An excerpt from "Posing"

By Noelle Q. de Jesus 

THE SIGN WAS straightforward enough. “Nude model wanted for graduate-level drawing courses.”  Reading it eight months ago, it occurred to Pilar this might be exactly what she needed.  For she had no desire to take a class in something practical, as her husband Frank Stone, had suggested, something like desktop publishing or computer programming, to focus on and occupy her once they were settled in New Jersey. That’s what Frank Stone said. She wasn’t sure why, but she always thought of her husband with his full name. Not Frank but Frank Stone.

And anyway, Pilar knew she didn’t want to find part-time work. What? Type up memos, say, or mind a store?  Just the idea of sending out her resume to one of the accounting firms in New York made her shudder. No, thank you. Those days were long gone. She had no wish to return to them. But yes, she experienced a restlessness in the mornings, getting dressed for no apparent reason or occasion. She wanted, no she needed, something different.  What was destiny, anyway, at the end of the day?  All Pilar wanted was to do something she could have never ever in a million years imagine herself doing. Something like this. Maybe exactly this.

She would have never considered posing naked for an art class in the past, and certainly never in Manila, say. But here, it was inexplicably appealing.

Of course, Pilar did not know the first thing about art. That was more Portia’s department. When they were young and still in school, in the summer, Pilar always opted for practical pursuits, short courses like business math and continental cooking—useful things. Their parents acknowledged that Portia had the creative streak. It was the younger, prettier Portia who did dance, and pottery, watercolor painting and drama. It was Portia who was encouraged to express herself on the stage. That was just the way things were in their house.

But Pilar thought about it for two days and on the third day, she made the phone call. Which is how it happened that she got paid by the hour as a nude model for the art department of on community college, and now, also at small graphic arts center in the area, a post she got through the professor’s referral. These days, she posed twenty, sometimes thirty hours a week. Wednesdays, she had a full schedule because she did a three hour art class at the college, grabbed a yogurt or a banana in the cafeteria, and then drove the arts center in the next town to pose for a series of anatomy sketching workshops. •

> Noelle Q. de Jesus has won prizes for short stories, including the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. She edited Fast Food Fiction: Short Short Stories To Go in 2003 (Anvil) and published a chick lit novel, MrsMisMarriage (Marshall Cavendish International) in 2008. A freelance writer and editor in Singapore, Noelle lives with her husband, Nathaniel Chua, her daughter Katharine and her son, Carlos. Her children are her greatest work.