
Houseguest
WE HAD MONDAY and Tuesday classes Thanksgiving week. That meant Fay had only one day of class since she had no classes on Mondays. Annette kissed me at the door of Lib Arts and I went in to sit beside Kendra. We didn’t even hesitate anymore. If I got to class first, Kendra just walked over and sat beside me. If she was there, I sat beside her. And it wasn’t always in the same place. Other students in our class usually arrived after us and decided which seats to take if we were in ‘their’ seats. An occasional glare would make us giggle.
“That’s new,” I said pointing at the ring in her nose. She’d had a little dot on the side of her nose, but the ring was a new addition.
“I got bored this weekend and had my septum pierced. No telling what kind of trouble I’ll get into over the break this week.”
“Aren’t you going home for Thanksgiving?”
“Arthur, I live on the other side of the fucking country. I’ll go home over Christmas. That’s it,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Why would I?”
“Well…” I knew what I should do. I could talk to Kendra okay. I still had trouble in class, but Kendra was my friend. “You… come… stay with us,” I blurted out. “For Thanksgiving.”
“I’m not looking for a handout, Arthur. I’ll be fine,” she said.
“No. Our friend… my friend… please.” I was struggling. Word bubbles kept entering my throat and then popping. “I’ll paint your portrait!” That was it. That was what she wanted and I’d promised. Thanksgiving was a perfect time. Kendra’s head snapped around to look at me.
“Really?” she whispered. I nodded. “Will it be okay? With Annette and Morgan?” I nodded again. “I’m not going to sleep with you.” This time my head snapped around. What?
“No! I… didn’t… wouldn’t… guestroom!” I was panicked. I needed Annette to get a proper invitation out. This wasn’t going well. Then Kendra smiled. My breathing slowed down.
“I was teasing, Arthur,” she whispered. “Don’t panic. If Annette and Morgan and your parents all say it’s okay, I’d be happy to visit over the long weekend. Really. Thank you for being my friend.”
Lady and Fay were easy.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before!” Annette said at lunch. “Of course you should spend the weekend with us. Art honey, that was so good of you to think of our friend. I just assumed that you were local like us.” Annette kissed me so hard I started squirming in my chair and thinking about not going to afternoon classes.
“Ahem,” Kendra said. She rolled her eyes at us. “I told Arthur I wouldn’t sleep with him. That goes for you and your girlfriend, too.” She looked all serious at Annette and I was glad to see that Annette’s response wasn’t much different than mine. She started spluttering.
“Kendra! We wouldn’t do that to you! That’s not why we want you to stay with us. We don’t… We’re just…” I’d never seen Annette unable to finish a sentence. Unless she was orgasming. Kendra grinned and we both snorted before we started laughing. Annette glared at us. “You scared me! I thought we’d done something wrong.”
Annette called Morgan and she quickly agreed, but over the phone Kendra really couldn’t prank her like she had Annette and me.
Convincing our parents wasn’t difficult, but they didn’t just nod their heads, either.
“How did you get to know this girl?” Mom asked. “Is she nice?”
“In my classes,” I said. “She’s my friend. Helps me a lot.”
“Art was always sketching in his notes for class,” Morgan said. “Like we arranged. When Kendra realized he was drawing people in class, she started posing for him. She finally followed him to lunch and asked if she could be our friend.”
“Art promised to paint her portrait,” Annette said. “We thought the break would be a good time to do it, especially since she can’t go home to Connecticut until Christmas.”
“It’s so hard for the kids on campus who can’t go home for the holiday,” Dad said. “Annette, you need to speak to your mother, as well. She’s hosting Thanksgiving Dinner this year, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sure she’ll be fine with an extra guest, but I’ll call her right away. It’s not quite the same as having a houseguest for the week.”
“Speaking of which,” Mom sighed. “Sleeping arrangements.”
“Guestroom!” we all three shouted. Mom and Dad snorted as they looked at us.
“I was going to say that it needs to be cleaned and prepared for a guest,” Mom said. “I didn’t mean to panic you. But since you have brought it up, what is your relationship with this girl? The fact that you have a successful ménage à trois does not mean it could simply adopt a fourth person without severe complications. Not the least of which would be whether the rest of your housemates…” she waved back and forth between Dad and herself, “were as willing to have another person on a long-term basis.”
“Mom, she’s our friend,” Morgan explained. “I think we can tell the difference between a friend and a lover.”
“I’ll help,” I said. Everyone looked at me like they didn’t understand. “Clean the guestroom,” I explained. I guess I was a little behind the conversation.
Tuesday afternoon after my drawing class, Kendra took me to her dorm room. Lots of people were hustling around and I was scarcely noticed as a boy in the girls’ dorm wing. There were whole families running around as students packed up to leave for the break with their parents. When we got to her room, Kendra’s roommate had already left.
The room was pretty basic. It was almost as big as our bedroom at home, but instead of one big bed against the end wall, there was a single bed on either side of the one window with a desk between them. A wardrobe partially shielded the beds from direct view from the door. Kendra pulled her suitcase from under her bed and started pulling things out of the wardrobe. On the left side of the room, behind the door, a second desk was tucked in. You had to hope your roommate didn’t crash the door open too far if you were sitting there. There was a sink and counter on the other side of the room, just beside the door.
“Will I need fancy clothes for dinner?” Kendra asked.
“We usually dress up a little,” I said, “but not suit and tie fancy. Just be comfortable.”
“What do you think about this?” she asked. She held up a nice pair of wool slacks and a long-sleeved blouse.
“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Maybe that’s what I should do your portrait in.”
“You mean instead of my sweatshirt? I suppose. Um…” She sat next to her suitcase on the bed with the blouse still in her hands. “Arthur… um… I’m a little… body shy. It’s not like I’m a virgin or I’ve never been naked or I’m religious. It’s just that people tend to be so judgmental. When you do my portrait… um… just remember that, okay?”
“Sure, Kendra. I know you’re a pretty girl. But I’m not asking you to pose nude or anything.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
Kendra finished packing about the time Morgan got to the room.
“Hey, this is just like mine last year!” Morgan exclaimed. “I like what you’ve done with it.” Kendra looked around and snorted. There was a whole string of sketches hung above her roommate’s bed, but Kendra’s wall was bare. Morgan, though, went straight to the desk between the beds. “Did you do this, Kendra?” A horse’s head was emerging from a block of clay.
“Oh. Yeah. It’s nothing. That’s like my doodle pad. I just scratch things out on it while I’m thinking of something else or while I’m reading. It keeps my hands busy.”
“This is good!”
“Naw. The proportions are all off and there isn’t enough clay to finish the body.” Kendra reached over and grabbed the clay, smashing it down as Morgan gasped. She shoved the clay into a plastic bag and tossed it into her suitcase along with a set of plastic modeling tools wrapped in a piece of terrycloth. “It’s like Arthur and his sketchbooks. Sometimes I just need to have my fingers busy and a girl can’t masturbate all the time.” Morgan squeaked and looked at Kendra. Kendra had a surprised look on her face with her hands raised. I tripped as I grabbed my sketchbook and started scribbling madly on a fresh sheet. Kendra saw what I was doing and just held the pose until I was finished.
“You do that so well,” Morgan said.
“Masturbate?”
“No!” Both girls laughed. “I mean you freeze in position when Art starts drawing and just hold it until he’s finished. The facial expression and everything. How do you do it? I’m constantly squirming around and shifting positions when he’s trying to draw me. When he did my nipple, I thought I’d die.”
“He… um… what?”
“Oops! I guess you’ll see it when we get home. Let me just say, it took a long time and I’m not a patient model.”
“O-kay then. I’ll wait for that explanation.”
“So how did you learn to pose?”
“Weird, really,” Kendra said. “Have you ever played the game ‘statue’?”
“You mean where everyone runs around and goofs off until someone yells ‘statue’ and everyone freezes?”
“Yeah. Well, I had a bunch of strange friends in high school. We played the game a little differently. There were six of us and when we got high, we’d play statue. We had a jar filled with slips of paper. Each paper had a famous pose on it. Like ‘Venus de Milo’ or ‘Aphrodite Rising’ or ‘The Discus Thrower’. We’d each draw a pose. If we weren’t sure about it, we had picture books where we marked them all. Once we were all ready, we’d stand in a circle facing each other and someone would call out, ‘Statue!’ We’d all pose. It was a contest to see who could hold the pose the longest. I was champion.”
“Wow!” I said. “You are a good model.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, it’s time for Annette to get out of class,” Morgan said. “Let’s get rolling.”
Conversation at family dinner Tuesday night was too fast for me to keep up. I laughed a lot, though. Mom looked hard at Kendra and then lifted her sunglasses to look a little more. She’d gotten used to Morgan, Annette, and me, but she usually had her shades on when there were guests. After she’d looked at Kendra, she set her dark glasses aside.
“Move along now. Nothing to see here,” Kendra said as she grinned at Mom. “Just kind of dull orange, flecked with a little purple and gold. Mostly what you see when people aren’t being passionate and are just going about daily activities. Neither happy nor sad. Creative and not caring about it. Not hot or cold. Nothing really to see. A perfectly ordinary person.” We all laughed. Kendra tended to talk a lot, but did she just tell Mom what kind of aura she had?
“How much do you know about auras, Kendra?” Mom asked. We were all asking the question inside. “Can you read them?”
“Oh, heavens, no! You’d think that if I could see them, I’d have one that was more exciting,” she laughed.
“Like Mom’s,” Morgan whispered. I glanced at her. What?
“Just an artist’s interpretation?” Dad asked.
“Oh. Memorized. Verbatim. What an aura reader in Greenwich Village told me last year. He started out with dark glasses on, like you did, and then when he looked at me, he took them off and shook his head,” Kendra said. “He said I was just a perfectly ordinary person. When you took off your sunglasses, which had never really been needed in the light of this room in the first place, I figured you must protect yourself against bright auras like he did. I bet these three give you fits, don’t they?”
“Occasionally,” Mom laughed. “I’ve gotten used to them.”
“That or go blind,” Kendra answered. “You don’t need to read auras to see how they light up when they are near each other. I wish I could see them. Here’s what I think. If I could actually see auras, I could model them. People are three-dimensional. We act as if auras are two-dimensional. Supposedly there is an outline around the body. But what part of the body? The body isn’t flat. You can’t outline it. So, if I was working in clay and could see the aura, I should be able to mold the shape of the aura.” Kendra was really getting into it. We were all staring at her. I hardly noticed Morgan nodding.
“If what you are saying is true, the shape isn’t just an outline,” Morgan said. “It’s more like a shell. Only it’s thinner in some places and thicker in others. It’s why we… I mean Mom has such a hard time recognizing faces in photos. The shape she sees isn’t the same as the features of the face she knows.”
“That’s it exactly,” Kendra said excitedly. “Of course, I can only spout theory. I can’t actually see the damned things. But look at the medieval paintings of Jesus and the saints. The concept of the halo is a realization of the aura. Artists captured it in a generally circular form around the head, but the aura is not limited to the head. It surrounds the entire body. Real artists have always been able to see more than the physical shape of a body. It’s what I strive for in sculpting. It’s where art has to go next. In three dimensions, to sculpt the essence of the person rather than the presence of the person.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I read. A lot. And then I just let my imagination take hold. I’d bet that when Picasso started analytic cubist paintings that he wasn’t trying to see all the sides of a person at once at all. He was a lousy communicator. Like Arthur. He painted. He didn’t talk. So, all we have are left-brained analyses of what he must have been doing. In my opinion, Picasso wasn’t trying to capture a third dimension, but rather the aura of his subject. He was trying to show the essence. And I won’t judge whether he was successful. How can we know unless we look inside the head of the artist? I just know that I want to capture that essence in three dimensions. Only I can’t see it. I have to depend on what I’ve read and other people’s descriptions.”
“So, you’re a police sculptor,” Dad said. We all looked at him and started laughing. “A police artist listens to the descriptions other people give him of the suspect. As he draws, the people who actually saw the suspect correct what he puts on paper. ‘The eyes were wider apart.’ ‘The lips were thinner. No thicker.’ ‘The ears were bigger and folded over.’ That kind of thing. You listen to what people say and correct your sculpture accordingly, while never having actually seen the subject yourself.”
“Wow! Yes! That’s exactly what I mean. Wow! No wonder you’re a professor,” Kendra said. We all laughed at that. “The only problem is that I don’t even have eye-witnesses. I only have written reports.”
“I’ll…” Morgan started and then looked at Mom. “We’ll help you. Mom can see what you want to sculpt.”
I heard what Morgan had really said. I’d suspected it for a long time. In fact, I suspected that I had a little of the talent myself, though not to the degree that Mom did. But I was certain that Morgan, my le Fay, could see the mysterious essence like Mom could. I wondered how she coped with the brightness. She never seemed to need sunglasses when she was looking at people.
We were all tired from school and even Dad seemed ready to just unwind. The four of us in the younger generation did up all the dishes and put away the leftover food. Then, being teenagers, we popped up a big batch of popcorn and grabbed sodas while we watched a movie. We had talked about what movie we’d watch, but when we got to the family room, Mom and Dad had just started an old black and white comedy with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. We shared a bowl of popcorn and then all cuddled up together on the couch. Mom and Dad were in the loveseat. Kendra started to go to the easy chair but Morgan grabbed her and hauled her down on the sofa.
“How are you going to reach the popcorn from way over there?” she asked.
I leaned against the arm of the sofa at the right end with Annette on my lap and Morgan cuddled up close beside me with Annette’s feet between her legs. It gave Kendra plenty of room on the sofa, but she ended up leaning against Morgan and falling asleep before the movie was over.
We all roused ourselves enough to get to bed and told Kendra we’d see her for breakfast.
I held my Lady and le Fay in my arms in the center of the bed. It was our favorite position. They could hold each other and both be on top of me. I think we were going to have a bed with a big sag in the middle because that’s where all three of us slept.
“Fay, my love, when did you start seeing auras?” I whispered. Fay giggled a little. Annette shut her up with a kiss.
“I want to know, too,” Lady said.
“Kendra kind of flushed me out of my cover, didn’t she?” Fay asked. “I guess the answer is always. I just never thought about it. At first, I thought that was what everyone saw. I certainly knew that Mom did. And it was what I always read in your paintings, Pen. I’m sure you see them, too.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It doesn’t really register until I paint and I see colors coming out that I wasn’t conscious of. Maybe we all see them. Lady, do you see auras, too?”
“Nope. Blind as a bat,” she laughed. “Or as Kendra. What a talker! And she just assumes everyone is on the same page she is. Did you see how she sat at the table and just immediately assumed that we all knew all about auras and expected her to, too? That was pretty amazing.”
“I like being with Kendra,” I said. “I don’t have to worry about talking.”
“Nobody does,” Morgan declared. “But I’m going to help her.”
“Help her what?” Annette asked.
“I’m going to be her eye witness for the sculpture she wants to create. What she said was mostly true, but it didn’t necessarily match up with what I see. I’m just not sure that I can talk through the visual well enough for her to realize… What did she call it? The essence instead of the presence? That is so true.”
“I’ll help,” Annette said. “I can’t sculpt what you see, but I might be able to write it out. What about you, Pen?”
“I’ll paint.”
“Is this one of those cases where you are going to paint someone’s tonsils?” Fay asked as she started scooting down my body.
“Are you thinking about painting Kendra, Pen?” Lady asked. “What colors do you see when you think about her breasts? She had her sweatshirt zipped up at dinner, but it was unzipped on the sofa. Did you notice? She’s got bigger boobs than Fay or me. Have you been thinking about drawing them? Or maybe what it would be like to suck on them?” Annette pushed a nipple between my lips as Fay’s mouth engulfed my cock. I moaned. Annette continued. “Kendra’s a dry reality, my love. But you are welcome to have a wet dream.”
I was so confused. Even though it was dreamy, Fay’s mouth moved on my cock in a very real way. I switched from Annette’s left nipple to the right and she moaned in response. I felt between her legs and found her wet slit overflowing. I cradled Fay’s butt in my other hand and Annette’s hand slid over it to plunge into Fay’s pussy. Images of Kendra’s dream-nipples swept through my mind, but I was overwhelmed by the reality of my two lovers. We weren’t perfectly in sync when we came, but we were close enough that we all fell asleep minutes later.
Kendra was in the kitchen with a cup of coffee when we came downstairs. I looked around for Mom but there was no sign of her. I got the orange juice out of the refrigerator after I’d mumbled a good morning.
I’d been awake for a couple of hours already. I had a vision taking shape in my mind that I needed to get down on paper. Artists have a long history of being inspired by classic literature, by mythology, and by sculpture that is hundreds of years old. I’d spent a good bit of time sketching statues in the art museum myself. But Kendra’s description of playing statue gave me an idea for a series of drawings and ultimately paintings in which a person was emerging from a statue. It would be tricky to capture the plasticene look of the statue and transition it into the fleshly look of the model. When I sketched the scene I had in mind, I couldn’t really tell the difference between what was supposedly stone and what was flesh. I was still deep in thought.
Of course, once Annette and Morgan had awakened, I got pulled back to bed—poor me. We didn’t make love every morning when we woke up, but on vacation days like this, we tended to take our time getting out of bed. Fay had been riding me vigorously when we thought about the fact that we had company. We still didn’t rush, but as soon as Annette bit one of Fay’s nipples and she exploded into an orgasm, we jumped out of bed and grabbed clothes so we could go downstairs.
“Your mom was up and showed me where coffee was when I got up,” Kendra said. “She’s so sweet. She said she likes grocery shopping first thing in the morning because there are fewer people in the aisles and most of the shelves were restocked overnight. I guess with a gift like hers being in a crowd could get pretty stressful. How does she stand looking at you three in the morning?”
“What?” Annette asked.
“You all three look so freshly fucked your auras must be glowing or shooting off sparks or something,” Kendra said. “Your mom must have a welding mask to look at you through.”
“Oh. Um… We usually shower before breakfast. Sorry,” I said. “It’s a vacation day.”
“Which isn’t to say we aren’t freshly fucked. Sorry to embarrass you,” Morgan laughed. “We should have been more considerate this morning.”
“Oh, it’s not embarrassing to me. I think Arthur’s more embarrassed than me. He’s the one who’s blushing. Must be a pretty good way to get up in the morning, so to speak. How do you ever get to class on time?”
“Practice,” I said. “Have to do it over and over.” All three girls looked at me and then spluttered out their laughter. What?
“What Arthur actually means is that he’s always had problems getting out of the house in the morning,” Fay said. “And it’s not about sex. He has to draw or paint as soon as he wakes up. There have been days when he was in his room upstairs all day long because he couldn’t tear himself away from what he was painting. But, if someone else is depending on him, he never lets them down. When Annette started picking him up for school, he was never late getting out the door.”
“That’s so sweet. I know when I get started on a project it just irritates the hell out of me if I have to leave in the middle. I’ve been known to cut classes, too.”
“It’s the same with writing,” Annette said. “If I’m in the middle of a scene, I can’t just walk away from it and expect it to still be there when I get back. The characters might have already moved on to something else. I have to stay with them while they finish.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said as she put plates of toast on the table with peanut butter and various condiments. “It’s the same way with spreadsheets. I could be right in the middle of adding an important column of numbers and get interrupted. It’s just terrible.” We all had our mouths hanging open staring at her. Then she did a perfect imitation of the hands up, puzzled expression I’d sketched of Kendra yesterday.
It was going to be a good day.
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