For Samuel, the rasp of an art pencil crossing parchment was the most erotic sound in the world.
The soft scritch scritch soothed his senses, making the stress of being among so many women fall away like wood shavings from his sharpener. The strokes filled his page, following the contours of the dance teacher’s wispy ballerina skirt.
He sketched in the lines of her body, the taut muscled calf, the elegant turn of her neck. Sometimes he paused, a prickle flowing through him like a current as she appeared on his page.
He looked up at the real woman, who moved to the barre with its mirrored wall. The little girls under her instruction mimicked her movements, tapping their tiny ballet slippers on the worn floor, out of time with the rhythm of the song playing through the speakers.
The woman stretched out her arm. Samuel’s pencil flew across the sketch, sweeping along the bend of her elbow and delineating each poised finger.
Mothers sat along the wall on hard benches, cell phones upraised. Their devices indicated their recording with beeps and chimes alongside the cadence of his long, even strokes.
Samuel switched colors to capture the warm tones of the teacher’s face where the sun from the high windows kissed her skin. The sensual slide of the tip of the pencil on the rough paper vibrated through his fingertips as if he were touching her.
His own daughter paused, snatching his attention to her end of the studio. Cassandra hitched up the back of her tights and jiggled out of step with the other girls. He watched her for a moment, wondering if she needed to visit the bathroom and if so, would he need to interrupt the class. After a moment she stuck her toe out again and turned in a slow circle, dropping back into the motions of her classmates.
Samuel should be drawing her instead. And he often did, images of her gazing out the front window at home, as if she could summon her mother’s return. Cassandra was only four, and almost a year had passed since she had last seen the woman who gave birth to her.
Samuel spent months trying to find his wife. The note she left made it clear she was not dead or lost, but needed to be free. Motherhood and marriage were not what she had expected. She wanted to photograph the lions in Africa, the capybaras in South America. She was anxious to go behind enemy lines to capture images of war and famine and danger. To live.
Still, he searched for her, expecting the tether that bound a mother to a child would hold. He would send her news, draw her back.
But she had slipped away from them, snapping the tie. He couldn’t find her. Then six months later, the papers had come. Divorce. She wanted nothing, just to be let go. He signed them and sent them back to some law firm in New York.
The music changed to a bouncy happy nursery tune. The little girls followed their teacher, elbows out, skipping in a circle. Samuel abandoned the sensitive drawing with its wistful, aching lines and flipped back to one he’d started at last week’s lesson. This image matched the current mood, the teacher smiling, dressed in a black leotard and jagged sheer skirt.
“That’s lovely,” a woman said, leaning in to look at his sketch pad. “Do you draw professionally?”
He shook his head, working hard to suppress his urge to turn the page away from her critical eye. “I work for the newspaper.”
“You must get to draw for them, then,” she said brightly.
Samuel merely nodded. There was no point in trying to express the heaviness he felt at work, arranging lines of crowded type into too-small boxes for the advertisers who could not afford their own graphic designers. His was a life of clip art and stock photos and font weights.
He did not do his job particularly well, and his lack of creativity plagued him. At night he often dreamed that the words he shoved into tight spaces broke free, letters bursting out of their sharp alignments.
Perhaps that was how his wife had felt.
The woman tugged a cell phone from her purse to snap pictures of the ballerinas, and Samuel sighed in relief. But he felt too near this other person, her proximity stifling his ability to fluidly create the lines of the teacher.
His drawings were his love affair, and he felt naked when they were viewed. Anyone could surely see his infatuation with the circle of her arms, his obsession with the tender arch of her foot as she pointed her toe on the barre.
The gentle slope of her back and the curve of her waist were visions that pushed away the demons that imprisoned him at night. The dance lessons were a hardship, both in their expense and in his time from work to bring Cassandra midday. He gladly paid the price, not just for his daughter, whose schedule he endeavored to keep. But for himself.
These moments brought him back to his center, his love of drawing for the art itself. He captured this woman on paper. His adoration of her was pure and unbroken and infallible.
She could not walk away from his page. She would never disappear from the reality of his pencil strokes.
He had no courage to take her from this world of drawing and unrequited love into the next one, of dates and awkwardness and devastation in the end. So he pined. He watched. And he let it be enough.