The Inspiration mf in repetition. And she was everywhere around the campus and the town. One Wednesday morning, Thomas had been dropping some papers on an art professor's desk and glanced through the door of the office that adjoined the classroom-studio. Eyes caught his eyes. Large dark eyes turned toward him and still, fixed, as though they stared out from the depths of a painting. The professor's class was painting, drawing. A nude model posed on a draped chair on the dias, her face coincidentally aimed at Thomas; her motionless, hooded eyes catching his random gaze and holding him. Hypnotic. Thomas stepped to the doorway and stared at her. Her face seemed composed of a single, unbroken line. Her mouth was slightly too large. Its voluptuous fullness gave weight, substance, sensuality to her otherwise ethereal face with its stormcloud eyes. She was half-reclined in an unusual position at once tense and abandoned, curled and extended. Thomas' eyes followed the stiff vertical pillars of her arms that supported her upper body, the hands gripping the edges of the chair. He saw how the globe curves of her breasts were a complementary counterline to the twist of her torso and the shape of her abdomen. Between her hips was the enigmatic darkness of sex from which one leg was lifted, the other extended. She made him think of cats. No, snakes. She simultaneously suggested both the feline and the serpentine. She was an excellent model. As Thomas watched, she seemed not to move, not to breathe, not to blink. Yet her pose suggested flowing motion. She seemed to writhe as a growing vine writhes--movement that is too slow for the human eye, yet impassioned and wild. The class ended. Students began rising from their places, cleaning brushes, packing their equipment. A man carrying a canvas stepped in front of the model and the spell was broken. Thomas almost stumbled back. Forty minutes had vanished. He moaned beneath his breath, unable to collect his thoughts. When he looked through the doorway again the dias was empty. The model had undoubtedly gone to the tiny dressing room in the corner of the sunlit studio. Thomas considered waiting for her, then suddenly turned and walked out of the building into the radiance, the blessing of a cloudless April morning. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ He had never seen the girl before, but now he saw her everywhere. Reading in the library, feeding geese in the park, laughing with her friends in the bars and coffee houses where the students gather. The pattern of her appearances became so regular that one night, as he prowled the town with his cronies, Thomas was subconsciously surprised by her absence. He felt vaguely detached from his friends, floating through the evening. The noise, darkness, flashing stage lights, and smoke of a nightclub were a shock to his senses. He sat with his friends, trying to participate in the conversation, sipping from a mug of beer. There were exotic dancers, stripteasers on the stage. He was not interested in them. He looked up casually and she was there, stepping onto the stage in a frilly white blouse with puffed sleeves. The magnetic power of her eyes was diminished by owlish glasses. Her full, dark hair was drawn back severely to the nape of her neck. The costume was meant to suggest spinsterish conservativism, repression. Librarian banality. Her short, tight, black skirt and stockings with seams in the back were incongruous. Her motions were halted, hesitant. She seemed to totter on her stiletto heels. Then the rock music launched into the power of the first verse and she began to dance, to move, to flow into the music. She strutted to the end of the stage with a commanding, sexy walk, swung around the slick pole in a slow arc. Her entire body seemed lifted up and out, as if but for the one foot on the stage and one hand gripping the pole she would take flight. The conversation of Thomas' friends became a muted hum beneath the pounding beat of the music. Thomas sat motionless, his beer glass halfway to his lips. The girl was really dancing now, spinning like a fakir, leaping up and sinking into a crouch which became a sprawl across the floor and immediately a panther spring to a standing pose. The spinster's glasses had vanished and her long hair flowed free, swinging out from her body like that of the Maenad in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Her hands moved to her waist and the tight skirt flew free of her body like a great dark bat. As though the skirt alone had yet restrained her, she moved now even more freely, swinging high over the audience on the pole, her bare legs flashing in the lurid stage lights. The filmy white blouse still hid her torso, but her hands drew up and undid all its buttons in what seemed like a single motion. She twirled on the stage, the blouse floating away from her, revealing the vertical curves of her body broken by the dark bands of her bra, garter, and g-string. The blouse floated down to a lifeless pile on the floor. The girl had obviously learned gymnastics as well. She slipped to the floor in a full splits, her legs long and straight behind and before her erect body. Then she bent back and brought herself up to a handstand, her legs snapping up to the vertical. She bent at the waist and brought her feet to the floor, pausing for a moment, her bare buttocks prominent over the tops of her dark stockings. The sound system blared a new song and her rhythm changed. Now she was nude from the waist up. She unsnapped her garters and her stockings started to roll down her thighs as she danced. She paused, sitting on the stage before a cluster of men. She slipped her stockings off sensuously along with her garter, then rose onto her knees and writhed before them, letting them push money into her g-string. Thomas found a ten-dollar bill in his hand and stepped up to the stage. Her motions were entirely sexual now, she leapt about the stage, her body throbbing, pounding as though the pounding beat of the music were a masculine lover taking her in a hard rhythm. She seemed to avoid Thomas, lingering on the other side of the stage. Then the music moved into a soaring guitar solo and she was in front of him, seducing him with motion, seducing the money from his hand. For a second, the back of his hand brushed her thigh as she lifted the g-string from her hip and the bill slid beneath it. She smiled at him broadly. He leaned forward and she bent her ear. "You do art modeling, don't you?" he shouted over the noise. She nodded, started to withdraw. "Would you be interest---" "I'll come to your table after my number." She disappeared. Though she was on stage and nearly nude, she seemed to hide herself, drawing back and vanishing in the chaos of the strobe lights. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I'm Catherine." Her voice and sudden appearance cut off the babble of conversation at the table. She extended her hand to Thomas and he jumped up to take it, then gestured to the one empty chair. She reversed it and straddled it, folding her arms across the wooden back. "You're a painter, you want to paint me?" she asked. "No, I want to sculpt you. Are you available?" "I am. Though somewhat inconsistently. Are you on a tight schedule?" Thomas shook his head. "Good. I can give you two hours about three days a week." Thomas nodded. "How much do you charge?" "Let me see your work," she smiled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "This is my studio," Thomas said and winced, thinking it sounded pretentious. "--my house." She walked across the hardwood floor, taking in the tiny, old fashioned building, noting the disparate acts of remodelling that had added a bay window, removed a wall to turn living room and front bedroom into a single broad space. Her leather sandals padded soft as a cat on the wood. The walls were hung with prints from the impressionists, interspersed with bas relief-type sculptures. Tables, pedestals, and crates held more sculpture, as well as pottery thrown and glazed with an exotic, free-spirited flair. The plaster casts and clay figures were of people, animals, flowing abstract forms which seemed to suggest the whole natural world. Thomas fidgeted while Catherine stood motionless, examining what Thomas thought was his best piece: A metal waterfall with stylized fish and a single, nymphlike child sitting on a rock. Minutes passed and only her eyes moved, following the lines of the sculpture critically, analytically. Thomas watched her, finding it difficult to recall a mental image of her body. Now she was dressed in a loose blouse and flowing skirt that hid her form. "Will you pose for me?" Thomas asked at last to end the silence. Catherine turned to him and her expressive mouth stretched in a broad, generous smile. She examined him with the same intensity her eyes had held as she evaluated his work. In her flat sandals, her eyes were exactly on a level with his. His skin had a faint cast, as though he had a drop of Spanish or Italian blood. Underneath his shock of dark hair, his eyes were green and she saw clearly that his thoughts and emotions could be easily read in his dark brows. Although there was maturity, a certain professionalism and sophistication in his eyes and his manner, Thomas' voice and body seemed boyish to Catherine, as though he had experienced delayed puberty. Realizing he was still waiting for a response to his question, she nodded with enthusiasm. "What will you charge?" "Nothing," she laughed. "Do you want to start now?" "You're free now?" Thomas was astonished. "Mm-hmm." Catherine put her hands into her thick hair. "Do you want any particular hairstyle, any particular costume?" Thomas hesitated. "Your hair is fine. I--" "Should I be nude?" she asked matter-of-factly. Thomas nodded with a jerk of the head. "You can change in there," he said fast, pointing back to the little room he realized was his bedroom. "This is fine." She undid the waist button of her skirt. Then she looked up at him and he again felt the tender jolt within him from the force of her gaze. "Unless you mind?" Thomas tried to say that he had no objections, but could find no words. Catherine smiled again and pushed her skirt down off her hips. She did not move quickly or nervously, and her actions were very different from the exaggeration and voluptuousness of her striptease the previous night. The skirt fell around her ankles and she stepped out of it, picked it up and draped it across the back of a plain chair. Then she pulled off her sandals and arranged them neatly beside the same chair. The big blouse covered her hips and pelvis, but Thomas stared at her legs, the tawny neatness of thigh and calf muscles that had a dancer's firmness and definition, the pattern of swirling curves rising >from the arches of her bare feet in long, smooth lines to disappear beneath the printed fabric of the blouse. She paused for a moment, turning to him, then began to unbutton her blouse. It fell open and Thomas saw she was wearing nothing beneath it. With a gesture that seemed subtly shy, she lifted a hand to the opposing shoulder and pushed the blouse down, drawing her arm free. She took it by the collar and lifted it from her other arm, then draped it carefully on top of her skirt. She walked to the open corner of the studio where the most light gathered. Thomas followed her with his eyes, seeing the sweep of dark hair, the straight back and slim arms held passively at her sides, the round, taut buttocks and powerful legs walking gracefully and steadily. She turned around in place, giving him another burning look. "Do you have a pose in mind?" "No." Thomas felt sexual arousal wash through him. He was glad for his bulky, loose work pants and dungaree shirt. "Hmm. Watch, then. Let me know what you like." Catherine stood with one foot pointed forward, as if in the first step of a dance. She gradually lifted her arms, a slow, all encompassing gesture like the invocation of a druid priestess. Her arms continued to rise, until her hands linked high above her head. She tipped her face slightly back, closing her eyes and parting her lips. She inhaled through her open mouth, her breasts lifting and seeming to swell. She held the pose for slow minutes then lowered her arms, holding them out from her body with the hands flexed back, as though daintily lifting an invisible skirt. Catherine turned to the left, a twist that began with her head, then moved through her neck and shoulders, changing the lines of her torso and belly. She twisted further, her hips beginning to follow the turn and finally her legs. With a single step she had her back to him, her feet together. She put her hands into the dark mass of her hair, lifting it >from the nape of her neck and turning her head to make her neck's curve more graceful. Then she arched her back slightly, lifting her rump and emphasizing it. Thomas felt paralyzed. He swallowed, feeling as though he were swallowing a silver dollar. As Catherine turned back to Thomas, she sank to a sitting position on the floor. She drew her legs up, then stretched them out, trying various positions with long pauses in each. Finally she lay flat on her back, one leg lifted, the other stretched long along the floor. She abruptly rolled onto her stomach, brought her feet up with her knees tight together. She raised herself onto her elbows, turned to Thomas smiling with one eyebrow raised, as though she were asking a question. Thomas was suddenly self conscious, realizing he had been standing staring at her without doing anything "artistic." He hurriedly grabbed a stool and a sketch pad and began to draw. They continued on like that for well over an hour, the woman still as a waiting spider while the man's pencil scratched across the pad. When the pencil stopped, without a word between them, she would move like flowing liquid to a new pose, then again be transformed to warm, flesh-toned stone. Thomas noticed her eyes move for the first time while she was posed. She was standing with one knee drawn protectively against the other, covering herself, her breasts and groin, with her arms. Her eyes looked up and to the left. To the clock. "Do you have to leave?" "Soon, yes." "Okay." He put down the sketch pad. She did not ask to see the sketches. As she dressed, they perfunctorily made arrangements for the next appointment. Then she shook his hand again, said something complimentary about his work, and was gone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Four days, four sessions, passed in that way. Catherine nude, posing, turning and moving with grace and poise and sensual beauty, using what Thomas learned were years of practice in the motions of modern and classical dance and gymnastics, years of practice in the revealing of her body in stillness in studios and wild motions in nightclubs. Thomas in motion around her, drawing closer and closer, sketching, taking myriads of photos with an instamatic camera, molding figures and curves and shapes in clay. By the third day he had drawn close enough to discover her secret. He saw the shudders in her body so minute that from even five feet away they seemed like perfect stillness. He saw the brief flickers in her eyes; saw the moments when, moving between poses, she released little pent up breaths and her lips would part and swell slightly, the muscles of her abdomen quivering. He thought perhaps he was imagining or misinterpreting these things, and then he saw how the rose colored skin of the areolas of her nipples bunched with tension. He saw, in her less demure, her more lascivious poses, when she would open her thighs and beneath the thick, rich, curling of dark hair he could glimpse the shadowed, deep colored folds of her labia. He saw the glistening slickness of moisture shimmer in the bright lights when she raised her legs. Catherine's body betrayed the secret of her sexual arousal, that despite her professional demeanor and frank words, she reveled in exhibitionism. She did not pose or dance for money or for art, but purely for the physical, sexual thrill of feeling the eyes of men and women on her vulnerable and uncovered flesh. On the fourth day Thomas was sculpting the side of her face and the elongated curve of her neck. Of his many studies on paper and in clay, he felt some were accurate and others were poor, but none evoked in him the coherent gestalt of beauty that he saw in the original Catherine. Moreover, he did not want to merely sculpt her, her mortal humanity, but rather that which is immortal and universal, an expression of the human form and spirit. Yet he could envision nothing. He could not see how to put the parts together into a whole, a work of art. His mind whirled between the technical frustrations of his art and the purely human and masculine feelings evoked by Catherine's nudity, her femininity, and especially by her ever more apparent sexual excitement. Frustration and the terror of failure washed him like ice water and he pushed too hard, smudging the clay he had meant to smooth, leaving his human fingerprints on that which he had hoped to divorce from human fallibility. He put down his tools and stood before the clay, not looking at Catherine. His head was lowered and his shoulders humped, like an exhausted laborer, a farmer or miner or soldier returning from the long hours of his task. "It's not working, is it?" Catherine's voice was soft, almost a whisper. She sat on the edge of the bed which Thomas had moved into the studio. "No." "Do you want me to go?" "No." He paused. "Yes. No." He paused again. "No. Stay." Catherine was silent for a time, regarding him from deep within her eyes. Then her expression softened. "Come here," she whispered. He stepped over to stand beside her, his loose hair hiding his eyes and the side of his face. "Close your eyes. Don't move." Puzzled, he complied. He felt the cool touch of Catherine's fingertips on his wrist, then she took his hand and held it. She drew his hand to her and brushed the back of it along her arm. Thomas started to move and she made a demure murmuring sound that meant "Don't move. Don't open your eyes." She turned his hand in her fingers and pressed the palm against her arm, then pushed it slowly over her shoulder, her body leaning into Thomas' passive caress. His hand moved across her back and up her neck, the fingers following the delicate shape of her ear, the sculptor's fingertips following the curving shape as though crafting it, creating it. Thomas felt Catherine's face like a blind man. His touches were no longer light and feathery, but firm, sculpting. He moved his fingers along the full softness of her lips, felt the touch of her tongue's tip. Her sharp teeth bit the tip of his finger. "Touch me," She whispered. "You must touch me." She continued to murmur to him: "To study with your eyes is not enough. It is your hands that sculpt, that form, that create." She was moving beneath his touch now, climbing up to a hands-and-knees position on the bed, twisting, moving beneath him. His hands learned the rhythm of her ribs beneath giving skin, the hollow of her waist and roundness of hip and the long, turning straightness of her thigh. She rolled partially over, feeling both his hands pressed firm against her body and pushing against them. She moved his hands with hers, over the soft, small convexity of her belly, up her body to her breasts. Catherine rubbed her breasts against the palms of Thomas' hands, stimulating her tight, excited nipples against the calloused warmth of his knowing hands. Thomas felt as though he was in a fire. Catherine's breath came in strained gasps as she struggled to whisper to him in a breathy moan, "Your hands must know, must have the knowledge of my body. You can never create what you want if you only know me with your eyes. I am separate >from you, we are two different people. As long as that is true, you can never make the sculpture you want. We must be two parts of the same whole." "How--?" Thomas started to ask. "Like this." She pushed his arms down and jumped up, throwing herself against him with the force of her passion, her greedy sexual need. Her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, she drew him down and pressed her mouth against his--open, hot, breathing into his mouth. He remained immobile, as if ensorcelled. Only his hands were alive, feeling the soft swelling beneath Catherine's navel, the rounded thighs pushing against his hands. His fingers burrowed into the wiry hair of her sex. With a heaving moan she lifted one leg, rubbing the inside of her thigh along the side of his body and wrapping her leg around him. Thomas felt the sudden, hot, slick petals of her vulva open and flat against his hand. She burrowed her face in his neck, pulling him backward, pulling him down on top of her on the bed. Her lips brushed the folds of his ear, whispering words so faint even though spoken directly into him they were nearly indistinguishable beneath the sighing moans of her arousal. "--Magic. There is a place, a secret magic place like a fairie grove. There I can work magic. It is a place within me, within my body. You must come into that magic place like Actaeon." Her hands were eager, now, fumbling in her excitement and her haste as she helped him undress. He started to lift himself above her but she grabbed him frantically, holding his bare chest hard against her bosom, holding one hand flat over his face, over his eyes, pressing down on his eyelids. She continued to whisper to him, her words fast and her breath hot in his ear: "Give me your life. Let me take your life, your energy, the liquid of your body, within myself. Let it fill me, every part of me, so we become one. Let me be a part of you, your muse. Go into the secret place, the magic place. You are like Orpheus going down into Hades. You must go down into the darkness of your own creative unconscious. A place as dark and dangerous as the world of the dead. There you must find me and bring me up to the light, with the talent that is in your hands. But like Orpheus, you must keep your eyes closed the whole time. Never look at me. If you open your eyes for even a moment, the spell will be broken, the sculpture will never happen." Then a fierce growl, "Come into me now." Her body arched beneath the weight of him. He embraced her tightly, felt her hips lift and tilt beneath him to catch the tip of his member in her vulva. Her hips rotated to accept him, her legs embraced his lower body. Primal force eclipsed his mind and his body reacted to her, thrusting hard and deep into her. She cried out; a long, almost musical note. Her body heaved and shook beneath him, coming alive with all the frenzied power of her exotic dance beneath the colored lights of the nightclub. Catherine felt him within her and clung to him with her arms and legs, trying to force herself ever more open to him. She drew on his sex and clutched it with the strong, subtle muscles within her, feeling the inward sensation of the soft tip pushing against her cervix. Through it all Thomas kept his eyes tight closed and his hands pressed solidly against Catherine's skin as though they were adhered there. He felt the dancer's agile motions of her spine and her abdomen, felt the rhythm of her sexual abandon. She moved beneath his hands, her skin seeming to draw and guide his caresses across it, from gripping the ample softness of her breasts to holding her sides, her flanks, sinking his fingers into her flexing thighs and feeling the powerful dancer's muscles beneath the tenderness of feminine flesh. "I am your muse now. I am yours--" her words became inarticulate, became the tender, feral sounds of womanly climax. Thomas throbbed, groaned. Tension constricted within the base of his spine, wringing the orgasm out of him in shaking, pulsing thrusts. He collapsed upon her and she collapsed beneath him, suddenly limp, her rib cage heaving as the sounds of her gasps surrounded him. After a long, quiet moment he slid to her side, gently withdrawing his spent sex from her. She turned to him and they lay in a close embrace. Still Thomas did not open his eyes. He believed all she had said about the magic spell, his heart had leapt to accept her words in all faith that required no thought whatsoever. Catherine held him close, her eyes closed now too; single tears oozed through her dark lashes. They did not sleep, but they lay together as if entranced. Several hours passed before Thomas turned from her and rose, stumbling through his studio, to his work table. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ His hands began to work the clay. He thought of nothing. His hands remembered her form, knew her form as his eyes alone could never have comprehended it. She was behind him, sometimes caressing or touching him lightly, her robe open so he could see her body when he turned. He braided wire for a framework, then covered it with bulky lumps of clay which he smoothed and shaped with fingers and tools. It took seven weeks, weeks of intense and growing love and always the physical contact like a rite, her calling to him, he with eyes closed reaching out, touching, then the embrace and the intense fire. He made the same sculpture twice, a first, sketchlike sculpture of clay, four feet high, then a larger version to be finally done in bronze. The sculpture was of a human female form, poised like a dancer, but the form was angelic. Great, curving, pinioned wings sprang from behind the figure to wrap it in powerful primary feathers. But the wings did not cover the womanly body, which was revealed in a sensuous, voluptuous, totally sexual and passionate way, as though the being was both angel and succubus demon. The face was an open mouthed mask of passion like the sculpture of St. Theresa of Avila, but the expression of orgasm was slightly more intense, less selfless; the eyes open and staring, huge, as magnetic as her eyes had been that first day in the professor's studio. Naturally, this was Thomas' first work which received serious critical acclaim. Several prestigious studios, seeing this work, expressed invitations.