We walked from the student union, down the sloping asphalt pathway that led from it to what was commonly called the Art Hut. I had never understood this nickname because, more than anything else, the building itself looked like a failed attempt at an industrial office complex. One that had never gotten past the first two floors and then had been cruelly sheared off and roofed with a patchwork of composite and tar. Inside, however, were the huts. Dark, warm corners in the large studios, where many of the art adjuncts would spend the night, as the conditions in the art building were often better than the places they rented in the surrounding neighborhoods-especially as winter came on. In the Art Hut, you could crank up the heat, and the bill went to the university. As we were walking through the doors and up the three stairs to the first-floor hallway, I thought that maybe I would come and live in the art building. Surely there had to be a blanketed warren to spare. What I hadn’t quite put together yet was that I was already churning. Half of my mind had now begun to plan an escape.

I saw Natalie retreat with a wave into Room 230-the Warm Room. I thought it was unfair that Natalie so often lucked out and got assigned to it, and had wondered if there was a silent favoritism shown toward my friend on the part of the room assigners at the start of every semester. I could see why. Neither Gerald, the other model, nor I brought muffins or wine over to the administrative offices. We never put Halloween pencils, with erasers shaped like counts or pumpkins or ghosts, in the secretary’s mailbox.

Gerald, I suddenly thought, was someone I did not want to see. He had lost his mother in a fire the previous year. She had gone to bed and left a cigarette lit, and the next thing Gerald knew he was falling to the floor and gasping for air. He barely got out alive, and his mother, they said, was dead from the smoke before she burned. Since then, when I ran into him, he would say, “My mother died,” in the middle of talking about the weather or about what poses we were doing for various classes. Natalie had always thought he was a little dim-witted, and this new habit seemed finally to have confirmed it, but as I walked down the hall to my own classroom, all I could think of was his genius. How did the firemen know it was her cigarette left burning on the bedside table?

“Hi, Helen. You look great!” one of the students greeted me. She was a girl named Dorothy, the best student in the class even if also an insufferable suck-up.

I could feel one or two other students take note of me then. They were adjusting their easels, which were battered and stained from years of undergraduate use.

I made my way to the three-panel screen, behind which I dressed or undressed. I noted only vaguely what was set out on the platform or pinned to the curtain that lay to its rear. There was a basin. There was a washcloth and comb. And on the curtain there was a large picture of an old-fashioned bathtub. It barely made an impact. I thought, Bathtub, and then I stepped behind the screen and sat down on the painted black wooden chair to take off my shoes and find my bamboo flip-flops to place on the floor.

Just as I had clung to the idea that Natalie was planning to tell me about the contractor, I now was helped along by the sharp scent of bleach coming off the former hospital gown hanging from a metal hanger on the back of the screen. The woman who did the laundry for the art building was afraid, Natalie and I both thought, of live-model disease. As a result, she used so much bleach that it quickly ate through the gowns we used and left them as thin as tissue paper after a very short time. But the scent of her fear, made palpable in the bleach, served to startle me to my task. I heard Tanner Haku, a Japanese printmaker who had ended up in Pennsylvania after twenty years of teaching around the globe, enter the room and greet his students. He began talking to them about individual style in the depiction of the nude.

I took my sweater off over my head and shoved it in the small hutch beneath the window beside me. I placed my shoes in the hutch below. I sat in the chair in my mother’s slip and my black jeans. On the other side of the screen, I heard Tanner Haku quoting Degas: “Drawing is not form; it is the way we see form.”

But he did not credit Degas. If he credited Degas, he would have to explain who Degas was and what Degas meant to him personally. It would be that much more of his soul he would have to sacrifice to the classroom.

I unbuttoned my jeans and stood to take them off.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I heard the reed-thin voice of a boy say.

I could feel the thud to Haku’s chest. After this many years, even though I was only the model, I could usually feel the thud to mine. But this boy’s confident assertion in the face of a hundred years of history made no impact on me now. In a way it made me see that no matter what happened, things would go on just as they had been, with or without me. Gerald would come, and he would say, “My mother died,” and the students would nod uncomfortably, but he would stand on the platform, and they would do slightly altered assignments-Man on a Pedestal instead of Woman at the Bath-and then they would turn them in and Tanner would listlessly grade them as he blasted opera and drank gin.

“And Helen will do a series of poses of women at their toilet,” he said.

I heard a few titters as I put my rolled-up jeans beside my sweater in the hutch. Ah, he is baiting them, I thought, and this gave me another jolt to stay on my feet.

As he explained what this meant, I knew he would be pointing to the basin and washcloth on the platform and to the picture of the old-fashioned tub. I knew I should hurry to disrobe. In just a moment, Tanner would say, “Helen, we’re ready for you.” But I stood in my mother’s slip. I felt the old silky fabric against my skin. I stepped out of my underpants and then undid my bra, pulling it through the spaghetti straps of the slip. Briefly I thought of Hamish waiting for me. Pictured him stretched out on the couch in Natalie’s living room. Then the vision changed, and his head was awash in blood. I put my underwear in the hutch just above my pants and sweater.

Everything about disrobing at Westmore had a rhythm. I walked into the classroom, said hello to a few of the students, glanced at the platform, and went behind the screen. I started undressing as the professor arrived, and continued as he began the patter that preceded my posing. Each article of clothing had its place in every room. In the room where Natalie posed, there was an old metal locker salvaged from the renovated gym. In my room, there were hutches and a painted straight-back chair. As I ran my hand over the material of the rose-petal-pink slip and felt my chest, my stomach, the slight curve of my hip, I thought of my mother. I thought of what a refuge Westmore had always been. I came, stripped away everything, and stood in front of the students, who drew me. I had never been quite so foolish as to believe that this meant they actually saw me, but the methodical disrobing, the stepping up on the carpeted platform, even the shiver in my body, often felt revolutionary to me.

I heard the students opening up their large sketch pads to a clean page. Tanner was coming to the end of his useless mini-lecture. I took the slip off over my head and stepped into my bamboo flip-flops. I placed the slip on the chair for just a moment and took the hospital gown from the hanger. Quickly, I covered myself.

“Helen, we’re ready for you.”

I saw the slip. It was my mother in the chair. I wanted to cry in horror, but I didn’t. Was I thinking self-preservation at that point? What was it that made me do what I did? As if it were one of the small objects in my house that I discarded, I balled up my mother’s slip in my hand and shoved it behind the hutches against the cinder-block wall. There it would stay, I knew, for a long time. Natalie had lost a ring there once, and months later a professor, bored to the point of rearranging the furniture in the middle of his own class, had found it.