The Third Eye

It was ten days until the end of class. Our easels were arranged in a semicircle around a 2 foot platform constructed of 2x 4’s. On it was an old dining chair draped in grey sheets.

I was staring at the empty chair… sweating, exhausted, tired. Praying that she would show up on this day, the last of many we had spent together. Warm up with a series of Contraposto poses for 2 minute gesture drawings then slide elegantly into that chair for a series of six 20 minutes sketches.

The teacher came around, making small talk as he made sure we were preparing to draw, both mentally and physically.

To him this class was about metaphysics, just as much as it was about craft. He saw it as therapy, meditation. If done correctly it was a religious experience. And thus it was of utmost importance that our heads were in the right place.

I tried to keep focused. But 10 minutes had passed? WHERE WAS SHE? I couldn’t contain myself. I turned away from my easel in frustration letting out a tense sigh.

He was there, immediately behind me. Staring at me. Arms crossed. Clearly he had sensed my aura with that clairvoyant scalpel of a his. His third eye was open wide, and I knew he was I peering deep into my Etheric body as I asked…

“Excuse me sir is Alicia going to be our model today?”

And with that I realized I had said too much. Shared something about myself I did not intend to...

He paused and tilted his head to one side. He stared at me with those beady brown eyes, peering out from just above the frames of his transitions lenses which clung stubbornly to the tip of his nose. Had the lenses reacted to the light pouring in from the windows, causing them to turn an ink wash grey…or were they simply reacting to the thoughts he was excavating from within me? The cracks at the corners of his eyes compressed as his eyes narrowed. It seemed that even the spiral colic of graying hair just above his left ear had subtly tilted toward me, like a radar dish tracking a satellite.

Could he see inside me, did he know what I was thinking?

His gaze did not let up, he had bypassed my superficial shell of lies and excuses, peeled them away like an onion skin layer, he dove deeper...yes he suspected there was more.

The nonchalance of my absences on non-Alicia days gave him reason to explore further. I constructed a firewall of lies relating to my obsession with drawing the perfect portrait, providing a red herring for my true obsession. Hoping he would abandon the spelunking of my neural network before he found the truth. He kept going. Deeper. He suspected something else.

He was close now. A drop of sweat ran down my forehead. I tried to speak and could not. Was that a smile?! Did the left corner of his lip curl ever so slightly? Fuck! He never smiles!

Frantically I remapped pathways to guide him into flamboyantly labeled directories containing information meant to subvert him. A search for Alicia/Model dumped him into a spider web of warm, fuzzy, childhood memories spent at my parents cabin on the Columbia river Gorge. Parasailing, glassy water reflecting the pine trees of the Cascades. He was reading me like a book, and I could not pull away.

It only took him a moment to see past this. The smile was spreading across his face. He closed these folders and pulled back out to the top level, quitting his local search on a folder by folder basis. Instead opting to do a full sweep at global level. In seconds he would have my secret. I relaxed, let out a deep breath. I prepared for the inevitable.

And then she walked in.

Dressed in black. Head to tow. She was wearing bowling shoes and a low-cut blouse that whispered the notion of her perfect breasts beneath. Breasts she would soon expose. I would spend the next 3 hours rendering her to perfection on a 18x24 piece of Strathmore sketch paper.

I turned back to the teacher. He was still staring at me. He made a gesture with his hand, flipping his palm upward, as if to say “ask and ye shall receive.”

Then, with complete sincerity he patted me on the shoulder and spoke.

“I’m glad to have you in this class Samson. You’ve made some huge strides, broken some bad habits. Center yourself man. Get ready to put pencil to paper. You seem tense today.” He turned away…

“Alicia^[1]” he said sarcastically, “so glad you could make it…can we try to be a bit more prompt next time?”

My secret was safe.