I am sitting on a bench in the dining room of the Chateau d’Orquevaux, deciding whether or not to go back for a third helping of salted butter smeared on fresh baguette, when the photographer and the model arrive. It’s five minutes before the model is supposed to take off all her clothes, and it seems, by her quick, determined walk and the concentration on her face, that she knows the two of them are running late. 

The model is young—mid-twenties—her skin plump and pale, the color of the butter I’ve been craving. Her dark hair is up in a claw clip, and she wears a thin, flowery dress that clings to her shoulders and waist with elastic bands. 

I pull at my jeans and tug my shirt down, making a quick decision not to eat any more bread. I’m not sure if I ought to go to the life drawing session. I’m at the chateau for a month-long retreat, but I’m here as a writer, not a visual artist. I own no brushes, no paint. I’ve come from the mountains of Colorado and journeyed east from Paris with a laptop, a spiral-bound journal, and two fine-tipped Pilot pens. 

And I’m not just the wrong type of artist; I’m also at an earlier stage than the rest. While the twenty others who plan to attend the session have shown works at Art Basel and in galleries from Sydney to London, won awards in Kuwait and grants in Seattle, I’m still trying to figure out what kind of writer I am. 

What I’m sure of is that I like to observe other people more than I like to be observed. 

So for now, that’s what I do.

The photographer is in his sixties. His white hair is cut short at the sides but a few long, soft pieces swoop across the top of his head. He’s wearing pressed jeans, leather shoes, and a white scarf tucked into the shape of a letter Q around his neck. As he enters the room, he meets my eyes and grins, as if we have known each other for decades. Before I can squirm away, he sits in the chair next to me and holds out his hand. 

“I am Rob,” he says. “And that—” he points with pride to the model “—is Netta.” His eyes follow her out of the room, and I wonder which part of her body he’s looking at. 

I introduce myself and shake his hand firmly, trying to mask my discomfort. But though I am taken in by Rob’s warm smile, his bright eyes and Dutch accent, I can’t shake a feeling, instinctual and urgent, of fear. An older man accompanying a beautiful young woman—a woman who is about to undress in front of a room full of strangers, a woman transforming herself into an object—is something I know to be wary of. I wonder how much Netta is getting paid. I wonder if Rob looked at her once, the way he just looked at me—overly familiar and interested. I can imagine him putting a hand on her thigh, telling her how beautiful she is—how alluring and nymphlike. I wonder what he asks her to do when the artists aren’t around.

I am worried for Netta. 

◆

I’m not afraid of men, but I know I should be. It’s a lesson I learned early and well. 

I was the eldest, so I was schooled first. When I was eight, my mother wrestled me on the low-pile carpet in the living room, in front of the baby grand. 

She grabbed my arms and pinned them to the floor, stuck a knee in my stomach.

I yelped. “Stop!”

“No.” My mother twisted her leg and dragged it to the ground, pinching my side. “Fight back. Fight me. If a man wants to hurt you, he won’t stop because you cry. Pain’s not the end. You have to fight.” 

I was wailing then, screaming at her to get off me. And she said it again, “Pain’s not the end. You have to fight.” 

I don’t know what happened next. I can’t remember if I fought hard enough to win her approval. I doubt she stood up that evening and truly believed I would make it through life unscathed by male violence. She didn’t and her friends didn’t. 

My friends didn’t, either. 

The point, though, is from that moment onwards, I understood that my life was a happy anomaly. When my father wet a facecloth and scrubbed me in the tub, I felt loved. When my uncle singled me out for a walk in the woods, I felt adventurous. When my grandfather taught me how to steer on the back roads of our family’s ranch, when I sat on his lap in the driver’s seat of the big Dodge Ram 2500, when the vibrations of the engine coursed through us both, I felt powerful. 

Other little girls, in similar scenes, felt very different. 

◆

“Netta—woah-huh. Fwooo. Netta is special,” says Rob while Netta is off changing in a bathroom. He scoots close to me on the bench. 

I laugh, growing more uncomfortable. “Oh yeah?” 

“Let’s see, shall I show you?” It’s not a question I’m supposed to answer. He pulls out his mobile phone, swiping up, then over, until a gallery of naked women appears in small squares across every pixel. He fingers the glass in a deft motion; he knows what he’s looking for. He’s scrolled for it before. 

As he swipes, I see glimpses. Two bodies under a gathered plastic sheet. A bare shoulder pressed into the soft mound of a full breast. Red string wrapped around torsos and legs. 

I am not sure why Rob has chosen me to show these images to. Was it because I was the first person he spied when he walked in? Or do I look young—the baby fat in my cheeks and upper eyelids persisting into my late thirties, making me seem more naive than I am? 

As he scrolls through the photos, there’s a rumble inside me. Some twisted combination of jealousy and arousal, fear and curiosity. 

Were those models in pain? 

How tight did their bindings tug at the cleft between thigh and pubic bone, at the base of their ribs, in the flesh of their upper arms? 

What must it feel like to have such confidence? 

Finally, Rob finds what he has been searching for and turns the phone so I have a better view. 

It’s a black-and-white photo of Netta, outside on a flat rock. Pine trees and a small butte jut up in the distance. Her right leg is stretched out to her side in a long line. Her other is tucked under the knee. Her hands are off to her left so that her shoulder, neck, and breasts catch the sunlight. 

“You see? Netta is—” Rob murmurs something in French. “She is come from Strasbourg, from the woods. I found her there, in the forest. And now? She is like a daughter to me. I have a daughter, but Netta, too, is my daughter.” 

At that point, I flash to my own father—a mathematician with crescent eyes, who wears Hackers Conference tee shirts and cable-knit sweaters. 

Even if I was the type of woman who felt comfortable being nude in front of a camera, there is no world I can conjure in which my father has photos of me, naked, on his phone. 

◆

I don’t need to tell women about being objectified. We all know what it feels like to be diminished in a man’s eyes. At the bus stop on Broadway, waiting for the SKIP. Whistles and yells from the driver’s side of a pickup truck. That’s when it started for me. At ten. 

Once, a Ford Taurus, its windows blacked out, pulled up next to me (in sweatpants and a high-necked fleece pullover, hair wet from high mountain sleet) as I walked my dog, Otter. We were on the back roads that create a grid behind the commercial district off the interstate in Silverthorne, where I lived. It was dusk. November cold. No one else was around. 

At first, I thought the car might be driven by a friend or a stranger who needed directions. But instead of rolling down the window and asking where Target was, the driver just matched my speed. I couldn’t see who was inside—if there were passengers, if anyone was filming me—and yet I knew for certain that the driver was a man. 

I tried to calm myself, to think rationally. Maybe the driver had a momentary lapse of attention and was checking Google Maps. Maybe he was watching TikTok. Maybe he was distracted because his grandmother just died. So I would do an experiment—I’d take the next right. Most likely, the car would keep straight and I would laugh at myself for overreacting. 

But when I turned, so did he. He revved his engine as he took the corner. 

At the next intersection, I doubled back, then darted behind the car, taking a left. He waited at a stop sign, then followed again, slow. 

Otter could sense my fear and began barking and straining against his leash. I searched for safety—a break in the fence ahead, another car I could wave down, a business where I might ask for help. But it was after five on a Friday in shoulder season. Doors were shut and daylight was fading. 

There were many scenarios that ran through my head at that point. Someone grabbing me and pulling me into the backseat; a gun pointed at my temple; two bullets in Otter’s speckled side. I tried to stay calm, like my mother taught me, but my ribcage hurt and my heart was pounding. 

I called my boyfriend, who was on his way home from Denver.

“Can you get to the police station?”

Maybe I could. I sprinted behind the car and across the street towards a construction site, climbed over piles of wood, and emerged by the main road.

The car’s tires screeched as the driver took the corners, looking for me.

The police were two blocks ahead on the right, across four lanes and a median, so I jogged along the sidewalk against traffic, waiting for him to pass on the far side of the street. There were enough cars now that I felt somewhat safer, but I knew that as soon as he saw me, he would U-turn. 

When it happened, I was ready.

◆

We gather in the salon. I go because I am curious and because the people I write about nearly always have clothes on. This will help me practice how to describe the naked body. But I am also feeling protective over this woman I barely met. If she needs my help, I’ll be there to give it. 

I am the only person who is writing, and I sink into a leather couch in the back corner of the room with my laptop resting on a pillow, set on my knees so my stomach’s obscured. In front of me are the visual artists, painting with acrylic and oil, drawing flourishes and pecks in charcoal, pencil, ink. 

After warming up with a series of shapes where Netta becomes both square and curve, curling tall and full in the light of the afternoon sun, it’s time for the first half-hour pose. 

In the place where the upright Roland electric piano usually stands, next to a large Baroque window, she removes her robe and sits, knees parted, on a stool. She raises her heels off the floor, angles her torso towards us, and rests on her hands. Red chiffon erupts from a dark mound between her legs. 

In front of her, twenty artists smudge brush on paper. They swoop in with pencils and crayons, erasers, ink. Glasses for eyes and for paint, they watch her. 

There is nothing like being viewed by artists. They see her strength, her intended lines, the small quiver in her stomach when she breathes, the movement of the clouds, reflected in flesh. 

But the pose she chose is painful. Netta closes her eyes, exhales hard, rearranges her fingers, swallows. She clutches the tops of her thighs and her forehead tenses. Even from the back of the room, I can tell she’s concentrating hard on her breath and balance.

Rob comes in. His Nikon is at his chest, held by a strap encircling his neck. The shutter clicks in a quick staccato. Netta’s eyes dart to meet his. Her heel drops. She flexes and shakes her wrist. Then, she looks at him again and smiles the smile a person makes when they need to connect with someone who knows them well. A smile that says, Why in the world did I choose this pose? We’ve talked about this! I’m such an idiot. 

When she’s given a break, Netta stands up, covering her stomach with her hands. She folds inward and bounces to the couch for her robe. 

Why, I wonder, is she so comfortable with her legs splayed open when she is nearly still, but doesn’t want us to watch her body as it does what all those buxom muscles and mounds of fat and lunch-filled organs do best—as it moves? What about walking makes her self-conscious? 

Does she feel more comfortable being an object than she does a person? 

◆

I made it to the police station. The car was still there, across the street, crawling along as if to check I wasn’t bluffing. When I approached some uniforms and pointed at his car—that’s when he finally gave up and accelerated away. 

It was only when I was in the back of a squad car, being driven home by a sympathetic female officer, that I began repeating all my actions back. Why hadn’t I called 9-1-1 right away? Why hadn’t I yelled, picked up a rock, charged the car? 

And mostly, why had it happened at all? Why had a man who didn’t know me want to make me feel like prey? Why had a stranger decided, all of a sudden, to stop thinking of me as a human who deserved respect? What about my body made me an object for that man to toy with?

◆

After the break, Netta returns to the front of the room and spends a few minutes considering potential poses. Her stomach drapes on top of her thighs when she folds over. Her arms are muscular, her back ripples. She has an underbite and an aquiline nose. She is beautiful and strong. I can see what she looked like as a child and how she will look in thirty years, fifty. I see where she will swell and shrink, where her skin will come loose and grow crowded with lines, where it will turn to shallot-skin paper, which follicles will become gray. 

Netta twists, propped up on her arms, her hands relaxed. Before deciding what form to take, she calls Rob over. “Hroe-berrr,” she whispers, dropping the final t in his name. She demonstrates an alternate pose and he—in French—directs her. I don’t know what he says, exactly, but he conveys that no, she shouldn’t do it that way. It’s not quite right or she will be uncomfortable or she won’t be able to hold it the full thirty minutes. 

She arranges her limbs like she’s practicing ikebana. Rob bunches up the white cotton sheet that was placed over the divan and tucks it with care underneath. Netta trusts him, listens to his advice. He can see the light as it settles on the straight muscles of her back, the curve of her hip, and the dark spikes of her hair. I wonder if this part—the part before the pose—is off-limits? The point in time when she hasn’t consented to being an object, when she is still a woman, looking at her friend, asking his advice. When she is being professional, when she is feeling it out. Am I breaking our silent artists’ pact, writing before she chooses what shape to become? Am I forgetting that she didn’t come here to model her process, her discomfort, her relationship with Rob—only her body?

◆

The artists have already begun modeling for each other. Kevin has painted Jason. Rosie is on the docket for tomorrow afternoon. A few days ago, Aaron went upstairs and four others sat around to observe and remake him in paint and ink. 

This morning, I visited the painters’ studios. Kevin’s is on the second-to-top level, the one where all the floorboards creak. He’d placed a mirror across from his easel, using it to create a staggering six-foot-tall self-portrait. It was all there—his kind eyes, the long beard that he keeps cut to a square, masculine angle. He had captured a part of himself in just a few days, from just his own reflection. 

He said, “Are you here to model?”

“No,” I laughed. “You don’t want that.”

But what I meant was, I can’t. Being an object is dangerous.

◆

It’s a classic pose, Netta’s final decision. A sleeping beauty on a leather couch, left leg stretched into a point, right leg tucked beneath, arms under her head on the tufted armrest, brunette hair cascading along the sweeps of her forearms. While she holds the pose, she relaxes her face so she looks like a restful Venus. Rob stands in the back of the room, staring at the screen of his camera. He snaps a few photos, then opens one half of the gilded double doors and sneaks into the foyer.

There’s something in the way Rob moves I hadn’t noticed before. It’s respectful and assured. When he uses the camera, I imagine he is searching for the angles where Netta’s beauty fills the space. But it’s clear he’s also checking she’s safe—he pays attention to the group, making eye contact when he can, ensuring that everyone is acting appropriately. And he is attentive to Netta’s poses, her comfort, her strain. 

Perhaps he’s more fatherly than I gave him credit for. 

When the time is up and Netta is clothed, we gather around the fruits of her objectification, each piece set on the floor with everyone circled around. In Nicola’s ink, the curve of Netta’s waist is pulled down towards the mound of her thigh, and her shoulder is a mountain peak in the Alps, high and jagged and commanding. In Kevin’s, her torso and back are broad, her eyes serene—a powerful figure, resting in the late afternoon sun. Rochelle concentrated on Netta’s face—the soft waterfall of hair, the far-away stare. 

Rob and Netta stand there, too. They comment on the range of colors, the brush strokes and details each artist saw. Every single piece, it’s clear, brings them delight.

◆

Over the years, I’ve tried to make myself hard. My mother taught me how. And I was confident—I held irrefutable truths in my chest: I was powerful, I was adventurous, I was loved.

And I knew that pain was not the end. I had to fight.

So I marched into pool halls in a mini skirt and high heels to beat men at their own game. To lose, too. To joke. To burp and cry and make a fool of myself. To force them to see me in all my messy humanity. I did it again on the rugby pitch. Then the weight room. On jiu-jitsu mats. At Civil Air Patrol. Up the ski lift. At the biker bars. 

The choices I made were a dare to every man I met: See me as an object. Believe you have the power. Underestimate me at your peril. 

I fucking dare you. 

But I’m not hard. Not in my stomach, not in my ass. Not in that soft, moist flesh at the tops of my thighs where my jeans wear out every six months. 

My voice and face are round and pretty. My hands are small. Dresses cling to the supple, baby paunch of my stomach, just above my pelvis. 

Some days, I consider a surgical or hormonal option. But not to change genders—I don’t want to be a man. I love my female parts, even when I don’t like them. 

I just want men’s power.

◆

At dinner, where all the artists in residence gather each night over steaming trays of roasted meat, bowls of green salad, and platters of spiraling savory pastries, I chat with Rob and Netta at one of the long tables. 

Rob sits next to me, shows me more photos of women that populate his phone. His eye is expert; bodies composed until they seem to exist in a different realm. Women making bends and shapes with their curves, their eyes fervent or relaxed, concentrated, in ecstasy. Rob tells me stories about his best friend, a Dutch woman who lives in Italy, and his wife, a French woman who lives in France. His best friend, he tells me, began dating a chum of his when they were all nineteen. When Rob met her, he thought, “She is too good for him. She should be with me.” 

At some point, they tried. It lasted three months. And now, at 65, she lives in Italy and won’t introduce him to her boyfriend because she’s worried he won’t approve. He’s going to visit her next week, he says. “And I’ll bring my French lover along.” 

“Oh, you have a lover?” I recoil and recalibrate. 

He wriggles with laughter. “Well, yes of course. She is my wife.” 

When I ask if he’s a full-time photographer, Rob tells me no, he’s a psychologist. I say, “Interesting,” because that’s what I think. A psychologist who drives ballerinas to chateaus so that twenty-one strangers can view her naked body and use it for their own designs. 

He searches my face to see if I’ve caught on. Then he smiles wide and shakes a flexed hand. “No, I’m not a psychologist. It was a joke. I am a coach—a life coach. I tell all these girls, these models, my models—I give them advice. I tell them that their relationship should be like business. In business, you sit down, you say, ‘What is it you want? Where do you want to be? Do you want children? Do you want to be rich? How do you want to live?’ All these conversations, they do not have. They do not say the things they need to say.” 

Netta is rolling her eyes, as if communicating to me that everything Rob says is an embellished, beautiful photo, obfuscating the drafts of the room, the cramp in her left toe, the ache in her wrist. 

I want to ask her then, how she does it. How she manages to contort her body for so long, to twist objectification into empowerment. How she is so confident. 

But I don’t. 

Instead, I ask her about her life, her complications. Her humanity. She tells me that a week ago, her boyfriend broke up with her. Rob told her to write her ex a letter—then Rob read the letter, all four pages of it. He told her it was the right thing to send. Tonight, Netta says, her ex wanted to meet and talk it all out. She shakes her head as she tells me that. Tonight. Tonight? “No, I told him. I am here. I want to be here.” 

Rob blows a bit of air through his lips, the French way. Like, c’est la vie. 

Netta shrugs. It’s clear how important today was—taking off her clothes in front of an audience of strangers, having her form preserved in brush strokes, these artists turning her shoulders into Mont Blanc, her legs into the Seine. Spending the day with this older man she trusts—her second father, her life coach, her mentor—this man who makes her laugh, who takes photos of her as though she is a goddess.

◆

The next morning, after Rob and Netta have left, I ask the other artists what it feels like to sit for a portrait session on the second-to-top level, where all the floorboards creak.

“Is it comfortable?” I ask Aaron. “Are you supposed to smile? How did you choose what pose to hold?”

“It’s hard,” he replies. “Painnnn-ful. Especially if you smile. Don’t do that. But it’s like Netta says: ‘Whatever pose you do, it’s going to hurt.’”

I am stunned for a moment, understanding what I’ve done.

When we were in the salon, when Netta was sitting, knees wide, in the spot where the electric piano had been, I hadn’t seen it. So concerned with the dynamic between her and Rob, I’d missed the moment she became me, aged eight, wrestling with my mother in front of the baby grand. When she knit her brow and flexed her wrist, Netta swallowed her pain. 

She chose to fight.

Those hours when she was naked in front of us, she had been doing the same thing I’d done on the rugby pitch, in the pool hall, at the gym.

And I had underestimated her.

I immediately regret what I said to Kevin, the day he asked me if I’d come up to model. I’d told him, “You don’t want that,” as if my form was too boring for his brush. As if I knew him well enough to finish his thoughts, to write his dialogue for him. 

Like with Netta in the salon, I realize I overstepped. Kevin never asked for me to write his portrait with my fear and insecurity, oil paint and tar, the sins of all the men I should be afraid of. If I demand that they see my humanity, I must do the same for them. 

I take the stairs two at a time, heading for the second-to-top level. My heart pounds at my ribs. My thighs ache. 

Kevin’s not in his studio, but the mirror is there. I watch myself. My chest heaves and my face is flushed. I must not look very different than I did when Otter and I ran to the police station. As I catch my breath, I try to see what the man in the dark-windowed Taurus saw. Squinting, I evaluate the curves of my hips, the tendons in my neck, the sharp angles of my elbows. These womanly parts of me—the parts I hide, that I’m ashamed of—the parts that seem to hold so much power, that I’m supposed to be proud of, and yet betray me—is that what the artists will uncover? Or will they paint me as I see myself? My backbone, jagged like the Continental Divide, the determination of a wildfire, the mess of emotions that tumble and churn inside me like the rapids and eddies of the Colorado River. 

But there is only one choice. I can be object and person. Like Netta, I will find power in the parts I’ve spent my life protecting. Perhaps the payment for observing is being observed. 

Whatever pose you do, it’s going to hurt. 

And pain is not the end.

Turning, I search for paper and pen. I bend over the desk, my back straight and stomach tensed, elbow and hip at right angles, like I’m about to take a shot on the eight ball. I think of deadlifting, taking a mountain curve on a motorcycle, and the ‘touch-pause-engage’ of a scrum.

The wood beneath me groans.

I write to Kevin. I’m ready.