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 to hell, Braam,” I say, quiet enough I think they won’t hear me but I’ll still get the satisfaction of having told them off under my breath.
But Johannes hears—he’s deaf to instructions about canvas priming but he’s dog ears for everything that isn’t meant for him. “What’s that, Constantijn? You’re going to hell?”
Dam Square looms at last—the milky green dome of the weigh house wears a hat of new snow, militias of sharp icicles lined along the gutters. The low clouds swallow the spire of the Westerkerk over the tops of the canal houses. A breeze spools off the water, bitter and ripe—I can smell the stench of the harbor, oysters spitting seawater and herring left to fester in shining piles upon the rotting slats of the docks. My stomach heaves.
I would be smart to joke back jovially, pretend like the taunts didn’t sting like rust on a razor, then say yes to a drink when Johannes suggests it. Probably would have been good to muscle down a kiss with a carmine-cheeked whore just to prove that I don’t find the female form almost entirely repellent. Maybe if I look long enough it won’t be; all these weeks of nude studies adding up have built up my tolerance. Maybe sinful desires can be cleansed through prolonged exposure, like colors faded from a canvas by hanging too long in a sunny corner of the house.
But instead I keep walking as the boys peel off toward the Wolf’s Head, letting their taunts roll off me like the snowballs melting down my back. I duck down Raadhuisstraat and across the Singel Canal, toward my parents’ house. They’ll have the stove lit, peat smoking in its belly, and my sister will take my cassock and my klompen and they’ll want to know about what I’m painting and my mother will have herring and none of this will matter. In a few moments, I can be home and pretend everything is fine.
“Constantijn, wait!”
Against