All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages. Saundra Mitchell

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СКАЧАТЬ to be more about keeping themselves in control as van der Loos calls for her to change positions and she presents us with an arched back that make her breasts reach for the ceiling.

      But for me, it’s as easy as not going hard over the Delft candlesticks and Jakartan pomegranates we have been sketching since we were twelve.

      Though if it were Joost Hendrickszoon reclining naked on a ragged sofa in front of me, a barely there whisper of silk draped over his most vulnerable bits—or, God help me, perhaps no silk at all—it would be me gasping down lungfuls of the frigid January air with my breeches tented, trying not to think about how desperately I would like to put my hands on some tackle that wasn’t my own.

      It’s been a time since I spoke to Joost—though spoke seems too generous a term for the blushing conversations I occasionally stammered my way through with him after Sunday services. That hasn’t stopped me from fantasizing about him without his clothes on when I am supposed to be staring at van der Loos’s girls and sketching them in repose. His family put their money in Viceroy bulbs and when the tulip market shattered, he had to abandon his own apprenticeship with the faience maker and take up work with the dockhands who load the cargo onto the East India clipper ships.

      I catch sight of him sometimes from afar, down at the docks, when van der Loos sends Augustus and me to fetch his imports for his vanitases and sacks of pigment powders, the sort than can be bought only on the other side of the world. As we load our handcarts with the smalt blue of Delft china or the yellow ochre stripes on the inside of an Iris petal, the thought of Joost somewhere nearby always has me by the throat. Even when he’s not in my sights, I can picture him—the muscles in his arms tense beneath the weight of porcelain, the concave hollow of his back bowing beneath their weight. All the anatomy lessons of my apprenticeship put to questionable use. Once, when he passed us by with a crew of the burly dock men, he winked at me, and I was so flustered I dropped a crate full of dried puffer fish from the West Indies I was holding. When we cracked the lid back at the studio, we found half of them had crumbled into dust, and I took a lashing over the knuckles for it from van der Loos.

      But Joost winked at me. All things have a balance.

      So my apprenticeship gives me charcoal stains in the creases of my palms, knuckles scratched from catching loose nails when we spread canvas over frames, my fingers dyed the color of Admiral Liefken tulips from priming red ochre pigment, while Joost broadens out his shoulders, sculpting him a silhouette like one of those Renaissance Christ paintings in church I used to stare at so long my mother thought I might become a clergyman.

      But so long as it is a woman draped across the sofa in the center of our sketching circle, I’ll be, as van der Loos proclaims, the best apprentice in the Guild of St. Luke.

      Though, it is mortifying to be declared thusly in front of a room full of the other boys, half of them rising to attention when our model stands at the end of the session and reaches down to touch her toes, presenting us with a near-telescopic view of her nethers. Johannes’s charcoal falls out of his hand and breaks in two against the floor, and Augustus already has that glazed look in his eyes of being halfway through a fantasy about taking this girl out behind the Wolf’s Head and getting his head under her skirt. Though knowing Augustus he’d be so sweaty with nerves if he ever got this girl alone he’d probably slide right off her. When we boil the linseed oil for binding, he can hardly look me in the eyes—I can’t imagine a girl would be any easier on him.

      From the back of the room, van der Loos knocks a hand against the wall, so hard and sudden that all the boys startle, eyes ripped from the model. “Good lord, it’s like you’ve none seen a woman before.”

      None of us want to be the one to admit that we haven’t—Braam, the oldest of us, is fifteen, so up until now it’s been mostly mothers and sisters and the occasional tavern whore for all of us.

      Van der Loos shoos the model into the back room, then stalks forward to the center of our circle. A curtain sheltering the high windows catches on his lace collar as he passes and he swats it free.

      “What’s this?” He flicks at Braam’s parchment, which is mostly devoted to breasts. “Is this what a woman looks like, or what you want her to look like in your fantasies, Englen? And this, Hermanszoon?” he snaps at Johannes, who reaches up like he’s going to cover his work and keep the rest of us from seeing it. Van der Loos passes Augustus’s easel without comment, but pauses on mine. I brace for a criticism, but instead he says, “This is well done, Constantijn,” and I start—I hadn’t realized he was so near to me.

      He takes up my sketch and holds it for the other boys to see. “And you know why this is well done? Because it does not reek of childish fantasies. Constantijn here has sketches that are anatomical. No breasts that defy gravity or exaggerated curves. You would all do well to adopt his attitude—this is not the last naked figure we’ll be drawing, and I expect a certain level of work from you.” He drops my board back on the easel, then claps me hard on the shoulder. “Well done. You did very well today.”

      I try to look pleased, but the compliment sends my heart hiccuping. A singling out is enough reason to be taunted on our walk home, perhaps get a handful of snow stuffed down the back of my breeches. I’ve done the stuffing before—we all have. But to be called out for being the only boy entirely disinterested in the female body could have a different end. They drowned a guild master in Delft last year, and shaded taunts don’t take long to darken into rumors. Though the danger of a jest holds little water with these rich boys whose parents pay fifty guilders a year for them to become painters, who will never have to grit their teeth when they lie with a woman or worry their minister will confront them about their unclean desires that could end tied to a millstone and tossed into the sea. Whose desires their masters condemn, but at least they’re boyish.

      I leave the studio that night sweating in spite of the winter cold. Most evenings, the five of us apprentices walk from van der Loos’s studio along the Uilenburgergracht to Dam Square, where we break apart, following the veins of the canals to our homes, but I try to clean up as quick as I can and escape alone. I’m the first one to leave the studio—I realize halfway down the stairs I’ve left one of my gloves behind, but I can’t muster the courage to go back to fetch it.

      I’m half a flight from the gate when I hear the lumbering thud above me of the other boys’ klompen on the stairs. They swarm around me on the street, like I’m a boulder in their stream. I speed up, trying to stay a few steps ahead with my scarf pulled tight around my face, but I can still hear them behind me.

      “Eyes ahead, Constantijn,” Braam calls. “Don’t want you getting distracted.” He strikes the last syllable like a cymbal, just as a clump of slushy snow slaps the back of my head. I don’t turn around.

      “Look at Constantijn, so focused.”

      “Doesn’t even notice the girls all around him.”

      “Have you ever seen a girl before, Constantijn? Come out tonight and we’ll give you some tutoring.”

      Another lump of slush hits near my feet. No wonder Braam’s vanishing points are always a few inches off.

      I pull up the collar of my cassock and walk faster, but my klompen slide on the stones, still slick with last night’s new snowfall. I have to grip the bridge rail as I cross the canal like it’s a lifeline just to stay upright.

      “What do you like more, Constantijn—girls or dogs?” Braam calls, and Johannes laughs.

      “Girls or chickens?” Johannes adds.

      “Girls or sailors?”

      “Go СКАЧАТЬ