Georgene Smith Goodin
I agreed to sit for the portrait because Picasso was your favorite. I assumed you’d paint fractured planes, a body in distortions and angles. I wanted anonymity with my fifteen dollars per hour.
Abby said you were kind, not creepy like some others in her life drawing class. Posing nude was never on my bucket list but rent needed to be paid and my ex was slow with the alimony. He told my lawyer he couldn’t stay organized without a woman. I tucked my feelings about that under my tongue.
When I arrived at your sun-dappled studio, it unnerved me to see an empty easel. The bread and the cheese set directly on a table’s rutted wood said date, not business. Perhaps you saw me freeze, because you were quick to say you liked to talk before breaking out your brushes, that you liked to make your subjects comfortable in your space.
I can’t believe I told you about my grandfather’s farm, that summer I was sent there after my mother died. How I begged my father to bring me home but he wouldn’t. I didn’t have the words to tell him what had happened and he couldn’t hear the hiss of violation in my breath. To get me talking, all you did was wonder how I got the scar on my forearm. Was it really that simple? Why had no one else ever asked?
I giggled when you pointed to a floor-length curtain in the corner and called it the changing room. Even though I would sit naked before you for hours, you gave me the dignity of disrobing in private. It was then I understood that it’s the act of exposing that creates intimacy, not the nudity itself.
You had me sit on a wooden stool, a swish of red velvet draped behind me. I turned my head a thousand times at your direction.
“Like that!” you exclaimed. “Is it okay if I take some photos?”
I nodded my permission and face-palmed when I realized I’d lost the pose. Your laugh was kind. You poured ginger ale in a champagne flute, told me to offer an imaginary toast.
“To new experiences,” I said, raising the glass, jutting out my chin with unaccustomed confidence.
I was surprised you didn’t paint in a cubist style, even more stunned my portrait was chosen for the exhibit’s poster. I stared from the canvas creamy pink and elegant, a bashful smile promising to spill my secrets if conditions were right.
My ex hand-delivered that month’s check instead of mailing it, knocked instead of slipping it through the slot. When I answered, he asked if I knew he’d gone to high school with you. He almost hadn’t recognized me, I was that beautiful in the painting. He wondered if we could go for a drink, maybe dinner. Catch up for old times’ sake, reconsider where things went wrong.
I took the check and told him next time he got himself a wife, maybe he should really look at her. Maybe he should try to see.
Georgene Smith Goodin’s work has appeared in numerous publications, and has won the “Mash Stories” flash fiction competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the cartoonist Robert Goodin, and their four children. Follow her on Bluesky, @gsmithgoodin.bsky.social