Let Down Your Hair (2 page)

I wrenched my head in, grazing one ear against the windowframe. Strands of my hair were still hanging over the sill, and my fingers felt like noodles as I struggled to gather them. It took four attempts to rebuild my bun and secure it.

When I looked out again, the man grinned and waved, as if we were sharing a joke. A bubble of warmth welled inside me, and I gave a tiny wave in return. A cloud cast a shadow over the skylight for a moment, and when the sun reappeared he was gone.

For five minutes or so, I stood at the window, looking through the skylight at the bare, polished boards. He didn’t come back, but his smile was still there, the way an image lingers after looking at a light. What was Andrea planning to do to him? She was famed for being ruthless with men in power. But he wasn’t a man in power. He was probably a student, modeling for art classes to pay his way through college. The afterimage throbbed with a terrible guilt, as if I’d set a pit bull on a puppy.

Maybe Andrea hadn’t got to him yet. I rang the building supervisor’s number. When no one answered, I typed “art class” into the college search engine and found
Life drawing, Mondays 3-5pm. Studio 3, Fine Arts building. Six week short course. Tutor: Sally Old.
I grabbed my keys and headed out the door.

The ground floor foyer of the Fine Arts building had the high-ceilinged cool of a cathedral. The painted eyes of long-dead professors watched from the walls as I hurried through the foyer to the elevator. I’d left a note for Andrea saying I’d gone to the library, and the lie rattled inside me like dice in a cup.

The top floor corridor smelled of turpentine and clay. I walked past pinboards flapping with flyers and timetables, to an open door labeled with a “3”. Inside, a ring of artists stood at their easels; in the center was a woman in a purple dress with a name tag that read “Sally Old”. She looked quite young, maybe thirty. The man from the window was nowhere to be seen, but his red rug was laid out on the floor beside her. No longer under the skylight, but a few feet to its right.

“Here for the class?” said Sally, with a smile that made the stud in her left nostril wink. “Thought we started at half past, did you?”

I gaped like a goldfish. “I … yes. No. I mean … I thought I should tell you that … that I saw your model.”

“Ryan, you mean?” said Sally. “Great, isn’t he? Where’d you see him, Carol’s class?”

Before I could clarify, a curtain in the corner of the room drew back and the man from the skylight stepped out in his robe. A ripple swelled my veins. His gaze fell on me and a curious frown started forming on his face.

“Anyway, sorry to interrupt …” I tried to sidle out with my back to the model, but Sally pressed a new box of charcoal in my hand.

“Don’t sweat it,” she said. “We all get lost. Get started and I’ll fill you in later.”

Cornered by her kindness, I gave her my name and she added it to her class list. I retreated behind an easel and tried to breathe normally as the model ambled back to his rug. Close up, his hair was a dark, springy brown that bounced as he walked.

Had he recognized me? Surely not from a couple of stories away, through two layers of glass?

“Can we have Ryan back under natural light?” said the woman at the easel next to mine.

Sally shook her head. “Afraid not.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “That man who came up before was from Buildings. Someone in Humanities saw Ryan through the skylight and made a complaint.”

Goosebumps of horror sprouted all over me.

The model gasped, clutching his springy hair in theatrical anguish. “A
complaint?
About seeing me in the buff? I’m crushed!
Crushed
, I tell you!” His voice was sunny and animated, like a character in a children’s cartoon.

Sally grinned. “Don’t worry, Ryan. We still love you.”

He released his hair, looking mischievous. “Maybe,” he mused, “the person who saw me just didn’t want to
share
the view with anyone else.” His gaze slid onto me, and this time I was sure he knew who I was.

My cheeks burned. I rummaged in my backpack to hide my face, wishing I could crawl all the way inside it and die. Why hadn’t I just let it go? All Andrea had achieved was to make him move from the skylight. Now this man thought it was
me
who’d reported him, and then hurried to the class to
see him naked!

“You wish, Ryan,” said Sally, taking out a small electric timer.

“A man can dream, can’t he?”

“He can.” The timer emitted a series of tinny beeps under her thumb. “But not when he’s giving us five two-minute poses and two fives. Now,” said Sally, addressing the whole class, “I’d like you all to start off with charcoal today. Later on, when the poses get longer, you can draw with whatever you like.”

The clink and rustle of other students preparing to draw filtered through my backpack. I peeked out. Ryan was standing by the rug in his robe, rummaging in his own bag. He pulled out a wooden sword and shrugged his robe to the floor. Beneath it, he was naked.

My hand whipped up to shield my eyes, as if I’d walked in by mistake when he was changing. In my peripheral vision I saw the other students looking him up and down. Not lustfully, but
analytically
. Holding pencils up to measure his proportions, pacing back and forth to assess him from different angles.

I lowered my hand. Sally was talking to a student about shading and Ryan was standing on the podium, sword in hand, as if public nudity was as natural as breathing. The only person in the studio feeling embarrassed and exposed was me.

Ryan brandished the sword as if fighting a duel, and Sally pressed her timer to start the session. The whisper of charcoal on paper filled the room. Willing the blood to recede from my cheeks, I selected a long piece of charcoal.

From this distance, Ryan’s nakedness was less shocking. Less shocking and more ordinary, somehow. More human. In magazines and websites bodies looked like mannequins, featureless and Photoshop smooth. Here in the studio, Ryan looked unnervingly
alive
.

He was still, but his body was stirring with life. His eyelids fell and lifted, and his ribcage swelled and contracted under his skin. The side of his left knee had a crescent-shaped scar, and his limbs and chest were sprinkled with dark curls of hair. My eyes skirted around his genitals, but I sensed them there, dangling between his legs like a sinister fruit.

Sally called “Change!” and Ryan turned side-on, placing the point of his sword on a stool as if claiming it for his empire. I sketched his profile but had only reached his nose when Sally called “Change!” once again.

She came over as the third pose began. “Big, loose sweeps of charcoal, Sage. Fill the page! We’re here to draw, not save paper.”

Ryan donned a fedora for the first five-minute pose, and I found my hand had relaxed into the new, sweeping movements. I captured not only his outline, but his hands and the details of his hat in the available time.

Sally called “Change!” again.

This time he went down on one knee, swept off his fedora and held it out, his eyes directly on mine. The charcoal I was holding snapped in my hand. I dropped my gaze to his fedora, readjusting the stub of charcoal with clumsy fingers. Blood flooded my cheeks once more, accompanied this time by resentment. Why had Ryan set up a pose where he was looking right into my face? Was he was mocking me, or trying to unnerve me?

Andrea would have felled him with a brutal remark; I went on strike instead. Knowing he could see me, I folded my arms and stood listening to the rasp of fifteen-minus-one pieces of charcoal. When Sally announced the break, I strode over to make a complaint.

“Hi Sage,” she said, setting the timer for ten minutes. “Keeping up all right?”

“I … yes. Thanks.”

“Help yourself to tea or coffee. You were doing great once you loosened up. There were some really expressive lines in that last drawing.”

I struggled to refocus. “Thanks. Um, about the model—”

“Good, isn’t he? Always dynamic, aren’t you, Ryan?”

“A dynamo in human form,” said Ryan, strolling toward us in his robe.

I scuttled over to the urn and stared at a plate of cookies, trying to gather my thoughts.

“Hey, Sage.” It was Ryan’s voice, so close behind I jumped.

Muscles puckered in my back. Staring me down hadn’t been enough. Now he was
following
me. Andrea’s lectures on sexual harassment and stalking pounded in my head.
Sometimes a harasser who’s ignored will give up. Sometimes, he’ll go on until he gets a reaction. The best thing to do is look him in the eye and confront him about his behavior.

“Your name’s Sage, right?”

Beads of sweat formed on my skin. He was even closer now, so close I could feel the faint warmth of his body. I’d never been this close to a man before. Summoning up my most assertive tone, I snatched up a cookie and turned to face him. “Yes. It is.”

He smiled, as if I’d cracked a mild joke. “You’ve come down in the world since I saw you last.”

It occurred to me that confirming my name was a mistake. He knew where my office was. My name was unusual. What if he searched the college directory and tracked me down?

I gripped my cookie and looked him in the eyes. They were the color of dark chocolate, like his hair. Embarrassment overwhelmed me again and the cookie disintegrated in my clenched hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said in a huff, as I swept the crumbs into the bin and hurried back to my easel.

“Relax!” said Ryan, keeping pace with me. “Don’t be embarrassed. I’m flattered!”

Four or five curious artists had turned to listen in. I dropped my voice to a hiss. “I’m not here to flatter you.”

He pressed the back of his hand to his brow. “Crushed again! So why did you come, then?”

“OK, everyone,” announced Sally, “time to get started. Two ten-minute poses. Do you want a stool, Ryan?”

“Stool, schmool,” said Ryan, returning to the rug with a swirl of his robe. “Seated ten-minute poses are for wimps.”

He took a plastic replica of the Statue of Liberty from his bag and thrust it in the air like a torch. This time I was facing his back. He had a light tan that extended up to the middle of his biceps and down to a curved line at the bottom of his neck, as if his T-shirt had left an echo on his skin.

When Sally next said “Change!” I tensed, but he didn’t face my way again. Neither did he speak to me in the next two breaks, leaving me to ponder his question:
Why did you come?

On the surface, the answer was easy. Because I’d wanted to warn them that Andrea was on the warpath. Yet this wasn’t quite enough to explain why I’d stayed, or the surge in my veins when I saw him again.

“All right, folks,” said Sally as the timer went off, “that’s it for today. Stack your easels in the corner, and go outside if you want to spray fixative on your drawings. See you next week!”

I unclipped my sheaf of drawings as a chorus of scraping chairs and easels filled the studio.

“Good work, Sage,” said Sally, collecting my box of charcoal. “Coming back next week?”

The events of the day pressed in like a hostile crowd. “Can I think about it? I’ve just started a PhD, and I don’t know how much time I’ll have for drawing.”

Sally nodded, not bothered. “Sure, that’s fine. Hope to see you again.”

She headed off to collect more charcoal, and I rolled my drawings into a cylinder.

“Need a rubber band?”

Ryan’s voice. He looked thinner dressed, as if his clothes had taken bulk away from his body instead of adding it.

My cheeks stayed cool, and only the faintest wary eddy went through me. “Actually, yes, thanks.”

He flicked a rubber band into the air, and it landed in my palm like a raindrop. “Sorry if I embarrassed you before. I can be an embarrassment, sometimes.”

As I stretched the rubber band around my drawings, the print on his T-shirt caught my eye: a small boy standing on a giant lemon, holding a flock of bluebirds tied to strings.

“By the way,” he added, “did you come up with an answer to my question?”

I hastily looked back at Ryan’s face. “Your question?”

“Why did you come to this class? Just … wanted to learn drawing suddenly?”

Self-consciousness returned, and I looked away. “Um, yes. I suppose so.”

“Well I’m glad you did. Nice to meet you, Sage. Catch you next week.”

He flourished a hand at me, slung his bag over his shoulder, and loped out the door, chocolate fountain of hair springing above him.

I walked slowly home, the conversation with Ryan turning over and over in my head. It was three and a half years since I’d spoken to someone my age who hadn’t been introduced to me by Andrea. Three and a half years since I fled college to finish my degree online from home.

When I started my degree in Women’s Studies at eighteen, I’d been full of hope and excitement. In my imagination, college was a wonderful place, where I’d find myself a circle of brilliant young friends who shared my passions and ideas.

My collision with reality was shattering. I couldn’t connect with other undergraduates at all. Most were locked in closed social circles, keeping in constant contact via their fancy cell phones. They used slang I didn’t understand, talked about things I didn’t know, and seemed far more interested in drinking and sex than anything they heard in their lectures. The few that enjoyed discussing ideas were scary and aggressive, or so full of drawling sophistication I felt intimidated. My clumsy attempts to talk to them were met with rebuffs and incomprehension. Sometimes polite incomprehension, sometimes condescending, as if I should know better than to think I was of interest.

After a few humiliating weeks, I retreated and spent my time studying and debating feminist theory with staff. This was what caught the attention of Jess.

Jess was a student in my Gender Politics class. I lingered after class to talk to our tutor one day and saw Jess still at her desk, contemplating a list of essay topics as if afraid it might bite her. She looked about eighteen, like me, with a face made up of circles: curly hair, round rosy cheeks and wide, despairing blue eyes.

“You get this stuff, don’t you?” she’d said, her lips tremulous.

I nodded. Andrea had taught me everything we’d covered so far when I was fourteen or fifteen. “Do you mean you don’t?” I asked.

Jess shook her head. “It’s like a whole different
language
. I mean, like, what’s
this
supposed to mean?” She pointed at the first essay topic. “Para … diggum,” she read gingerly.

“Paradigm shift,” I corrected. “It means a change in the way people think about things. Like when people stopped believing the sun went around the world and started believing the world went around the sun instead.”

Jess’s wide eyes widened still further. “My God,” she said, sounding awestruck, “you are so totally going to ace this subject. Half the time I don’t even understand what you’re saying.”

I gave an offhand shrug, but her innocent admiration touched me. “Would you like me to help you?”

She nodded, as if I’d thrown her a lifeline. I spent half an hour taking her through the essay topics, and her earnest gratitude warmed me to the core.

At the next tutorial she sat beside me, and the following week she invited me to lunch after class. After a month of walking among aliens, one had finally rolled out the welcome mat.

Jess had just graduated from high school, where she had more young people in her circle of friends than I’d met in my entire life. As her new Gender Politics friend, my job was to listen to the tales of these friends and give a feminist analysis of their behavior. Jess seldom asked me about myself, but I didn’t mind. I had no tales of my own, and I enjoyed being entrusted with hers.

Near the end of first semester, Jess invited me to her nineteenth birthday party. She’d booked a private room for twenty in a karaoke bar to “get trashed and sing cheesy songs”.

At half past eight, Andrea dropped me off in Chinatown, where I steered through the crowds to a flight of granite steps. At the top was a bar, behind which lounged a bored Chinese youth reading a magazine. I gave him Jess’s name and he pointed me down a corridor with muddle of discordant voices leaking through the doors.

I opened the door labeled “4” and a wall of noise smacked me in the face. The room was windowless and dotted with orange vinyl couches. The only light came from a television screening what looked like a Korean romcom with suggestive subtitles scrolling along the bottom. In front stood three off-key young women holding microphones. One was fondling her body as she sang, one was pretending to give her microphone oral sex, and the third finished every line with an inaccurate swig from a bottle. Of the people nursing drinks on the couches, the only one who gave me more than a cursory glance was a stocky young man with a humorous mouth and skin the color of sarsaparilla.

He held out an oddly formal hand. “Hi, I’m Sumeet.” His palm was cool and dry, and his voice was deep and lilting, with an Indian accent.

Sumeet had featured in several of Jess’s tales. He’d arrived at her school from India when he was fourteen, and was one of the few guys who could see through Bitchy Caitlin, a redhead who thought herself the “hottest thing ever”.

“Hi, I’m Sage.” I attempted a smile in return. “Is this Jess’s party?”

Sumeet nodded. “Take a seat.”

I slid onto his couch a careful arm’s length away. The song ended and the three women rambled over, looking me up and down as if they couldn’t quite believe what they saw. For the first time in my life, I sensed there was something terribly wrong with me.

“You’re Sage, the feminist, aren’t you?” said the tallest of the women, with the smile of a circling shark. She wore a skin-tight black dress that bared most of her thighs, and her long, wavy red hair identified her as Bitchy Caitlin.

“How did you know?” I asked, trying to be friendly.

She darted a sidelong look at her friends. “Call it a hunch.”

Her two friends giggled, still looking me up and down. Both wore low-cut tops that exposed half their breasts, one with a mini-skirt and one with black pants. Like Caitlin, they had long glossy hair, lashings of glittery makeup, and heels so high they walked with a strange, stilted strut.

I could have been of a different species from these women. Everything I was wearing had been bought by Andrea: my loose hemp shirt and pants, my Fairtrade canvas shoes and the green men’s jacket she found at a charity shop. Andrea often bought secondhand men’s clothes.
They’re better quality than women’s clothes
, she told me, with an eye roll to say this was only to be expected. My hair was very short, and the only thing on my face was a pair of Andrea’s glasses, recycled and fitted with my lenses.

The thought of Andrea bolstered me against their stares.
Don’t be cowed, be compassionate
, she would say.
They were raised in a world where a woman’s worth is measured by her sex appeal. Where they’re fooled into obsessing over diets and shoes to stop them from challenging male power.
I lifted my chin, and tried to see their sneers as an opportunity. Maybe I could help these women escape The Male Gaze and embrace real power through feminism.

“
Loving
the look, by the way,” added Caitlin, closing in for the kill. Her friends giggled so hard that they almost toppled off their stilettos.

My stomach caved in with shame. These women would die of laughter at the thought of learning anything from me. They were at the peak of their sexual power, and to them I was a loser and a joke.

“Are you girls being bitchy?” asked Sumeet.

I felt unsettled. On one hand, I didn’t want a man to protect me; on the other I was desperately glad he’d stepped in.

“Us, Sumeet?” said Caitlin, in mock-wounded tones. “We’re
never
bitchy, are we, Kayla?”

“
Never!
” said the woman in black pants.

“Anyway,” said Caitlin, her perfect teeth glistening, “nice to meet you, Sage. Come sing with us later.” She sashayed away to a couch with a wave, and the other two followed behind.

“Don’t listen to those girls,” said Sumeet. My hand dodged his reassuring pat. “They think looking pretty means they can act ugly.” He sounded kind, but his gaze scanned the legs of the three departing women in a way no man had ever looked at me.

The last of my pride crumbled. “Is Jess here?” I asked, craving the reassurance of her admiring, dimpled face.

“Oh yes. Here in body, but not in spirit, you might say. Or maybe in too many spirits. Let me show you.”

He led me to a couch. Jess lay face down in a short red dress, her curly head joined at the lips to the man underneath her. All I could see of him was two denim-clad legs and a forehead edged with spiky blond hair.

“Jess,” called Sumeet, “your friend Sage is here to see you.”

Jess detached herself from the man and looked up. Her left cheek was smudged with mascara. “Sage!” She extracted the man’s hand from her top and clambered off him, engulfing me in a hug that smelled of hairspray and cocktails. “Thanks
so
much for coming!” Her voice was bright but unsteady.

“Happy birthday!” I said to her right ear, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

“My
God
, we need to sing something together! Shove over, Kurt.”

I balanced myself on the very edge of the couch. Kurt got up with a grunt, yanked his shirt over the lump in his jeans and slouched in the direction of the bar.

Jess draped one arm around my shoulder and picked up a plastic folder with the other. “How about some Madonna?”

My spirits, which had begun to lift, stalled somewhere between my shoulder blades. “I don’t know any Madonna songs.” I’d read articles that called Madonna a twentieth century women’s icon, but I’d never heard any of her music.

Jess gaped. “Not even ‘Like A Virgin’?”

I shook my head. I’d never listened to commercial music. Bubblegum, Andrea called it. Disposable music for the masses to chew and spit out.

Jess and Sumeet stared as if I’d come from another planet.

“How about Rihanna? Or Adele?” said Sumeet hopefully.

Withering under their saucer-eyed disbelief, I dropped my gaze to my hands. “Not really.”

They listed artist after artist, and each time I shook my head my spirits sank a little further. I reminded myself that I knew plenty about important things, like politics and history and world poverty, and that pop music didn’t actually
matter
. But there on the orange couch, behind a giant folder of songs, it felt like the most important thing in the world.

Ten crushing minutes later, Jess thrust the folder into my lap, told me to keep looking, and took Sumeet off to get drinks. Alone on the couch, I leafed through the greasy plastic pages. I found a handful of tracks I knew, but they were songs from Andrea’s time, two generations removed from the fluffy pop blaring from the speakers.

I shoved the folder aside and slunk to the toilets to pull myself together. Shortly after I’d locked myself into a cubicle, two sets of stilettos clattered in, and I recognized the voices of Caitlin and Kayla.

“Did you see Sumeet? He was almost
flirting
with her!”

“Yeah, but guys love that dyke stuff,” said Caitlin, unzipping her handbag. “She probably reminds him of lesbian porn.”

I heard the click of makeup containers being opened and shut.

“So is she a dyke, or just a femmo?” said Kayla.

“God, she
must
be a dyke. I mean, seriously, check out the ugly glasses and the butchmeister haircut. Is she in the army, or what?”

It was at this point that I realized they were talking about me. I sank fully clothed onto the lid of the toilet, their words hitting my stomach like fists.

“And the clothes! My God, where do you even
find
clothes like that?”

“Some dyke shop. Made extra baggy for feral pubes and leg hair.”

Andrea would have marched out and mowed them down, but I curled into a ball, not wanting to listen, but unable to stop. Jess talked to me constantly about the people at this party: what had she said to them about me? Was I a circus freak she’d plucked from her “femmo” class for her normal friends to laugh at? Was everyone who looked at me sniggering at the hairy dyke loser in bad clothes who didn’t know a single pop song?

By the time Caitlin and Kayla left the bathroom, tears were streaming down my face. I smeared them on my sleeve and crept out to the mirror. Was I ugly? Did I look like a lesbian? What was so bad about my clothes? I stared into the glass for a good five minutes, and realized I had utterly no idea.

The loud, discordant karaoke bar was suddenly too much to bear. Head down and shoulders hunched, I ducked into Room 4 to thank Jess and say goodbye. She was back on the couch with Kurt. I cowered in the shadows, waiting for her to disengage, but the kissing and groping went on and on and on. I gave up and fled the place, scuttling through the streets and cringing every time someone looked at me. My bus pulled away as I was crossing the road, so I decided to buy a newspaper to screen out the contemptuous world.

As I walked to the counter of the convenience store, my gaze strayed over a glossy magazine. A pop star Sumeet and Jess had mentioned was featured on the cover. I couldn’t bring myself to buy a copy, but when the next bus arrived, I took my broadsheet newspaper to the back seat and turned to the Entertainment and Fashion sections that Andrea always threw out. I threw them out myself before I got home, but only after I’d read them cover to cover.

Four days later, I saved Jess a seat in Gender Politics, but she didn’t turn up. I rang her when I got home, and she told me she’d withdrawn from the subject.

“It just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be,” she said, her voice stiff and cool.

A shadow of foreboding crept over me. “What did you think it was going to be?”

“I thought it would be about women being strong and doing what they want, but it wasn’t that at all. Mostly it was just preaching.”

“Preaching?”

“You know, about how there aren’t enough women in politics, and whatever. I mean, maybe women don’t
want
to be in politics.”

Part of me wanted to make her see why politics mattered, and how much she owed feminism, but another, deeper part sensed it was too late. The note of admiration had vanished from her voice; the welcome mat had been snatched from the doorstep.

“I’m sorry I left your birthday party without saying goodbye,” I said. “I was feeling sick, and you were busy with Kurt, so I—”