Blue Nude
by Elizabeth Rosner
Summary
BLUE NUDE is the story of the complex union between two artists in San Francisco --- the elder and once-prominent German painter turned professor, Danzig, and Merav, a youthful Israeli beauty and former art student who makes a living working as a nude model. The two have deep and guarded pasts, both dating back to lives in foreign countries, separate yet intricately connected. Although they are many years apart in both age and experience, their sordid histories haunt their present lives and profoundly influence their decisions, actions and relationships.
Excerpt
Begin anywhere, Danzig says. The shoulder, the rib cage, the thigh, the ankle. It won’t be an accident, even if it feels that way right now.
He stands in his classroom at the Art Institute, the students arranged on chairs and stools in a rough circle with their sketchpads and charcoal, all sixteen of them waiting for the model to take the first pose on her platform.
Find a place where your line wants to take a journey, he says. Some curve in any direction, a place where skin meets light, meets shadow. Let your hand tell you. Begin there.
It’s almost the last class of the semester, and he is deliberately talking about beginnings, not endings. He keeps promising himself he is never coming back, but he keeps coming back. For the third year in a row, he has made a vow not to return in the fall, but he’s finding it hard to take his own word seriously. Even when he is shouting at his students, feverish to convince them to care more, he feels his own intensity in doubt, wonders how much he still cares himself. He used to relish the moments when they jumped at the sound of his voice, but now he is no longer sure that anyone even flinches. Their anonymous, hopeful faces may not be enough to save him.
He stands beside his faithful skeleton, the one that dangles like a marionette on its wooden stand, its bleached bones as familiar to him as an old friend. This is the invaluable prop he calls Doctor Memento, for memento mori, though Danzig is sure most of the students imagine he must be referring only to his own death and not theirs; they’re so young they are still convinced of their immortality.
He is not allowed to touch the models; that’s one of the rules of the Models Guild. And so instead Danzig will rest a hand on Doctor Memento’s shoulder blade, tap a fingertip on his collarbone. Today, he casually holds the good Doctor’s left hand as a form of mild entertainment or even consolation. Later, he will gesticulate with its digits for emphasis, always reminding the students to keep track of the bones.
Look closely, he tells the students. Deeper. This is the predictable architecture of the body. This is how you pay attention to the truth.
Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Rosner. Reprinted with permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House Inc.
Author's Biography
Elizabeth Rosner is a poet, essayist, and the author of two highly acclaimed bestselling novels: THE SPEED OF LIGHT, winner of literary prizes in the US and Europe, and BLUE NUDE, named one of the year’s best by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.