The woman at the Chicago painting workshop

She finally told the group what she did for a living. We were all chewing soaked-grain and yellow-split pea soup around a picnic table. She put on her straw hat (the sun was coming out.)
"I'm a nude model for the Art Institute of Chicago."
My husband asked me what she said. He's learning English. And I didn't want to tell him. I didn't want him to look at her, be captivated by her. But I did.
"elle est un modèle de nu." I said. He smiled.
The tan, concerned-faced mother from Madison asked her who she worked with.
"Floyd Berryman, Barry Hastings, Clive Constance-Wells, Anika Kravitz, all of them," she said, "I've been doing it for ten years and I'm really good at it."
"I'm sure the professors appreciate working with someone that knows what they're doing," the watercolor animal artist commented.
"They do. They tell all the younger models to come see me work and to take notes. They say I'm the best. I know how to move. I've got it."
She took a spoonful of soup to her lips and paused.

Her hair was starting to gray. When I stood behind her, I could see course, white hairs sweeping around her tumble-down bun. It wasn't her white, pore-less skin, her classical Grecian profile, or the lipstick applied to her little mouth that told me she was used to others' eyes on her. It was in her eyes. They reflected years of approving glances from men artists (after all the experts on beauty!) and a total self-confidence that came from seeing her exposed body manifested thousands of times in smudged charcoal sketches strewn on florescent lit floors. It was in her forced feminine posture that hinted, "I am my body." It was in her bawdy jokes.

"She's like a cat on a hot tin roof!" The instructor crowed as she perched one foot on the bedrail, the other on a windowsill to reach a spot on the wall that needed paint. She put her arms around him way too much.
"What color would you call this?" He asked the group, holding up a swatch of orange paint he blobbed on a board.
"Cantaloupe?" he suggested.
"What? she asked coyly, "we 'can't elope'?"
"Well, I still have three weeks left in the country," he shot back.
She let out a laugh of pure pleasure and touched his back.
When she was idle, she kept a large, unused, rectangular brush in her hands and caressed it like a cat.
The second day of the workshop, she came in very late. At five. The workshop ended at five. But the instructor was delighted to see her. The third day, she was on time and we took a tour of a Waldorf-Steiner school where she helped out with a mural.
"I added the mice," she said.
I looked closely in the salmon and pink grapefruit swirls and found little gray mice hiding in corners, under windowsills, stealing tiny pieces of cheese.
I watched her put on her straw hat again before we went out into the sunlight and she told me her favorite color was white. She said she looked good in white and that she couldn't stand to wear red because it reminded her of all the bleeding she'd done in her life. And I was wearing red.


p.s. How does this story relate to my greatest challenge? Freud could maybe find it somewhere in there, but I don't really know myself!