Mercy

Chapter One: Lucy and Mr. Norris

The floor was hard and cold against my shoulders, under my ass. He couldn’t get a carpet?
At least an area rug?

I guess this is what he paid me for, this discomfort and chill. My muscles started to ache from lying still and holding the demanding pose. If I didn’t love him so much I would never submit to this, but I completely adored him, so here I was. And yes, he paid me quite well for my services and regularly asked me back, which I found both flattering and reassuring.

I looked up at him from under my eyelashes but I doubt he even noticed my gaze. His eyes were fixed, as always, on my supple dancer’s body offered before him. I watched his powerful strokes, vigorous and intense. He was actually quite robust for a man of seventy-five. His name was
Pietro
and he was an artist.
And me?
My name was Lucy, and unfortunately I wasn’t quite sure from day to day who or what I really was. I guess if I had to choose I would say I was a dancer first, who just happened to fall into nude modeling on the side. It was high art stuff, not porn, although I knew plenty of dancers who took the porn route to make ends meet. Like most dancers, I wasn’t precious about my body. I knew it was nice and I used it when it suited me. But porn wasn’t really my thing. It seemed so squalid, so I was glad for this gig, being painted by a real artist.

The broad strokes
Pietro
made scratched loudly in the silence, that abrasive sound of pencil on textured canvas that I knew so well by now. Sometimes it irritated me, but sometimes it relaxed me and I floated off into daydreams listening to it go on. Sometimes, instead, I pictured the lines of my own body as he put them to canvas with his hands.
Pietro
made large works, sprawling and spare, all shading and lines, although my body and face were definitely there. No abstract, amorphous, unrecognizable figure. It was definitely me and part of me got off on that fact. He thought I was beautiful. He’d told me so when he hired me. “I need your beauty,” he’d rasped to me outside the theater like a desperate man. The very next day, I’d knocked on the door of his studio. He’d guided me inside, coaxed me out of my clothes and said, “Beautiful girl.” Then he turned me so my back was to him and started to sketch my curvy little ass.

But it wasn’t about sex, not even for a second. Believe me, no sex was ever involved. Even though
Pietro
undressed me like the most solicitous of lovers every time I came over, we were not lovers. We were nothing more than friends. Not even friends really. He was more like a mentor.
Or maybe a grandfather, a nice grandfather who gave me advice.
I loved
Pietro
with my whole heart, loved him like the father I’d never had, and
Pietro
was always kind to me the many hours we spent together at work.

He scratched at a line with his finger, adjusting the shading with a frown. When I thought that my back would break from the strain of the pose, he smiled at me and sighed.

“It is time for a break, I think.”

“How did you know?”

“The little lines in your forehead, they draw together like this.” He made a funny face, an exaggerated imitation of my discomfort. I laughed, shrugging on the robe he handed me.

I looked at the canvas while we chatted and rested. It was almost done, I guessed. The last two works of me had been standing poses, which was much more relaxing. I could stand for an eternity not moving a muscle, piece of cake. But this pose had me on my back with my arms up over my head, and my legs curled loosely at my side. It was a lovely pose, I could see that on the canvas, but it hurt to hold it for such a long time.

Luckily,
Pietro
was conscientious about giving me breaks. He only refused to let me up when he was in the throes of “the muse.” When I did take a break I felt guilty, because it always took time for him to get back into that same space he’d been. It always took five minutes or more just to return my arms and legs to that perfect angle he craved. I would let him manipulate me into position, loose and compliant. It was sort of like sex, only
Pietro
wasn’t my lover.

No, my lover had left me last week. Did I say he was my lover? He was my fiancé, actually. The operative word being
was
. He
was
my fiancé, until he left me at the altar. He
was
my fiancé until he realized he was in love with someone else. He had never loved me even though he’d said he did, and I hadn’t loved him, and that was the worst thing of all.

But I preferred not to talk about Joe. I’d finally reached a point where I could conjure his face without bursting into tears. And around the time I reached that point, I decided not to conjure his face anymore at all. I was a practical person in matters of the heart. I had never been in love. I realized that now, after the wretchedness of last week, that I had never been in love and probably never would be, because there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t feel things right, or maybe I just didn’t want to.

Not feeling things came in handy in many ways. As a modern dancer, you’re grappled and grasped pretty regularly. You spend hours punishing your body at the
barre
, at rehearsals, at choreography, at nightly performances. As an art model, you’re manipulated and posed. When you make your life by your body, it’s actually better not to feel too much.
To feel only what matters.
Stretch.
Breathe. Turn. Soar
. I felt my body move in space and that was enough.

This would be the third work I’d done for
Pietro
. The first two had sold as a set to an anonymous buyer for an obscene amount. After they sold,
Pietro
had given me five thousand dollars and said he felt it wasn’t enough. I tried to refuse it because he already paid me an hourly wage that was more than fair, but he insisted, telling me it would assuage his guilt.

“What did you sell them for?” I had pressed.

“A lot.
A bidding war.
Two buyers.”
Then he’d told me the amount and my mouth dropped open. I pocketed his check without another word.

But
Pietro
was deserving of every success. He worked hard at his art and his vision was original and striking. I wondered as we worked what this one would sell for. To me, it was even more beautiful and provocative than the others. I wondered if he thought the same thing, if it mattered to him.
What will this bring me? How much money will I make?
I wondered if he looked at me differently now. When he looked at me, what did he see? Beauty, as he
claimed,
or something else?
A naked, compelling body to sell for money?
Lots of money, it seemed. But I was more than happy to be a vessel for his success.

I left
Pietro’s
at four o’clock to go to the theater. We had no rehearsals on Tuesday, just a nightly performance at eight. I was meeting
Grégoire
for dinner beforehand.
Grégoire
, my dance partner, and my best friend.

Grégoire
was a couple years older than me, thirty years old to my twenty eight. He had cried on my shoulder the day of his birthday. “Thirty?” he’d mourned. “It’s too awful to be true.” And it was awful, because we were dancers. Our performance life spans were miserably short, especially with the kind of punishing dance we did. I already nursed aches and twinges that worsened by the week. I hoped to make it to thirty five, but even that seemed an unlikely event. So I held
Grégoire
in total empathy that night, stroking his soft black hair and crying along with him. Life after dance was something I never thought of, something I hadn’t planned for, at least not yet.

“Lucy!” He waved to me as I neared the stage door. He was leaning against the wall jabbering on the phone. Talking to his boyfriend no doubt, who he claimed to love desperately, but who was rarely around. “He works,” he explained. “He’s not in the arts.” The sugar daddy,
who
had a real job. Every dancer needed one, just as I’d
had,
only I hadn’t been able to hold onto mine.

I waved back to him and crossed the cracked pavement. The ground outside the theater was littered with cigarette butts and plastic water bottle caps.
Disgusting dancers
, I thought to myself. I went inside to drop off my bag in my dressing room, my eyes adjusting to the darkness from the blinding light outside. I was so sun-struck I almost collided with someone in the corridor. He steadied me and I looked up at him with an
embarrassed
grin.

“Sorry, I’m blind.”

He answered with a smile and left his hand on my elbow just a little longer than seemed right. And I can’t explain it, but the way he held my arm felt...well...almost inappropriate in some way. When he finally let go I scurried down the hall, fighting the urge to look back.

But it was hard not to, because even in my blindness I noticed he was an extremely attractive man. Even sun blind, he’d made me feel hot and agitated with nothing more than the strange firmness of his touch.
Sandy blond hair, a broad face and mouth, and blue eyes that couldn’t possibly have been as light as they looked.
It was just the sun, I thought, that made them so singular. It was only the sun that made me feel so unglued.

I pushed into my dressing room and found
Elinor
there. I dropped my bag, and I normally would have walked right back out. But he might still be back there by the stage door, and for some reason I didn’t feel up to facing him again. Instead I resigned myself to small talk with Ellie.
Elinor
was a dyed-in-the-wool dancer, artistic and pure. Talking to her was like driving wood chips under my fingernails. After five minutes of her prattle, I figured I’d rather face the elbow grabber in the hall.