A Brief History of Male Nudes in America by Dianne Nelson, Dianne Nelson Oberhansly

man who bought me three rings and moved me twice. After his internship with Signature One Consultants, they hired him full time, and then he only came into Fiddler’s with clients or sometimes alone for a nightcap.
    â€œPrentice, are you happy?” I asked him.
    â€œHappy,” he answered, but it was the kind of response I could never trust.
    I told him to explain, that there were all kinds of happy, that we should know each other’s mind.
    â€œO.K.,” he said, pretending concentration, eyes closed tight, hand on his forehead. “Tell me what I’m thinking.”

    What I’m thinking is that you can never leave a body until the very end, like that moment in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
when they show a man and his body finally separating from each other. It’s an old photograph and the authenticity is questionable, but the idea itself is wonderful, how you get up and walk across the room and just leave your body lying there.
    It’s not bitterness that makes me say this. It’s simply how much my body possesses me, how Prentice would stand in a doorway and I’d be unable to think clearly. In the mornings, how the warm sunlight could tie me to the ground or how I could shiver and ache—almost like the flu—for one good kiss.
    One night I thought I lost my body in the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, but if so, it hadn’t gone far. I’d been reading an oversized reference book,
Twelve Moons of the Year
, and it was closing time, and when I stood to leave I was thinking of the final illustration in the book—a landscape, winter-brilliant, the stars caught in thehigh, barren treetops. It wasn’t until I was in my car and five blocks away that I looked down, and like a tired swimmer come back to the shore, it was there, all of it, my knees and breasts and the small of my back, which later that night Prentice moved to and kissed twice: once cold and light, then a second that lingered.

    I gave up doing hair and there was only one kind of eyebrow I was any good at. Prentice came in and saw the mess, saw my face smeared with dried clay and just smiled.
    â€œNo, I can’t get studio space at the junior college,” I told him.
    â€œI didn’t say anything. Relax.” And he made his way to the kitchen.
    In ’80 we went to Minneapolis to visit his mother and a couple of years after that we camped in the Ozarks, which later Prentice admitted was not all that restful as a vacation. The trails were poor and the season unusually wet.
    From the other side of the room, Prentice watched me so often. What he saw was probably no different than clay: an impasse, a collarbone. The small features of children that, when set in marble, seem no more than strokes or petals. His hands knew these things as well as mine.
    The best present that I ever gave Prentice was on the occasion of his going-away party from Fiddler’s. He was kind of embarrassed with everyone standing around in the lounge in their street clothes, but he appeared cool and gracious nonetheless. I let him open the gift in the car, and he was surprised, if not also confused. It was a three-foot porcelain platter shaped like a fish. The scales were in detail, shimmering, and the eye, an oval of gold leaf. I had found it in an Oriental market, and the only time Prentice took it off his coffee table was the Thanksgiving we tried to serve the turkey on it, but it was all wrong. Prentice was always slightly overwhelmed with gifts. He’d look at them closely, amazed, and he’d thank you ten times.
    When I think of my body next to Prentice, I see how time is a ritual, a complicated working out of who will reach over and turn the lamp off at night, of how things will finally be said and done.
    â€œDee, it’s not too late for med school,” my mother offered long-distance from Boulder, but Prentice and I were still together. She had no idea what it was like, this body,